Did you notice the extra tab? Last night, we launched gaming.icrontic.com as a channel of the site dedicated to our favorite hobby. Be sure to grab the gaming RSS feed to keep up to date on what’s happening. We’ve already published our first article on Left4Dead tactics, and have plenty more on the way. Read the welcome post and comment over there!

The new MSI GX630 notebook will allow for up to 15 percent overclocks for gamers needing a little something extra.

AMDZone benchmarks Valve’s new Left 4 Dead shooter. This game is cool but will your card play it? Find out.

TechReport reviews the ASUS G50V gaming notebook. TBH, it’s decent.

Check out the sweet flame job on the Smooth Creations LAN Shark’s acrylic case. Is this the start of a new trend?

Guru3D tests 16 video cards in Call of Duty: World at War.

Long-time Icrontic contributor Jared Atchison shows you how to pick up a little extra performance from Valve Software’s amazingly popular Team Fortress 2 addon for Half Life 2.

When I built my new XP rig last week I immediately installed TF2 and Counter-Strike since those are my favorite MP games.

After playing TF2 for two nights I noticed a rather big problem.

I was getting really bad lag spikes within the game. Turning on the netgraph (net_graph 3 in the console) showed I was getting spikes where the choke would run high (30+) and I was often getting spikes where the graph would show basically nothing for 1-3 seconds.

BEAST Computers sent Hexus a pre-production model of their upcoming Core i7 gaming rigs.

As far as geeky charities go, Child’s Play is one of the best out there. The guys from Penny Arcade started Child’s Play in 2003 to accomplish two goals: To provide video games and related toys to hospitalized children and to refute the general perception that gamers are inherently violent, anti-social, soulless idiots. 

It has grown over the years, and now brings toys and games to children in hospitals all over the world. In 2006 they broke the $1 million donation barrier and it just keeps going up. 

As Gabe said in 2003:

Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits. 

So if you are feeling a little charitable, you can find out many ways to help at the Child’s Play website - either by directly purchasing an item for a specific hospital on an Amazon wishlist, or donating cash via Paypal. Gamers and geeks unite! It takes a village to raise a child, you know

As we get ready for Icrontic Oktoberfest 2008, with arrivals from forum members Fatcat and Eggroll, it’s hard to sit down to write news, but this is what I dug up for evening gaming tidbits.

• Wired reviews C&C Red Alert III and finds it rad. The best new feature? Co-op campaigns.
• Speaking of reviews, ArsTechnica tackles Fallout 3. I’ll sum it up: Get the game.
• HardOCP has a Far Cry 2 performance evaluation, showing how certain video cards perform.
• I know I mentioned it in the morning edition, but still…. World of Warcraft now boasts over 11 million players. Crazy.
• Our many European readers will delight to find out that Rock Band 2 will be coming to Europe for Xbox 360 in November. Instruments, sadly, won’t be available until December.
• In the mood for more tower defense flash games? I like Vector TD2. A lot. FML.

Dammit for not having any more points in my XBL account, cause today is Penny Arcade Episode 2 day!

• Yeah, in case you just missed my last sentence, Penny Arcade: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 2 is now available for 1200 points on XBL, and is also available for Windows from Greenhouse games. No word on a Steamified version yet. You can bring your character from Episode 1 over, and if you’ve beaten Episode 1 and gotten half of Div, you can unlock the other half as a support character in the new one.
• The Azeroth Times today reported that the zombie problem is over. Blizzard, in conjunction with some scientists and other smart people, did some kind of social experiment by releasing a highy contagious virus into the World of Warcraft. Some loved it, some hated it, but for better or worse, it’s over.
• Speaking of Azeroth, IC Forums member Pigflipper turned me onto the WoW-based webcomic “Flintlocke vs. The Horde“. Funny if you are a WoW player. If not, it will be meaningless. Of course, 11 million of you ARE WoW players, so…
• THQ is suing Activision over (some would say ‘extreme’) similarities in packaging of their respective latest entries into the off-road racing genre. Seriously, let’s be reasonable here: They look the frickin’ same. Seer Prime predicts a THQ victory in this skirmish.
• In case you’ve always dreamed of an Xbox 360 controller with a chinese dragon, a sexy lady, and an old telephone on it, Walmart is going to make your (weird) dreams come true. File this under “wtf”.
• For $99 you can upgrade your Xbox 360 arcade to 60gb and get a headset and 3 month Gold subscription. Meh. If you already have a 20gb, you can get a 120gb HD for $30 more.
• Cyclonite gives us his first impressions of LittleBigPlanet and Dead Space in the Icrontic Blogs. Great. Now that’s TWO games I want to get for the PS3. Only a year after I got the thing.

That’s it for this morning. Perhaps there will be enough news for an afternoon or evening edition. We’ll see how things shake out.

There are lots of little bits of gaming news out there today, so I’ll try to sum them up succinctly:

• Valve announced that people who pre-order Left 4 Dead will have early access to the demo. The game will be released on Nov. 18th but pre-orders will be able to play the 4-player demo on the 6th. This is similar to what they did last year for people who pre-ordered Orange Box - we were playing TF2 for a few weeks before release (and, we got hooked…) Valve REALLY thinks you’ll like this game: Gabe Newell says “Every time someone plays Left 4 Dead, we witness the most overwhelmingly positive reaction that we’ve seen from any of our games.“
• Oh you may have heard. Fallout 3 is out today. You can buy it everywhere, and also get it on Steam.
• PSP owners may be interested in the new version of PSP Media Manager out today.
• LittleBigPlanet servers are now up so user-generated content can be shared. As a bonus, all user content from the Beta will be made available in the production game.
• Siouxsie and the Banshees Track Pack available for Rock Band on the 360.
• ArsTechnica reviews Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and likes the “going back to Castlevania II” style.
• I can’t stop playing NinjaKiwi’s Bloons Tower Defense 3. FML.

ArsTechnica interviewed a few members of the fan translation team that is responsible for the English translation of Mother 3. This was really a labor of love for these guys, as the technical details of what goes into a localization are pretty spectacular. Even if you’re not a gamer or have no interest in Mother 3 (It was called Earthbound in North America), this is still an interesting read.

My goodness, this game is good. I’m hesitant to say that I like — even love — this game because I didn’t buy into the hype of Far Cry 2 until, well, four days ago. I just couldn’t get excited about it. I was a huge fan of Far Cry when it was released, but that game’s bread and butter, the Crytek team, went on to develop Crysis without Ubisoft. To me, Crysis was the true successor to Far Cry. It was superior in every way to whatever Far Cry 2 could possibly accomplish, but Ubisoft has done a decent job with the property without Crytek. Is it a better shooter than Crysis? The two can hardly be compared. (more…)

In working with Sam’s Club to create an incredibly-valuable new hardware bundle, Microsoft has provided further evidence that it’s going all-out to beat the PS3 this holiday season. The list of goods?

• One 60gb XBox 360 console
• One copy of Lego Indiana Jones
• One copy of Kung Fu Panda
• One full retail copy of Guitar Hero III, guitar included.

The price?

Just $349.

These contents, by themselves, would run approximately $520 new: $299 for the console, $100 for Guitar Hero with hardware, and $60 each for Lego Indy and KFP. That means you’re getting $220 worth of games for fifty freaking dollars.

Coupled with the recent price cuts, if you don’t have a 360 yet, it’s looking like a startlingly good time to get into the game. See you online - you can bet I’ll be there this holiday season.