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If Paper Mario 2 could speak, it might tell you that turn-based RPG combat is almost uniformly boring and rubbish. You wait a bit, you hit a button, you inflict some damage, you withdraw, you rinse, you repeat, you grow old, you die lonely. And even as you roll around in your grave, the worms and microbes feasting on your decaying innards are all waiting, hitting a button, inflicting some damage, withdrawing, rinsing and repeating. And they hate it too. If anybody could bear the spectacle for long enough, they might well hurl mouldy vegetables at the screen and boo incessantly.

The Adventure Company has announced plans to release Return to Mysterious Island, developed by Kheops Studio for the PC and inspired by a Jules Verne novel. Due out in winter 2004, it's an unusual (surprise) adventure title, in which the player controls a lass called Mina, who arrives on an uninhabited island where she encounters the ghost of Captain Nemo, whose body is trapped in his ship the Nautilus deep below the island shore. In order to lay his spirit to rest, Mina has to piece together hints and clues, travel to the Nautilus and retrieve Nemo's body.

Application programmer Neil Aitken has filed a lawsuit against his employer Vivendi-Universal Games, alleging that he and colleagues were regularly forced to work excessive hours and falsify timesheets, and denied overtime pay.

Halo 2. It's out on November 9th, and we understand that some of you are quite interested in it. Heck, Microsoft's J Allard reckons it will top one million pre-orders, and that people will take days off work in order to play the thing.

n-Space's inventive GameCube first-person shooter Geist has been delayed again, according to the latest issue of official magazine Nintendo Power in the States. The game will now be released in 2005.

Independent Australian developer Krome Studios is turning its attention to next generation console platforms, and is already working on new technology to suit them, the company announced on Wednesday.

American online retailer EBGames.com has updated its site to include a listing for Vivendi Universal's Starbreeze-developed title The Chronicles Of Riddick on the PC platform, with the title apparently due to launch on November 15th.

Sega, Sammy and Namco are combining forces to promote a new networking system for Japanese arcade machines. The three companies hope to ease the burden on arcade operators who are currently forced to employ various different systems, and open the door to more online enabled arcade units.

Nintendo Europe managing director David Gosen is to leave the company at the end of August after five years with the platform holder, and is set to move to mobile entertainment publisher Digital Bridges as COO.

The official website for Far Cry today carries a statement from Ubisoft producer Matthieu Boulard on the status of the game's next patch. "Patch 1.2 is in its final stage of production: a nasty scoreboard bug and a CD key security issue remain to be fixed, but otherwise a huge list of improvement/fixes have been implemented and tested successfully," he says. We're now localizing all the readme files, and the final candidate will be tested extensively later this week to make sure it is really solid - we don't want to rush in the last few days after such a long development time." In other words, expect to hear more very soon.

A new promotion from Microsoft in the USA is offering Xbox Live users a choice from a selection of free games in return for referring their friends to the online gaming service before the end of July.

Hong Kong based published Enlight has announced that it will publish Mercury Steam's Scrapland, and that American McGee will serve as executive producer on the game - which is due for release at the end of 2004 on PC and Xbox.

It began life as freeware. Coding from his bedroom in Finland, Risto "Riz" Remes created a little hockey management game focusing on one league. Fast forward a few years and he's sitting in Islington, London, having just finished work for new employers Sports Interactive on the first of potentially many iterations of NHL Eastside Hockey Manager - a full blown, multi-league hockey management game built on top of the Championship Manager codebase and published by Sega. Quite a change. With the game due out this Friday, July 2nd, we caught up with Riz and tried to get a handle on how it came together, the benefits of things like Riz's relocation and the acquisition of an official NHL/NHLPA license, and what happens next.

This generation of Mario Tennis will not support networked or online multiplayer features, Nintendo of Japan has confirmed, following speculation borne of an erroneous update to one of the platform holder's press sites - ironically, organs aimed at informing the assembled e-hacks, rather than confusing them to this degree.

The latest annual report from the Consumer Entertainment Software Association (CESA) shows that the games market in Japan declined once again in 2003, leading to an overall decline of some 40 per cent since 1997.

The most visible sign yet of Sega's decision to re-integrate its development subsidiaries back into the main company has come in the form of the closure or stripping down of the studios' individual websites, which is happening this week.

The Japanese are going to have to wait. Whereas last time out, those of us in Europe were forced to endure an infuriating delay of several months before getting our hands on Metroid Prime, for the inevitable sequel, Nintendo is planning to release the PAL version at roughly the same time as its American counterpart. Crucially, that means we should see it before Christmas. The Japanese release has reportedly been bumped to 2005 to accommodate us.

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that signups for the European closed beta of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of WarCraft will kick off on July 5th. Potential testers can register at Blizzard's various European websites in England, France and Germany.

The huge pent up demand for Driv3r ensured that Reflections' long-awaited sequel was catapulted to the top of the charts in its first full week on sale. According to Chart-Track, the game has the 11th highest-ever weekly sales of any PS2 title, and the fifth highest ever weekly sell through for any Xbox title.

It had been available for a while in streaming video format, but we thought you might like to know that Konami has finally popped up a 45MB Windows Media format video of its sterling Metal Gear Solid 3 trailer from E3 this year. It's about fourteen minutes long, and a must-watch for MGS fans keen to find out what's going on in the latest instalment in Hideo Kojima's sneaking series. We've mirrored it at Eurofiles. Download away.

LucasArts has released a six-minute trailer for Star Wars: Republic Commando, which introduces us to what narrator Chris Williams describes as the Star Wars galaxy's equivalent of Navy SEALs. With the game set between Episodes II and III of the movie, the trailer focuses on an incursion into the depths of the planet Geonosis. You can download the trailer now from Eurofiles.

Developer Taldren, best known for its work on the Star Trek licensed Starfleet Command, has reportedly shut its doors - with Internet posts suggesting that the US company has closed, but some staff are opening a new firm in South Korea. Earlier this year, it was announced that the studio's action title Black9 had been put on hold by publisher Majesco, a major setback for the company which now appears to have brought about the closure of its US offices. However, other reports from staff at the company suggest that Taldren CEO Erik Behnke is planning to move to South Korea to work on a new MMORPG project with a number of other Taldren staff. No information about the new project has been announced, except that it is "myth themed" - which, given the general form of MMORPG projects, isn't exactly a revelation. Further details of the new venture should hopefully emerge in the near future.

North Korea has claimed that Ubisoft's Ghost Recon 2 is nothing more than a piece of propaganda in a newspaper column that promised "miserable defeat and gruesome deaths" for the Americans. At least, that's according to American military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which hardly strikes us as an impartial source...

Back on June 4th, when Nintendo released F-Zero: GP Legend in Europe, we remarked somewhat testily that we had no idea whether it was any good because Nintendo of Europe had failed to send out review code. And in the absence of the usual saturation coverage from the States (the game's not due out there for some months yet), and negligible marketing push from NOE, there was an unspoken assumption that GP Legend - derived from a Japanese anime - might be a slightly simpler, less significant entry in the series. A kind of F-Zero Lite. Something we weren't supposed to see.

Microsoft is offering Rallisport Challenge 2 fans the chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip to the LG super racing weekend in Belgium at the end of July - as part of its latest Xbox Live tournament.

Reports from Japan over the weekend have indicated that Nintendo is set to announce another addition to the GameCube's line-up of RPG titles, with work on a home console version of GBA RPG series Golden Sun apparently underway.

Kris Oprisko, the writer of the forthcoming Metal Gear Solid comic book, has shed some light on how the project came about and what he and artist Ashley Wood are attempting to do with it in an article published on The Comic Wire here.

Konami of Europe has announced plans to release U Move Super Sports, a package of fifteen sports-themed mini-games, for EyeToy this September. Rather like the original EyeToy: Play suite of challenges, UMSS is high score-based and features support for small multiplayer tournaments.