REDMOND, Wash. - April 10, 2007 - Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie Studios today confirmed the multiplayer beta of "Halo 3" will debut to audiences worldwide via Xbox LIVE on May 16 at 5 a.m. PDT and run through June 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Coming exclusively to the Xbox 360 console this fall, "Halo 3" is the highly anticipated third chapter in the groundbreaking "Halo" trilogy from legendary developers Bungie. "Halo 3" lets gamers experience Master Chief's greatest battle as he launches an epic mission to stop the Covenant, destroy the impending Flood threat and ultimately save mankind.

Piracy does have its good sides as well. Funcom, the makers of the two famous 'The Longest Journey' games, recently announced to stop producing traditional offline PC games because of too many illegal copies. Instead they are concentrating on their online game portfolio that will get another finished entry among Anarchy Online soon: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.
If you want to be one of the first in the World of Hyborian then I suggest you to apply for the soon to be started Beta Test of Age of Conan over here. The "the most brutal Massively Multiplayer Online game ever created" is scheduled for the end of October 2007 and will run on Windows XP/Vista PCs and the Xbox 360. If you want to get more information about the game and the world where it takes place I recommend to take a look at the corresponding Wikipedia entry found here.

The French Station Drivers let you download a leaked Beta of the upcoming Catalyst 7.3. Of course the driver is non-official and the improvements appear to be very minor. OCWorkbench ran it through their paces and differences to the Catalyst 7.2 aren't nearly there.

Anyone hoping to get a chance to experience the next chapter in the adventures of Master Chief can't get "invited" anymore. Bungie Studios have sent all 13,333 beta invitations that they wanted to. Serious Halo fans that want to play before Halo 3 is released sometime in November will have to buy the Xbox360 game Crackdown.

Crytek and Electronic Arts have been rumored to be biding their time until Vista gains serious momentum before unleashing the first major DX10 title. However, a recent chat with the developers of Crysis reveals that this is not the case. In fact, we should be hearing details about a public multi-player beta very soon. We'll keep you posted on how to register for the beta as the information becomes available. However, if there's one thing this beta will show, it is what hardware you really need to run Crysis. All those amazing movies we've seen have been on Crytek's hardware. It will certainly be interesting to see how Crysis runs on a slightly more normal computer.

Although many Xbox 360 gamers may have been worried that the Halo 3 online beta would be hard to find, IGN is reporting that all versions of Crackdown will come bundled with the beta. Previous reports had suggested that only a few limited copies of the game will have the beta, but a Microsoft representative has confirmed that all initial copies of Crackdown will include an invite to test it out. This will probably give a boost to crackdown sales and give Xbox 360 fans the chance to get an early look at one of the most anticipated games of next-generation consoles.

The Windows Server code-named "Longhorn" is the successor to Windows Server 2003. Numerous sources suggest that the Operating System will be name Windows Server 2007 or 2008, depending on its release date. The Longhorn server beta program will be launching within the next few weeks. Microsoft is allowing public preregistration for beta testing of the upcomming "longhorn" server operating system. Allegedly Microsoft will have it available for download within the next week or so.


You can register on this page.

Apparently, there was a Halo 3 beta key giveaway we missed. However, not to worry, as Microsoft is letting more people register for free entry into the Halo 3 beta program. All you have to do is play Halo 2 online. According to Microsoft's new "rule of three", you need to play Halo 2 for three hours between Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007, 12:01 a.m. EST and Feb. 3, 2007, 11:59 p.m. EST. If you do, then Microsoft will allow the first 13,333 who complete the three hours to get a free registration to the Halo 3 beta program. If you miss this opportunity, buying a copy of the Xbox360 game "Crackdown" will land you a free Halo 3 beta registration. When the Halo 3 beta is released, people who have Halo 3 beta registrations can download it through Xbox Live.

ATI Catalyst 7.1 Beta for Windows Vista Available

This is a beta version of the upcoming Catalyst 7.1 Radeon driver from ATI/AMD. We are sure a lot of people will be really pleased to see it. The revision build of this archive is 8.33 and should be an interesting driver for sure. I can not stress enough that this is a beta driver which is distributed by ASUS. You use it at your own risk.

Download: ATI Catalyst 7.1 Beta for Window Vista (91.6MB)

While NVIDIA still hasn't posted a G80 driver, ATI has upgraded it's suite of drivers for Windows Vista. Anyone with Windows Vista RC2 or RTM can download and install the latest version of Catalyst Beta Driver for Windows Vista, which fixes issues in several games such as Serious Sam 2. It also fixes issues in Windows Media Player, the general installation/uninstallation of the drivers, and Temporal Anti-Aliasing. You can read the full release notes here.

You can download the December 13th version of the drivers here.

AMD/ATI does not reccomend using these drivers on mission-critical systems, does not support them, and says they will only install on a computer with Windows Vista RC2 or later.