Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II will feature more monsters, graphically stunning environments and five new and unique customizable player characters to choose from, hidden areas to explore, as well as a new item creation system that will allow players to create their own ultimate magical artifacts. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II is scheduled to be available at retail for holiday 2003. Read more for some new screens, as well as a new in-game trailer, showing off the 'Ysuran' character in action. Ysuran is a potent spell-caster who can grow to become awesomely powerful. As a necromancer, a wizard specializing in the dark art of death magic, he is very skilled with spells that create, modify, or destroy life force.

Ultimate Arena, Inc. today announced the addition of award-winning and top-selling Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003 to its website. At Ultimate Arena, online gamers can create their own tournaments for cash prizes. Players fund their accounts with a credit card or PayPal, select a supported game, choose desired game settings, and pay a tournament entry fee as low as 50 cents. The player or team that wins the match collects the prize money.

Publisher/Developer Strategy First announced today that the Disciples world has expanded even further with Disciples II: Servants of the Dark, which shipped to retail stores today. “First we brought you Guardians of the Light, and now Servants of the Dark, which is going to introduce gamers to a whole new side of the Disciples world,” says Steve Milburn, Director of Marketing for Strategy First. “The good side was fun, but we all know that everyone is waiting for their chance to visit the dark side…”

Sonic The Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka and SONICTEAM return with their first all-new platform game since the SEGA Saturn era! Darkness has fallen upon a once-magical land. An evil King who seeks to rule with an everlasting night has captured the creatures that inhabit this realm. Now, a young boy must use the powers of a legendary suit to control special eggs in order to restore light to the land. Read more for some new screens ...

Activision/Grey Matter have released a new patch for US edition of their action adventure game Spider-Man: the Movie. This upgrade brings your retail game to v1.3 and fixes an issue that resulted in the Training missions not working properly with certain Pentium 4 processor, as well as an issue that prevented digital controllers with less than 8 buttons from working properly (thanks 3DGamers). Read more for download links ...

As was announced & expected Valve is releasing new Half Life 2 footage through their Steam service. They have just unleashed a self-running Bink formatted video showing off the incredible re-created G-Man in Half-Life 2. Watch the transformation from old to new and simply marvel at the difference. Read more for download links ...

The World Cyber Games semi-final action continues this weekend at CompUSA locations across the nation with Half Life: Counter Strike on Saturday, July 19th and Unreal Tournament 2003 on Sunday, July 20th. The tournament begins promptly at 11:00am and all participants should arrive by 10:30am. For more details and a list of CompUSA locations please visit the official World Cyber Games website

Jaleco just informed us that they have launched the official website for their upcoming RTS 'Goblin Commander'. To kick-off the official 'Goblin Commander' website features a gallery of concept art and the recently released screenshots showing the two-month design enhancement from the 24-member art team. Check out the inaugural “Developer Diary” posting by Producer Chris Millar. Millar, a PC strategy game veteran hand-picked to lead the console-inspired development team, discusses the Fog Of War methods used in the game to balance strategy elements with design goals.

In Killer 7, players take on the role of Harman Smith an unlikely assassin who lives life at his own pace. Switching between seven different personalities, he employs each character’s abilities to terminate targets he deems “deserving to die.” Read more to check out some screens ...

Infinium Labs announced today that the highly anticipated new gaming console, Phantom, will be unveiled to the public at the first annual Ultimate Gamers Expo in August. “We’re very excited to be unveiling the Phantom for the first time at the Ultimate Gamers Expo,” said Tim Roberts, CEO of Infinium Labs. “This show is the perfect venue and gives us the unique opportunity to show the system firsthand to over 100,000 gamers and industry insiders.”

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 :

• MoH: Rising Sun - Trailer
• Drake - Trailer
• SSX 3 - Trailer
• SSX 3 - Trailer 2
• NBA Live 2004 - Trailer
• Powerdrome - Trailer
• XIII - Trailer
• Etherlords 2 - Trailer
• 
  
  We will update this throughout the day when new trailers become available. Read more for download links ...

City Interactive announces that the release date of the game named P2 [working title] has been moved to Q1 2004. P2 [working title] is 3D strategy in space, the sequel to “Project Earth” that contains advanced strategic section and the fleet management option. P2 takes best elements from RTS and RPG to build never seen gameplay experience. To be continued ...

Players will aid Mace Griffin's search for revenge and the truth by taking on an extensive variety of bounty missions. For example, in either space or on the ground, the player will be able to destroy massive space stations, stop rustlers from stealing alien super cattle, infiltrate and sabotage organizations, salvage smuggled technology and protect crime lords. The mix of missions will require speed, agility, skill, accuracy, brutality and powers of deduction. It all sounds very appealing, now read more to find out if it actually is ....

Lost Dungeons of Norrath is a new expansion for the incredibly popular PC Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), EverQuest. This full-sized expansion will focus on the exploration of more than forty dynamic dungeons, with the main emphasis being placed on single group content. New technology and design ideas have been implemented that will allow players to work their way through dungeons individually tailored to the strength of their group. Lost Dungeons of Norrath will be available fall 2003 in limited quantities at retail and as a secure digital download from SOE.

The latest installment in the award-winning series, Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria is a unique blend of role playing and turn-based strategy gaming. Set in the troubled land of Etheria, old foes such as Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs have resumed their ancient hostilities and the Undead legions of Lord Bane have returned. The game centers on the actions of your Warlord, who plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of your military efforts. Read more to check some new screens ...

FilePlanet has posted up another one of their exclusive downloads for their FP & Founders subscribers, offering a free seven day trial of SOE's massively multiplayer first person shooter PlanetSide. The download is 1.5gig large, so it might actually take you 7 days to get it as well. Also for their FilePlanet & Founders subscribers is a another exclusive download of Rockstar's urban racing game Midnight Club II. The multiplayer demo includes the LA level with three cars and four modes of play for up to eight players.

Vavle just send over word that the Steam Beta is entering its final phase, and is now open to the public. To enter this beta, simply download and run the 500K installer. Steam, a broadband platform for the deliver and management of digital content, currently features a variety of Valve games including Counter-Strike 1.6, which introduces the new riot shield, the official CS bot and more. Visit the Steam Powered website or read more for details & download links ...

As expected & announced, the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Map Editor is now available for download. This will allow anyone to create maps and content for Enemy Territory. Please note, these tools are not supported by Activision, id Software, or Splash Damage. Help is available via a community forum located right here where you'll find open discussions on working with the editor.

Blizzard Entertainment today announced that lead programmer Rick Seis has accepted the role of development team lead for Blizzard North. In his new position, Seis will focus on leading Blizzard North's concentrated team of developers while assuming the day-to-day responsibilities for maintaining and promoting the group's success. Additionally, Blizzard North will be streamlining their teams into one core group in order to focus their development efforts on one key project. Further information regarding the specifics of their next project will be announced at a future date.

The release of the new tactical 3D action-shooter BREED will be postponed and put off until September. Many fans from the BREED community and the entire action-shooter scene had made worthwhile suggestions. The British BREED developer, Brat Designs, took these suggestions to heart and even further increased the game's complexity. Since the publication of the beta demo at the beginning of June, the 3D action-shooter has undergone a lot of fine tuning. The full support of DirectX9 and NVIDIA's enhanced rendering technology have turned BREED into a visual masterpiece!

'Hunter: The Reckoning Wayward' is a 3rd person action-shooter set in the fantasy world of White Wolf role-playing, players act as human monster-hunters protecting and defending lives of the innocent. One to two players choose from 5 playable Hunters, each possessing a vast array of weapons, edges (spells) and supernatural abilities. The nice folks over at Vivendi sent over a build so read more to find out how our hunting trip went ...

Chessmaster brings a grandmaster-strength engine, the strongest ever in a console product, to the PS2. With opponents of every skill level from beginner to grandmaster, anyone can find a challenge that matches their abilities, or inspiration to become a master. Chessmaster for PS2 also has a library of tools to elevate your game, including the complete tutorial content from Josh Waitzkin and renowned chess coach Bruce Pandolfini as found in the Chessmaster 9000 PC product.

Activision sends us word that the map editor for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is slated to be released at some point tomorrow. No further details are available at this point.

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 :

• Champions of Norrath (PS2) - Trailer
• Advent Rising - Trailer
• NFL Street - Trailer
• Ghost Recon: Island Thunder (Xbox) - Trailer 2
• Endless Ages - Trailer
• Lock On - Trailer 3
• 
  
  We will update this throughout the day when new trailers become available. Read more for download links ...