For the first time ever, Harry Potter fans will be able to experience the magic of Harry's first year at Hogwarts with next-generation graphics and updated gameplay in the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone game from Electronic Arts. EA's UK Studio, the team behind the worldwide success of the original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets games, which together have sold over 20 million copies worldwide, joins Warthog Games in developing the title for the PS2, the Xbox, and GameCube. The game is scheduled for release in the fall of 2003 under the EA GAMES brand.

Apparently ignoring the launch debacle the first 2 days, LucasArts' Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, the first Star Wars massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, experienced unprecedented success in its first week of availability, garnering more than 125,000 users and receiving accolades from gaming press and players alike.

The game is developed on original high-tech engine The Firestarter Engine, which uses the possibilities of the latest accelerator generation GeForce3/4. Among the engine possibilities are work with outdoor and indoor areas, coloured dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, vertex and pixel shaders, T&L, procedure textures, various classes of particle system-based effects, interactive and destructible level objects, realistic physics, high-polygonal character and monster models (up to 5000 of polygons), skeleton animation. The official site has once again been updated with 4 new screens, read more to check them out...

Patch 1.31 will only include the arm patches fix that that caused server connection problems. Testing on it will begin next week and public release is expected in 3 weeks. Tony Ray, from Even Balance, is working closely with the development team in integrating Punkbuster and everything is going smoothly. The SA servers (windows - linux) will hit testing in a few days. Exact release on this is uncertain right now. What can you expect in the future? Patch 1.4 is being worked on and is scheduled for release at the end of August. This is shaping up to be the largest patch thus far in terms of bug fixes and improvements. Plans for an official MOD and release of an SDK are underway (expect both to come later).

Activision just dropped us a note about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory -- if you've been holding off on the download because of your bandwidth, you won't have to any longer. Over the next couple of months, Enemy Territory will be on the discs of magazines all over the world! We've got a partial list below of gaming magazines that will be including Enemy Territory and when they're coming out. An updated list can be found on the official Wolfenstein website.

Another day, another batch of game trailers were released. Instead of giving them all their own posts, we grouped them, and so far there are trailers for :

• Call Of Duty - US Campaign Trailer Pack
• Call Of Duty - Russian Campaign Trailer Pack
• Heaven And Hell - Trailer
• The Kore Gang - Trailer
• Spyhunter 2 - Trailer
• 
  
  We will update this throughout the day when new trailers become available. Read more for download links ...

City of Heroes is the first superhero themed online RPG and will offer a host of exciting and compelling gameplay features. Players create their own heroes, choosing from hundreds of different powers, skills, abilities, and items and design their own unique costumes. Then they can band together with other players to fight evil, build their own secret headquarters and strive to become the premiere hero group in the city.

Building further on an already successful partnership, Atari, Inc. and FUNimation have entered into an agreement, through which Atari will publish video games for certain next-generation consoles based on FUNimation’s popular animated television series, Yu Yu Hakusho. Already an acknowledged blockbuster in Japan where the manga alone has sold more than 40 million copies, Yu Yu Hakusho made its debut in the United States in April 2002 on Cartoon Network, where it is currently among the top-rated shows on the network’s “Toonami Block” of programming. Read more for details ...

Midway Games Inc. announced today that Midway Arcade Treasures, the first next-generation console offering of more than 20 classic arcade games, is scheduled to ship in fall 2003. Midway Arcade Treasures features hundreds of hours of classic gameplay action from all-time arcade favorites including the fast-paced action of SpyHunter, the multiplayer collaboration of Gauntlet, the space-age adventure of Defender and the dueling combat of Joust, just to name a few.

P.M. STUDIOS today officially announced the development of the 3D Action-RPG Game– ETROM: “The Astral Essence”. Earth 476. A.H.E.F. (After Human Empire Foundation): the Future? Etrom is a project aiming at creating a world where we find conflicting societies divided by walls, laws, secrets, towers and deserts, characterized by either fantastic technologies and ancient civilizations governed by mysterious hidden energies. Read more for details & screens ...