I was reading an article on the theory of Far Cry 2’s ’slow burn’, which is the idea that it takes a while to get going, but once it does it’s rather brilliant. While this may be true of some people, I found it was rather gripping throughout, from the rather shockingly subdued taxi ride into the country to the various open missions you start out doing. Yes it doesn’t lead you by the hand, but since I always play my games off the beaten path, this really didn’t trouble me. I sought out the Silenced MP5, and went off to do my thing.

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The Witcher has now sold according to developers CD Projekt Red. The team are proud to show that single-player PC gaming isn’t dead, and I totally agree with them. For such a game as The Witcher to have sold 1 million copies world wide (both the original and Enhanced Editions) is a great achievement from this small Polish development team.

The full press release (see below) provides a bunch of interesting quotes from the CEO of CD Projekt RED and the CEO of CD Projekt where they talk up GOG.com and a new multi-plat game underway with Metropolis Software.

The game has also just celebrated its first anniversary, to celebrate the team have released this special video showing off The Witcher and other projects from CD Projekt.

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The first Left 4 Dead TV ad has been made public by Valve and is part of their massive $10 million marketing campaign for the zombie horror co-op game that is due for release on the 18th November. Courtesy of Doug Lombardi you can find it below right now.

Atari have confirmed that a new Riddick game will be released next spring. The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena was originally rumoured to be a remake of the original Riddick game with added content, it has now been confirmed to feature a totally new full-length campaign. The first game received pretty solid reivews if I remember correctly and Jim Rossignol certainly enjoyed it.

Personally, I played a bit of the demo for the original but nothing more, it is something which I always feel that I should delve back in time to play again. It is always good to see franchises which have been running quiet come back, bring on next spring then.

Full press release follows.

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Those wacky guys over at Destructoid have set up a gaming tournament with the help of Intel and CyberPower. The competition is open to all and every two weeks cash prizes of up to $1000 will be up for grabs with a couple of grand prizes being some top quality CyberPower PCs.

The first games in the tourney are browser-based so there is no reason for not getting stuck in, check it out here.

Read on for my ramblings regarding what I expect to see in Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Spoilers from Episode 2 are present, so watch the fuck out. A slightly more organised version has also appeared on halflife2.net

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Empire: Total War is ready for pre-purchase on Steam right now. For those of you who chose to pre-purchase you will receive a copy of Rome: Total War Gold for absolutely nothing.

It costs $54.99 here in the UK which is a bargain considering you get Rome thrown in too. Well maybe not a bargain, but it isn’t a bad offer.

The Steam and retail versions of Empire will also come fully loaded with Steamworks which will provide owners of the game with updates, downloadable content and achievements. Steamworks will also act as the multiplayer backend of the game, more details will emerge on this soon.

For those of you who are now worrying about offline gaming, don’t worry, you only need to connect to the internet once via Steam to play single-player.

It is released February 3rd in North America and February 6th in Europe and other territories.

The PC multiplayer demo for Call of Duty: World at War is now available on fileshack and weighs in at 845MB.

Beta keys are readily available from the Call of Duty site. The game lands on 11th November so make sure you get playing it soon or you will miss out.

FEAR 2: Project Origin will be coming to numerous digital distribution channels, including Steam on its February 10th 2009 release. Project Origin is the sequel to the 2005 horror hit FEAR and will throw gamers back into a world where Alma is wreaking havoc.

Thomas Gewecke, President, Warner Bros. Digital Distribution was forced by Alma to release the following statement about the digital distribution of FEAR 2.

“More and more gamers are taking advantage of digital distribution to access videogames,”. “Digital distribution is going to be an important facet of the gaming world and we are glad to be a part of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s efforts to offer additional, convenient, and flexible options for players.”

Nice to know well in advance what games we can expect to see on Steam.

Call of Duty: World at War is officially going to have zombie Nazi’s in a four-way co-op mode which I assume will be appearing on the PC and the console versions of the game. Taking a hint from Left 4 Dead maybe? Regardless this zombie mode will allow you to use money earned from killing the zombie on a range of different weapons while you and your buddies help barricade the house you are in. Looks damn fun.