Last month the Championship Gaming Series, a new professional gaming league owned by DirecTV, made a rather audacious splash by holding its first ever live draft at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills. Last night, the first CGS season for North America came to an end as the Chicago Chimera won the first CGS title by defeating the Carolina Core 22-21 in a series of matches that were broadcast live on DirecTV’s “The 101” channel.

Chicago Chimera GM Brian Flander celebrates with the CGS trophy Monday night.

Just several weeks ago in July, the classic Guns N’ Roses album Appetite For Destruction had its twentieth anniversary. There was a retrospective in Guitar World, and a cover story in Rolling Stone, and it brought back my first memory of when I heard that great album.

It was a day or so after I turned 16, and the album was being played in-between bands at a festival concert I went to in Hollywood. Welcome to the Jungle started slamming through the P.A. and I thought, Is this that band Guns N Roses? I remembered seeing the song title in an ad for the album. I also remember seeing the ad for the album, and without hearing their music, thought, Great, another band that’s all Aqua-Net and no talent like Poison, just what we need. But now as I was actually hearing them I thought, This is pretty good. Then It’s So Easy came on, and I didn’t even realize it was the same band because Axl Rose’s vocals sounded so different.

I finally got the album and agreed with what those in the know were saying before the band broke big: This is one of the best rock albums I’ve heard in years. It also gave rock and roll the good swift kick in the ass it needed, and not a minute too soon,

It wasn’t long before Guns N’ Roses became the biggest band in the world, and they hit at the right place and time. A lot of kids, like myself, were coming of age then, and here was an album that captured the angst, anxiety, and confusion that came with adolescence. Like many great rock albums, it was a soundtrack to our teenage years, and like AC / DC’s Back In Black, whether you liked hard rock and metal or couldn’t stand it, you probably had a copy of it because the music was too good to ignore.

It’s sad that Guns N’ Roses fell apart like they have, although back in the day the band was so volitle, out of control and drugged out, many wondered if they would live long enough to achieve long term success. Instead, the band imploded from too much too soon, and Axl’s egotistical, prima donna bullsh*t. Rose, the only remaining member, is desperately determined to out-do Appetite with the years in gestation Chinese Democracy album. But as talent manager Bernie Brillstein once pointed out, and it certainly fits in this case, the more you sit around and worry about staying hot, the more likely you’re going to get cold.

What made Appetite great was that the band didn’t over think everything and micro-manage every detail. As former GNR guitarist Slash told Guitar World, “Appetite was basically just an off-the-cuff recording. Guns were a club band, and like most first records from club bands, it was mostly made up of material that we had been playing onstage for a while. We were pretty rough around the edges and had virtually no studio experience. We went in there and threw the album together pretty quickly.”

As a result, they captured lightning in a bottle, not an easy thing to repeat. Yet as Slash told Rolling Stone, “When I was a kid, there were these be-with-you-forever albums that represented something in your life. Whether it was the background music of your childhood or your puberty or whatever – Dark Side of the Moon or Sticky Fingers or Aerosmith’s Rocks or Led Zeppelin IV. And we made one of those records, which is all I could ever have asked for. It gives me goose bumps. That’s something no one ever can take away from me.”

Ever since Far Cry developer Crysis came to E3 2006 and blew people away with a demo for a little game called Crysis, gamers have been anxiously waiting for what has been the most anticipated PC title in years. Electronic Arts announced today that Crysis will be released on Nov. 16 in North America and Europe (the game had previously been marked for a release in early September). The exclusive PC title will be available for both Windows XP and Vista, using both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. There's also a new Web site for the game -- www.nanosuit.com -- that has some updated material that I found interesting.

So many games...so many chances for exploitation. Variety is reporting that producer Samuel Hadida has secured the rights to "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". Hadida has experience with bringing games to the silver screen having produced "Resident Evil: Extinction" to be released this year and last year's "Silent Hill" adaptation, but he's nowhere near the connoisseur (or should I say biblical apocalypse beast) that is Dr. Uwe Boll. In addition to "Wolfenstein" Hadida has the rights to "Onimusha" in hand and has signed "Silent Hill" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" director Chrisophe Gans.

Say what you will about "Silent Hill" as a movie, it is the most loyal adaptation of a video game to date. Much of the time filmmakers are content to use the game's proper name but they feel that they know better how to make the conversion successful (rather than just using the story, setting, and characters that made whatever game they are adapting a hit). "Silent Hill" captured much of the look and feel of the game while also presenting some striking and beautifully horrific imagery. Hadida is just producing however, so what we're really interested in is who is writing and directing.

Hadida has tapped fellow "Silent Hill" veteran and "Beowulf" screenwriter Roger Avary to write and direct the "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" movie. Avary is known more as a writer but has directed films like "The Rules of Attraction" and "Killing Zoe" in the past. “I’ve been playing the character of B.J. Blazkowicz since the epic ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ first bruised my brain and have ever since wanted to bring his adventures to life on the bigscreen,” Avary said. “It’s time to bust some dams, storm some bunkers and blow up some bridges.”

We hear this kind of thing a lot from creative people claiming their unrelenting loyalty to a property they've been a fan of since before it was cool to be fan of it, but ultimately the men with the money have the final say in how it goes. Movies use formulas to increase their chances of making money and those formulas don't always work for videogames. Luckily "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" is pretty formulaic in and of itself so this could be more "Silent Hill" than "House of the Dead". You can read the full Variety story here.

I caught a headline yesterday on Kotaku that made me pretty upset. It seems that the Web site Gaygamer.net was the subject of a massive hacking campaign last week by unknown homophobic parties. The trouble started last Wednesday when the site, which to my knowledge is one of the few gaming sites that caters to a gay audience, was hit with small denial of service attacks. The site suffered some periodic crashes but Friday GayGamer’s hosting service was able to root the IPs where the DOS attacks were coming from and block. Unfortunately, that’s when the real trouble started.

Last week Take Two Interactive announced that the October 16, 2007 release date for Grand Theft Auto IV (the next entry in their award-winning and political whipping-post franchise) was getting pushed into the Spring of 2008 on all systems because of "almost strictly technological problems... not problems, but challenges," to quote Take Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick.

Zelnick went on to say, "With Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar is setting a new standard for next generation video games. Certain elements of development proved to be more time-intensive than expected, especially given the commitment for a simultaneous release on two very different platforms. We all recognize that perfecting the game is vital and I can assure everyone it will be worth the wait. We owe it to the game's millions of fans, to our dedicated development team, and to our shareholders to make sure that Grand Theft Auto IV is a groundbreaking gaming experience that takes maximum advantage of next generation technology."

Sam Houser, Founder and Executive Producer of Rockstar Games, added, "The new consoles are allowing us to create the Grand Theft Auto game we always dreamed about. Every aspect of the game and its design has been completely transformed. The game is huge and is pushing the hardware platforms to their absolute limits. The top engineers from Sony and Microsoft are working closely with the team in Edinburgh right now, helping us to fully leverage the power of both platforms. As always, our goal is to surpass even the wildest expectations of the game's fans, and to create the ultimate high definition video game experience."

As the news spread across the lush forest of the internet so did the conspiracy theories. Why not announce this at E3 instead of showing a version of the game that was clearly not going to be ready in a matter of months? What is causing the delay so late in the development calendar? How can I possibly enjoy Christmas this year without stealing cars and shooting people? GTA IV forums were on fire with the news. The website gta4.net reported over 800 replies and over 20,000 views of their thread on the delay in less than 24 hours.

It wasn't just gamers that had opinions. Analyst for Wedbush Morgan and video game industry scryer Michael Pachter believes the Playstation 3 is where the blame lies. Pachter said, "We think it is likely that the Rockstar team had difficulty in building an exceptionally complicated game for the PS3, and failed to recognize how far away from completion the game truly was until recently. We think it is also likely that Take-Two had a contractual commitment to Sony that it would not favor competitor Microsoft by launching the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV prior to launching the PS3 version, and believe that any delay of the PS3 version necessitated a delay of the Xbox 360 version."

Despite the fact that it isn't official and amounts to little more than watercooler gossip Xbox 360 owners used Pachter as a battle standard to attack PS3 owners blaming them for all the world's ills. It would seem that one of the most successful and well-known (for good or ill) game franchises in the world was destroying the very fabric of the multi-console society.

Personally I don't care when it comes out and I don't care why it was delayed and why no one said anything. In my experience a late game is always better than a broken one and when a publisher takes it on the chin and allows a developer extra time to finish a product it's a sign that some part of the world is working correctly. Take Two really needed GTA IV to come out this year with the controversy surrounding Manhunt 2 and the less-than-stellar performance of All-Pro Football 2K8. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt here and wait until the game comes out before burning down our own houses and flipping over our neighbor's car. There will be plenty of other games that include shooting coming out in time for Christmas.

The L.A. Times just ran a familiar dispatch from Hollywood about projects stuck in “development hell.” This time, it’s about various Neil Gaiman projects that have struggled to reach the silver screen, and by the Times count, it’s more than 12 projects in 16 years that stalled including the movie version of Sandman, and Good Omens, which has Terry Gilliam attached.

Yet finally there’s been a break in the logjam, and three Gaiman flicks are coming out this year into next: Stardust, his adaptation of Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and Coraline, directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas). Gaiman also hopes to direct Death: The High Cost of Living, himself next year with Guillermo del Toro executive producing.

Gaiman wrote his adaptations of Beowulf and Sandman with Roger Avary (Rules of Attraction and co-writer of Pulp Fiction), over ten years ago, and High Cost of Living has also been “in development” that long as well. Gaiman told Times reporter Sam Adams that in the ‘90’s, “the executives had no clue who I was. They didn’t read comics. They didn’t read fantasy or understand it. They liked movies like Beaches. But the guys who brought you the bottle of still water and stayed over at the edge of the meeting, they knew who I was.”

Today Gaiman has several factors working in his favor. The fans that hovered over on the edge of the meetings, and would ask him to sign their copies of Sandman after the big execs turned him down, are now running the studios themselves. The major studio attitude towards comics has also, obviously, changed drastically, and the world-wide success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy made fantasy a viable genre again. Not to mention the new motion capture technology Zemeckis has embraced has finally made an epic poem like Beowulf filmable.

“On the computer-animated Beowulf, the restrictions of budget simply don’t apply,” Adams writes. “Gaiman balked at writing what he assumed would be a costly underwater battle until Zemeckis told him that nothing he could write would cost more than $1 million a minute to film. Gaiman used to say that writing comics was like making a movie with an unlimited budget. Movies, it seems, are catching up."

Yes, O.J. Simpson is back in the news. The family of murder victim Ron Goldman won a court order yesterday that awards them Simpson’s earnings for participating in the new sports title All-Pro Football 2K8. Simpson allowed 2K Sports to use his name and likeness for the game, which features more than 200 former NFL greats like John Elway, Jerry Rice and Barry Sanders (all three of whom grace the cover of the title).

As if there was any doubt that Halo 3 is poised for monster sales and unprecedented commercial success, Microsoft announced today that the highly anticipated sequel has exceeded 1 million pre-orders in North America, which is the fastest game to reach that coveted milestone. That achievement would mean so much more if industry retailers honored pre-orders.

I’ve suspected that with the glut of potential blockbuster games and huge franchise titles set to arrive over the next four to five months, some of the less fortunate games might get pushed out of the crowded fall/holiday season release crunch and into 2008. It’s already happened with Rockstar’s Gtand Theft Auto IV, and now we have another title that has been delayed: Funcom’s MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

Right as the last Harry Potter book was being released, and everyone was panicking about the ending being leaked, a site called SaltyStix.com ran a story called The Best Twist in the History of Film (that I wasn’t shocked by at all). The best surprise ending in all of film history, according to this site? The Empire Strikes Back, and its revelation that Darth Vader was Luke’s father.

“It doesn’t even strike many of us today as something that could have ever come as a surprise,” writes Stix contributor Bob. “It’s kind of a shame to (sic), because I feel like when it was revealed in 1980, it shocked audiences around the world….Many people today don’t even realize that this was a twist at all. The idea that Luke’s father is Vader has become engrained in our social consciousness.”

As this site also points out, Empire was such a great movie, it wouldn’t have ruined the experience if you knew the ending before you saw it. “Far too many movies today are build on the idea of a twist ending,” Bob continues, “and some of these movies are completely ruined if the ending is known going into it.”

It’s true that some films dangerously hinged on whether the ending worked or not. A twist can totally make a film, like The Usual Suspects, and a film can also fall apart if the end surprise is weak, like the endings of The Game, Unbreakable, and The Village.

What The Sixth Sense had going for it was the fact that it came out of nowhere with no advance hype in what’s usually a dumping ground for Hollywood, the month of August. Once the word got around there was a secret, the audiences were very good about keeping it because the movie played fair.

The Sixth Sense was clever because the twist would have been easy to guess, but M. Night Shyamalan did a good job distracting you. Sense and Suspects also gave you a lot of clues along the way you didn’t notice at first. The most obvious one in Sense was Bruce Willis always wears the same clothes, and one of the best clues you’ll notice the second time you watch The Usual Suspects is right before Kobayashi comes into the story, Spacey is staring right underneath Chazz Palminteri’s coffee cup.

In both the case of Suspects and Empire, the twists were in character’s names. Vader means father in Polish, and Keyser Soze’s true identity was hidden in his name as well. At a screenwriting seminar for Fade In magazine, Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie recalled the character was originally going to be named Keyser Sume, who was a real person he used to work with at a law firm. Using a real name could cause legal problems, so it had to be changed.

McQuarrie’s roommate had a Turkish-to-English dictionary, and he exhaustively searched for a substitute last name. After looking up every evil word he could think of, like fire and devil, McQuarrie finally told his friend to look up the word verbal, which translated to Soze. McQuarrie then joked that the movie’s a huge bomb in Turkey.

Not long ago, I picked up Psychonauts for the PlayStation 2. I had heard a lot about the game and was extremely eager to try it. For one, Psychonauts had a great pedigree; the game was developed by Double Fine Productions’ Tim Schafer, a former LucasArts designer who helped create such classic titles as The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. And secondly, Psychonauts had garnered a ton of strong reviews and awards since it debuted in 2005. And these weren’t just run-of-the-mill positive reviews that we see almost every day for virtually every game, thanks to the dread “8 to 10” review scale that many media outlets use (or “4 to 5” scale, depending on which site or magazine you read). These reviews were gushing love letters praising the game’s imaginative visuals, original story, and sly humor. So why did the game end up as a commercial bomb?

How big will Halo 3 be? I recently wrote about some of the hype regarding the highly anticipated Xbox 360 title, specifically the record-setting preorder demand and the bounty of product tie-ins, marketing events and promotions surrounding Halo 3. We all know the game is going to be huge, but exactly how huge? Where will the game rank in terms in the history entertainment blockbusters? And can it take down the current champ?

At this year’s Comic Con, Hostel writer / director Eli Roth announced a project on his slate titled Trailer Trash, which will be an entire feature length movie of fake coming attractions. Is this an idea whose time has come in the age of A.D.D.?

Tom’s actually predicted this one, as strange as that may sound. Back when we wrote about this year’s L.A. Grindhouse Festival, I mentioned the hilarious movie trailers that were shown before the features. There are compilations of B movie trailers available on DVD that are great fun to watch, and I wrote, “Maybe one day they’ll be a whole two-hour movie that’s nothing but fake coming attractions.”

The idea for Trailer Trash obviously grew out of the failed Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, which had fake coming attractions in-between the fake features, like the faux slasher film Thanksgiving, which Roth wrote and directed (the best fake trailer in ‘House is Edgar “Shawn of the Dead” Wright’s Don’t, which perfectly captured the true spirit of these movies).

A whole movie of fake trailers could actually be a pretty daring experiment, and if it succeeds, it could wind up being a lot of fun. The problem is, today’s general public doesn’t get this kind of stuff. It’s too “inside baseball” for anyone but film-geeks. Grindhouse suffered its fate at the hands of a generation who had no idea what double bills were, let alone drive-ins and the sleazy, low-rent “grindhouses” that showed those kinds of films.

But in other ways, today’s movie-going audience could be very ready and eager for a film like Trailer Trash. These days films are so heavy with visuals, they’re often called coming attractions for themselves. In his review of Michael Bay’s Armageddon, Roger Ebert wrote, “Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any thirty seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad.”

Maybe it would make more sense to spend $200 million on a five, six minute movie, cut out all that unnecessary plot, dialog, story, and character development that no one pays attention to in summer action films anyways, and the studios can make their money back by having numerous showings a day. Considering fans paid full admission price to see the trailer of Episode One, and walked out to avoid suffering through Wing Commander, it may not be such a far-fetched idea.

How about what the L.A. Times suggested in their review of Rush Hour 3? “It’s been pointed out that the outtakes that traditionally accompany the closing credits on Jackie Chan movies are sometimes more enjoyable than the movies themselves. If there’s a Rush Hour 4, somebody might want to consider swapping the time allotted to plot with the time devoted to the gag reel. A two-minute movie followed by 89 minutes of outtakes doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.”

The new track list for Guitar Hero III: The Legends of Rock just keeps getting better and better. Activision announced yet another addition to the game at an exclusive preview for the game at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival yesterday, and it’s a great one: “She Bangs the Drums” by The Stone Roses.

Yesterday Electronic Arts announced that they are continuing the story from Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars with an expansion pack. Development is already underway on the expansion titled Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath and is expected to be released in in the Spring of 2008 for PC and Xbox 360.

"This expansion has an impressive new single player campaign, a new global strategic layer that adds depth to the familiar Command & Conquer style gameplay, and several fun, all-new toys that range from versatile combat soldiers to giant armoured walkers," said Mike Verdu, VP and Executive Producer at EA Los Angeles (EALA).

"Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath also features a new strategic layer to gameplay that allows players to establish bases, build customized armies, and attack their enemies on a global scale – and then dive into the frenzied tactical combat where their skills as a commander will make the difference in battle. The game also introduces six new sub-factions and a wealth of new units, structures, and powers to the armies of the Global Defence Initiative, the Brotherhood of Nod, and the enigmatic alien Scrin."

"A new global strategic layer" makes me think of the excellent Dawn of War expansion The Dark Crusade. I like those big Risk-map affairs like The Dark Crusade and The War of the Ring mode in Battle for Middle-Earth II where there is some persistance with your army between battles but what eventually happens - at least when I play them - is that I build an unstoppable juggernaut that crushes everything later in the game. Since you can take elements of your army with you from battle to battle it's best to just rush with your standing army early in each battle and not even worry about building anything. Maybe the C&C3 expansion will have a way of dealing with that. Hopefully it's better than the "global strategic layer" that was in earlier C&C games where you just picked which battle to engage on a map but it had no relevance in the grand scheme of things.

The EA press release went on to say, "The single player campaign will allow players to experience a new story that spans 20 years – from the rebirth of the Brotherhood of Nod after the Second Tiberium War through the dramatic events of the Third Tiberium War and beyond. The story is told through a new set of high-definition live action video sequences starring a celebrity cast. Joe Kucan, the original actor who portrayed the character Kane in Command & Conquer games over the last decade, will reprise his role as the megalomaniacal leader of the Brotherhood of Nod. Other details of the cast have yet to be announced."

It sounds like they haven't locked down the TV all-stars from Tiberium Wars but certainly intend to try. I'm not sure that the FMV sequences are as important to the game as EA makes it out, but there is a certain guilty pleasure to them. I gave Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars a pretty favorable review so I'm looking forward to some more frenzy-paced RTS action.

It's here. Xbox 360 owners are already tired of the BioShock demo that was posted on Xbox Live over a week ago, but PC owners still haven't been able to test it out on their systems. 2K Games promised a PC demo before the game was released and have delivered on that promise.

Yesterday an administrator on the 2K Games site posted to the forum that the PC demo would be available today and then later the site front-page was updated with this message, "The wait is nearly over. At 7 PM EST the BioShock PC demo will go live for you to enjoy. We will have exclusive pre-loading at Fileplanet. Set your watches for 7 o'clock!" FilePlanet was running a front-page link to reserve the demo but that link has since been taken down. No doubt the demo will be available on or around 7:00pm but who wants to wait that long? From the looks of things SoftPedia has the demo up on their servers and available for download right now (the link you're looking for is here).

The SoftPedia servers were getting slammed when the demo first went up but download speeds may have normalized by now. It's important to note that a number of fake BioShock demo links have been reported so be careful before jumping onto a mirror. The demo size is around 1.84 GB so any file sizes much smaller than that and it's probably fake. Word on the forums is that the demo from SoftPedia is also completely unlocked (meaning you can play it as soon as you install it) and exactly the same as the Xbox demo but with all the fancy PC graphics your computer can muster.

I loved the Xbox demo (you can read my impressions of here) but I'm playing this thing on the PC. It's a shooter with high-end graphics and while I do love playing in the surround sound on a giant screen, I just can't pass up mouse and keyboard at 1600 x 1200. Maybe I'll give the Xbox version a run after I've played it through on PC. If you're worried about finding it in stores and haven't preordered a copy, you can pick it up on Steam and start preloading now. The Steam counter states that it will be unlocked at 4pm EST tomorrow. BioShock is due to hit store shelves tomorrow as well.

Crysis already has PC gamers benchmarking and upgrading their systems in the hopes of being able to run it with all the features turned on, but it seems that the drivers from NVIDIA are giving the developers fits under Vista. Many early adopters already took the plunge with Vista in the hopes that DirectX 10 would be embraced by developers and a new age of PC gaming goodness would begin. It sounds like the developers are doing what they can but that "DirectX 10 era" may be a bit further off.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz co-founder and President of Crytek Cevat Yerli spoke about some of the frustrations they've had implementing DirectX 10 features. In response to a question about why Crytek still demos the game under XP and DirectX 9 Yerli had this to say."

"We're still receiving drivers which are crashing, that's the main reason. We don't have a stable driver yet. We have drivers out there on the market but we are pushing the drivers so hard that we are getting all the time multi-core drivers, dual core drivers, or multi-threaded drivers essentially, with multi-threaded architecture."

"Until we get it on Vista running on multi-threaded drivers we don't want to show any more, because we are getting performance impact on Vista. We don't want to make Vista look bad either, because it's not Vista's fault - it's the driver right now. So we're working very closely with Nvidia to resolve these last issues we have with systemic performance... There are a lot of driver issues on the market."

No doubt Vista doomsayers will readily arm themselves with this information, however worry not Vista fans; Yerli is confident that the problems will be fixed in the next few weeks and everything will be running smoothly in time for the November 16th release date. Then again...what is he going to say? I doubt a goal-minded and PR savvy President is going to come out with, "Yeah it's going to suck for you on Vista until about February 2008." We won't know for sure until we get the game for ourselves but this might dampen the spirits of the DX10 fanboys.

You can read the full interview here and part one of the interview with Cevat Yerli here.

Hmm... Looks like September 25th is going to be a busy day for shooter fans. Not only does it see the release of Halo 3 on Xbox 360 which will no doubt become the fastest selling thing ever, but EA announced that they will be premiering a demo of the entire first level of Crysis for PC on that same day.

It could be completely accidental. After all the two games aren't really going after the exact same demographic. Sure a lot of Xbox 360 owners have PCs and vice versa but there's no reason you can't go buy Halo 3 and also download the free Crysis demo. There's no need to pick sides here. Crysis looks infinitely better than Halo 3 but the multiplayer component may not be as good. They're both shooters but they may end up being very different games. The competitive nature between the two comes from each game being labeled as a champion of it's respective platform. Crysis has long been heralded as the game that will prove *again* that PC gaming is far from dead and capable of delivering a superior graphics experience (a fact currently being made evident with BioShock), and Halo 3 is said to be the game that will take the 360 sales into the stratosphere. So this becomes less of Halo 3 vs Crysis and more PC gaming vs Xbox gaming (or console gaming).

I'm looking forward to Crysis a lot more than Halo 3 but I expect Halo 3 to move considerably more units. It's just the nature of the beast. Here's the EA announcement:

PC gamers now have a reason to mark a big circle around September 25th on their calendars as the single player demo for Crysis will be lighting up rigs worldwide in just 30 days.

Consisting of the entire first level in Crysis’ epic single player campaign, “Contact,” gamers will get to finally experience first-hand the stunning visuals, revolutionary Nanosuit gameplay and open-ended level design that make Crysis one of the most anticipated shooters and PC games of all time. The demo is also poised to include a huge surprise from Crytek, but for now you’ll just have to wait...

Click here to read it on EA's page with just a tad more information.

The pioneer of the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game genre is about to turn 10 and instead of growing old and haggard Ultima Online has gone in for some serious cosmetic surgery. A new expansion titled Kingdom Reborn is free for download and a 14 day trial is available for new people and those who left the online world of Ultima behind long ago.

Ahh Ultima Online. I have both fond and horrifying memories of the first few days that game came out. A friend and I spent six hours looking for something...ANYTHING...to fight. We happened upon a deer and leapt on it all swords and gnashing teeth. It killed us both. UO may not have been the most graceful way to introduce the world to the "graphical MUD" - what later became the MMO - but it was the first to venture into that territory and make it a success. The launch was ripe with crippling lag and a dearth of enemies and it wasn't long before the roads between towns were filled with murderous player-killers looking to rob you of your hard-earned belongings just for the fun of it.

Ten years and seven expansions later some are still playing UO and those loyal few are in for a treat. From the screenshot comparisons below it looks like the game has been revamped in a big way and with a new 14 day trial I might just give this thing a run. The graphics may not blow you away compared to new games but compared to the old engine it's pretty sweet. Check out the screenshots for yourself by clicking the previews below.

Here's a trailer EA put together for the game's relaunch.

Here's a snippet of the press release from EA:

With Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, the legendary kingdom has been redrawn, reengineered and rebuilt for the next decade of players seeking an epic, fantasy MMO experience. The revamped new player content welcomes those who have never adventured through the celebrated lands of Ultima Online. Additionally, enhanced visuals and brand-new user interface present the game in a whole new light to veteran players.

"As the tenth anniversary of Ultima Online's launch approaches, Kingdom Reborn introduces an entirely new experience while preserving the spirit of the classic MMO," said Mark Jacobs, VP and General Manager of EA Mythic. "Kingdom Reborn represents EA's ongoing commitment to MMOs and Ultima Online's dedicated and loyal community, some of whom have been playing the game since its launch almost ten years ago."

Finally here's where you can download the free expansion and the 14 day trial.

Ever since Activision announced at E3 2007 that former Guns ‘N Roses guitarist Slash would be appearing at a boss in the forthcoming Guitar Hero III: The Legends of Rock, people have been wondering who else might pop up in the game. RedOctane has said that it will announce the addition of a second legendary ax man for Guitar Hero III (and no, it wasn’t the recent unveiling of Poison lead singer Bret Michaels as an in-game character). Guitar Hero fans have been waiting patiently to see who the second boss will be, and it looks like the mystery guest is none other than Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fame.

According to a post over at Destructoid, there’s visual proof that Morello will be part of Guitar Hero III, which is scheduled to arrive on Oct. 29. In addition, a recent GamePro video preview of the game mentions Morello as well. This is good news, quite frankly. Slash is a no-brainer when it comes to iconic guitarists, obviously. But Morello is an outstanding choice because, for my money, he’s been the most original, daring and exciting guitarist of the last 15-plus years. I haven’t been the biggest fan of Rage Against the Machine or Audioslave, but I don’t think there’s any question that Morello is one of the few true guitar heroes working in rock today.

Guitar Hero III looks like it’s shaping up quite well. I was a little concerned when the original developer Harmonix bolted to make Rock Band, thus handing the franchise over to Activision (which acquired publisher RedOctane) and Neversoft, a developer best known for the Tony Hawk game series. However, after getting a preview of the game at E3 and seeing it in action, Guitar Hero III looks like it will be a worthy addition to the franchise.

Last week, Rockstar Games’ Manhunt 2 finally got a new rating from the ERSB after being slapped with an Adult Only (AO) rating earlier this summer for excessive violence. Manhunt 2 is now rated M (for Mature) and scheduled for an October 31 launch on the Wii, Playstation 2, and PlayStation Portable. Now that Manhunt 2 has been toned down a bit and received a new, consumer-friendly rating, everything is good to go, right? Wrong.