The new Dragon Age Origins patch patches the game to version 1.03 and can be downloaded via the BioWare Social Network.

One of the major problems fixed by the patch includes the long loading times between areas, although we're sure that fixing such a problem four months after the games release might be seen as a little too late for most players. Still, if you haven't got around to playing the game through yet, it's certainly going to save you a lot of time sparing into space.

The patch also readies the game for the upcoming expansion, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening which is being released in just a few short days.

Here's the changelog in full:

• Various changes have been made to code and resources to support the Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening expansion pack. Most of these changes do not affect Origins itself
• Some players were experiencing increasingly long load times. A major cause of this problem has been fixed
• At higher levels, non-player characters now receive a bonus to armor penetration. This mitigates an unintentional imbalance with well-armored high-level characters, since armor penetration previously did not scale as aggressively as armor itself did
• Elite-rank enemies (lieutenants) can no longer be shattered. This preserves the intended tactical design of many combat encounters
• Portraits for summoned creatures (like a ranger's wolf) were displaying improperly while in the party camp. This no longer occurs

It's a great big server roller coaster over at EA this week as the struggle to maintain and repair the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 servers to the point where users can enjoy the game without any problems.

EA sent a tweet about servers causing problems earlier in the morning, stating that "EA servers are currently down stopping login to a number of EA games. EA is investigating and will be back online as soon as possible."

This was only a few days after the servers had previously been taken down on Sunday evening. Despite coming back up this afternoon, there will also be planned down time tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. GMT,  with no time yet stated as to when the servers will come back after that.

It's not been a great launch for EA and Dice. We had plenty of problems playing over the weekend and it hasn't exactly been perfect since the 'fix' was issued either. Even on servers we know have been updated there still seemed to be disconnection issues and the server list still takes about 3 minutes to load up, complete with incorrect information about ping and player numbers.

Let's hope this 'maintenance' period fixes some of those issues.

Tactical RPG series Jagged Alliance is likely to finally see a third game in the series after all; the struggling IP has been picked up by German publisher bitComposer Games.

The sequel will be the first game in the series since Jagged Alliance 2 was released to critical acclaim over ten years ago - a game which went on to achieve cult status. Although the game was previously being developed by developer Akella, that project was cancelled in Winter 2009 and there hasn't been much information on the fate of the series until now.

With bitComposer now firmly holding the rights, it's nice to see something being done with the series, though the contract has stipulated that Strategy First will be developing their own 'social networking' version of the game this year, which sounds horrifying.

Here's the lowdown on what we should expect from the third title in the series:

"The Jagged Alliance series has received numerous national and international awards since its first appearance in 1994. The second part in particular, Jagged Alliance 2, released in 1999, won a host of accolades and gained the highest plaudits from the global games media.

Jagged Alliance 3 will build on the strengths of its famous predecessors and, set against the backdrop of a gripping story, will again deliver the much-loved combo of turn-based strategy gameplay with roleplay elements."

We wish bitComposer the best of luck. If they can ever make half the game Jagged Alliance 2 was, we'll probably be happy.

PC Games Hardware has conducted an interview with the Chief Technical Officer of 4A games, the developer of upcoming story driven FPS, Metro 2033.

As you can imagine from a site called PC Games Hardware, there’s plenty of talk about all sorts of technical decisions and the issues that arise from such choices. In-between this however, there is some interesting information on how the company are going to use the extra power the PC platform can bring.

Most of this includes taking the existing graphics and ramping them up a notch for those with PCs that can handle the extra push. This includes rendering nearly twice the number of sounds and doubling the size of the textures, which will of course result in a much sharper, prettier experience all round.

4A aren’t neglecting people with older computers though and plan to include full DirectX 9 support along with some features that are typically only seen in DirectX 10 games:

“Yes, Metro supports DX9 too, and we've put a lot of effort to provide features which are usually considered as being DX10+ exclusive. For example soft particles are available in DX9 as well, but other implementations usually need DX10-level hardware to do it.

Actually it's not that difficult to support older operating systems. We'll drop support when there will be less than 1% of our potential user-base.”

We congratulate 4A games for not only trying to push the PC version beyond what the console gamers will experience but also keeping themselves mindful that we don’t all own quad core, SLI systems at the same time.

Source: PC Games Hardware

Talking to tech website Thinq, senior manager of developer relations at AMD Richard Huddy has voice his opinions on rival company Nvidia's propriety physics middleware PhysX, stating that developers outside of Epic don’t really want to use the system but are being paid to do so, creating a rather artificial market:

“They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn’t because the game developer wants it in there.

I don’t know of any games company that's actually said 'you know what, I really want GPU-accelerated PhysX, I'd like to tie myself to Nvidia and that sounds like a great plan”

PhysX is essentially an engine that allows physics calculations to be performed by a relevant GeForce card rather than just using the CPU. It cant lead to an overall smoother gaming experience on some systems. However, the system only works with Nvidia cards, unlike AMDs open source alternative.

Of course, regardless of all of this, AMD still have yet to show any real development in the field of GPU accelerated physics while many top titles are already using the Nvidia system, including titles such as a Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origins. While AMDs pursuit for open source physics might be nobler than PhysX, it’ll need to actually get off the ground, first.

Source: Thinq

The demo for the sandbox sequel Just Cause 2 was released on Steam last week, but it’s now available across the internet in all the usual, although we suggest picking it up from a fast and easy site, like WorthPlaying.

We have of course been playing it ourselves. As promised, the demo encompasses a huge desert themed area of the main game and gives players the freedom to do just about anything they want. There’s a thirty minute time limit though, so you can’t just play forever. It’s a little big like time limited demos you used to see years ago for other open world games like the original Grand Theft Auto.

Anyway, it’s great fun. You can drive around, fly around, make everything explode and cause general chaos. It looks beautiful and is reported to run quickly even on mid range systems. Of course, the biggest problem with the original game was repetition in missions, and it’s hard to figure out if that’s going to be an issue again within the confines of a thirty minute demo.

Gamers still running XP should be warned that the game requires DirectX 10 in order to run and therefore won’t run on anything older than Windows Vista.