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Robert Ludlum’s best-selling spy novels and blockbuster film adaptations have thrilled millions. Now for the first time, become Jason Bourne, Ludlum’s most famous spy, in an original videogame that takes you deeper than ever before into his world of action and espionage.

When curious fishermen pull your body from Mediterranean Sea you have little clue of how you got there or even who you are. A hidden Swiss bank account number leads you to Zurich where you soon discover that not only does somebody want you dead, but you’re armed with a mysterious mastery of martial arts and marksmanship to fight back.

Firearms, melee weapons, advanced fight techniques and even your surroundings are all at your disposal to weaponize, as you neutralize threats in a seamless blend of infiltration, shooting and hand-to-hand combat. Go deep into the Bourne canon as you hunt down the truth behind your fragmented past and turn the tables on the government agency that made you their number one target.

You are Bourne – hunted, driven and deadly.
Coming to PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system and Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system in 2008.

Slightly older news but it’s something to post with the new trailer:

- Scott Miller (3D Realms Co-founder) says Duke might make it this year.

- 3DR faced the problems of trying to grow large enough to maintain three simultaneous internal projects while developing DNF, and it threw the company back–some shit got canned, and other shit was either set aside or given to third party developers.

- 12 years of development went towards interactive environments that their game engine was not mature enough to handle, so the code was rewritten resulting in a series of complications which produced further setbacks.

- Scott Miller says they’ve finally achieved their goal of creating a “super-interactive” game environment.

- 3DR won’t disclose how many employees they have, but they hired a crap-load of new talent after–and this is what the article says–firing half its employees. That’s interesting, because I had the notion they left on their own–but I’ll leave it at that because I don’t want to start any drama.

- Apparently Bombshell (which was one of the three stand-alone game projects 3DR was working on) is now integrated into DNF. Miller isn’t quoted on the confirmation, but the article says she’s part of the Duke universe as Duke’s action-female counterpart.

- Scott jokes about Duke dying in the end, and goes on to say most of the weapons from Duke3D are back in DNF. Also, Duke is still a controversial character because the company is trying to retain his bad-ass image.

- The entire game is narrated through the first-person view; Duke’s now off duty in Las Vegas where he kicks back at his casino, the “Lady Killer,” which is then raided by aliens.

- Scott admits the project’s come along roughly, but once again uses his “end of the tunnel” metaphor to say the game might finally be on the right track. 2008, here we come.

Source

Microsoft is cutting prices for various versions of Windows Vista. But good luck figuring out exactly what that means for you. In the US, CNet reports that customers purchasing a full boxed version of Vista Ultimate will pay the same high $399 price as always. But the price of an upgrade disc has dropped from $299 to $219. The base price of Home Premium stays the same at $240, but the upgrade price has dropped from $159 to $129. And of course, you can find everything for cheaper if you shop around.

Confused yet? Well, one thing is certainly clear. Microsoft is trying to push more copies of Windows Vista. And while the company claims that adoption rates have been high so far, the truth of the matter is that most new Vista users got their copies when they bought a new computer preloaded with the operating system. The high price may be one discouraging feature, but wide reports of software incompatibilities and other bugs have also scared away a lot of consumers.

And don’t forget the fact that Windows XP still offers most of the features many computer users are looking for, so why upgrade? Look, we’re not trying to bash Microsoft here. In fact, quite the opposite. The company put out an operating system more than 5 years ago that was solid enough that it’s still in use today. Maybe when Microsoft stops offering security and feature updates for Windows XP people will switch to Windows Vista en masse. But charging hundreds of dollars for software that may not run on existing computers and doesn’t offer many advantages over your existing software doesn’t make much sense to us, price cut or no price cut.

Source

FrostWire 4.13.5 is now available for MS Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Major updates improve network bootstraping and peer discovery. 4.13.5 includes improvements on the Chatroom tab, Audio Previews and more.

Other improvements have taken place for the FrostWire build process (for developers this means true One-Step builds for all versions). Updates on translations have been made thanks to the feedback from users in Poland and throughout Latin America. .

Download FrostWire 4.13.5

In more detail users can expect the following:

* Faster peer discovery on connection bootstraping. No more “Starting Connection…” problems, first time users will connect faster without using the official FixConnecting.zip patch.

* Smiley Support to the chatroom

Users can see the available smileys by entering the command
/smileys

Now its possible to see and use Smileys from the Community Chat tab, Smiley display can be enabled or disabled from the view menu:
Show Smileys

Users can also toggle Smiley display directly from the chat window by typing the command
/tsmileys

* Fixed wording on Spanish and Polish translations.

Bug Fixes and other improvements for this release also include:

* FrostWire Message Update System improved. Per community request, some announcements will not be shown more than once so the user is not annoyed upon every application launch
* Fixed bugs on the media player and playlists on Preview.
* Fixed bug on search box auto-focusing while a search was running.
* Fixed i18n system error for systems which default language is not english
* Potential bugs related to deprecated code gone

Users can find now by details without the auto-focusing problem.

FrostWire 4.13.5 is expected to be the last of the 4.13.x series.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is a powerful personal firewall for Windows® that protects your computer by preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to your computer through the Internet or a network. By monitoring applications that connect to the network Firewall Plus can stop Trojans, backdoors, keyloggers and other malware from damaging your computer and stealing your private information.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is advanced technology designed specially for people, not experts. Powerful prevention against attacks and known exploits is activated by default while experienced users can optionally create their own advanced packet filtering rules, including IPv6 support, to customize the network defenses. All you need to do is install it for immediate and automatic ongoing protection.

That’s why PC Tools Firewall Plus provides world-leading protection, backed by regular Smart Updates, real-time protection and comprehensive network shielding to ensure your PC remains safe and hacker free. PC Tools products are trusted and used by millions of people every day to protect their home and business computers against online threats.

Download PC Tools Firewall Plus 3.0.1.9

The European Commission has fined US computer giant Microsoft for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour.

Microsoft must now pay a record 899m euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m) after it failed to comply with a 2004 ruling that it abused its position.

The ruling said that Microsoft was guilty of not providing key code to rival software makers.

EU regulators said the firm was the first to break an EU anti-trust ruling.

The fines come on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros in March 2004.

“Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision,” Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

Future improvements?

An investigation concluded in 2004 that Microsoft was guilty of freezing out rivals in products such as media players, while unfairly linking its Explorer internet browser to its Windows operating system at the expense of rival servers.

The European Court of First Instance upheld this ruling last year, which ordered Microsoft to pay 497m euros for abusing its dominant market position. Last week, the firm announced that it would open up the technology of some of its leading software, including Windows, to make it easier to operate with rivals’ products.

“As we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are focusing on steps that will improve things for the future,” Microsoft said.

Further cases

But the firm is still being pursued by Brussels.

Last month, the European Commission launched two new anti-competition investigations against Microsoft into similar issues.

The first will look at whether there are still problems regarding Microsoft abusing its dominance of the PC market to grab market share of the internet.

The Commission will also investigate the continued interoperability of Microsoft software with rival products.

Source

According to the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog, cyber criminals are populating the Internet with Web sites designed to exploit several recently-discovered security holes in a half-dozen widely used ActiveX plug-ins for IE 6 and 7, most notably the one offered by Facebook and MySpace to help users upload photos. The sites, advertised via links in email and instant message spam, also ‘probe for other vulnerable IE plug-ins, including two recently discovered from Yahoo! and one for QuickTime (this one attacks a vulnerability Apple patched just last month). The sites also throw in an exploit against a six-month-old IE flaw.’ The article notes that the SANS Internet Storm Center has released a GUI tool to help users safely deactivate the vulnerable plug-ins in the Windows registry.

Source

Download Unreal Tournament 3 v1.2 Patch

Changes from v1.2

Gameplay:
Increased UTGame MaxPlayersAllowed to 64.
Fixed leviathan turret instant refire exploit.
Fixed errant lock on warnings when no longer in vehicle.
Fixed first person weapons in demo playback.
Fixed translocator telefrag victim message.
Fixed encouragement sounds not being randomly picked by bots.
Implemented viewobjective spectating system for Warfare.
Fixed berserk held by driver applying to all vehicle turrets.
Only force low gore on German versions that were low gore only before being patched.
Fix for unnecessary content staying in memory on seamless travel.
Fixed shaped charge node exploit.
Fixed the Scavenger exploit.

User Interface:
Clicking on the settings tab goes to directly to the full settings menu.
Added VOIP speaker portraits to HUD.
Fixed character portraits sometimes not showing up on HUD or not staying up long enough.
The Host server menus will no longer disable internet options if CheckNatTypeDisplayError returns true. It’s just a warning now.
Fixed the CD key always prompting when the user has no network card
Added support for commandline log in -login=xxx -password=xxx. This also allows Gamespy comrade and other external applications to be used to launch network clients.
Added UI option to hide objective paths (the white arrows).
Added UI option to enable joystick support.
Added JOIN to midgame menu when spectating.
Added cancel button to “logging in” message box.
Added support for auto-updating UI with new options.
Improved language support for French, Spanish, Italian, and German.
Joystick key bindings in UI display properly.
Added game and UI support for customizing crosshair scaling.
Added “Add Favorite” button to Server Browser server list tab.
Fixed favorites Tab Page server details not updating.
Improvements to voice menu. Added “status” section.
Leave “Disconnect” and “Exit Game” on the mid game menu when seamlessly travelling so that players have a way to abort lengthy downloads
Show “Change Team” button before the match has started.
Added support for localized “single score needed” string.
Tweaked some HUD message font sizes.
Favorites/History lists list servers that are currently offline.
Favorites/History lists don’t stop working as the number of servers in them crosses max threshold for GS query.
Fix for end of round scoreboard displaying extra “Player” bots.
Fixed leviathan deploy icon positioning.

Networking:
Added support for autodownloading packages while in gameplay or while travelling.
Auto team re-balancing before map transition if bPlayersBalanceTeams is set.
Fixed dedicated server memory leaks.
Force client state synchronization when in spectating state. Fixes sporadic issues with players not being able to join games.
Fixed sounds not being heard correctly by clients if the sound location is the Actor’s location and the Actor is not relevant to that client.
Fixed spectators being unable to move after a level transition.
Fixed track turrets being in the wrong position on clients in some cases after being destroyed.
ConnectionTimeout and InitialConnectTimeOut now both 60.0. Addresses both clients failing connection because they take too long to load a level, and initial connections staying open too long.
Fixed HTTP download compression.
Fixed a bug where download during seamless travel would break because the downloader was keeping a pointer into the package map’s list, which is unsafe while the game is in progress because that list could have more items added to it (and thus the memory rearranged) at any time
Fixed a bug where in rare cases packages would get downloaded twice.
Fixed spectators able to enter as extra players in Duel.
Fixed issue where CTF, vCTF, and WAR maps are listed in the server browers when searching for a DM game when server changed gametypes.
Fixed bots not replicating their view pitch, so their animation looks better in net games.
Strip OwningPlayerName= from the URL, as this is determined elsewhere and was breaking dedicated internet servers launched from the UI.
Fixed package downloading not moving on to the next download method if it successfully downloads the file, but that file is not the version that the server is requesting.
Fixed client crash if the user disconnects while downloading a file during a seamless travel.

Server administration:
TCPLink and Webadmin functionality implemented.
Banning is now based on CD key hash, so players can’t circumvent bans by creating a new profile.
Fixed being unable to kickban players with | in their names.
Added versioning information to the game settings
Dedicated servers don’t require DirectX shader model 2.0
Fixed AdminForceTextMute and AdminForceTextUnmute.
Restored the compress and decompress commandlets.
Fixed AdminCmdOk() function not working properly if you were the listen server.
Banned IDs readability improved.
Added MaxClientTravelTime config option to GameInfo. If set, clients are kicked if they take longer than this many seconds to travel between maps.

Mod support:
Added ScriptedTexture, a type of render to texture that gives Canvas access to script/C++ for rendering custom overlays.
Added a version of DrawTile() to Canvas that takes a Texture instead of Texture2D so render to texture stuff like ScriptedTextures can more easily be used.
Added Timestamp function to UObject, returns a string in the format YYYY/MM/DD – HH:MM:SS
Weapons now take roll from player viewrotation.
Fixed custom character DLC not applying until the next time the game is run because the default object was not updated after combining the .ini files.
Added a ModFamilies array to UTCustomChar_Data to allow mod authors to add families to the list.
Fixed Change Node Status Kismet action not working on fully constructed powernodes.
Merged ageia particle fixes.

Map specific:
Fixed DM-Deck get out of world exploit
Fixed DM-Gateway portals sometimes sending you back to your starting point.
Fixed CTF-Coret collision exploit.
Fixed kismet spawned key vehicles not showing on host minimap. Fixes tank showing on host minimap in VCTF-Kargo.

AI improvements:
New orb carrier strategy AI.
Improved bot hoverboard use.
Reduced bot orb spawner camping.
Fixed bots stuck on orb spawner unable to grab flag.
Low skill bots use artillery properly.
Tweaked shooting at nodes vs shooting at enemies.
No human bonus to threat value.
Improved threat picking AI, taking into account effectiveness of bot’s weapon.
Tweaked bot AI for link gun, flak cannon, redeemer, and AVRiL.
Bots tend to stay on same enemy more, and focus on key vehicles more.
Tweaked campaign auto skill adjust.
Possible safe fix for bot navigation issues with staticmeshcollections on console. Also a performance improvement on PC and console.
Tweaked rules for whether to attack node or enemy first.
Improved bot AI for defending nodes with an orb.
Fixed pathing issues that were causing bots to get stuck in some places. When a move fails, force a route refresh. Add cost to reachspecs when bot fails repeatedly.
Improved AI code for adjusting around obstacles. If adjust left and right fail, try moving to center of reachspec.
If previous move failed, don’t allow “advanced tactics” (serpentine, etc.) for next move.
Added FailedMoveTarget and MoveFailureCount to controller to track movement failures.
Added bForceNoDetours to UTBot. Don’t allow detours when bot is approaching a neutral node (more important to touch node first).
Fixed bots thinking they’ve reach the orb spawner without quite getting there and touching the orb.
Fixed cases where bots could get stuck failing to translocate over and over – bots know to give up now.
Adjusted bot reaction time to seeing new enemies.
Improved bot AI for dealing with lifts and hoverboards.
Bots taunt after winning a match.
Bots now can be fooled by feign death.
Sandstorm has more impact on bots being able to acquire/aim at enemies.

During the 2008 Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco, Nintendo has announced that May 19th will be the launch date for the much anticipated Wii Fit. It’s done really well in Japan so far (over 1.4 million units sold so far!), and it would seem that “exergaming” has become more popular than some would have thought. No price has been announced yet, but I’m sure we can count on Nintendo to keep it affordable. GameSpot obtained a copy and posted their findings after lengthy testing. It looks great, I can’t wait to get one!

(H/T: GeekSugar)