IGN had another look at the single-player campaign of Dark Messiah. They were allowed to play the prologue and two other missions, and posted their impressions.

GameSpot posted a transcript of a community chat they had with three members of the development teams (and it's quite unfortunate that we missed it). Fans asked questions about the over-powered mage, server-side options, endings, downloadable content and much, much more. Some of the questions and answers, such as a reference to the beta being open soon, hint to the fact that the chat happened a couple of weeks ago.

Last but not least, Valve announced on Friday via the Steam news that "Prepurchase starts in a little over a week (...). The countdown has begun." Preloading Half Life 2 took me forever (in addition to busting my monthly bandwith limit), so I think I'll wait for a boxed copy instead.