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Ubisoft has moved the release date for Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements, moving it back a few weeks to 7th December.

Light gun shooters haven't always been popular at home, and not just because pointing the gun off-screen to reload sometimes incurs collateral damage ("why is my plant pot in the fire"). Instead it's the old dichotomy of arcade and home - what's brilliantly brief in amongst the slots is bewilderingly insubstantial when your receipt says 39.99.

Developer Vicarious Visions has said the DS version of Guitar Hero III will come with its own peripheral.

Psychonauts developer Double Fine has skilfully crafted a new epic to yank us through a long Monday back at the grind stone. Except it's not their big new release, which we don't know about yet, but a web-game instead.

Atari says that a new demo for Race 07 is now available to download. We checked and it is. Good work, Atari!

A Most Wanted list you say? Cripes, whatever next: a Tips and Cheats pamphlet to go with Eurogamer's promotional Pacman Beach Ball cover mount? Still, it's the summer, there are precious few games around and, with an awful lot of new titles coming up towards the end of the year you might quite reasonably want to know which ones to keep an eye on.

Splash Damage has announced that the PC demo for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be available to download this afternoon, from 6pm BST (UK time) onwards. Isn't that the evening? We're not sure.

Is it that time of year already? The time when another Tiger Woods golf game ambles onto the fairway of life, prompting us all to chuckle at how it's the same as the last one and who buys these things and blah blah blah? Such cynicism is understandable, given the rather lazy port which heralded the series' next-gen debut with PGA Tour 06. Last year's update improved on that uninspiring start (not a difficult task) and, inevitably, this latest variation offers an even more tweaked and buffed experience.

Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos has revealed that the Xbox 360 retail bundles of Rock Band will all come with wired guitars, while PS3 packs will be wireless.

Sales of Nintendo hardware have fallen in Japan, where the DS handheld has shifted fewer than 100,000 units for the first time this year, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

Developer Ready at Dawn has said God of War: Chains of Olympus will be out in North America on 4th March, 2008.

Xbox Live is down! Xbox Live is down! Fortunately we have Major Nelson to explain why, which he does by telling us that maintenance is being conducted until 1pm GMT (2pm BST).

Community and data collection tool, Xfire, has now passed the 8 million subscriber mark, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

There are less than two months to go now until action-RPG Hellgate: London hits the shops. It's a PC-exclusive and is being developed by Flagship Studios, formed by a team of ex-Blizzard employees who worked on Diablo.

Bizarre Creations has scribbled on its Project Gotham Racing 4 website with new information about sparkly Arcade Mode.

Newly installed EA Sports boss Peter Moore reckons that the publisher needs to start using social networking ideas, among other things, to compete for the "hearts and minds" of a wider sports audience.

Microsoft and Bungie have reportedly banned a Halo 3 fan from Xbox Live for more than 7,000 years after he got his hands on the Halo 3 Epsilon test build.

That's the way you do it! Forgive my brief moment of Mr Punch madness, but with Rock Ballads the SingStar series has finally clicked back into its groove. As this marks the tenth outing for the franchise in just a few short years, a production rate which makes even the EA Sports roster look positively lethargic, it was perhaps inevitable that quality would eventually take a back seat to quantity. That's not to say there haven't been tunes worth warbling in the last few updates, but it did feel that SingStar was becoming little more than an interactive version of the interminable Now That's What I Call Music compilation series.

Microsoft is in talks with the BBC to bring the broadcaster's library of content, including high definition TV programmes, to Xbox Live.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, there's an uncomfortable feeling that recent events have killed off any lingering hope of a career in politics. Or, indeed, in any field in which the muck-raking tabloids are likely to take a pop at you by dredging up old skeletons. The kind of skeletons that come from closets you thought you'd dumped at the bottom of the local lake decades ago.

In light of recent chatter about Stranglehold having cost USD 30 million to make, we thought we'd ask Valve's Gabe Newell how much Orange Box ran to. "I don't know," he told us at Games Convention. "We don't track that."

Gosh! It seems like only 3 months and 8 days ago that we last sat down for half an hour with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, which is probably because that was when we last sat down with him. He said lots of things back then, so for our Games Convention chat this past week we were able to skip some of the pleasantries and talk in more depth about Orange Box, Steam, Wii controls and which is better PlayStations or Xboxes. Only kidding. Sort of. Plus we talked about those excellent TF2 movie shorts - have you watched the Soldier one yet? Read on also for Gabe using a swearword, which we think is an exclusive. Enjoy.

Do you remember the Heavy Weapons Guy video that Valve did to promote Team Fortress 2? Of course you do, because it was ace. Well, they're doing another one.

Word on the vine of grapes is that Valve has narrowed down Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal's cluster-release to 9th October.

Valve has told Eurogamer that it has no intention of charging customers who download additional content for games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, despite the widely spread increase of paid-for updates in the PC and console world.

Team Fortress 2 is shaping up to be one of the multiplayer PC games of the year (providing it comes out in this one, obviously). In and around our recent playtest, we were able to ask designer Robin Walker a bunch of questions about the decisions behind it, and the plan going forward beyond release. What follows is a selection of topics raised during the hours we spent in Robin's company, all knitted together fancily so it looks neat and tidy and you can read through it easily. You wouldn't want the raw transcript - it's epic, and we said a lot of stupid things. We're not very clever really. Enjoy.

In Team Fortress 2, Valve's fort-versus-fort multiplayer FPS, the devs have tried to apply the lessons they learned about iterative design to a multiplayer game. It is, in designer Robin Walker's words, "the first time we've got our shit together enough to do this" (and they've had a few goes - TF2 was originally announced in 1998). One of the words we hear a lot is "pacing". "We've always thought of pacing as a crafted thing in single-player," says Walker. "We spent a lot of time in Half-Life 2 crafting the highs and lows." Now TF2 has them - instead of standing around defending the base ("a flat experience"), you're forced to deal with rapidly evolving situations, like a Medic and Heavy Weapons Guy combining to capitalise on the former's temporary burst of invulnerability. When an enemy moves your flag, it will take 30 seconds to return to its home even if you touch it, forcing you to adjust your area of defensive focus. Similarly, get halfway through capturing a control point before death and your partial control will gradually diminish, giving the next wave the chance to resume the attack, and forcing the defending team to keep more of an eye on it. The dynamic changes minute to minute.

Originally published on GamesIndustry.biz, today's wide-ranging interview with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell touches on everything from the decision to extend Half-Life 2 episodically and introduce advertising to online multiplayer game Counter-Strike, to the future of the Steam business and what to expect from the next five years of gaming hardware. It also offers an insight into how Valve is structured, and why the developer believes listening to its customers is paramount to its success.

Valve has decided not to bother with The Black Box, which would have allowed PC gamers to buy Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 without having to pay for unneeded copies of Half-Life 2 and Episode One.

By now you'll have read our extensive hands-on report on Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Well, hopefully. Having spent an hour working through each of the six sections Valve prepared for us to play, we sat down with programmer David Speyrer, designer Gautam Babbar and Valve's ever-present marketing director Doug Lombardi and talked about the development of Episode Two, the release date issue, and where things might be going in Episode Three.