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As spotted by a keen-eyed Eurogamer forumite, the KotOR 2 Restored Content Project has gone into open beta. You're just a 15MB download away. Details below.

[It seems to have gone through nearly as many name alterations as the Sugababes have line-up changes. It's the sequel to RPS-championed Russian existentialist minor classic Pathologic, the game Walker described as Oblivion with cancer. It's finally translated to English. It's time to send the man who Butchered Pathologic to see Wot He Thinks of The Void...]

Twelve years of Ultima Online (twelve years!) are being celebrated by EA by allowing old players to return and play for free until the 16th of October. You can download the client for your glorious return here, which is also where newbies can access the 14-day trial. The most recent expansion for Ultima came out back in August, with a load of new content including a playable Elven race.

Read about Alec's adventures in the aged MMO just here, and tell us if you're going to return to Ultima in the comments below.

Surprise, shock, delight and queasy nostalgia hit me all at once when I loaded up Steam a couple of days back and was greeted with an ad for Mad Balls In Babo:Invasion. Wait. Mad Balls? That's a name I haven't heard in a good 20 years. What trickery is this? None at all, it transpires - just an apparently rather delightful electric videogame starring a retro toy...

And by "own" I mean the publishing rights. Come on, fess up. You need to tell Direct2Drive, or perhaps GoG.com. (Via Blues.) Then the mighty classic can be re-released. More important information below.

There's a first trailer for Dawn Of War II: Chaos Rising. It contains: some ice. And a gold man. For less than a second. And that's it. But if you're JUST SO PUMPED about the new expansion, perhaps that will be enough?

There will be blood.

The sort of thing I'd normally put in the Sunday Papers, but when I saw Soren Johnson twitter it this morning I think it's worth linking by itself, especially because it deals with a lot of topics which have been floating around the RPS comments threads (and the inside of my head) recently. It's Greg Costikyan notes from his presentation at GDC Austin, splendidly entitled Randomness: Blight Or Bane. This is the sort of thing I love seeing Costikyan do - a large, sweeping, cultural history of the topic which grasps and tackles the seeming paradox that we're dismissive of randomness yet it's persisted and thrived in gaming culture. One of Costikyan's many strengths here is examining that innocuous "we".

Another of 2009's Unknown Pleasures inches ever closer. Samorost's creator's commercial adventure will debut on October 16th via all the digital channels you can imagine, including Steam and Impulse. If you want to pre-order you can do it from their site for a mere seventeen - count 'em! - dollars. Which saves you three whole dollars over the release price. I'm not particularly interested in the pure adventure genre any more, but this really has be intrigued. Here's the latest short video...

A new trailer emerges for the first project from the indie-influenced LucasArts Workshop, Lucidity. Bearing quite a lot in common with the previous game footage, it also contains a few twists of its own, not least the one 55 seconds in.

The footage from the game of James Cameron's Avatar shown at the Tokyo Game Show is shooty indeed. (And reminiscent of the early footage of Lost Planet 2.) I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for all that blasted and mutilated alien wildlife - I'm assuming that's going to be the point of the film, and therefore the game, since the plot centres around consumerist humans hoovering up resources from the lovely alien world of Pandora. I can already sense that it's going to be considerably more satisfying to shoot up the humans and mechs than it will be to fire your guns at a trumpeting bird-o-saur, righteous or otherwise.

Dark tidings from Camp Bioware, in this seemingly rather ill-judged trailer for the new Mass Effect 2 character Subject Zero. Bitch. Shoots for Strong Vengeful Joss Whedon Villain-Type, but comes off like an insipid, low-rent exploitation movie. Bitch. Hopefully this is simply an unfortunate marketing misfire, as with those very silly Marilyn Manson/low-budget porno trailers for Dragon Age, and not representative of the tone of the game itself. Bitch. But I must say, they're going to have to fight to win back my anticipation for the game at this stage. Bitch.

Just finished writing up the penultimate Blood Bowl match report, which I'll be posting tomorrow, but I found myself reading Mat Kumar's piece on his reservations on Blood Bowl. The Caledonian Chaos Warrior is a bit of a dice-head on the quiet, but he's found himself frustrated...

"Now, I wish I could say I picked up Blood Bowl and it's everything I've dreamed of and more, but it's really not. Blood Bowl, on the PC, brushes so close to perfection that it's driving me utterly bonkers."

A lot of people have been turned on by the match reports, despite me really trying to talk about the interface problems too. I think, just a a matter of balance, it's worth linking to Mat's piece which really stresses them - and not just because he's terribly nice about my journals. Go read.

Walking-gaming-polymath Richard Cobbett brought this to my attention. Wadjet Eye Games' Dave Gilbert has decided to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur by making their Shivah free to download today. All you need to do is go to the buy page and enter the coupon code "FreeShivah". And lo! A game will be yours. Why should you do this? "Put simply, if you're into adventures or games that tell stories, Dave Gilbert is one of the guys you should be watching," says Richard, before pausing to allow us to put a page-break in.

Sundays are for Bacon, Batman and compiling a list of interesting (mainly) game related reading from across the week for the RPS-readers' delectation, while trying to avoid to linking some quasi-ironic piece of pop.

• Quinns has started blogging about games more regularly. You may be aware, he does a lot of traveling. Here's things he learned about real traveling versus 16-bit RPG adventure traveling. For example: "1) On a real adventure, you will not find the lowest-level enemies first. Low-level enemies must be found through trial and error. 2) Warthogs are not low-level enemies. 3) Bandits are not low-level enemies. 4)Rats are DEFINITELY NOT low-level enemies". Lots more, natch. He also reviews WET without having played it.

The last time I used 'innovative' or 'refreshing' to describe a hex wargame, Good Queen Bess was on the throne and bear-burning and witch-baiting were legal. While HPS explore some unusual themes now and again and Matrix flirt with modernity occasionally, on the whole six-sided PC strategy seems firmly wedged in the past. Three cheers for Hours of War then. This Finnish-made WW2 operational wargame currently in open beta, blends the unorthodox and the familiar in a most enticing way.

Hold onto your hats, it's a new podcast. It's almost too much to bear. Jim and John ascended in the RPS Zeppelin to discuss matters of PC gaming. And in a shocking twist, this time they do discuss PC gaming. It's beyond belief.

Sadly, not that G-force. It's an action-platformer based on the contemporary Bruckheimer flick based around an crack squad of - er - Guinea Pigs who complete missions via their fancy high tech equipment. Hmm. Frankly, it sounds a bit like a kidified version of Morrison and Quitely's Incredible-Journey-meets-Terminator WE3. Anyway, it's over 600Mb and you can get it from here. And you'll find some footage of the tiny rodents fucking shit up below...

Sony have sent out a survey to Planetside players, asking for feedback. Here's what it says:

We plan to expand the PlanetSide® universe with another game and we need your help with the design. After all, who knows the game better than you, our customers, the people who actually play it! Don't worry about the original PlanetSide, it isn't going anywhere.

We want to hear your opinion and to do so we have put together a short survey. The information you provide will play a critical role into helping guide the development and direction of the next hit Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter.

More thoughts below.

If you're a fellow Britisher, you may have caught a staggeringly unpleasant, one-sided and sensationalist half-hour of fact-free garbage on ITV earlier tonight. It's about videogames and addiction, and because a handful of young people they document demonstrate significant emotional or social problems and play videogames a lot, this of course means games are monstrously addictive with tragic long-term consequences. It couldn't possibly be that they play videogames for too long and too intensely because of their other problems or circumstances, could it? NO NO NO DON'T TALK SENSE.

What follows is a video that simultaneously makes me want to cartwheel down the steet shouting "videogames! videogames! videogames!" and also curl up into a confused, future-shocked ball and wait for the end of the world. It's Dead Rising 2's multiplayer mode. It's the Running Man with zombies. It's Smash TV starring guys with three-foot, razor-sharp antlers strapped to their heads. It's TERROR IS REALITY XVII, and you've probably never seen a video quite like this...

I was planning to write up a Blood Bowl game now, but realise I have to write up a story idea for my COMICS PAYMASTERS. Instead, I'll do a swift mention of some surprising port news. Apparently ludicrous 360-Slasher/Platformer/QTE-'em-up Ninja Blade is to appear on the PC in October. Who'd have thunk it? I reviewed it for Eurogamer when it came out on the 360, and gave it 7/10 for its agreeable lunacy. And it really is proper mental. Some of its lunacy is highlighted in the following trailer...

The first trailer for Square Enix's second Final Fantasy MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, has washed on the shores of the internet. It's... Japanese? And pretty. That said, I'm not sure how close to the game this is, because the main site shows stills from the video as "screenshots", which seems a bit unlikely. Anyway, this is very much a next-generation build for Final Fantasy XI, with Square Enix talking about allowing people to transfer old character names to the new game, as well as being able create very similar avatars based on the same race types and classes. Lots of changes to the details of combat and professions, of course, but we can assume the core experience will be rather similar. The game is scheduled for some time in 2010.

Come on, hands up if you played and loved Final Fantasy XI, I know you're out there.

And one of our Unknown Pleasures for 2009 emerges, resplendent with shiny-flickery stuff into the light. Llamasoft's Gridrunner Revolution is now available to buy for $20 directly from them, or $25 dollars with the divisive-yet-awesome Space Giraffe. For those who wish to do the ever-popular try-before-you-buy, there's a demo available here for your pleasure. I plan to write some opinions up after I've played some more, but you'll find an introduction to this shooter's key concepts in the video below...

"Philosophical First Person Single Player Exploration Puzzle Art Game," apparently. I spotted Hazard: The Journey Of Life over on Indiegames, but I haven't had time to get it working yet. The video (below) is definitely worth checking out though, as this minimal Unreal Tournament 3 mod has a fascinating minimalistc presentation and promises some strange-looking puzzles. (More fodder for the first-person puzzle camp.) It seems to be a work in progress as the mod only runs at 800x600 and requires some batch-file fiddling to get working, as explained in the readme. (Which also instructs you to read itself...) Anyway, worth taking a look.

Bioware's fantasy epic is trundling towards us like a siege tower made of conversation trees and noisy metal, and we're starting to get a few glimpses of the characters in detail. One such glimpse, a video show-casing Zevran The Asssassin, possibly Dragon Age's stabbiest character, sits below the click. I've also posted a small gallery of the latest screenshots, which you can click upon for embiggenment.

It's nice to see that Dreamkiller is heading in the direction I hoped: stupid and proud of it. Whether it will be all that and worth playing remains to be seen - opinion is quite divided on Painkiller (and more so on Painkiller: Overdose developed by Dreamkiller devs, Mindware). With Serious Sam 3 on the way, there's perhaps fresh interest in an old-school zero-gimmicks FPS, and beyond the ridiculous premise (psychologist enters patients' dreams, shoots monsters and blows shit up) this is as traditional as could be. As the new trailer shows, the team behind it certainly aren't aiming for anything highbrow.

...but the PC version is delayed! I know! That never happens, right? Ubisoft has just dropped the bomb about the no-longer-November release, claiming it's so they can "deliver the best quality game".

Pirhanha Bytes - the venerated and cheerily mad studio behind the Gothic RPGs - are backbackback with next month's Risen. I've spent a little time with some preview code, and they've just released a making-of video. See how I kill two birds with one stone. I am Bird-Killer, killer of birds.

I'd not spotted Grappling Hook before, until I saw the demo appear. Now I'm wondering why we haven't heard more about it. The creation of one-man dev team SpeedRunGames, more intimately known as Christian Teister, Grappling Hook is a first-person puzzler centred around a - wait for it - grappling hook. And as I might have made clear before, ALL games are improved by the addition of either double-jumps or grappling hooks. Grappling hooks doesn't quite have a double-jump (there's an extended jump instead) and as such falls short of angelic perfection. But despite this, after playing the demo I conclude it's pretty damned fine.