If you're still looking for reasons to (re)purchase Lost Planet: Colonies, IGN has outlined four new single player modes for the game. One of those in particular raised an eyebrow: a first-person mode that you can toggle via the menu screen. Curious how the traditionally third-person Lost Planet would look as a FPS? Check out the video above.

Other bonus modes include the self-explanatory Score Attack, a gauntlet of boss fights in Trial Battle Mode and Off Limit Mode, which lets you replay levels at a much greater speed with unlimited ammo. We've embedded a video of Off Limit after the break. Lost Planet: Colonies is coming May 27 on PC and Xbox 360 (still no PS3 confirmation) for $30.

[Via X3F]

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Colonies Edition -- known around these parts as Lost Planet: Colonies or Lost Planet 1.5 -- has finally been officially announced. The game is a repackaging of the full Lost Planet title, plus a bunch of additional multiplayer and single-player extras. The good news: It'll cost about $30. The bad news: Colonies Edition multiplayer will be incompatible with current Lost Planet games.

Scheduled for a May 27 release on 360 and PC, Colonies mainly adds new, creative multiplayer modes to the original game. Several are based on holding checkpoints and CTF variants. Our favorite, however, lets one gamer control an Akrid, with the others teaming up to try to take down the alien. Different creatures are available, and we recently saw a demo showing how a spindly, player-controlled giant can make quick kills with its swiping legs.

New playable characters, new weapons, and new levels are also added. Many of those are tuned for these alien battles, giving bunkers for humans to hide from the less-mobile aliens. Xbox 360 and PC players can play against each other using paid, Xbox Live gold accounts. Non-paying PC gamers will still be able to play online, but they'll only face other PCs.

Listen up, nuggets. You're in a Colonial Viper. You've got no wingman, three inbound Cylon Heavy Raiders, and you just spotted a Basestar several klicks away. What do you do? Choose your own adventure:

1. Whiz your flight suit.
2. Call for backup and fire up your FTL drive
3. Hammer down the trigger and go for the gold

Now you can actually make the call yourself. The open source Beyond the Red Line project based on Battlestar Galactica has finally released demos of the game for the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. We downloaded it and took it for a spin. While there's a fairly steep learning curve (much easier to deal with if you've played Freespace 2 a lot), the space combat and in-game elements are slick.

The game is powered by the new and improved Freespace 2 engine, although it's entirely standalone so you don't need Freespace to play it. They've put together their own audio for the entire demo, which includes original characters, voice acting, and soundtrack pieces from Bear McCreary and Richard Gibbs (composers for the show), online multiplayer that actually works, and it's own storyline. In fact, if you haven't seen season two, you'll want to avoid the game for the spoilers.

While there aren't any Six models in here, we like what they've put together so far. Plus our favorite word "free" is sandwiched in there too. It'll give you something to do until the next season starts ... in 2008.