News Roundup: Hot Ninja Beat

• John Yan's Action Game of the Year:  Stranglehold.  (No no no.  John only likes it because he's Asian.)
• (...I should get banned for little asides like that one.)  Spider Man: Friend or Foe -- demo!  And peep Cyril's preview up above, too.
• Wow, this game just won't die.  Here's an updated DX9 and DX10 demo of Lost Planet.

• Video Vault:  Clive Barker's Jericho Lt. Black trailer; Tony Hawk's Proving Ground launch trailer; Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2; Lucky Luke: Go West; MySims high res, low res; Sonic Rush Adventure trailer #2; Hot Wheels: Beat That;and NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams.

• Pic Pack:  Alpha Prime, Code Lyoko, StateShift, Kwari, Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, and Tabula Rasa.

• ActionTrip previews the mighty return of a venerable series in Team Fortress 2.
• Killer Betties wasn't as impressed with Carcasonne as everyone else.
• MMORPG.com webbed a review copy of the Razer Tarantula gaming keyboard.
• Several game journalists gathered at Richard Garriott's place for some Tabula Rasa-themed fun.
• Dan Fortier's MMOWTF column tackles MMO difficulty (to include the concept of perma-death).
• The multiplayer aspect of Sacred 2 was placed in the hands of ActionTrip.
• AtomicGamer was rather unaffected by Medal of Honor: Airborne's start-anywhere antics.
• WarCry has one more interview from AGDC, with Auran CEO Tony Hilliam.
• Get caught up in the development cycle of Darkfall with this latest dev diary.
• And somebody's a huge fan of the Conan series at WarCry, as they crank out an article on "Mitra's Method -- Unwritten Lore in Age of Conan."

• Galactic Dream: Rage of War 1.0F patch, 1.0 demo patch.