Up to this point the Diamond XBL users have been enjoying the free status but all the good things can come to an end: a fee will be forced on them and the Diamond Card program will run on the user's Passport Unlimited information. The annual subscription of $6.95 is not that high, but the originally free services that have entered the low cost scheme or the ones that had a certain price and now are free have caused a lot of irritation to the customers. The current accounts are valid until the subscription runs out. The Diamond Card offers some bonus to the subscribers, like discounts from stores like Ticketmaster, Timberland and McDonald's. More information can be found on the official site of Xbox Live Diamond.

 

The movie Transformers (2007) inspired a lot of toy makers to come up with very interesting new concepts and building methods. The Master-Chief from the Halo series is also very popular as the series has a huge fan-base. What happens when two similar looking concepts mix together? Well - you're bound to come up with something that looks pretty much as the picture in the image above. You've probably imagined the Chief as being a robot and not a virtual human being at least once due to his sleek armor - so why not turn him completely into an autobot? This item can be bought from eBay and the bidding  has reached $30. If you like this item go for it on eBay and you might be the new lucky owner.

MTV has launched recently a very interesting new feature at trackfinder.mtv.com, namely Rhythm Game Track Finder, that can help in finding out which rhythm games can be discovered in certain songs.

An immediate usage theory is that this can help in making a better decision as a buyer on what games you should own, so that you can make a comparison and select your favourite. The tracklists from various games are available, like Guitar Hero, Rock Band and SingStar.

An update was recently released through Steam which brings a lot of changes, among which there are the following:

- Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers
- Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world
- Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware
- Fixed players blocking doors in Well
- Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well
- Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

The graphic optimizations are meant to increase performance for the gamers with a low-end computer. However, even if the game can now be played on slower computers, that does not make up for the lag that is experienced by some gamers.

<-125x125 Button - left->Finally, after many weeks of waiting and many announcements, one of the "most wanted" patches was released. As expected, a lot of hotfixes and also tweaks have been added to the game. And as a bonus, there are also some updates. It remains to be seen how much of a performance boost will this 139mb patch bring to the gamer's desktop systems. The patch can be downloaded from here, and the list of fixes and updates is below:

Fixes:

- Potential crash in D3D10
- Orange boxes apearing when hispec savegame loaded into lowspec game
- Inconsistent damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW
-Reflection resolution on D3D10, MultiGPU reflection update fix
- Memory leak with FSAA modes
- Infinite ammo hacks
- Memory leak in D3D10 when switching screen modes
- Multi Core optimizations
- When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will be in a permanently raised position.
- Crash when loading savegame with level exported recently by editor
- Virtual keyboard does not function properly when a game pad is connected
- Users can lose the ability to look around with the Right Stick
- Setting screen resolution to “default” stops user from selecting last resolution
- Bug when changing resolution in D3D10
- Issues with Depth of field and water droplets in D3D10
- Crash on NaN warning

Updates:

- Added: Motion Blur UI and V.SYNC UI options
- Optimized: Motion blur
- Optimized: FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing)
- Optimized sound id implementation
- Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10
- New benchmarking files for ice CPU benchmark.
- http/xmlrpc password protected remote control session
- Marked debug cvars as cheat
- F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well

Tweaks:

- Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
- Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly
- Disabled automatic turret bounding boxes on vehicles to prevent issues with LAW hit detection
- Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
- Clamped water tesselation to avoid cheating in MP
- MultiGPU improvements with depth map updates