Dynamix sent along another update on the state of development for TRIBES Extreme titled "Getting to know the TRIBES Extreme Team: An Exercise in INTENSITY." Once again, it's quite lengthy, so I've put it all on a separate page right here. It certainly lets you get a sense for the team's nuttiness, and even has stuff about the game:

"There'll be new multiplayer maps too," Jesse says. "Plus we're offering balanced ladder maps for tournament matches."

"New buildings will also be a big part of the game," Ian puts in. "Some of the single-player buildings will be really different, and between our new multiplayer buildings and the ones we're getting from players responding to the open call, we're going to see a lot more pop in the gameplay."

According to Scott, Dynamix has put out an open call for players to submit new multiplayer games and skins. "Response has been absolutely tremendous."

"There's one map in particular that actually gives me vertigo," Blake says. "It's just amazing."

Nels points out that TRIBES Extreme will remain completely compatable with the existing TRIBES game, so players need not be concerned about not being able to take Extreme onto their favorite servers.

PC.IGN.COM previews Messiah with a hands-on look at Shiny's upcoming possessive third-person action game, saying "We play Messiah and pronounce it 'Sacrilicious'!" (I feel dirty just writing that word.)

GameSpot Homeworld Demo Download page has the 62.7 MB downloads of a playable demo of Sierra/Relic's upcoming strategy/space sim, Homeworld. Thanks Billy at Voodoo Extreme. Word on the page is: "Even though it looks complex, Homeworld's tactical interface is surprisingly easy to use. You'll find yourself building ships, attacking pirates, and scavenging asteroids in a matter of minutes!"

A new screenshot from F.A.K.K.2, Ritual's upcoming Quake III-engine action/fantasy romp has been posted on FAKK YOU! This is an actual in game shot that is part of a press CD released at ECTS, and can also be found on U-Games' ECTS F.A.K.K.2 preview which reports on the game from the show.

PlanetUnreal has word that The Playing Fields, host to a big Unreal Tournament extravaganza this week in London, has over 500MB in screenshots, more than 200 photos of people in action, and over three hours of video direct from the computers. A few screenshots have been posted on PU to give a sampling of the huge selection.

Games Domain Review interviews programmer Quinn Dunki from Bungie talking about her work on Oni, with an emphasis on being a woman working in the games industry. This was posted Thursday at Games Domain, but we missed it at the time, and when it was listed yesterday at the Oni homepage, sharp-eyed Frans spotted it and sent along word.

PCParadox has posted three new screenshots from Sanity, Monolith's isometric action game based on their LithTech engine. In other Monolith news, Exxtreme3D has posted a preview of the Metropolis developed, Monolith published game Odium. The preview is definitely hands off, and there are six screenshots, although I'm not entirely sure if they're new or not.

The recent gXp LAN party in Hagen, Germany, featured a beta build of Unreal Tournament available for play. AEon, one of the attendees, has written up a hands on preview of the game, complete with 13 new screenshots. The text is all in German, of course, but that's what Babel Fish is for.

Legend's Glen Dahlgren has posted this week's update to the official Wheel of Time page, with the latest developments on this Unreal engine RPG/Strategy title (thanks Apache). In this week's update he talks about several aspects of the game which are either finished or nearing completion, including the cut scenes and sound effects, as well as the reactions to the preview copies of the game that were sent out to various websites.

BZ2.com has posted a tutorial, as well as all the files you need to make your own Battlezone II maps using the recently released demo. We've checked with Activision, and this is indeed kosher with their EULA, so download and make all the maps you want. In other Battlezone II news, Pandemic's official Battlezone II site has been updated with a new shot of the week. This week's shot shows off the new ISDF unit (thanks GA-Strategy).

Version 2.2 Beta of Action Half-Life, the popular mod for Half-Life has been released, and is available for download (thanks Pedmeg). This version adds Action Quake 2 - style pain reactions, and a boatload of bug fixes.

Outrage has posted a version 0.92 update for their Descent 3 editor, which has a ton of changes, including support for user defined paths, bug fixes, the addition of more renderer options and lots more (thanks Frans).

The Croft Times has compiled pretty much everything available online from Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation, with over 230 shots (including some exclusive character and editor images) and eight exclusive windows background images (thanks GA-Source).

Two more of those "mass market" games that sell like hotcakes and make for great jokes from time to time were announced today. GTInteractive surprised absolutely nobody when they made their announcement that Deer Hunter III will be shipping this October, featuring "a full virtual hunting season where gamers can actually scout deer during the preseason." Also of note is Sierra Sports' Professional Bull Rider, which hopefully will feature a scene like this (taken from the recent Blue's News trip to an actual rodeo).

NVIDIA has announced that they're partnering with Acer Laboratories to create Aladdin, a new low-cost chipset based on the TNT2 line that will be used primarily for sub-$1000 PCs (thanks USBWorkshop). According to the press release,Gigabyte Technology, ASUSTeK, C.P. Technology, Acer and ABIT are all readying motherboards with the chip built in. For the techies, here's a list of features:

• Support for up to 1.5GB of SDRAM, VC-SDRAM or EDO memory.
• Enhanced high-bandwidth, internal de-multiplexed AGP bus.
• Intelligent Arbiter, low-overhead context switching design for optimal SMA performance.
• 128-bit TwiN Texel graphics pipeline - two texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock.
• 32-bit color, 32-bit Z/stencil buffer with single-pass multitexturing.
• Video in, TV out and TMDS or Digital Flat Panel support up to 1280 x 1024 resolution.
• Fully compatible with all WHQL-certified DVD decoder software for RIVA TNT2.
• Coupled with ALi's M1535D Southbridge, features integrated super I/O controller, integrated audio, software modem interface, four USB ports and UDMA-66 support.

Birdman's Lair, the source for all things SpaceOrb, has posted a patch for the retail version of Heavy Gear II that adds support for the always entertaining SpaceOrb 360 (thanks Frans).

GT Interactive and 3DRealms have announced that the Color GameBoy version of Duke Nukem has shipped. Like the recent N64 and PlayStation Duke titles, this isn't a port, but rather an original game - in this case, a side scroller (which harkens back to Duke's early days as a platform stud).

• Tweak3D has posted what they're calling "very rudimentary benchmarks" with a PowerVR Neon250 board, testing the hardware with Quake II and Q3Test.
• SystemLogic has posted an editorial entitled "Mac vs. PC", which asks for readers opinions on the two platforms (although I suspect they just really like getting hate mail).
• HP has announced their new Polar Logic cooling system, which they say offers massive benefits over earlier solutions (thanks HardOCP).
• Overclocker's Workbench is reporting that Intel is actually underclocking their Pentium III 600s to 450 in order to satisfy customer demand for the 450 Mhz processors (that they're phasing out).

Frans sends word that Sierra has released a patch to fix problems installing Starsiege (not TRIBES, just Starsiege) on Windows 2000. It's available from their FTP site, and is 3.6MB.

Billy "screenshots" Wilson has posted 15 screenshots from the PC version of Bioware's MDK 2, showing off the latest from this surreal action game. MDK, as everyone knows, stands for My Dreamcast Kicks (butt).

The Delta Force Updates Page has been, well, updated with a new patch for the game (with separate downloads for each territory). Thanks Frans, who's mirrored the files on 3DGamers.com.

Fragadelic Females Duke It Out is the name of an article on Wired News about the Female Frag Fest, whose finals will be taking place tomorrow at Ground Zero (thanks devilbunny). It's another one of those public interest stories about women in gaming that we've all read before, with the usual batch of quotes from female gamers talking about how they're just as good as guys (if not better).

The Descent Chronicles has word of sightings of the FreeSpace2 demo on CD at some software stores, so if the 60 MB download of the demo of this upcoming space sim daunts you, checking with your local retailer may provide the opportunity to check it out.

The JailBreak for Half-Life page has a Half-Life version of The Citadel, described as "the most popular Q2 Jailbreak map ever." Also, Descent3.Net has word up of a Descent 3 version of the Minerva level a D3 recreation of this "old loved and equally hated D1, D2 level."

Stu Denman updated the Surreal TECH Page with a surreal update about pi. Nothing newsworthy or about Drakan or anything, but I just really wanted to be able to use that headline like that.

Aaron at Rogue Spear Retreat sends along word that there's a fix for those experiencing "severe pauses" (or hiccups) when playing the new Rogue Spear demo:

To fix these hiccups in gameplay, go to your options and disable "action sounds"

The newly-opened CitizenKabuto.com marks their debut with a new interview with Tim Williams, the creative director for PlanetMoon Studios on Giants, their upcoming third-person game of living large (or small, or naked).

Pretty pretty bang bang is a Salon Technology article that quotes Dennis "Thresh" Fong, several message board postings, as well as id Software's Graeme Devine discussing the "arcade" aspect of Q3Test, and the upcoming Quake III Arena, and their impact on the game's appeal for both hardcore players and newbies. Thanks Elrond Hubbard. Here's a bit to give the gist of what's discussed:

What's got those hardcore gamers so worked up? For one thing, Quake 3 is, well, beautiful. "A lot of the other hardcore players don't like Quake 3 because it's so mass-market and so 'arcadey,'" explains Dennis "Thresh" Fong, arguably the greatest first-person shooter player ever. "The icons are simpler. They have cartoony boxes for ammo, and it's all color-coded in bright red and bright purples, colors you'd never see in the other Quake games." On the aesthetics charge, Id's Devine pleads no contest. "We purposefully gave Quake 3 an over-the-top, cartoony, comic-book look," he says. "Our big influences included games like Street Fighter and Robotron."

The Adrenaline Vault News has a little unconfirmed speculation that Activision is currently developing the yet-to-be-announced Heavy Gear III, based on a comment in the news about Activision and Won.Net's new agreement (story).

The Matrox Users' Resource Centre has word of the release of a new version 1.12 Beta Build 015 of the MGATweak tweaking program for Matrox cards."The new version improves the overclockability of the G400 MAX by providing clock duty cycle correction control and the option to turn of auto duty cycle correction as used in previous version of MGATweak, at the expense of violating the chip specification PLL programming procedures. Duty cycle correction is further explained in the user guide. By ignoring duty cycle correction, some G400 MAX can go as high as 170/227."

As always, thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for helping us keep up with these:

• Well Rounded Entertainment reviews System Shock 2.
• Gamecenter reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• GamePower reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• GA-Strategy Reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• GamePen reviews Force 21.
• Sharky Extreme's 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV Review is by Vince Freeman of Extreme Hardware (don't ask me how that works).

• The newly opened Tribal Outpost has a whole load of resources for those interested in editing Starsiege TRIBES...
• Clan World Network interviews Fargo of GameSpy Industries fame...
• GameSpot's Battle Of The Booth Babes a traditional rundown of the trade show eye candy at ECTS...
• Unreal Universe has a Wheel of Time desktop wallpaper for download...
• There's a Hatfields & McCoys demo giving a taste of this "light hearted real-time tactics (RTT) style comedy shooter from Lupine Games." Thanks Demo News...
• CNET Download.com has a new version of the GetRight resumable download client. Thanks Ant...
• PlanetShogo has version 1.0 of Wraithadmin, the first ever Shogo remote administration tool...
• Had enough of the on-topic stuff? Bigkid.com.au has new Dirt Track Racing shots showing off the latest racer from RatBag, and Microsoft Flight Simulator site has AVIs of FS2000...

I'll share the outcome of my Outlook conversion experiments as soon as I'm able to conduct them, but again I was quite busy with some site stuff yesterday, so I still haven't gotten back to butting heads with the project.

Link of the Day: The Smoking Gun. A brand-new site devoted to gaming industry and humor, and pretty damn funny (and useful, confirming once and for all loonyboi is not John Lennon).
News Story of the Day: Norway police seize lethal potato weapon. Thanks devilbunny. I hope they didn't get the blueprints from when it was the link of the day. Remember, you should never try things found in the link of the day at home without trained supervision (I still have a vat of poisonous magic coffee in the fridge from ignoring that advice).