Yesterday news broke of Infinium Labs, the company behind the Phantom console, seeking legal action against HardOCP for defamation. To quote Infinium PR, HardOCP was "one of the original sites to have spread misinformation" about the Phantom console. Which I read to say they didn't care for their article very much.

Today HardOCP released an official response to the litigation.

I have extended HardOCP.com's pledge to correct any and all possible inconsistencies or errors in our editorial entitled Â"Behind the Phantom ConsoleÂ" personally to Timothy Roberts and Kevin Bachus of Infinium Labs and they have yet to inform HardOCP.com of any information we presented as being not correct. ...
Kyle Bennett
Editor-in-Chief @ HardOCP.com

From the comfy yet forgiving seat of my couch, I really don't see what the hell Infinium was thinking when they tried to pull this. Libel only counts when what they're saying isn't true. HardOCP has offered to correct any inaccuracies in the article, which Infinium hasn't even bothered to take advantage of. In fact, they haven't named anything as specifically being inaccurate other than general threats of "misinformation", "false" and "defamatory". Do they seriously think they can sue people for not liking their product? To me this does more harm than good, any company that baselessly threatens to sue other people has begun it's death throes. It's sort of a shame, after they go out of business we'll all have to resort to talking about John Romero again.

So I know what you're thinking. "Yeah right Pyro, it's really just more surprise gay porn" but its the real deal.  The source code for Valve's Half-Life 2 has been leaked to the net.  An anonymous GWJ reader has verified this is real.

I can confirm that this is indeed no fake ... The thing is available as a torrent download on the net. I don't know how much action they will take against people downloading this. ... The last edits are from a month ago (in the files).  If this is fake, it is a damn good one. It looks very coherent.  Over 100 megs unpacked source

There's still no official word from Valve and I haven't seen any other sites pick it up.  There isn't any word on who leaked it either and from what I have heard the source doesn't give it away.  Hopefully when this gets out in the open Valve can work with its partners to figure out who did this.  Let's also hope it doesn't delay Half-Life 2 any further.

One things for sure, this can't be ignored.  Those in the know already have it and they're probably working on their first cheat right now.  Legitimate customers are the ones who need to know about this as they are the ones that will get their machine potentially broken into when they go online.  You can't warez with month old source code, all it's good for is exploiting others in multiplayer and allowing crackers to make better cracks. Customers need to know that there are cheaters out there right now with the full Half Life 2 source code, if this is true.

*UPDATED* Yes, Slashdot has put us over the barrel today, we apologize for the site outage. Read more for Gabe Newell's response to the leaked code and a plea to the community to help track down the hackers responsible.

Since you're gobbling up our bandwidth anyways check out Sway's weekly Infinite Lives comics which he updates every Friday!

Wow. Did you guys see this story? Rumor has it (well, xbox.ign.com has it) that Rockstar is bringing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the Xbox without the Grand Theft Auto so they can work around the little issue of PS2 exclusivity. Is that sneaky or is that sneaky? I mean, really, if you're going to do something that slimy, you should probably go all the way and call it Grand Theft Automobile or something. I can't believe that Sony would let that happen without at least a couple lawsuits. You can probably bet that there is a significant stack of dollars that is being shoved around to cause a publisher to so completely shatter its relationship with the number one console.

I'm not sure what kind of fallout we'll see from this. Maybe we'll see a very familiar female in a very familiar powersuit in an upcoming Xbox game simply called Prime. Or maybe PlayStation2 owners will be playing Knights of the Old Gang later this week. I'm nervous, folks, aren't you?

If you thought Acclaim was strange for their marketing stunts, check this little tidbit out. The upcoming ESPN Football 2K4 has a different kind of fansite. It has plenty of info, pictures and even videos, but none of it is "official". Furthermore, the webmaster actually hates SEGA and the game, but still puts all kinds of info into his website, and it's not an MMORPG!

The webmaster claims that he is a beta tester, and that the he is fighting against the Sega corporation to stop their "the crimes against humanity perpetrated by this evil corporation". He claims physical violence and injury against him because of this game, and has all kinds of evidence, which happen to have behind the scenes footage of the new Sega game.

I can't say it's not working. I care nothing about sports games, and I want to download everything on this site.

While I was over at Blue's stealing his newspaper I noticed that the Ultima Stratics forums contain a supposed image from a development demo of Ultima X. There have been rumors for a while now that say EA is working on the next Ultima game without Richard Garriot at the helm for obvious reasons. Will fans come slinking back for a new game in the venerable Ultima series? Only time (and marketing) will tell.

Thank you Blues.