Brand new concept, TrackMania drags the player in a funny universe of track building and driving. For the first time, the player has to build his track before racing. Will he find the right way to do the best time ? He has to collect all the blocks of the Trackmania set, a truly virtual construction game enabling the creation of increasingly larger and higher tracks with a capacity exceeding 2000 blocks ! Read more for details and screens ...

Take-Two Interactive has released a demo for PopTop Software's 3D management strategy Railroad Tycoon 3. This demo contains a pair of tutorials, a single scenario/sand-box map, all set in Italy as well as an additional scenario/sand-box map set in Heartland, USA (thanks 3DGamers). Read more for download links ...

Codemasters has released a demo for HotHouse's tv based music show American Idol (distributed as Pop Idol in the UK). The 'American Idol' video game is a complete recreation of the TV show that you can play at home! You create, style and rehearse your own contestant, and then compete to win the Pop Idol Crown! Read more for download links...

GSC Game World is glad to inform all the fans of tooth-grinding shooters that our arcade FPS FireStarter has gone gold. The game can be expected to hit the stores very soon. Due to technical peculiarities, the game does not run under OS Windows 95, 98 and ME, while supported only by Windows 2000 and XP.

DreamCatcher Games today announced that it has shipped Pax Romana on PC. Pax Romana is an historical strategy game set in ancient Rome, designed by the creator of Europa Universalis. There are two sides to this epic game – political and strategic. The strategic side is very much a battle of cunning and well-planned military tactics, whereas the political side involves the manipulation of senators and generals alike, as politicians seek to gain military and financial power.

Microsoft Corp., beset by widespread criticism of security flaws in its software, on Wednesday put up a bounty to track down the authors of two computer bugs that choked the Internet earlier this year. Microsoft offered two $250,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the Blaster worm and the SoBig.F e-mail virus, which infected more than half a million computers, crashed thousands of systems, and snarled Internet traffic across the globe in August and September.

This went under our radar earlier today/yesterday but LucasArts just let us know that the official Armed and Dangerous web site has gone live. Armed and Dangerous is LucasArts' upcoming Action-Action title coming out on the Xbox and PC in early December. The site is full of new and exciting content and you should consider it a resource. So turn up the volume on your computer, and take a look! You can also check our recent 'Armed and Dangerous' preview...

Xbox Live, the world's most intense unified online gaming service, just hosted its hottest weekend ever. This past Sunday, November 2, Xbox Live set new usage records. On that day, 83,652 unique users spent 262,268 hours on the service -- or more than three hours per user. Sunday's most-played Xbox Live game was "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3" with 24,478 gamers signing in for battle. At one point, 6,731 gamers played the game simultaneously.

Ritual Entertainment has released the Star Trek Elite Force II source code giving you the change to create single & multiplayer mods for Raven Software's shooter Star Trek Elite Force II. Read more for details & download links ...