NOOBS Paradise

Deputy arrests another Deputy, his wife!

ELKO, Nev. (AP) - This might make for a tense time at home. An off-duty sheriff's deputy in Nevada was pulled over and charged with driving under the influence - the arresting officer, her husband.

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Gaming for a Living

Pay to play at Tournament.com and turn your frags into funds.

By Tom Chick

You ready to put your money where your mouse is? UK-based Tournament.com plans to launch a service this month that will let gamers pony up an entrance fee, play a first person shooter match, and then divide the money among the winners. After the house gets its cut, of course.

Episode Three in the mix

Valve comments on Episode Three progress

Half-Life 2: Episode Three is in pre-production and Valve doesn't anticipate gamers returning to City 17, according to marketing director Doug Lombardi. Valve comments on Episode Three progress. We were in Valve's offices this week talking to them about Episode Two, and we couldn't resist checking in on the third. "Pre-production is definitely going, and it'll be ramping up rather quickly now that they're ramping down on Episode Two," Lombardi told us.There's a "skeleton crew" doing the work, he added, although their attention is being split between that and ongoing development of Episode Two, which is nearing completion ahead of what Valve hopes will be an October release.

Lombardi and programmer David Speyrer also continued to fuel rumours kicked off in PC Gamer UK that Episode Three might climax with a battle at an Arctic research station. "We're not going to spoil it. No matter what Doug said," Speyrer joked.Perhaps tellingly though, in a separate discussion about moving the player towards the team's "ultimate goal" over the course of the episodic trilogy, Speyrer mentioned that a lot of work had gone into "creating a natural progress of topography and climate". Our emphasis.

So will Episode Three change setting drastically, we asked? "I don't think you'll head back to City 17, for sure," Lombardi said."Not in Episode Three, anyway."

Team Fortress 2

We are pleased to announce that the next generation of facial animation technology for Source will be released in Team Fortress 2. By leveraging the rapid pace of advancement in PC graphics, video games can now match and actually surpass the facial animation used in feature film and broadcast television production. We've released a video of this real-time, in-game, in-engine facial animation in action in support of ATI's launch of the Radeon HD 2000 series. By running entirely on the GPU of the videocard, the facial animation not only looks dramatically better, but frees up the CPU to perform other tasks like physics or AI.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_ZlPBep9yE">Watch the video</a href>

Student Arrested for Making a CS:S Map

Another in a series of paranoia induced freak outs, comes the news that a student attending Clements High School in Fort Bend, Texas was arrested for making a Counter-Strike map based on his school. The map was intended for use solely amongst the creator and his friends, but was discovered by concerned parents who then contacted the authorities.