ALX wrote me recently to let me know that he and his team have finished a fan-produced Portuguese translation patch for Defiance. There are a surprisingly large number of fans living in Brazil, and I'm sure they will appreciate having subtitles and menu text in their own language.

There is a new address to send letters to if you would like to voice your support a new game in the series:

Crystal Dynamics
Attention: Chris Bruno (or) Legacy of Kain Series Team
1300 Seaport Blvd. Suite 100
Redwood City, CA
94063-5538
USA

I've received the new NECA Raziel figures, and they are quite detailed. I am planning on having a review online in the near future. I've also played through Uncharted twice (on Normal and Hard), and am working on the most difficult setting ("Crushing") in order to unlock the remaining bonus content. Once I've managed to do that, I will be posting some detailed information about it. This is definitely an adventure game that fans of the Kain series should take a look at.

Umah over at the Eidos forums let me know last weekend that Kyle Mannerberg had passed away. Kyle was part of the team at Crystal Dynamics that made Defiance, and was the last of the three team members who had officially "taken up the torch" of the series' story when Amy Hennig moved on to work at Naughty Dog. I never had the opportunity to meet Kyle, but the memorial which his family created for him makes it obvious how much he meant to them and his friends. Their comments are more than worth your time to read if you haven't already. Kyle was 29, and died of natural causes.

Umah created a separate memorial thread, and an interview which he was a part of is available in the Defiance section.

Uncharted - the Playstation 3 game that Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand have been working on at Naughty Dog - was released today in the US. I was fortunate enough to see it a couple of times while it was in development (more on that later), and those of you who have PS3s are in for a treat. I'm going to be picking one up shortly so I can play through it myself. This game has so much going for it that it's almost ridiculous - Amy and Richard brought the cinematic storytelling style of the Kain games with them, it is visually stunning, it has an action element that would make it worth playing even without the cinematic aspect, its score is by the same composer as Firefly, and it has Simon Templeman in one of the key roles.

Several readers have also written to let me know that NECA is releasing two new Raziel action figures this month. I have them pre-ordered, but don't yet have any specific recommendations as to where to buy them yourself, so if you are interested you are probably best off doing a Google search for a store that will sell to you.

Andrew_Fradley has released a couple of new patches for Soul Reaver and Blood Omen. I haven't had time to update the information here, but you can find out about the Soul Reaver patch and the Blood Omen patch in threads over at the Eidos forums.

I've just finished Only_Skin_Deep version 1.1, which supports exporting the textures from the Playstation 2 versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, and fixes a bug with some of the textures exported from the PC versions of those games.

Scales_of_Anarcrothe is a new utility by Andrew_Fradley. It allows objects to be switched around in the PC version of Soul Reaver.

At this year's E3, a new trailer for Uncharted was released. This is the game that Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand have been working on at Naughty Dog. There is also a familiar voice at 00:48 in the video.

I've just added the first release of a new content-extracting application: Only_Skin_Deep, which can extract the texture maps from the PC versions of Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, as well as all versions of Soul Reaver.

Andrew_Fradley has just released a really powerful piece of software: the Blood_Omen_Trainer. It allows PC gamers to use nearly all of the cheat device code effects in Blood Omen.

I wasn't able to add all of the new content I had on my list last night, so here is most of the rest.

Andrew_Fradley has been hacking Blood Omen, and has provided a savegame for the PC version which will start the player in the Developers'_Level_Select room.

Delejes emailed me to point out that the Defiance bonus material includes some concept art of the Avernus_Cathedral_Deleted_Areas, which is now part of that article. I have at least one image for nearly all of the Defiance articles now, but please keep the fan art coming. It's really great to see how everyone imagines the way things might have turned out.

Abbas and Rick emailed me some additional information for the Character_Names article.