Redlynx’s Trials 2 motorbike game is now available for download from digital delivery service Steam. It’s a scarily addictive bike sim with silly physics, pitting your hapless cyclist against bone-crunching time trial races and stunt courses ranging from ‘ooh, that’s a bit tough’ to ‘bastard hard’. Scores are automatically uploaded to a worldwide leader board and the game very cleverly lets you download ghosts of other players to race against. It’s a fantastic game that we recommend everyone should try, especially since the price has now halved to a ludicrous $9.99.

Ubisoft has officially announced the sequel to the popular 2003 action-adventure game, Beyond Good & Evil. The long-awaited Nietzsche-inspired title, Beyond Good & Evil 2 was revealed at Ubisoft’s recent Ubidays expo alongside a couple of screenies and a teaser trailer - enjoy!

CPU manufacturer AMD has announced it’s launching a new standardised PC system that’s playable ’straight out of the box’. It’s called AMD GAME!, is Vista-based with a Phenom processor and ATi graphics - check the full specifications here. It’s being marketed at a console-esque breed of PC gamers who don’t want to have to know what’s going on inside the box, with AMD intending to update the specifications every six months to keep in step with the industry. Currently it’s only available from Canada and US, but if its target market overcomes their confusion over the difference between a 2008 and 2009 Ultra system, we could be seeing them stocked over here.

Click here to check out the new AMD GAME! website.

Foxconn has announced a special event to celebrate the launch of its ‘Quantum Force’ motherboards. The menacingly-named BLACK OPS, DREADNOUGHT and DESTROYER boards will be on show at YOYOTech’s London store on Saturday 24th May. As well as giving you the opportunity to check out the new kit first hand, YOYOtech is also offering TPCG readers a 5% discount on any product (excluding CPUs) on the day, and you can enter a competition for the chance to win a full system or a Foxconn BLACK OPS motherboard. The event starts at 12pm and the YOYOtech store is located at 30 Windmill Street, W1T 2JL.

The first trailer for Red Alert 3 popped up on the internets over the weekend. As you can see below it features plenty of footage of the upcoming game including lots of naval warfare and, yes, armoured bears. It also reveals a possible release date of October 2008. The music in the trailer is Frank Klepacki’s ‘Hell March’ from Red Alert 2, and they’ve also re-used the unit sounds.

Eidos and Funcom celebrated their latest venture, Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, with a massive launch party in Oslo on 13 May. The event included over 50 actors dressed in barbarian garb, a fantasy battle scene and of course, King Conan himself who oversaw the festivities from his lofty perch and only deigned to move when a fight broke out and his warriors were in grave need of assistance.

Music came courtesy of the Age Of Conan soundtrack director Morten Sørlie and Norwegian punk rockers Turbo Negro, who received a warm reception from the 400+ event attendees. More details and photos to come on the TPCG blog site.

Both Mass Effect PC and Spore are to use SecuROM as copy protection for the retail versions. The controversial anti-piracy software requires an internet connection to connect to an EA server and verify every ten days. Derek French, technical producer at Bioware clarified the news,

“An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every ten days after. You can be completely connectionless for nine days and encounter no problems playing Mass Effect. And you don’t need the disk in the drive to play.”

While PC security and privacy issues aren’t at stake here, this will obviously pose a problem for those that haven’t got round the clock internet access and It also flies in the face of EA’s claim that Spore can be played as an offline game.