Death-defying jumps, leaps of faith... and now time attacks. The news hit (courtesy of 1up) that you will be able to not only do time attacks, but also compete with others:

Producer Tom Ferrer explained to us that the time trial portions of Mirror's Edge will be "bite-sized and short so you can grind them and play them and get faster and faster. It's not like playing an entire level." Naturally, you'll be able to upload your fastest time for each section to online leaderboards, and you can even download ghost data that appears in the game as a stylish red silhouette showing how other people completed the task.

There's been scant little information on the UE3-powered Sin City game, based on Frank Miller's graphic novels, but one of the tidbits to surface today is that the original developers, Transmission Games, will no longer be developing the title. Instead, a new, currently unnamed studio, has taken the helm.

The Unreal Engine 3-powered title actually shifted development houses "quite a long time ago," a Red Mile representative informed GameSpot, though they offered no details on the current developer. "Transmission is focusing on Heroes Over Europe, which is quite an important title for us."

At the BBFC site, you can find a list of files that will be contained on the Gears of War 2 Bonus Disk. It appears that there will be a little over 148 minutes of video with dedicated sections to several of the characters, locations, creatures, and weapons as well as COG and Locust image packs.

Straight from Fraghouse comes a melee weapon modification that promises to bring lots more gore and fun to UT3. Hacker can be downloaded (833 KB) from BeyondUnreal FileWorks and the description and tasty screenshots can be found below.

"Designed as a reinstatement of a blade-based melee weapon for the Tournament (and replacing the Impact Hammer), the Liandri Hacker is a durable tarydium-powered mining tool that can cut through tough materials with little to no resistance, including flesh. Primary fire initialises the high-speed circular saw, whereas secondary fire engages the rubble-clearing electrical discharge, which is powerful enough to launch vehicles around and destroy them in two or three hits. The resulting [configurable] recoil will also propel the user backwards, and so can be used to "hop" across great distances."

Alpha Protocol, announced earlier this year, is a new Unreal Engine 3 third-person shooter / role-playing game from Obsidian (Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2), published by SEGA. 1Up and Videogamer are both offering previews of the title and you can check out our Alpha Protocol Media Page for 32 screenshots. The game is due out on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in Q1 '09.

If Obsidian Entertainment hoped to escape from their stereotype as the role-playing-game developer that iterates on games from BioWare, perhaps choosing to announce a third-person shooter/RPG mashup shortly post-Mass Effect wasn't the best idea. At least they're switching things up thematically, though -- Alpha Protocol is a spy thriller, rather than a sci-fi space opera. And from what I've seen so far, the action is a bigger focus, with completely real-time gunplay and stealth.

The Game Factory developers seem to be taking a page out of the American McGee vision of twisted fairytales with their newly announced Unreal Engine 3 title: Fairytale Fights. A preview at Gamespot finds our protagonist, Little Red Riding Hood, painting the scenery red with her cache of knives, shotgun, and spiked club.

...when Red was attacked by a pack of four animals, she didn't look frightened at all. Rather, she got a maniacal look in her eyes, pulled a knife out from underneath her hood, and set about slicing her attackers. The game's "slicing system" is sophisticated enough to cut off enemy limbs or even cut them right down the middle without having the path of the knife predetermined at all. We saw enemies cut almost exactly down the middle, we saw them lose arms, and on one occasion, we even saw an enemy lose his eyes along with the top of his head after stumbling into a large bear trap.

An IGN preview offers a similarly gruesome view along with a handful of screenshots.

Certain moments even had Red executing a charged finishing attack which zoomed in on the action only to show the victim getting sliced in half -- skeleton and entrails in perfect view. Gamers worried about the moral ramifications of such needless violence should be comforted (or not) by the fact that everyone in this Fairytale world looks a little bit unwell -- even the rabbits were crazy-eyed.

The game appears to be headed to PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 and is due in the third quarter of 2009.

Kotaku has a rather nice preview of The Chronicles of Spellborn, based on some hands-on playtime at the Games Convention. The preview goes into depth about the player creation and combat systems and the author seems to come away with a highly favorable opinion of this upcoming UE2x powered MMORPG.

What Lies Hidden: The tag line for The Chronicles of Spellborn is “What lies hidden must be found...”, and it applies just as readily to the game itself as it does the storyline. Hidden beneath the unique art direction, intriguing characters and flashy spell effects is an MMORPG that doesn't play quite like anything I've seen before.