2K Games announced today that Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings, the expansion pack for the award-winning Civilization V, is being developed for Windows-based PC. Developed by Firaxis Games, Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings introduces new gameplay content, enhancing the Civilization V experience and providing even more ways for players to achieve world domination. The Gods & Kings expansion pack spans the breadth of human civilization, taking players from founding the first Pantheon of the Gods and spreading religion across the world, to deploying spies in enemy cities to steal information and technology.

"Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword set a precedent in new content and game features in a Civilization expansion pack. 2K Games is continuing that tradition with Gods & Kings," said Sarah Anderson, senior vice president of marketing for 2K. "The Gods & Kings expansion is the quintessential Civilization V addition, making Civilization more addictive than ever before."

NVIDIA today released PhysX System Software version 9.10.0513. The software installs the NVIDIA PhysX runtime and GPU acceleration support by any NVIDIA GeForce GPU since 8-series that has over 256 MB of memory. While normally new versions of the PhysX System software accompany new GeForce driver launches, this release comes shortly after 2K Games released the PhysX-optimized version of Mafia 2 demo on Steam, which in turn came shortly after NVIDIA released its latest WHQL-signed GeForce drivers. The software fixes some important performance issues with the game. Apart from this, the new version also fixes an important bug that prevents PhysX GPU acceleration in notebooks with NVIDIA Optimus technology. This release will also be included in the next version of the GeForce driver.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA PhysX System Software 9.10.0513

Quite possibly one of the most anticipated games of 2009, BioShock 2 has finally been given a set date from publishers 2K Games. Set for a simultaneous release on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC on October 30th 2009 internationally, while North America will have to wait another few days for their release on the 3rd November.

The Steam Holiday sale is on now. Through January 2, 2009, every game on Steam is available at 10% to 75% off the regular price. Select publisher catalogs such as Ubisoft, THQ, and 2K Games are 25% off. Award-winning titles such as Bioshock and Portal are available for 75% off the regular price. For more information, please visit this page.

In a rather vague press release, 2K Games officially licensed Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 to use in making an unknown number of undisclosed games. One of these games is very likely to be the BioShock sequel, whatever it may be. Unfortunately, at this point, it seems as if BioShock sequels will only come out once very two years (or that's what the author feels, at this point), and Ken Levine (the main writer for the original BioShock) will not be part of a BioShock sequel. Hopefully, the new titles 2K is developing will not run into the problems that developer Silicon Knights is having. Silicon is having so much trouble getting Unreal Engine 3 to work that they've sued Epic Games.

The finalists for the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards have been selected, with BioShock (2K Games) taking the lead and receiving a record 12 nominations including the "Overall Game of the Year" award. The nominees list continues with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision), Rock Band (MTV Games), Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo of America) and Valve's Orange Box. The awards ceremony, hosted by Jay Mohr, will take place during The D.I.C.E. Summit 2008 on February 7 at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas. Feel free to see all the finalists nominated in 26 categories here.

2K Games owner Take-Two Interactive has officially announced the creation of 2K Marin, a new development studio located at 2K's new headquarters in Novato, California. Said to be creating original intellectual properties as well as assisting with other 2K projects, 2K Marin is reported to be made up of some ex-BioShock (PC, X360) staff. BioShock was developed at 2K's studios in Australia and Boston, a tag-team formerly known as Irrational Games.

We're focused on continuing to bring new brands and cutting-edge gameplay to market with the creation of the 2K Marin studio,

said 2K president Christoph Hartmann.

2K Marin will build upon our success in creating and leveraging AAA franchises.

The long-awaited BioShock patch is available a little earlier than expected. Click here to download the PC 1.1 patch (27MB) or here to read the full release notes.

2K Games has announced that a BioShock PC patch and Xbox 360 title update, as well as a free downloadable content pack for both Xbox Live and for the PC, will be released this week. For now, the content pack will include several extra plasmids for players to use while the patch will fix the game's field-of-vision perspective. A full list of bug fixes and everything included in the DLC will be put up on The Cult of Rapture when the downloads become available.

Bit-tech reports that a new 2K Games studio is being founded specifically for the development of BioShock 2. The new studio, 2K Marin, will consist of the remnants from the 2K Boston developer team of the first BioShock. Apparently, not many of the original staff wanted to work with Ken Levine ever again after the first BioShock. 2K Games understood the sentiment and allowed the staff to set up a new studio so they can work on BioShock 2 while leaving Ken in 2K Boston with Project X which has been confirmed as being a new X-Com game.

Anyone who played BioShock last night on the Xbox360 got a seemingly pleasant surprise: there was a patch being installed that would fix some minor in-game issues. More specifically, it "improves stability on autosaves, fixes a bug where an AI will not utilize health stations properly, and fixes a music bug in the title menu". After the patch was applied however, gamers reported several instances of global freezing/glitching, sometimes as often as once every 30 seconds. A 2K Games representative assures us that 2K games is looking closely at the problem, and is working hard to resolve it.

We have been reading and listening to your frustrations over SecuROM, PC activation problems, and technical support issues since BioShock launched on Tuesday, and we've devised a plan to help.

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times. Also, we have in the works a revoke tool which you will be able to run on your machine if you want to free up that key and move it to to another computer (this works very much like Steam or iTunes system). We are also working with SecuROM and 2K customer service, so that when you do need to call in support problems, you get answers to your questions faster, without much waiting or being bounced around. SecuROM has been given much more autonomy to help fix your problems quickly and effectively. I am personally sorry for anyone who got bounced around in the past couple days (I even think I contributed to this problem) and we're going to make sure that does not happen in the future. As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base.

It appears that players are having problems after reinstalling BioShock a few times. BioShock is using Sony's anti-piracy SecuROM which contacts them with your hardware specifications. SecuROM's website states "Only legitimate customers who have purchased the product are able to unlock the program which is bound to the hardware after activation. This ensures that once activated, it cannot be transferred to another PC and therefore not being mass pirated." Players are reporting after installing the game more than two times will stop the installation process. So not only is it being bounded to your current hardware. It will also lock you out after too many installs.

2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, today announced that it will publish Mafia 2, a sequel to the original Mafia title that sold more than two million copies worldwide and helped popularize the gangster genre. Featuring a deep mobster-driven narrative packed with both behind-the-wheel and on-foot action, Mafia 2 is the sequel fans have been clamoring for. The game is being developed by Illusion Softworks, developers of the original Mafia title, for next generation consoles and Games for Windows. Like the original Mafia title, Mafia 2 immerses players in the mob underworld of a fictitious late 1940's-early 1950's scenario. For more information on Mafia 2, please click here.