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Valve Software has apparently licensed a rather shiny knife for use in Counter-Strike 1.6, and has released a PDF detailing the weapon's history. According to said document, the new CS knife is based on Mick Strider's award-winning "Badlands Bowie", which "started as a 1/2 inch thick slab of 6AL4V titanium. The edge is press-fit Stellite, and no bonding agent was needed or used as it is held in place due to the extreme precise fit between the titanium and Stellite." Wait, there's more. "The handle is fossilized mastodon ivory held in a carbon fibre pocket." Actually, there's even more detail on the knife's colourful background (which beat off designs by - amongst others - Ken Onion and Tom Mayo) in the PDF, which also has a picture.

The sun's shining, the days are long and we're almost halfway through the year. At this strategic midpoint in the gaming calendar, we thought we'd take a breather from looking ahead to the wasteland of the summer gaming drought, and cast our eyes over the performance of the class of 2003. Call it an end of term report, if you will.

C&VG reports this afternoon that Sega has finally unplugged its Dreamcast game servers - as announced at Sega.com. Sniff. All that remains is support for both DC versions of Phantasy Star Online. We can't remember the last time we went online with our Dreamcasts, but we're pretty sure PSO was the only thing we bothered with anyway. Still: sniff.

Hot of the heels of all the other extremely successful professional gaming associations [meow -Ed], former Fox Family Channel/Saban Entertainment executive Eric Rollman is set to launch the Global Gaming League this summer, an initiative that will seek to create star players and fans out of couch junkies by presenting the noble art of digitally slaughtering other people in a new and entertaining light. Apparently.

Nintendo will seemingly look for any old excuse to whack out more of its hardware in some new duds. This time, the Japanese colour fetishist is launching a quite ghastly-looking mint green Gamecube to coincide with the release of Namco's Tales of Symphonia RPG in Japan on 29th August.

On June 5th, brand new Barn and Chateau maps were released for RTCW Xbox owners to download, giving Live-enabled gamers something else to play with besides the default loadout. However, forum and newsgroup reports now suggest that perhaps these maps were on the game disc after all.

Acclaim has signed the exclusive videogame rights to Archangel Studios CG-based comic series The Red Star, and hopes to release a slew of games across all next-gen console systems in 2004.

Contrary to a shifty report we drew attention to yesterday, which saw Microsoft's David Hufford tell the Puget Sound Business Journal that "Half-Life 2 is not going to be on the Xbox," spokespeople from Valve and publisher VU Games have scrambled quotes to journalists the world over, with Valve's Doug Lombardi confirming that "Half-Life 2 is planned for the PC and Xbox," adding that "[Valve will] announce a shipping date for the Xbox version later in the year," when speaking to GameSpyDaily. Phew!

When I were a lad [you still are! -ageing Ed], when this 'ere computer video game cacophony were nought but a guilty hobby perpetrated by the bullied and terminally short of friends, we used to play a proper sport: football. Every wet Sunday morning, we'd troop down to the local recreation ground with our parents where we'd meet a bunch of equally terrified youngsters, usually from some far-flung London borough, or Tring, and proceed to waggle the ball about in the mud with them for about 70 minutes, rarely keeping up with it, and pausing occasionally to suck oranges and listen to heated discussions between neighbouring Dads on the touchline about everyone's bright future in the England team.

Atari's film tie-in Enter The Matrix is on top of the UK all-formats chart for a fourth week, thanks to strong performance on PS2 and Xbox - but it was a quiet week overall, with total value down some 23 per cent, while units showed a similar drop, down 22 per cent with new releases making little impression.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is due out on November 3rd in America, according to a Nintendo representative. Having removed the game from its website for some reason, Nintendo was obviously inundated with RPG fans' anxious concerns, and one of their responses has now made it onto the Internet. "Please note that this game has not been cancelled," the punter in question was told, with the author of the email adding that "Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is currently estimated for release on November 3, 2003."

Having noticed this listing for "Baldur's Gate 3 PC" on EBGames.com yesterday, our neighbours at C&VG extracted some rather unfortunate news from Vivendi. Apparently "nothing was known of any involvement between VUG, BioWare and a third outing in the Baldur's Gate series," when they spoke to the Frenchmen, and you can also head over to HomeLAN Fed to hear the same thing from a different PR person.

Gaming and television haven't enjoyed the best of relationships over the years. And although we're finally starting to escape the traditional perception of gaming as an anti-social pursuit reserved for outcasts and loners, gaming and TV still make poor bedfellows, siring badly researched, under-funded and generally weak offspring, seemingly designed to patronise the audience.

It was bound to happen. We were foolish to think it wouldn't. In fact, the only surprise is that it took this long. Yep, the marketing men have finally taken over gaming.

"Half-Life 2 is not going to be on the Xbox," Microsoft's David Hufford has told the Puget Sound Business Journal, in an article commenting on the Microsoft-Sony console war. "Valve is sending us mixed messages on that," he added. None more mixed than "we're also working on an Xbox version," a quote attributed to Valve's Doug Lombardi by German mag AreaXbox at the start of last month.

Currently causing ripples across the gargantuan gaming ocean, PlanetSide has won over many players who were left out in the cold when their beloved Tribes 2 went a bit rubbish. Now Ampled Labs LLC, a small team of independent developers with previous experience in mod development, is hoping to steal some of PlanetSide's limelight with its announcement of online role-playing shooter, Rise of Power.

Sega has unveiled its carefully orchestrated beta test plans for Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution (they'll never fit that on Japanese Cube packaging). According to various sources, the first 10,000 punters to pre-order the game from Sega Direct in Japan will also receive a free trial version, featuring offline and online scenarios and all the planned communication features of the full game.

Quicksilver has released an official beta patch for Master Of Orion 3, weighing in at 5MB, which improves the game's interface, enemy AI and - perhaps most importantly - its Alt-Tab behaviour. Unfortunately for fans of the game, the new patch is incompatible with the old patch, presumably meaning some sort of reinstall. We say "presumably", because we were unable to extract the file from Quicksilver's troublesome FTP server (but by all means have a go), and the installation instructions are cunningly secreted amongst the zip detritus. And although we have no particular problem with FilePlanet, where the zip is mirrored, we'd lost interest by that time.

"For the first time on the Nintendo GameCube comes Resident Evil 2/3 in all [their] original glory," so the back of the box blurb goes. But whereas Capcom and Shinji Mikami lavished a huge amount of care and attention to remaking the 1996 original a year or so back, what the company has delivered this time around is two functionally identical ports of the ancient PSone originals, yours for a mere £25-30 each depending on where you look.

Ever since Jak & Daxter, PlayStation 2 has become the console for platform games, with Ratchet & Clank and Sly Raccoon serving to emphasise this during the last few months. Nintendo must be livid. But the main architect of this shocking changing of the guard is a little company called Naughty Dog, most famous for giving the word 'bandicoot' actual meaning. A little while ago, we asked you what questions you might ask Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin, given the chance. Well, we recently did have the chance, and put a number of questions to Jak & Daxter's minder-in-chief on your behalf...

Take-Two recently battered down the door to Raylight Studios, the developer handling upcoming GBA space shooter Wing Commander Prophecy, and were kind enough to send us the interrogation footage. From this we managed to extrapolate the following, which sheds some light on the course of the game's development. Wing Commander Prophecy is due out June 27th.

Epic, Digital Extremes, Atari and NVIDIA have today launched the "$1,000,000 NVIDIA Make Something Unreal" contest, which aims to recognise those talented part-time developers behind mods for UT2003 and the as-yet unreleased UT2004 (screenshots of which emerged today). To enter, your mod has to be freely available and compatible with UT2003 or UT2004.

Having published The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and its subsequent expansion pack Tribunal, Ubi Soft has unsurprisingly confirmed that it will be handling Bethesda Softworks' second expansion, Bloodmoon, which should be available in Europe and Australia this month.

"He lives in a house, a very big house in the country," as Damon Albarn sang so forgettably a few years ago. We only bring it up because it could have been written about Donkey Kong (apart from the subsequent part about herbal baths), whose antics in one particular Country are so saleable that Nintendo is rounding on us for the third time today with the GBA release of the previously SNES and GBC-based platformer. As explained in our epic ramblings on the subject , it's just fun. It's well-made, derivative fun.

First person shooters, so the received wisdom of PC gaming goes, simply don't work on consoles. Take away the keyboard and mouse from a PC FPS ninja, shove a joypad into his hands, and you're left with a player who may not be able to stop staring at the ground and walking off cliffs, but could certainly moan about the rubbish controls to Olympic standards. To a certain degree, they have a point. If you're dealing with a "twitch" FPS game where reaction times and accuracy are vital, then the joypad is a cumbersome interface, and those rare FPS games which really work on consoles (GoldenEye, Halo, Metroid Prime) all work so well because they significantly rethink the weapon and interface conventions of the genre.

CDV has released a demo of Heaven & Hell, an RTS in which one quite literally plays God, attempting to sway the inhabitants of a biblical land to believe in your particular brand of good or evil godliness. To help push things in your favour, you have seven prophets and all sorts of wonders and plagues at your disposal - it sounds a bit like Black & White, but with an actual game in it. You can grab the 102MB demo,which features a tutorial and one mission, from Worthplaying.

PlayStation Experience, also known as "the bit with games in it" to ECTS-goers, will once again occupy the front half of Earl's Court between Thursday August 28th and Sunday August 31st this year, Sony has announced today.

Just in time for today's review, Activision and id have released the first official downloadable map for Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War via Xbox Live. The new multiplayer level has teams of players attempting to locate and destroy an Axis arms cache. Get your download on, you lucky punks.

All six members of the team that produced MDK have been reunited to work on the LucasArts-sponsored Armed & Dangerous at Planet Moon Studios, the developer has announced. After MDK, five of the six Shiny employees went on to found Planet Moon, which developed the hugely entertaining Giants: Citizen Kabuto on PC and PS2, but the sixth, Martin Brownlow, remained as project lead on Sacrifice. Having recently contributed to Enter The Matrix, Brownlow has now rejoined his former colleagues at Planet Moon, where he will take up a role working on LucasArts' comic Xbox and PC shooter.

The all-star cast of industry veterans behind new development studio Real Time Worlds have formally announced their new venture, and dropped broad hints about the nature of the next game from GTA creator Dave Jones in the process.