CDV has opened up 13,000 new slots for the War Front: Turning Point public beta. Those who are interesting in stress-testing the upcoming sci-fi RTS’ multiplayer functionality can head on over to FilePlanet.

War Front: Turning Point takes the “what if?” route, combining an alternate timeline with an extensive selection of sci-fi inspired weaponry. It is scheduled to ship this September.

Following up on the previous story, Autumn Moon Entertainment has signed a deal with Crimson Crow that sees the Hamburg-based publisher getting worldwide publishing rights to A Vampyre Story. The game has had its story written by Bill Tiller, the founder of AME and a former employee of LucasArts who has worked on legendary titles such as The Curse of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones.

The point-and-click adventure “A Vampyre Story” tells the story of the beautiful, gifted opera singer Mona De Lafitte, whose life is brought to an abrupt end by a vampire baron named Shrowdy von Kiefer. Henceforth, she is doomed to a miserable existence as the unwilling companion of the vampire in his gloomy castle. Fate smiles on her briefly when her undead captor is destroyed. Seizing the opportunity, Mona runs away and tries to fulfill her dream of singing at the Paris Opera. Accompanied by her mischievous bat Froderick, Mona must face a number of challenges in her odyssey and learn not only to accept her vampire nature, but also to use the abilities she has acquired to her advantage.

The game will be released worldwide sometime next year.

This year’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, will be host to the global debut for the multiplayer mode of Lost Planet, Capcom’s next-gen action shooter for the Xbox 360. Visitors to the event will be able to partake in four vs. four team battles, struggling against opponents as well as the harsh icy weather in the game. The event will showcase just one of the numerous multiplayer maps and modes that will be available in Lost Planet when it’s released in early 2007.

Through a blog post, Dennis Dyack, Director at Silicon Knights, mentions that the studio does have sequels “in mind” for Eternal Darkness and that they’d definitely make them… after the Too Human trilogy is done. He goes over the differences, with respect to storylines, between the two games, revealing that the three Too Human titles will have ‘discovery’, ‘revenge’ and ‘enlightenment’, respectively, as themes.

Development on Halo 3 is going along at a pretty good pace, or so it seems from the latest Bungie update, which err… updates us on the UI side of things. The user interface for the game has “come on in leaps and bounds” since it has been in development for a long time. It’s implied that the new UI will be very user-friendly and will let users change options from wherever they want. Here’s a sample:

UI gurus Dave Candland and Colm Nelson were kind enough to give me a guided tour today and I can honestly say that I finally “get it.” The problem with adapting to a new UI is the problem of familiarity. You expect things to behave the way they did in Halo 2 and when they don’t, it’s easy to think, “Oh, that’s broken,” when in fact, something has technically been fixed. And the sign of a good UI is that it only takes a couple of tries to get used to it, and that everything is found in its logical place.

Oh and there’s a picture of Master Chief intently looking on at a corn cob…

Reflecting the sentiments of many, Jeff Minter, founder of Llamasoft, and creator of many legendary games, had some less than flattering things to say about Sony in his latest column for Edge. Sony is “incredibly arrogant,” he wrote, adding that the PlayStation 3 is “expensive” and lacks launch games. “They seem absolutely certain that even when they say it’s going to be considerably more expensive than existing consoles, nevertheless us eager customers will rush out in droves to buy it because it’s, hey, a new PlayStation.”

On a related note, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot also had reservations about the PS3’s high price tag. Even though he expects the console to sell out its initial shipment, it may need a price drop to compete with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii in 2007. The Xbox 360 sells for $400 for a premium bundle; the Wii is expected to retail for a maximum of $250 when released later this year.