The Spore Team presents the Tribal Stage, the third evolutionary map in the Spore universe. You begin the Tribal Stage as a small group of sentient creatures which have just discovered tools and have formed the first tribe on their planet. Gather food with your tribe members by picking fruit, hunting or domesticating wild animals and fishing. Your tribe runs on food -- they buy tools with it, purchase tribal accessories with it, gift it to other tribes, steal it from other tribes, and (of course) feeds their own tribe with it. Use different tools to befriend or attack neighboring tribes, aid in hunting and gathering, or heal your tribe members. Depending on how you played the Cell and Creature Stages, you will begin the Tribal Stage with two of six super powers at your disposal. Defeat or ally with five tribes to conquer the continent and form civilization!

News coming out of the Penny Arcade camp; Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One has finally been priced ($19.99) for the Xbox360, PC and Macintosh. Digital distribution will be the method of delivery for the Xbox360 console, by way of Xbox Live Arcade. No date announced, but Spring 2008 is the target for its debut.

The new id Software game that has been rumored around the web for the last week or two has finally been revealed. The game is called Rage, and it was revealed in some detail today by Carmack himself at the QuakeCon festivities. The trailer showed a game set in an outdoor setting, with driving and shooting elements featured prominently. The single player game will apparently have gamers traversing an open world from town to settlement to encampment, all the while evading and fighting off mutants and other monsters, and even the government from time to time. It sounds like your straightfoward run and gun action -- just the sort of thing id is good at. Stick to what you know, we say.

According to Prudential analyst Jesse Tortora, it is possible that Apple could move towards the videogame console market. The new console could easily be made up from the Mac Mini and iTV. Apple already launched a limited videogames download service for the iPod, and has hired games developers specialising in both hardware and software, according to Tortora.

MacSoft has released the long-awaited universal binary update for Halo for the Mac platform. You can purchase a disc directly from Macsoft for $10, or you can download the image for $5. This is only important for owners of Intel Macs who should notice a considerable performance increase .