Valve and Vivendi today announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit filed by Valve in August 2002. The parties have resolved their differences, and the settlement provides for the dismissal of all claims and counterclaims. VUG will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve's games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source, effective August 31, 2005, and notify distributors and cyber cafes that were licensed by VUG that only Valve is authorized to distribute Valve games to cyber cafés and grant cyber café licenses. All previous license agreements made by Vivendi are being terminated. Needless to say, settlement or not, this is a huge win for Valve.

Already revealed a few months ago, Nival Interactive today officially announced Hammer & Sickle, a new tactical role playing game set in the Silent Storm universe. The game is being co-developed by Novik&Co and Nival Interactive.

DreamCatcher Games today announced Dungeon Lords has reached gold status worldwide. To mark the occasion, DreamCatcher has released the intro-cinematic for Dungeon Lords, created by Brain Zoo Studios, giving fans a taste of what to expect when the game ships on May 4, 2005.

ForwardGames' Notcom Racing is a next-gen futuristic racing game with more than a twist. Race among beautiful, highly detailed environments, over the magnetic track at insane speeds, find your way out among track-traps of any sorts, change vehicle configuration on the fly and do not, do not use wisely your lethal embedded weapons arsenal!

2K Games today announced Vietcong 2 for the PC, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Vietcong and the expansion pack Vietcong: Fist Alpha.

Cyanide Studio today announced the development of their latest cycling title, Pro Cycling Manager. PCM will have more detailed animations, an experience system, stage editor and also several multiplayer modes. Cyanide Studio is using the GameBryo engine, and the Paris-based developer of Chaos League has also recently licensed SpeedTree for use in Pro Cycling Manager. Read more for the first screens ...

The Hostile Intent team has released a new version for their Half-Life mod, bringing it to v1.4 (requires v1.3.5) and has a slew of bug fixes and game tweaks, new and updated maps, new weapons etc. Read more for details and download links ...

The newest PSM issue reveals the first details about Activision's latest Spider-Man game. Several big changes over the previous Spider-Man 2 title have been made. First off, the game graphics will be more true to the actual comic book style, referred to as 3D comic inking, and include cinematics via a "comic panel" presentation. Ultimate Spider-Man will have a less expansive game world, but Treyarch made up for that by increasing the detail of the environment, adding a "threat assessment" feature which forces you to prioritize tasks, added more mission variety and a new combat system, and allows you to play as Spidey and Venom. The game story is written by comic book author Brian Michael and picks up after issue #39.

Another day, another batch of game trailers were released. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are trailers for :

• Black & White 2 - Trailer
• Dungeon Lords - Trailer
• Grandia III - Trailer
• Pariah - Trailer (Part 1)