Well it's not out till the 29th, but already the reviews are rolling in and Grand Theft Auto IV looks set to take the game of the year title by a mile. Gorgeous graphics, incredible detail, stunning 16 player multiplayer and strippers. What more could your trigger fingers ask for. The new cover system looks to work really well with the ability to use any object for dodging bullets. Drive your car into a mob fight, jump out and use it for cover as you blast away the enemy. Pretty cool stuff.

Here's a round up of the scores:

 IGN - 10/10 Masterful

Official XBOX Magazine - 10 Perfect

CGReviews.com - 9.3

We don't even need to ask if you are buying this game - we went down to the local blockbusters to reserve a copy and they said they were completely sold out of the first truck load and to come back for the second shipment and they might have some then.  If you've already played the game fill out the comments box and make us drool.

And if you know where we can lay our hands on a copy, even better!

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Flash based games are big business on the internet and used to entertain surfers in between more serious browser sessions. Itch.com recently contacted us to have a look at their new Tower Defense Game, one of the most popular casual flash games you can find online and for good reason. They are highly addictive. This version features a great adaption of the classic game with several different maps, loads of weapons and weapon upgrades and some unusual baddies and end of level bosses.

The basic idea to the game is to stop the evil creeps (random objects) crossing from one side of the map to the other with the use of weapons that you purchase. The weapons can be upgraded and you'll certainly need to do this as the baddies get faster and tougher as the levels progress. To start with you have a limited amount of cash to spend and in order to earn more you have to kill the creeps. Saving up for bigger towers and upgrades allows you to kill the enemy quicker but if you save for too long the creeps with break through your defenses and you'll lose the game. Timing when to put a new tower down can make all the difference and if you can hang on to your cash till the end of the level a nice interest bonus will be added. 

The flash interface is simple to use with weapons accessible in the top left corner of the screen. The game loaded superfast for us - Itch.com obviously have some good servers powering their system - and worked perfectly in IE and Mozilla. You might want to make sure your popup blocker is turned off if you want to access the instructions - Mozilla didn't announce to us it was blocking this at first and it was only when we tried it in IE that we realised it was blocking the popup instructions window.

If you've yet to discover Tower Defense on your browser, Itch.com have a really nice version to play. They even provide a highscore service so you can see how good you stack up against fellow surfers.

To play this game and a whole host of other flash games, head on over to the Itch.com website. 

The Futuremark announcement can be seen in this page, and means that your wishes as a 3DMark user will finally be granted: a game that looks just that good. Let's be honest, we all lusted over those gorgeous graphics they've been feeding us all these years, but games of comparable beauty always took their time to catch up. No more.

The project, imaginatively called Futuremark Games Studio, will give birth to not one but several AAA titles. One of them, at least, already being developed. They promise that the games will look good and that they will run smoothly on your average PC, but for those used to building engines that don't have to worry about frame rates, it will constitute quite a challenge.

I would even say more, these guys found some special pleasure in bringing the best hardware to it's knees, and now they are forced to take into consideration something other than SLI or CrossFire configurations. They will also have to learn when to leave some visuals out, in favour of faster rendering, so give them some time here. But if you are of the impatient kind, you can try here from time to time, to see what's cooking.

Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Nintendo Wii has sold over 1.4 million units in its first week. Now we all know that since the game is very successful, it also means it’s very good. But how good?

Rainbow Six Vegas 2

The first edition on the Xbox 360 took gamers to new heights with outstanding graphics, gameplay and one of the best cover systems ever developed. Co-op and multiplayer were a joy to play - the use of split screen was beautifully implemented and saw us loosing many a nights sleep to Vegas fuelled with nachos and beer. New features include an enhanced version of the "Persistent Elite Creation" system. Players can now customize their character with experience points earned in both single-player and multiplayer. There is also a new stat-tracking feature which observes how players choose to play, unlocking new weapons and equipment based on their playing styles. All of the old weapons from Rainbow Six Vegas will be in Vegas 2. There are 11 new weapons, 13 multiplayer maps, 2 new game modes, and a tweaked ranking system, as well as improvements to the online functionality to make it easier to find online sessions. In addition, players can now join matches that are already in progress.

Expected release date - March 18th, 2008

Move up ladies and get ready to say goodbye to reality, loved ones and life as you know it. Rockstar games has given the word that the official release date for Grand Theft Auto IV is the 29th April. It will ship on the PS3 and Xbox 360 simultaneously with exclusive Xbox 360 downloadable episodes to follow.

The trailers look amazing and it's hard to imagine a game this big and good looking can run at decent framerates on the consoles. Mind you Rockstar are wise guys and we are sure they'll have a trick or two up their sleeve. Now try and get some sleep in before the 29th if you can.

Looks like the Duke is ready to come out of hiding and start ramping up the media hype. 11 years in the making and a hundred game engine changes later, the almost total media silence from 3Drealms about their follow up to the hugely successful Duke Nukem 3D game has lifted with a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. In typical 3Drealms fashion it shows little more than some cut scene footage of Duke weight training and gives no real indication to the quality of the game engine they are now using. But who cares. The good news is that there really is a Duke Nukem game in the pipeline and just maybe 2008 could be the year we all get to kick some alien butt and chew bubblegum. The loyal fans on the 3Drealms forums are over the moon - you just can't keep a Duke fan down and the promise of more media footage must mean 3Drealms are getting close to the goal post.  For now here's the Duke pumping up. Asta la vista baby.

This week, Crysis has finally been released. You know about it's beauty, and you also know you'll be needing quite some hardware to get the most out of it. Does that include a quad-core processor?

Cervat Yerli, from Crytek, was reported by The Inquirer as saying that a quad should be at the top of anyone's upgrade list for playing Crysis. "If [your system is] balanced, we are more CPU bound than GPU [...] We recommend quad core over higher clock."

PC Perspective does show numbers regarding both a Quad and a Duo, but DX10 and DX9 are thrown into the mix (as well as a GPU change).

Lastly, let's mention that some comparison done at Tom's Hardware, between the demo and the real deal, shows the demo being actually a little bit faster. That same review points out proper utilization of all the cores on their Quad, but specific performance gains aren't given.

The latest release, Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" is compared at Phoronix with the Windows version still used by most gamers out there: XP SP2. To get both 3DMark01 Second Edition and 3DMark03 working under Linux, WINE 0.9.46 is used.

Test system: ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard (Intel's X38 Chipset), 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 memory,  Mushkin 780W PSU, Intel Pentium D 820, ASUS GeForce 8600GT 512MB and GeForce 6600GT 128MB graphics cards. Drivers were ForceWare 163.71 for Windows and nVidia's 100.14.19 for Linux.

3DMark01 is a complete win for Microsoft here, but some 3DMark03 tests are more even. Multi-Texturing Fill Rate was very close for the 6600GT (there's some performance issue with the 8600GT keeping it down to 6600GT levels). Something similar happens with the Ragtroll test, where Linux wins with the 6600GT but doesn't improve when moving to the 8600GT. The CPU test is a clear win for Linux.

Despite inconviniences typical of a beta, this Unreal Tournament III demo must be enough, for the time being, to get an idea of the requirements of this game.

An important point to remember is that, although the final version will be more "polished", the frames per second we see in this Anandtech article are probably higher, because it's not testing with high quality textures and the scenarios are devoid of characters.

Among the most relevant conclusions we can come to, let's say that cache size brings up to a  20% performance increase for the Core 2. Another element to take into consideration is the number of cores the processor has, which can translate into a 60% gain (when going dual) and a 13% one (when going Quad). On the other hand, raising the frecuency  of a Core 2 Duo from 2 GHz to 3,33 GHz only gets us a 28% boost.

And what of the graphics cards? nVidia wins, although AMD keeps pace at the same price range (Radeon HD 2900 XT and X1950 XTX vs NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 320MB and 7900 GTX).