"No surprise here, but PureBalance, the creators of the popular anti-cheat software PunkBuster have been contracted to provide anti-cheat counter measures for Call of Duty: World at War by Activision.

Although most of us are against multiplayer cheating, clients like PunkBuster usually add new and very annoying compatibility issues for the end user."

"The most popular games online are Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that.

So what happens to the lesser known games as time marches on and the smaller games are squeezed off the shelves? Do the communities live on? Do the hardcore refuse to let go? Do newcomers to Xbox Live wander into empty lobbies and try to figure out why nothing is working?

We take a handful of older games in the office and give them a whirl online, to see what's left of the origi..."

"Today Sierra announced two separate expansions to its spooky first-person shooter, F.E.A.R. For the PC version, the Perseus Mandate expansion gives players a new angle on the events at Armacham with a new team. The story runs parallel to the original's and includes new enemies.

On the Xbox 360, F.E.A.R. Files includes both of the expansions that have been made available for the PC version: F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate.

Look for more details on Perseus Mandate and F.E.A...."

"As bug discoveries go, we can't technically claim to have discovered this one. Still, it seems that by stumbling upon a major slowdown in F.E.A.R. during a recent Maingear desktop review, we've come across what might be a more universal issue in PC gaming performance. We're not trying to cause a panic. F.E.A.R is the only game we've seen suffer a significant frame rate loss. But an intriguing post on the official F.E.A.R. forum indicates that the issue might be more widespread. The potential ..."

"Ubisoft releases five new maps for recent Tom Clancy title, while free modes arrive for Sierra's supernatural action game, with multiple map packs on the way."

Monolith has opened a new contest where participants get a chance to christen the sequel to their celebrated FPS, F.E.A.R. Entries can be as simple as a suggestion, but contestants can also submit files (up to 30MB in filesize) for images or movies of their own design to sweeten the deal. The contest runs until June 22nd.

Incidentally one of the contest rules advises against the use of acronyms for title submissions. Maybe they felt the first game's title was too corny; well, that and M...