Codies club Cube
More toys for Cubists!
Codemasters is set to launch a barrage of games at GameCube owners this year. Four of the company's key titles, Colin McRae Rally 3, LMA Manager, Club Football and Shoot to Kill will form the initial Cube line-up, with more to come. "Codemasters' ethos is to support the world's most successful gaming formats," Marketing Director Mike Hayes enthuses, "Nintendo has produced an excellent machine in the GameCube and we believe it provides the base for our developers to produce superb editions of these titles. Given Nintendo's continued strength in the global market, GameCube will become one of Codemasters' key publishing platforms." Perhaps the most significant of those titles is Colin McRae Rally 3. Although obviously not platform exclusive, it does provide some solace to fans deprived of the likes of Gran Turismo, Project Gotham and Rallisport Challenge. Colin McRae Rally 3 is expected to provide the most realistic rally experience to date, building on the enormous success of its predecessors. The only difficulty it faces is a presently saturated market, but with the ruling Rallisport Challenge an Xbox exclusive the developer-publisher has the opportunity to redress the balance with this multi-platform release. LMA Manager on the Cube is not considered a direct competitor to the market-leading Championship Manager series, which now appears on PC and Xbox, but it does offer a fairly impressive array of features and provides an easier introduction to the genre than its stat-heavy companion. Meanwhile, not much is known of Club Football apart from its marketing campaign. Individual club-branded copies of the game will be released as previously reported, but the game is going to have to do a lot more than package itself creatively to break into the tough football genre, even on the relatively underpopulated GameCube.