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After the first announcement on 1997-04-27 and over eleven years of fresh start after fresh start, Duke Nukem Forever finally comes to your system. At least if your system is an Xbox 360. Jon Siegler, the webmaster of 3D Realms, confirms this on their site: "As has been reported around the net today, we can confirm that the game has indeed passed final certification with Microsoft on Friday the 15th of August (on our first try, no less). That means the game is done — it is now in the hands of Microsoft." Update: 08/19 10:47 GMT by T : Several readers have written with a correction: this announcement is actually about Duke Nukem 3D, rather than Duke Nukem Forever.

The extraordinary problems that Microsoft's Xbox Live experienced over the holidays were followed up with swift promises of a free game to compensate for the frustration many users suffered. The company has followed through, and has announced that Undertow will be the free game sacrificed to mollify gamers. The game will be free to download all this week, starting tomorrow (Wednesday) and running through this Sunday. "Two weeks ago, Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten posted a letter to Live subscribers apologizing for poor performance during the holidays and promising a freebie was on the way. There are currently no plans to offer a substitute game for those who already own Undertow." Just the same, Major Nelson sent along word to 360 Fanboy that they'd 'take care of you' if you found yourself in that situation.

I Love Bees is regarded as one of the more successful alternate reality games (ARGs) ever run in the US. It should be no surprise, then, that the game's spiritual sequel entitled simply Iris , is causing quite a stir. It began on June 11th, with cryptic messages in the Bungie forums. Designed to take players through the history of the Halo world over the course of the summer, players have already uncovered some 'pre-game' information; for all intents and purposes the actual game hasn't started yet. Michael VanderZand probably wish it was already over, though: then he might have some peace and quiet. The climax is expected sometime on September 26th, the day after Halo 3 releases to stores.

Via Xbox 360 Fanboy, and in the grand tradition of Peter Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews, comes some fascinating revelations about Fable 2 and past games. Mr. Molyneux's tradition of honesty continues, with up-front admissions of problems with Black and White 2 and a few hints about what we'll be seeing in his upcoming fantasy game. "One of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn't, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures' intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn't get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side."

Much like the deleted content from KOTOR 2, Xbox 360 fanboy has word that Star Trek: Legacy's storyline has been cut as well. Derek Chester, a writer for the game, spoke up on the official boards for the game: "[Forum poster] Star Dagger is correct, a lot of what was intended was cut. From rendered cinematics and interstitial cutscenes to a great deal of backstory and events that took place between the eras to tie them together. The total portrayal of the intended story was incomplete. Dorothy and I wrote a lot for this game...but not everything made it in. As a result there may be some difficulty in following the motivations for characters or the reasons for crucial events. The story as was written, tied together a great deal of Trek history and events to make it seem more substantial than it came across in the final game."

aplusjimages writes "1up.com is reporting that Dec. 4th, will be when Bungie will start taking registrations for the Halo 3 Beta test. This is also the date that the new 60 second commercial will air on ESPN's Monday Night Football. There have already been sightings of gamertags playing Halo 3 Beta online." From the article: "'There will be multiple ways to get involved with Halo 3's public beta and next week's online registration is just the first way.' The registration program will be set up at Halo3.com and will give players a chance to be one of the 'select members to join the unprecedented Halo 3 public beta program.' If you don't get in to the beta via this method, relax, there will be numerous other opportunities to participate in the beta."

amitlu writes "What's it like to be assimilated by Bill Gates' empire? Russ Pitts from The Escapist talks two game industry veterans, Bruce Shelly of Ensemble and Jordan Weisman of FASA, to contrast two hugely different opinions on the matter. While Bruce, still employed by Microsoft, has nothing but nice things to say, Weisman paints a much different picture. From the article: 'Let's say, part of what they wanted from us was our development culture, because we'd worked very hard to have this collaborative, effective team, and they wanted to kind of build those kinds of teams and kind of capture that. In reality, ... the machine of Microsoft, unintentionally, I believe, and inadvertently, ripped that apart. Rather than model itself around what we had done, our [culture] got forced into their model. ... We lost that special sauce that we had built.'" Speaking of FASA, if you're interested you can sign up for the Shadowrun Beta. They're only looking for 360 players, at the moment, and only ones with gold Live accounts.

Kotaku is reporting that Epic has confirmed a November 12th retail date for Gears of War, the highly anticipated shooter for the Xbox 360. This announcement confirms a date found by individuals participating in a viral marketing campaign via Xbox Live. From the announcement: "'Our vision is to deliver a one-two punch of cinematic action paired with a thrilling and compelling interactive experience,' said Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer at Epic. 'With Gears of War we've created a title that will place gamers directly in the shadows of a ravaged world, surrounded by the beautiful remnants of a destroyed city and the horrific dangers that hide in the rubble.'"