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IGI2: Covert Strike development continues apace, and the latest nugget from Codemasters is a movie showing off the game's stealthy gameplay. The download comes in several sizes, ranging from 6-11MB, available from the official IGI2 website. It depicts the game's hero sliding down ziplines and ladders, using an infrared scope in the dark and examining targets from a distance using GPS tracking. Although the movie is a bit dark in places, it gives you a fair idea of how the stealthy gameplay will unfold, with as much capping as there is sleuthing.

NovaLogic is to publish Data Becker's Highland Warriors for the PC. Highland Warriors begins with the founding of Scotland around 850AD and peaks with the fight for independence during the 13th and 14th centuries. Players can choose to fight as one of three Scottish clans, or to risk life and limb for the British crown, in 35 historically founded missions. The game also supports up to eight players over the Internet (Novaworld, presumably) or via LAN, and should ship to retail across Europe on January 31st, and in the UK on February 14th.

Phantagram has released a one-minute-fifty trailer of its forthcoming mech smash 'em up, Phantom Crash. The trailer portrays a fast-paced title full of heavyweight explosions, three-dimensional twisted metal carnage and loud rock music. It runs at a reasonable resolution too, so you should be able to get a decent idea of how the game looks and plays. However, this does mean that it weighs in slightly heavier than similar movies - it'll cost you 26.8MB in download time, and you can pick it up from here.

The seven Vice City soundtrack CDs are finally available for pre-order in the UK. Take-Two has apparently teamed up with HMV to offer them individually (priced £10.99) or as a box set priced £33.99. Take-Two states that the retail price for the set will be £29.99, although we guess the extra four quid is pre-order taxation. You can find the Vice City soundtracks here.

A while ago, Square announced plans to exploit Yuna and Riku from Final Fantasy X in their own spin-off releases, no doubt to help balance its finances. Although interest in these two games bubbled and frothed on the surface of gaming forums all over the world, there seemed little chance that either would amount to anything significant for Final Fantasy fans.

A while ago we took a bit of time out from pasting brains on concrete and scoring winning World Cup goals to examine a less gamey game from Jester Interactive. Music 3, the follow-up to the rather excellent MTV Music Generator 2, seemed keen to reinvent the PS2's audio capabilities in order to produce the best and most extensive music composition program for consumers imaginable.

Ubi Soft is to extend its rather large range of Scrabble boardgame-on-the-PC products when it releases Scrabble 2003 Edition and Scrabble Junior for the PC this November, and Scrabble 2003 Edition on PlayStation 2 in December. Both games have been developed by UK studio Runecraft, with 2003 Edition featuring the most up-to-date word lists and challenging AI opponents, and Junior cutting out all the violence and debauchery for the nippers [you must play Scrabble differently to me -Ed].

For those one or two of you unfamiliar with Bandai's Tamagotchi, it was a playground sensation for months. Each Tamagotchi was a little digital pet stored on a small, flattened-egg shaped plastic gadget with a tiny little mobile phone-esque screen. You had to feed and nurture the little blighter by pressing various buttons, and at the peak of his abilities you could have him battle with rival pets via infrared.

The US version of Serious Sam for the Xbox has gone gold, with the European version awaiting final approval, according to Croatian developer Croteam. The Xbox game combines the best elements of the First and Second Encounter PC releases. Croteam is promising enhanced visuals (which remain true to their trademark cartoony, Doom-esque style), 36 levels in total (some of the bigger PC levels had to be split, but if anything this has improved load times and made the game a little easier to palate), as well as the co-operative aspect which made the PC games so endearing.

Tactical RPGs are growing in number and popularity. Final Fantasy Tactics is being given a new lease of life on GameBoy Advance, and Capcom has plans to release an Onimusha Tactics title in the near future too. Now even Koei is looking to break into the genre with Dynasty Warriors/Kessen-inspired Dynasty Tactics, but after an hour or so with DT, we're not so sure they can manage it.

EA has brought forward the PS2 version of FIFA Football 2003 to clash directly with Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 2 on October 25th, a move aimed at, well, who knows? FIFA 2003 is a big step-up from previous iterations, particularly 2002 FIFA World Cup, which even the developer has described using foul four-letter words we can't print here, but surely it can't hope to give Konami's incredible footy simulation a race down the wing?

Digital Reality, developer of Platoon: The 1st Airborne Cavalry Division in Vietnam (that's a heck of a subtitle), has released a 38.6MB movie of the game in action (available from 3DGamers), with a cinematic intro and more than six minutes of in-game footage.

Splinter Cell producer Mathieu Ferland has been fielding questions about the game on Ubi Soft's official forums, answering questions about blood, animation and downloadable content.

Hypnotix has developed what it describes as a 'booster disc' for Outlaw Golf, which will be released in the US by Simon & Schuster in due course. However, unlike previous booster discs (like the one American Dead or Alive 3 owners were offered to bring the game into line with its continental counterparts), this disc will not update the original game, instead serving as more of a demo for the forthcoming sequel, Outlaw Golf 2.

Last week, UK-based electronics retail chain Curry's reduced the price of Xbox to £129.99 when customers traded in an old console - a saving of £30 on the usual retail price. In response, competitor Argos cut the price of the console to £129.99 outright, console trade-ins be damned. This led to widespread speculation that Microsoft was planning to reduce the price of Xbox across the board, but late last week the platform holder was denying that, instead highlighting the forthcoming bundles it has planned.

Possibly one of the most hotly debated topics of recent years was whether TimeSplitters was actually a good game or not. It certainly split (pun intended) Eurogamer opinion right down the middle with some deriding its shallow non-entity single player experience, while others warmed to the hugely entertaining and quirkily original Challenge Mode, engaging multiplayer mode and the fact that it pushed the PS2 so early on in its life.

Ah, the Dreamcast; a console that we have loved and lost, but it was certainly better than not to have loved at all. Remember Soul Calibur, Shenmue, Grandia II, Skies of Arcadia, Metropolis Street Racer, Virtua Tennis and Phantasy Star Online? Remember laughing at everyone who spent £300 on a PS2 at launch and then sat staring glumly at it for six months while you romped through a crop of the best games ever to grace a home console?

Tennis Masters Series 2003 is due out on Xbox, PC and GameBoy Advance on November 1st, with a PS2 version shortly afterward, publisher Microids has informed us this afternoon. TMS 2003 lets you participate in the ATP's prestigious tournament-of-the-title, in a globe-spanning tour which crosses the hard courts of Indian Wells, Miami, Toronto and Cincinnati, the clay courts of Monte Carlo, Rome and Hamburg and the indoor courts of Madrid and Paris. With 6,000 polygons per each of the 67 motion-captured players, TMS 2003 should look great, and a lot of the detail has been spent on facial expressions and animation.

When we first realised we had four pairs of tickets to the Game On exhibition in Edinburgh, we were tempted to pair you up and make you go with total strangers. That's the sort of crazy, happy-go-lucky fellas we are. Fortunately for you, our bosses thought it was stupid, irresponsible and potentially illegal, so we instead elected to offer four pairs of tickets, and leave the partner issues up to you lot.

Changes will have to be made to Grand Theft Auto Vice City and BMX XXX if either game is ever to appear in Australia. That's the verdict of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), which, unlike industry bodies in the UK and US, is run by the country's government.

Hideo Kojima has told Famitsu magazine in Japan that he is working on a GameBoy Advance title, although the developer wouldn't say just what. Kojima-san has worked on previous handheld titles, including the GameBoy Color version of Metal Gear Solid, and naturally the hope is that this next GBA title will be some sort of Solid Snake outing.

This week's release list is slight but bright, and headlined by the most eagerly anticipated of all first person shooters - Free Radical's monkey-packed launch title follow-up, TimeSplitters 2, which appears on both PS2 and Xbox (with a Cube version still to come). We thought a lot of this on first impressions, and you certainly won't be disappointed if you risk avoiding our review and plough some hard-earned into it this morning.

Red Faction II is now less than a month away, and publisher THQ is continuing to drown us in assets in an attempt to prove that the PS2's best single player FPS is a II rather than a 2. The latest movie to issue forth from Sopot's regime focuses on the various vehicles under your team's command. From gunships and cars to walking mechanical suits, Red Faction II is brimming with mechanised destruction, and you can find out in this 21.6MB Windows Media format movie.

The long-awaited Cossacks: Back to War is due out tomorrow priced £19.99, and publisher CDV has released a free, previously unavailable campaign to whet the appetite of the original's many fans. The campaign, entitled 'Enemy of the Crown', is based on historical events set in corrupt, Tsar-ruled Russia between 1740 and 1764. The campaign uses different scenery to the majority of Cossacks campaigns, and begins with small maps and individual unit-based combat, gradually scaling upwards until the player is fighting for the very liberation of the entire country, and the appointment of a rightful Tsar.

Apart from motorbikes, cars with funky suspension and questionable haircuts, there isn't much to distinguish Grand Theft Auto III from GTA Vice City, but even so, each and every snippet of information about the game is lusted after and disseminated within seconds. And since you're no doubt amongst those grabbing every last byte, Rockstar has served up a few more in the shape of an October trailer, featuring more of Tommy Vercetti's Scarface-esque antics set to funky music and writhing bodies (both dead and dancing). You can find the 24MB QuickTime trailer at the official GTA Vice City website, along with its slightly more palatable 15MB sibling.

You've heard a lot from us about Volition's Red Faction II. You know it's a PlayStation 2 exclusive first person shooter with a heavy-duty story-driven single player game. You know it has a weighty collection of multiplayer modes to back that up, and, Volition hopes, to rival TimeSplitters 2. You also know that we've played it, and that we rather like it. Well, now we have the final game, and just to reiterate; it's wall crunching, bone shattering, grenade popping good. What follows is a detailed account of our first hour with the full single player game.

CDV and Ukranian developer GSC Game World's American Conquest is now available in playable demo form, so you too can now duck into one of the most engaging RTS games since the original Cossacks. Although we haven't had a chance to examine the 221MB demo, the size alone suggests that there's a fair amount of it. You can download the American Conquest demo from here.

Capcom is bringing Breath of Fire IV, Dino Crisis 2 and Mega Man X6 to the beige box, and has released a selection of screenshots from each to celebrate. All three games are lined up for a February 2003 release, but the best thing about them is the price - currently set at £12.99. Whatever your feelings about RPG sequels, survival horror spin-offs and formulaic platformers, at that price all three games represent tremendous value for money.

SSX Tricky, the follow-up to the PS2's most influential launch title, will - somehow - appear on GameBoy Advance in a near-feature-complete port, EA Sports BIG has revealed. Easily the Canadian developer's finest game to date, Tricky still seemed an odd choice for a GBA release, but if the screenshots and press blurbs are to be believed, EA has managed to recreate the game's 3D engine in physically undiminished form.

TDK Mediactive's Mercede-Benz backed 'WorldRacing' title has been delayed until January 2003 due to a need "to invest more time in the development process" at German firm Synetic. That from TDK director Heiko Tom Felde. Although dismissed by many as just-another-racer, TDK hopes that its heavyweight license coupled with a thorough simulation can transcend the rest of the genre after a last stretch of elbow grease-splattered track.