As reported on Eurogamer, an author is suing Ubisoft for copyright infringement relating to the Assassin's Creed franchise. John Beiswenger claims that Ubisoft have lifted various aspects of the series' plot from his 2003 novel, Link.

The novel features a link device, where ancestral memories can be accessed and relived by the user of the machine. According to his complaint, references to assassinations, a bio-syncronizer, ancestral memories, and various bits of religious imagery - including the Garden of Eden and Jesus himself - are evidence enough that Ubisoft are in breach of copyright.

Thanks to the popularity of the series, the author is asking for $1.05 million, or $5.25 in total damages depending on whether Ubisoft intentially pulled the plot, or if they did it accidentally. Gametrailers.com are also involved in the case thanks to this trailer, advertising an Assassin's Creed II PlayStation Home space.

Until a few days ago, Link had just one review on the Amazon marketplace. Since the complaint, 16 more have been posted. And the scores aren't pretty. "This book is terrible; its not worth the time it takes to read, and i will rage if it delays the AC3 release," says one user.

The trailer above loudly announces that Dirt Showdown will be released on May 25. A demo will be released on Steam in a couple of weeks on May 1 if you fancy trying out Showdown's lively, arcade slant on the relatively serious rallying of the core Dirt games. That'll let us crash a selection of cars across a "solo and multiplayer event."

Showdown features rough and tumble races set amid boisterous carnival locations. Expect ramps, choke points, stunts and plenty of collisions. Previous trailers have shown crashes on the 8 ball arena, crashes in the midst of crowded night time contests and crashes during frantic midday bouts. If that's not enough crashing, there's a destruction derby mode solely devoted to dishing out points for big hits.

If you're to get hold of Showdown early, the "Hoonigan Edition" should be available to pre-order from Game and Gamestation, though the PC version doesn't seem to be there at the moment. The Hoonigan version comes with some extra car liveries, and online XP bonus and some extra in-game cash to spend on your cars. Check out the Dirt Showdown site for more.

Intel and Plextor have both announced new additions to their SSD line up this week, hitting low price points for fast solid state drives. While they're timed to arrive at the peak of current generation SSD technology, though, it's what comes next that's really interesting.

The two drives in question are Intel's new SSD 330 and Plextor's M3 Pro. They're both on their way to the PC Gamer labs for a head to head review I'm looking forward to. The drives will be the just about the last showdown in this generation of SSDs between the two most popular controller chips, which provide most of the performance of a drive.

Intel's 330 uses the Sandforce SF-2281, which was seen in SSDs from Corsair, ADATA and OCZ last year and thrashed all competitors thanks to its ability to compress data on the fly. When working with uncompressed data, read and write speeds close to the maximum bandwidth of a 6Gbps SATA port haven't been uncommon. Where data is already compressed, however, they tend to be a bit slower.

Plextor's M3 Pro, meanwhile, uses a chip from rival Marvel, the 88SS9174. It's the same chip as used in OCZ's Vertex 4 and Crucial's M4, but Plextor says that it's heavily customised the firmware so that performance is much closer to the theoretical maximum speeds quoted at all times. The Marvell controllers don't compress data in the same way, which combined with Plextor's True Speed tech should, the company says, deliver a more consistent performance over time.

Certainly it's quoting much faster write speeds than other Marvell-based drives, like Crucial's M4 (a theoretical 200Mbps write speed for the Crucial drive compared to 450Mbps for the Plextor).

In reality, however, the practical differences between a lot of SSDs, especially when it comes to write speeds, aren't easily detectable. They're important, because you want to know you're getting value for money, but upgrading to almost any of the newer SSDs is going to give you that exceptional boot up speed performance that you crave and fast loading times. Write speeds are more important for things like high def video editing, and the chances are that you're going to be much more interested in cost. Getting the biggest drive you can afford makes a lot of sense if it means less housekeep and more games on your fast drive.

At the moment, this is where Intel has the edge. A 120GB SSD 330 costs $149/£110, which makes it the cheapest such drive available at the moment (just). The M3 Pro, meanwhile, is one of the priciest, with 128GB models costing around $205/£150.

That could all change soon, however. Plextor's SSD Project Manager Lytian Lee told PC Gamer that he expects a move to 19nm NAND flash chips to happen sometime around the end of August, which will see a dramatic reduction in the cost of SSDs all round. While most people see SSDs and hard drives co-existing for the foreseeable future – SSDs providing speed, traditional drives providing bulk storage – he's not so sure.

“Once we move to 19nm, the price will go down for sure,” he said, “And I can see a point not too far in the future where SSD prices will be comparable with traditional drives.”

Bad news for Darksiders fans, Death has been detained. A post on the Darksiders 2 site says that the sequel's release date has been pushed back a couple of months so the team can polish up Death's bony face. "Darksiders II will be moving to release globally in August 2012, rather than June as previously announced," says the post. "This is great news for the team at Vigil, because it allows additional time for polish and to ensure that all aspects of Darksiders II meet the high-quality bar the team is targeting."

"As we’ve stated in numerous articles and videos, Darksiders II is substantially larger game than its predecessor and the ambition of this project requires extra time " adds the THQ rep. Vigil have previously said that it'll be about twice the size of the first game. The post also assures fans that the delay isn't down to the recent THQ layoffs. "The staffing changes at Vigil Games have not impacted the release date."

Death seems a lot more lithe than his impetuous brother, War, who was the main character for the first game. War was all about furious, lumbering charges with giant hammers. Death is more of a dancer, and wields a pair of "swiss army scythes," the reliable, cost saving soul cleaving device of choice for the discerning grim reaper on the go. See it in action in this Darksiders 2 trailer.

Market research firm IDC has released its quarterly figures for computer sales in the first part of 2012. It's surprised some pundits by claiming that far from the traditional PC era being over, worldwide shipments are up. They're even showing growth in debt-saddled, austerity shackled and market saturated Europe, of all places.

In a release accompanying the info, the firm describes buyers as 'still cautious' and possibly waiting on Windows 8, but highlights problems in the hard drive supply chain following flooding in Thailand as the most significant factor holding back purchases. Despite these problems, it says that while it was predicting just 0.9% growth worldwide the actual market expanded by 2.3%

That means a further 87 million PCs were created in the first three months of the year than existed previously, up on 85 million in the same period for 2011. The figures include sales of Apple Macs, but not tablets of any OS or flavour. Apple was the third largest vendor in the US, although outside the top five worldwide.

The most impressive performance was by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, which increased the number of PCs it sold by 43.7% globally to nearly four million a month. ASUS also fared well, putting out 22% more machines than previously taking its total to more than five million (presumably laptops) for the period.

The salient point is that while computer use is changing rapidly, spurred on by adoption of mobile platforms, it's not necessarily the PC that's suffering. In fact, tie this story in with last month's news that 2011 was a boom year for sales of PC games, then set it against the declining revenues from console software and you've got a fairly convincing PC renaissance story.

Of course, it could also just be an errant blip against underlying trends, there's no getting away from the fact that PC sales were generally down last year in most developed markets.

I apologise for the headline, by the way. For the first ten years of my journalistic career I absolutely refused to talk about 'Qs' when I meant something to do with months of the year. At some point I gave up fighting the good fight against the hateful expression. Sorry.

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be free again this weekend as part of BioWare's ongoing programme of free trials. The game is open from now until 2.00am CDT/8.00am GMT on Monday morning. It's only available to players who haven't taken part in one of the previous free trials, however, so if you're looking to form a second opinion then you'll need to subscribe.

According to the official post, you don't need to provide your credit card details and your trial characters will be saved if you decide to keep playing. You will, however, be capped at level 15. That still gives you access to the first four planets, both capital planets, PvP Warzones and one Flashpoint, however.

The Old Republic is currently in the midst of the Rakghoul plague, a series of live events currently focused on Tatooine. It's been fun to watch the missions unfold - check out our guide to the Rakghoul event here.

Will you be trying out SW:TOR this weekend, readers? Or are you intimidated by the massive block of all-caps 'small' print at the bottom of the official post? If so, just imagine it scrolling slowly up your screen accompanied by a horn section.

"The year is 2047... oil has run out... governments have collapsed." It all sounds a git grim in the future. That probably explains why people are going underwater to have third -person battles in suits designed by Master Chief's tailor. Biart7's Deep Black: Reloaded is available on Steam right now for £18:39/$23.99, or on the official site for £15.99. There's also a 432MB demo available for download.

We haven't played this yet, but there's certainly potential for some fun wet/dry shooty action, even though there's no multiplayer. You might want to dust off the Razer Hydra if you've got one too - Deep Black supports the quirky little thing.

A mysterious blurry poster has fallen into Kotaku's hands, passed on by a "retail source." It's tagged with Activision and Treyarch's logos and features a big date and a tagline "return for debriefing."

The framing device for the Call of Duty: Black Ops single player campaign was an angry debriefing session. You'd return there between missions to listed to a man shout things like "Mason! Mason! The numbers, Mason! what about the numbers? WHAT ABOUT THE NUMBERS?" Lurking silhouettes of brooding military men has been a staple of Black Ops marketing materials in the past, too, suggesting that this could be a tease for the heavily rumoured Black Ops 2.

Black Ops 2 has being popping up all over the place. It was briefly listed on Amazon at one point, it's been spotted on dev CVs and Activision snapped up web domain names related to Black Ops 2 months ago. Activision haven't confirmed anything yet, mind. The date on the poster could be the reveal date. Here's the full sized pic.

Funcom have just opened up The Secret World's Secret War. Signing up will put you on the registration list for the upcoming beta.

It's a web-based game that plays out like a basic version of Risk. You'll be deploying your real life Facebook friends instead of little plastic men, They earn points to level you up and unlock in-game items. Annoyingly, it means you'll need to get a lot of friends involved to make a dent on the world. Convenient then, that you'll get XP for recruiting players and unlocking achievements, as detailed in the FAQ.

Funcom are also picking eight random players each week who'll win guaranteed beta access and a trip to Funcom's studio's in Montreal. Winners will get their name implemented somewhere in the game world too.

Annoyingly, the whole thing is powered by Facebook Connect. That means Funcom have access your basic information, profile information and email. It'll also try to post on your Facebook Wall and access your friend's shared info, rendering the whole thing not very secret at all.

Sniper Elite V2 claims to feature "the most realistic simulation of military sharpshooting yet available" on its Steam page. The ballistics system takes "gravity, wind, velocity, bullet penetration" and "aim stability" into account every time you pull the trigger. Hit the target and you'll get to see your victim's demise in splattery detail via a hallucinatory slow motion death sequence. This gory epilogue peels back the victim's skin to show organs popping and bones shattering from the impact of your bullet as it passes through your enemy's squishy body. This feature is "not available in Germany."

If that sounds like the sort of shooter you might like to shoot guns in, you can take a few experimental pot shots now in a new demo, available on Steam. The full release is scheduled for May 4. Yesterday we learned that the team deathmatch mode that it ships with will be exclusive to the PC, which is nice. Check out the official Sniper Elite V2 site for more.