I've been playing the hell out of Bet on Soldier since I got it last week. I think that Bet on Soldier is a genuinely enjoyable shooter that will appeal to any gamer, but wait for my review. Speaking of games, we have lots coming out this week. The PC gets the Serious Sam II.- FINALLY. There's also the low-budget Rag Doll Kung Fu fighting available via Steam.

Here's a full list: (Oct.10-16)

PC: Evil Dead: Regeneration / Neverwinter Nights: Diamond / Rag Doll Kung Fu / Serious Sam II / Splat Magazine Renegade Paintball

PS2: Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E. / Devil Kings / Jampack vol 13 compilation / L.A. Rush / NCAA March Madness 06 / Romancing SaGa / SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs / SSX: On Tour / Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge / Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan / Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles

Xbox: Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E. / L.A. Rush / NCAA March Madness 06 / Serious Sam II / Splat Magazine Renegade Paintball / SSX: On Tour / Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge / Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan / Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles

GC: Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E. / SSX: On Tour / Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan

GBA: FIFA 06 / Hello Kitty: Happy Party Pals / Madagascar: Operation Penguin / Teen Titans / Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King / Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan

PSP: Gretzky NHL 2006 / SSX: On Tour

DS: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney / Zoo Tycoon DS

This week on DVD we have:  Kingdom of Heaven / Southpark: Season 6 / Stargate: SG-1: Season 8 / Unleashed

Here's some stuff:

• Is U.S. cybersecurity heading for catastrophe? - Security experts say Homeland Security unit is ill-prepared to handle a major online attack.
• Cops smash 100,000 node botnet - Dutch authorities arrested three individuals last week accused of running one of the largest ever hacker botnets comprising over 100,000 zombie PCs. The three men, aged 19, 22 and 27, were not named. Police confiscated computers, cash and a sports car during searches of the suspects' homes. A botnet is a collection of hacked computers at the disposal of a hacker without the owner's knowledge. Botnets are commonly used to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or to send spam.
• New DS trojan bricks your Nintendo DS - DS users, you can know longer feel like virus-free Mac nerds to the PSP fanboys’ PC dweeb—a trojan of the same kind as we saw before in the Trojan.PSPBrick has come to brick that dual-screened gaming device of yours, and we ain’t talking about the Neo DoubleGames here. So if you happen to be of the dubious persuasion to run 3rd party DS roms claiming to be hentai viewers (ahem), don’t come whining to us when you’re stuck with a fancy paperweight trying to figure how to restore your DS to a playable state.
• PS2 Price Drop Coming? -  According to the new report from WMS, Sony will "likely" cut the price of PS2 from $149 to $99 at or around the same time as the introduction of Xbox 360 in late November.
• Windows Vista Build 5231 Leaks - A new build of Windows Vista has leaked, a week before the new build is expected to be released to testers. The October CTP build released to testers will incorporate additional functions than this leak, whilst likely retaining the same build number.
• Microsoft Warns Not To Use 'SP3 Preview Pack' - Microsoft has issued a statement in their newsgroups regarding this unofficial package: "It is just a collection of hotfixes and other updates we have released. It will not update your Windows XP system to SP3. It also contains a number of private hotfixes that are usually only issued to users with a specific identifiable problem. The hotfixes are not as rigorously tested at public released ones this is why we ask you to call PSS to get them so we can track you and provide further assistance such as new versions of the fixes etc as they become available. "
• Google launches RSS reader - Google has unveiled a beta of its Google Reader, a web-based RSS reader, to the search engine's registered users.The reader is similar to the online service offered by NewsGator, allowing users to subscribe to RSS feeds and receive a notification when a website publishes an update.
• DivXtoDVD 2.0 review - CDFreak took time to test the application that is able to convert DivX, XviD, Mpeg4, MOV, AVI, WMV and more video formats to DVD and burn it to a DVD recordable.
• Samsung SPH-V8400 - Samsung announced the SPH-V8400 today that’s only 15.9mm thin. The slim and light new slider phone has an MP3 player, a 1.3 megapixel camera, an electronic dictionary, photo-editing functions, file viewer, and voice-dialing. No further details on it, though it'll be on display at the Korea Electronics Show starting tomorrow.
• TCP/IP Speakers - From the anouncement, "Polk Audio LCi-IP Ultra High Performance In-Wall/ In-Ceiling Loudspeakers are the world's first active Internet Protocol-ready Loudspeakers."
• HD DVD will dump region codes  - At the DVD Forum Japan Conference 2005, Toshiba Digital Media Networks’ Hisashi Yamada apparently told the world that region controls were for the axe:  "We’ve gotten a variety of opinions about region controls. Even in the Steering Committee, they are extremely unpopular; we decided to not put them in. HD DVD probably won’t contain any region playback controls."
• 10 Tips for choosing the best DVD player or recorder - The following tips can help you navigate the maze of technical options and choose a DVD player that's best for you.
• French boffins push hard drives to the limit - Professor Harald Brune and his colleagues at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne believe that they have reached the ultimate density limit of magnetic recording with a self-assembled lattice of non-interacting two-atom high islands of cobalt on a single-crystal gold substrate. The density of 26 trillion islands per square inch is the highest yet recorded, and 200 times the bit density of current computer hard disks.
• Why did CryoSat crash? - Authorities have launched an investigation into what caused a satellite designed to gauge global warming to crash into the Arctic minutes after its take off in Russia this weekend.
• Driverless VW declared winner of $2 million robot race - A driverless Volkswagen was declared the winner yesterday of a $2 million race across the rugged Nevada desert, beating four other robot-guided vehicles that completed a Pentagon-sponsored contest aimed at making warfare safer for humans.
• Mirae Plasma Thin Film Speaker MP-C100 - Mirae Plasma created some cool looking design studies of speakers using their down to 0.5mm thin speaker technology

Reviews: Bet on Soldier (7/10) / Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood COPS 2170 / Cross Racing Championship 5 (8.5/10) / Darwinia (8/10) / Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (8.8/10) / Metalheart: Replicants Rampage (3/10) / Myst V: End of Ages (4/5) / Singles 2: Triple Trouble (7.9/10) / The Sims 2 Nightlife (3.5/5)  / Ultimate Spider-Man (8.3/10) / Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of Wa r - Winter Assault (89%)

Previews: Auto Assault / Earth 2160 / Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green / The Movies(1) / The Movies(2) / Titan Quest

Media: Pacific Storm shots / Stoked Rider featuring Tommy Brunner

Other gaming news:

• Mini-DNF Nuggets - How Big is Duke Nukem Forever? -> George Broussard - I don't have an exact number, but the guys have told me in the past that we're at a million lines or more. Meqon code is excluded because that's just linked in. We don't have the source code. The current game sits at 9.6 gigs, but as I've said in the past, that will be trimmed as there is surely lots of data in there that needs to be culled. I can't see culling more than 2-3 gigs though.  (thanks VE3D)
• Irth Online Dated - Magic Hat Software, developer of fantasy MMORPG Irth Online, has announced the game's official launch date is set for Tuesday, November 1, 2005.

Buy goodies:  Stargate SG-1 - Season 8 Boxed Set (you save $17) / Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith DVD (you save $14) / South Park - The Complete Sixth Season (you save $15) / Batman Begins (Two-Disc Deluxe Edition) (you save $15) / War of the Worlds (2-Disc Limited Edition) (you save $14)