It has been a long 11 years since the last tactical role-playing title from the Jagged Alliance series was released. And it will be 12 before the next one arrives, but we do have confirmation of that happening. BitComposer Games now owns the franchise rights, and has announced that Jagged Alliance 3 will be released sometime next year...

It seems EA fell over at about 1am AEST, again. Since then, a new server-side patch has been released, and the Gamers-Underground.com servers have just been updated with it. This should fix the Punkbuster kick issues that are being experience globally.

Despite this, DICE has requested that all servers are run without Punkbuster enabled until the master server restart taking place at approximately 6pm AEST tonight - which didn't happen last night as planned.

Just when you thought the wonderful world of co-operative gaming was over, announcements stating support for it roll in - thick and fast. The latest in the line-up to do so is Ubisoft's Ghost Recon: Future soldier which we teased with a trailer recently...

Some new details about Batman: Arkham Asylum's sequel have emerged. According to the IMDB revealed cast listing, Vincent Martella is set to be the voice behind Robin. You might have seen him in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo and television show Everyone Hates Chris, and even heard him as Hope Estheim in Final Fantasy XIII...

The EA master servers are being restarted at 6pm AEST (7pm AEDT) this evening, as DICE work towards creating a solution with greater stability. Yes, this means you'll be booted from your Bad Company 2 game and may be unable to reconnect to EA for a short period.

The subtle hints and blindingly obvious viral marketing imagery recently distributed by Valve have finally come to fruition. Steam is headed to the Mac, as are most of Valve's best games. Portal 2 is to be released simultaneously on Mac and Windows, while you can also expect Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series for the platform in April...

During the night DICE were tweeting away, keeping the community informed about yet another major Bad Company 2 server outage. "All teams are actively engaged in diagnosis and remediation" we were told. Additional services are being added to help spread the load, but it's noted that "despite having a major infrastructure in place, the peak traffic this weekend has been huge, 400% higher than any other Battlefield's peak simultaneous users."

The original Mafia was one of the most under appreciated games of the naughties. It's amongst a very short, short list of games I consider my most memorable - it did Grand Theft Auto, better than Grand Theft Auto. Needless to say, I'm very excited about this game. Embedded in this article is the latest trailer, for your viewing pleasure.

Update: servers are back online!

It was sure good to see so many new and old faces playing with us last night. In fact, the servers were full right throughout the night until about 7am when they went down for patching.

Having just woken up and wanting to get back onto the Bad Company 2 servers, I've noticed that I can't. Neither can any of you, according to a bundle of Steam private messages this morning.

Unfortunately, EA is experiencing an outage. An official Twitter states that it "affects a number of EA games. A fix will be done as soon as possible." Well, damn. With any luck we'll see you back on there shortly.