A post on Ubi's Shadowbane forum (thanks Fragzone) let us know that their gaming servers has been hacked..

The Shadowbane service came under serious attack tonight. Wolfpack Studios and ubi.com have been called in and we will be investigating these incidents all through the night tonight. Ubi Soft and Wolfpack Studios are now working with law enforcement and we promise all of you that these individuals will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

More info can be found @ Shadowbane Catacombs forum!

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy is a dynamic single and multiplayer action experience featuring an all-new epic story. Players are immersed in the role of apprentice at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy where they learn the power - and danger - of the Force. Amidst a multitude of complex and richly detailed Star Wars environments, including twice as many unique locales as those in Star Wars: Jedi Outcast, players face a variety of powerful and insidious enemies... Today we serve up eight young Jedi screens!

Criterion Software announces that its de facto game development technology, RenderWare, will be used by SEGA's SONICTEAM, Ltd. development studio in the creation of "Sonic Heroes" for the PlayStation2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube.

Arx Fatalis is a first-person RPG, which plunges players into an amazingly complex fantasy-world of trolls, goblins and 'Snake-women'. Creating weapons, solving puzzles and completing amazing quests, gamers become heroes as they battle in an evil world. Players will also need to master a unique real-time magic system to cast more than 50 different spells based on 20 different runes.

Utilising the technical prowess of the Xbox video game system from Microsoft and Xbox Live!, Digital Extremes, the developers of Unreal Championship in conjunction with Epic Games and Atari have completed the auto-update for the game and is available for download through Xbox Live! today. While new to the console arena, auto-updating has been a mainstay of PC games for many years, and is a requirement to maintain fair and fun online gaming. Online games are extraordinarily more complex than single player titles. Exploits will invariably be found by the hundreds of thousands of gamers playing and sharing ways to gain an advantage in the game. Auto-updates defeat these exploits and balance the playing field against those who would cheat to win.

Play.com is offering PS2 consoles at the lowest official price of only £129.99 in UK. This price matches upcoming Sony PS2 console reductions across continental Europe, which excludes the UK.

On the Raven Shield Platoon site you can find the third map released by Amon, member of the Raven Shield dev team. This map is considered an official map by Ubi Soft. Amon first intended this map to be Multiplayer and now it is. The map supports only Adversial MP modes (except for Pilot). The download is 1.69 Mb and you can grab it here!

Boolat Games unveal their next project (thanks Blues), a weapon-supported arcade racing game named Lagster.. Here is a clip from the game description:

“Lagsters” is the fascinating weapon-supported arcade races in tubes! One to eight racers can participate in a race struggling for survival and, of course, for money.

The concept of the race inside of the pipes displaces some aspects of a “flat-road” race, in particular those of the spatialization and gravitation. Spatialization sustains pivotal change: left and right in terms of the pipe plane eventually acquire a sort of a new meaning, not evident at the first sight though, and gravitation based on “repelling” objects out of the center of the pipe will be constantly dragging the car onto the pipe surface. The tracks are annular in their shape and they will have different length and number of tours in a bout. Every track has various hurdles and various accelerating and decelerating surfaces, etc. There are also sparse bonuses on the track, which can either help or hopple the player.

You find more info on the new official site here!

The Canadian Press reports that Microsoft has a vision for just how its Xbox video game console should fit in consumers' homes. It's a hub-and-spoke strategy. The personal computer is at the hub of the home, where people store their music, digital photos and other files. But when people want to share that experience, it's usually in front of the family TV.

All you need is Music Mixer, a product unveiled at the recent E3 Convention in Los Angeles. It allows you to transfer digital music and photos from the PC to the Xbox, play DVDs or CDs, strip lyrics off music - even karaoke. You can also customize your own soundtrack and visuals.

Check out the full scoop here!

TWENTY FIFTEEN today tossed up the official site for their upcoming PC/Xbox Vietnam War game Men of Valor: Vietnam. The site includes screens and general gaming news..

Men of Valor: Vietnam follows new recruit Dean Shepard and his squad of Marines through the wartorn jungles of Southeast Asia during America's most controversial conflict. The atmosphere of the troubled 1960s filters through sixteen historical missions that take the player from coastal plains of Chu Lai to the ancient city of Hue at the height of the Tet Offensive.