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It seemed like it would never happen, and now it seems we'll have to wait a bit longer. For a few short hours it seemed that the Half-Life 2 saga was drawing to a close and would finally go gold on monday. A post on Half-Life 2 Fallout's forum, allegedly from Valve chief Gabe Newell revealed the news, but further investigation revealed it to be nothing more than a hoax, scuppering the mouth-watering prospect of a mid September release for the biggest PC game of the year - for the time being at least.

Further information emerging from embattled publisher Acclaim this afternoon indicates that contrary to some media reports today, no redundancies have been made at the firm, but a filing for Chapter 11 protection is expected.

The situation at struggling publisher Acclaim took a turn for the worse this morning, as staff at the firm's UK offices reported that their salaries have not been paid - and those at the Manchester studio were allegedly sent home.

Eidos is planning a third Deus Ex title and another, more modern Thief title, according to comments made by former Eidos president Rob Dyer while he was still at the company, which surfaced in an online interview earlier this week.

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Although Ubisoft has yet to confirm it as such, both Sony and Nintendo's American offices seem to have had no qualms about letting slip the real title of Prince of Persia 2 this week, although in Sony's case at least it had the decency to scrub the title off its website before too many people noticed.

Mario Party 6 will be a bit more conventional than Nintendo has previously implied, judging by reports that surfaced overnight, although it will make use of a proprietary microphone peripheral Nintendo plans to launch to coincide with the game's US' release.

Following Epic Games' surprising defection from Atari to Midway recently, it sounds like the Unreal mob is planning to take advantage of its new digs by integrating some popular characters from a fellow Midway franchise into the next edition of its arena-style Unreal Championship shooter.

Nintendo of America has followed Nintendo of Europe's example (better cut out and frame that sentence, kids, it's a rarity) and sent out a list of its planned autumn and early winter releases for GameCube and GBA.

The long-awaited pre-load programme for Half-Life 2 has begun, with Steam users being offered the chance to start pre-loading Valve's uber-sequel as of now.

Publisher Bigben Interactive has announced that it will be extending its Talent:UK Live touring talent contest into schools and city centre venues this autumn, to tie in with the arrival of the new Dance:UK : XL title.

We don't know about you, but every so often when we're reading about some wonderful new trickery in a videogame - be it graphics, audio, networking, you name it - we're forced to fire up another web browser and head off hunting for a simpler explanation. Buzzwords, much as we love them, can be a big problem for us all, and that's one of the reasons we've decided to kick off a new, semi-regular area of the site dedicated to working out what the hell some of these things mean. Hence the name. In these days of normal mapping, specularity and a whole host of other exciting things that only a scant few can fully comprehend, What Does It Mean will attempt track down the sort of people who came up with the whole idea in the first place, and then try and extract some sort of reasonable explanation from them.

Kessen III is due out on PS2 in Europe in the summer of 2005, KOEI's European subsidiary announced this morning, boldly proclaiming that, "Kessen III will be considered the game that redefined the Kessen series."

EyeToy may have enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in Europe, but ever since we first got our hands on it last summer we've been dogged by a nagging suspicion that it's done so largely by virtue of novelty. When we look back at the games we've played using that little USB webcam, it's clear that they reject much of what we love about the medium - most notably the importance of skill, progressive challenge and replay value - in favour of novelty tasks that rely partly on the player's excitement at seeing him or herself on the screen, and partly on an array of cuddly sound effects and wackiness to attract attention.

Sonic running down a tube, then whacking zombies with our arms. On the surface it doesn't sound that much more impressive than any of the other countless EyeToy mini-games packages we've encountered, which have seemingly lost their charm in recent months. But delving a little deeper, as we did with Sega SuperStars at E3, we were impressed with a number of things, especially in the case of Sonic. Here was a game that wasn't just about flapping arms and setting high scores; it was about directing a character and beating levels one by one, you could actually fail at it, and it was better for the use of the camera. Somehow more engaging than it would have been on a pad.

X-Men Legends is the latest high profile licence on its way to N-Gage, Nokia announced this week. Legends will see players create, customise and control their favourite X-Men in squads of four, with a variety of single-player missions alongside the usual four-player Bluetooth multiplayer. N-Gage Arena will be used for high scores and downloadable missions and sub-games. The game should be out in the first quarter of 2005.

THQ has finally confirmed that the awkwardly named WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw will feature online play. The PS2 exclusive wrestling title will also feature voice work from most of the wrestlers involved, too, although certain classic combatants will obviously be unable to contribute.

Konami is planning to reward Japanese pre-orders of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater with a six-tune soundtrack disc, the publisher announced this week, and in a bizarre move is also planning to give shareholders free copies of the game when it comes out.

Valve has released a pair of new Half-Life 2 videos based on its E3 presentations this May. 'Tenements' and 'Ravenholm' are both available from Eurofiles at the, er, locations we just linked.

Publisher Acclaim has been granted additional breathing room by primary lender GMAC Commercial Finance, which has temporarily agreed not to act against the company despite the end of an extension to its credit facility.

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It may have no photos, concrete details or links for pre-ordering, but that hasn't stopped Amazon's Japanese arm from posting a product page for the PlayStation 3 this week. What it does have, amusingly, is a few of the usual speculative reader reviews - five stars each, if you're wondering. We admire their optimism. As it stands though, Sony has yet to announce any concrete details of the machine, other than the fact that it plans to unveil it by the end of this year. We'll be sure to let you know when that happens...

In a move that blurs the very definition of what constitutes a sequel, Ghost Recon 2 will be released as two distinctly different games, with parallel development teams working on their own vision of the game.

id Software's PC first-person shooter Doom III is still at number one in the UK this week, despite a strong challenge for the top from Sony's Athens 2004, which climbs one place to number two on the back of a 55 per cent sales increase.

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Codemasters sends word that you can now download a single-player PC demo of Colin McRae Rally 2005 from its website ahead of the game's launch next month. The Britsoft publisher also tells us that PS2 and Xbox demos will appear on the coverdisks of both formats' official UK publications on September 9th and 6th respectively.

Game Stars Live is going to be a busy place for Nintendo fans, it seems, although judging by details that landed in our laps this morning there seems to be something of an emphasis on extra-curricular activities.

PSP title Metal Gear Acid will make its playable debut at the Tokyo Game Show next month between September 24th and 26th, Konami has confirmed, where it will join Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater as one of the focal points of the publisher's display.

The newly created European subsidiary of NCsoft, NCsoft Europe, has announced that it will be attending the European Games Network trade show this September and showing off Lineage II, City of Heroes and Guild Wars. The publisher is planning to launch Lineage II and City of Heroes over here by the end of 2004, with Guild Wars due out in 2005; meanwhile its developer Arenanet has announced a global beta event will run from October 29th to 31st. "EGN offers us the facility to firmly establish our presence in the European marketplace. It is a ready-made opportunity for us to present our products to both trade and media while also doing business with our prospective channel partners," NCsoft Europe COO Sebastien Vidal commented.

Electronic Arts and Digital Illusions CE have released a World War II modification for Battlefield Vietnam, effectively transplanting the sort of gameplay we had in Battlefield 1942 into the more advanced Vietnam engine.