Plenty of games have been delayed for a few months this year, in order to escape the holiday season, where so many game will be released, including highly anticipated titles like Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2. It now appears that GSC Gameworld’s third Stalker game is being delayed as well.

Stalker: Call of Pripyat was supposed to be released this year on PC, and it was to be one of the first to support DirectX 11, the new DX update that will ship with Windows 7. According to publisher BitComposer, the game will now be released during the first quarter of 2010.

AMD has launched the world’s first DirectX 11 graphics card, the Radeon HD 5700. The card is an evolution of the previous 4700 series, and packs twice as many stream processors — 1600 — as the previous generation. Clock speeds and memory bandwidth has also been improved.The GPU is based on the new 40nm manufacturing process, which means the card consumes less power, especially in idle state.

The first batch of reviews all confirm that this is the fastest single-gpu graphics card on the market (and in history, for that matter). Check out the reviews on AnandTech and HotHardware for more in-depth coverage of the new monster from AMD.

The past few games in the Need For Speed franchise haven’t impressed fans and critics alike, and EA is looking to make up for it with NFS Shift. This time, it’s a rather competent racing developer that’s “behind the wheel”, so to say; they were the ones behind the very competent racers GTR 2 and GT Legends, so it’s no surprise they were given the task of rebooting one of the longest running racing franchises in gaming.

Need For Speed Shift is the 13th Need For Speed game, and it appears that this time, the developers were looking to just get it right, not re-invent the wheel (pardon the pun). The career mode begins by throwing you on a track alone in a BMW, in order to test your skills (the game adapts the difficulty when you complete the track). While that’s a great idea, it’s frightful when you’re driving the first time, the controls are all over the place and you feel like quitting before even completing the first lap. Suffice to say, the first impression is rather bad. After fiddling with the setting and learning to proper handle the cars, it gets better, but we would have expected a better learning curve from such experienced racing developers. READ ON »

The upcoming MMO Aion, not released yet, already is running into server problems. It seems that the folks that pre-ordered the game and that have access to it now, are forced to wait, sometimes several hours in order to play the game — and this is even bore the game is released to the general public.

If you’re one of the (un)lucky ones to already have Aion, hope that other players might find it discouraging and leave, cutting your wait time a bit. Stay tuned for our Aion review in the upcoming days.

Microsoft recently lowered the price of the Xbox 360 Elite to $300 to combat the new equally priced PS3 Slim. Now Microsoft is taking it a step further, offering buyers a $50 mail-in rebate for buyers of the console until October 5.

You can get the rebate form here.

The Team Fortress 2 community is one of the most vibrant ones, and Valve has a history of appealing to them, like including fan made maps into official updates. This time though, a fan made class update, the Guard Dog, might not make the cut.

It’s a concept that introduces Guard Dogs in TF2, which can attack and protect, and even fetch medic kits. Check out the full, TF2-update style page here. Valve has posted the update on the official TF2 page, giving it a thumbs up as a concept.

Not a fan of plug-and-play consoles? Neither were we, until we saw the FireCore, that is. This console is essentially a Sega Genesis remake in the sense that it lets you play Genesis carts. That’s where the similarities end, however, as the console itself actually comes installed with 20 Sega Genesis games that you can play right out of the box.

Want want? Of course you do, Buy.com has the FireCore console up for sale at just $50.

It seems that the guy who founded DICE, Fredrik Liljengren has moved onto bigger and better things with his latest game studio, Antic Entertainment. You may be familiar with DICE as the studio behind Battlefield: Bad Company and Battlefield: 1943.

Anyways, Antic Entertainment is to be a studio that specializes in free-to-play games with their first title being Junk: Battles. This browser based RTS will let players create their own ship and then duke it out against other players as they collect parts to upgrade said ship.

If you want to read more about Junk: Battles and Antic Entertainment, head over to the game’s official website here.

via gamasutra

Last week an Xbox 360 WiFi adapter that supported 802.11n was spotted at the FCC but Microsoft kept quiet about its existence. Today, they have come forth and told Joystiq that the device does in fact exist but otherwise didn’t give many details.

They did however let us know that the device will be “another choice to consumers” which leads us to believe that both the 802.11n and previous 802.11g will be on store shelves together. Perhaps the 802.11n adapter will take the price point of the 802.11g at $99 while the later will get a price cut.

We’ll have to wait until Microsoft says more before we make anymore assumptions.

It’s no secret that MMOs take a long time to make and cost sizzling amounts of money, which is no surprise that developer Turbine, which has been “secretly” working on a console MMO for a year and a half, revealed that they’ve spent over $20 million on the project so far. The game will be released in 2011 on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

While console games this generation have outsold the PC counterparts by large margins, not many MMOs have made it to the consoles yet. Actually, only two MMO games, Final Fantasy XI and Phantasy Star Universe have been released on consoles, and a third one is officially on the way, when Cryptic Studios revealed that the PC MMO Champions Online will make its way to the Xbox 360. However, the game has been delayed because of Microsoft’s policy towards MMOs on the console.