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LucasArts is still beavering away on Star Wars Bounty Hunter, one of the best-looking things to come out of Episode II besides Natalie Portman, but the developer issued a press release yesterday to remind us all that Skywalker Sound is handling the audio aspect of Jango's adventure. And slice my arm off if they haven't finished. In announcing their completion of Bounty Hunter's 'sound design', which consists largely of raw materials from Ben Burtt's Star Wars sound catalogue, the illustrious post-production audio experts had some nice things to say about the games industry. "This project was a lot of fun for us, and we plan on pursuing other ventures in this market," veepee and general manager Glenn Kiser enthused. LucasArts shot back compliments, but failed to say when the game is due out on its chosen platforms of PS2 and GameCube. Fortunately, we know that it has a November release date in the US, and we'd be surprised if Activision - LucasArts' European handler - wait longer than they have to in bringing it to us. Related Feature - Star Wars Bounty Hunter screenshots (Cube)

Xbox launch title Halo remains the best-selling game on the console to date, shifting well over a million copies worldwide. Almost everyone who has an Xbox has a copy of the game, and the few that didn't already own it have kept it permanently glued to the top of the Xbox top ten here in the UK since March. So to say that the sequel is eagerly anticipated would be a masterpiece of understatement. Our first glimpse of the sequel came in the form of a handful of "screenshots" last month, but now we've got a better idea of what to expect thanks to a two minute trailer showing what appears to be excerpts from the opening cinematic. Picking up where the original game left off, Halo 2 sees your battleship returning to Earth to find the planet under full scale assault by a Covenant battle fleet. Naturally it's up to you to save the world. It's all very rousing stuff, with gorgeous (but presumably pre-rendered) visuals and a lovely orchestral score, ending with a spectacular shot of the Master Chief doing the ultimate HALO jump while vast explosions dot the surface of the planet far below. It might not tell us much about the actual in-game action we can look forward to second time round, but it's still well worth a look. Grab it from one of the following sites -

Real-time strategy games generally fall somewhere on an axis between two poles. At one end you have the stylised combat of Command & Conquer and its ilk; at the other, the insane realism and micromanagement of Close Combat, veering into the realms of tactical action with Commandos. Sudden Strike 2 plants its flag firmly on the realistic end of the pitch, but can it keep fans of the original title satisfied, and perhaps more importantly, will it attract new players to the series?

Capcom's Street Fighter franchise is about to strike again, with the (slightly later than anticipated) arrival of Street Fighter Alpha 3 on GameBoy Advance this November. As you would expect, the game features a wide range of characters (over thirty, including three new ones), a variety of gameplay modes (versus, training, "dramatic battle" and others), three fighting styles to master and all manner of special moves, combos, blocks and counter-attacks to indulge in. Having sold humpteen million units across virtually every console format since the year dot, European publisher Ubi Soft will be hoping that this latest installment in the series translates smoothly to the world of handheld gaming. While we wait to find out how the conversion process went, why not have a squint at these fresh new screenshots of the game in action... Related Feature - Street Fighter Alpha 3 screenshots

Publisher CDV has announced that the UK version of Divine Divinity has now gone gold and is on schedule to arrive in stores on Friday 13th September (unlucky for some). Designed by Belgium's Larian Studios, Divine Divinity is an epic role-playing game and a strong contender for the Daftest Title Of The Year award. Featuring a vast fantasy world to explore, hundreds of skills, spells and items to amass, and over a hundred NPCs to interact with, it's pitched somewhere between the fast paced hack and slash of Diablo and the more involved storylines and dialogue of Baldur's Gate. Our first couple of hours with Divine Divinity have proven quite entertaining so far, but given the sheer scale of the game it could be some time before we have a full review for you... Related Feature - Divine Divinity preview

Arguably the most agreeable thing Square has done in ages, developing a brand new Final Fantasy Tactics game for the GBA has brought with it a myriad technical questions from cautious fans about the ins and outs, and since we first caught a glimpse of the stunning game artwork and plot basics, we've learnt a bit more about how the various game mechanics will operate. However, with these details come more and more questions. Damn you, Square! The first bit is the Judgement System. Quite simply, a judge will determine the victor of a battle, which suggests that conflict isn't quite as finite as with other Fantasies, RPGs, action games and virtually anything else we can think of. Clearly the rules of chivalry will be alive and well in the lands of FFTA. The Kuran System, however, is a bit easier to get your head round. A Kuran is a multi-purpose handyman, apparently, and in FFTA the player can become one and take on a number of jobs. Lastly, we found out some more about the enigmatic Region Create System - FFTA does not feature a pre-ordained world map. At this we made one of those deliciously onomatopoeic, quizzical noises which doesn't work on paper. We should have waited for the next bit. The reason there's no world map is that the player can create the world map on his or her own. Yah, we get it. Honest. Related Feature - GBA's FF Tactics is sequel not port

Take-Two's "mobster simulator", the soon-to-be released PC title Mafia, is heading to PlayStation 2 and Xbox sometime during 2003 according to the publisher. Then again, Mafia release dates, eh? Not an exact science. Take-Two has also named the PC version of the game the proverbial Godfather of both titles. Related Feature - Mafia preview (PC)

Nintendo of America is hoping to elevate that loveable pink blob Kirby to the status of his 20-year-old compatriot Mario and the likes of Pokémon, with the aid of a ten-million-dollar campaign over the next years. NOA's efforts kick off with a new Saturday morning cartoon, "Kirby: Right Back at Ya!", which debuts on Fox in the States on September 14th at 9am and 11am. The show has been described by one of my editorial colleagues as "what would happen if the creators of Pokémon dropped far too many tabs of LSD". Of course, the idea behind the campaign is to remind the consumer that Kirby is more than a pink blob. Actually, he's a pink blob in training. Having crash-landed on the planet Popstar, Kirby becomes sworn protector of Dream Land, where all the happy dreams in the universe originate. As you may recall from the days of his wonderful GameBoy adventures and his behaviour in Super Smash Bros. Melee, he can inhale his enemies' special powers and regurgitate them in his defence. He doesn't say much, which is probably just as well, but he's a force for good, and we should all know it. There's a lot more to Nintendo's $10m investment, but you can probably guess most of it. Toys, food sponsorship, lots of branding and of course games, including the Kirbster's forthcoming GBA adventure. The reason for this substantial investment? We'd hazard a guess that it has something to do with Kirby's creator Satoru Iwata, who was himself elevated recently. To the position of president of Nintendo...

Bandai, a name synonymous with Digimon, Tamagotchi and Power Rangers, and, on the plus side, with the various faces of Gundam, has placed its standard alongside Nintendo's in the battle for console supremacy. As reports on Bloomberg and elsewhere attest, Bandai plans to develop games for Nintendo GameCube starting this year, with the first due to ship in Japan this November. Although it's unclear what the European implications are just yet, we quite like the idea of beating up Power Rangers and Digimon characters in our vision of Super Smash Bros Melee 2.

Liverpool-based Rage has had its fair share of problems in the last couple of years, with boss Paul Finnegan admitting earlier this year that the company needs "a big winner" to turn things around. Luckily then their line-up for the next few months includes a few potential hits, most notably Rocky, which is coming to all next-generation consoles as well as the GameBoy Advance. The idea of basing a game on Sylvester Stallone's series of boxing movies might seem a bit odd considering that many younger gamers don't have a clue who Rocky and Apollo Creed are, but we're happy to report that the resulting game is a lot of fun in two player mode. There's a wide range of nicely animated characters from the films to control, some evil looking facial deformation technology to bruise and bloody your opponent's ugly mug, and plenty of scope for ducking and diving once you get to grips with the controls. Inline skating game Rolling is also looking promising, although it now has to scale up to the lofty heights achieved by the genre-defining Aggressive Inline if it's to truly win our hearts. Elsewhere things were a bit more patchy. Lamborghini (on PS2 and Xbox) certainly looks suitably pretty in motion, but the handling and physics felt a bit odd and we never quite connected with it. Presumably it's still being tweaked though, and if Rage can make the gameplay match the graphics we should be in for a treat. The big disappointment though was Twin Caliber, an on-rails shooter whose major innovation is that you control two guns separately using the two analogue pads and a pair of shoulder buttons. It's a nice idea, but actually mastering the system takes some time, and the whole gory atmosphere of the game is let down by your character, who looks like an extra from The Village People and frantically jerks his arms around as you aim his guns. While this was quite amusing, we can only hope that the animations in the final game will look somewhat better.

In an unusual move, the founder of California's Presto Studios has apparently decided that he's had enough, and is now in the process of shutting down the company he co-founded way back in 1991. While many developers and publishers have gone to the wall in the past, Presto say that money isn't the issue here. Indeed, the company's last game (Myst III: Exile) has already sold over a million copies worldwide and is about to be released on the PlayStation 2. Their next release is Whacked!, one of the launch titles for Microsoft's Xbox Live service. So if the company is making money, what lies behind the closure? Well, CEO Michael Kripalani told his local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, that "we were at the point where we had so many expenses and such a high payroll that we started to lose passion in the games". Several future projects had failed to find a publisher, and Ubi Soft are reported to be looking elsewhere for someone to develop a fourth Myst. According to the newspaper report, Kripalani blames spiraling costs and the gaming industry's obsession with sequels and franchises, which has made it harder for independent teams such as Presto to find funding, particularly when it comes to PC games. Of course, Presto's output has been somewhat hit and miss over the years, from adventure games such as their popular Journeyman Project trilogy and Myst III to the middling Star Trek cash-in Hidden Evil and the pits of Stephen King's F13. With the company's future beyond Whacked! uncertain and the team having difficulty coming up with a concept that they could sell to publishers, it perhaps makes sense for them to bow out "on a high note" rather than carry on working in an industry that has changed almost beyond recognition in the last decade. As for Michael Kripalani, apparently he's going to use some of his earnings from Myst III to travel the world and "figure out .. what inspires me".

With its run at the Barbican Gallery in London set to end on September 15th, the Game On exhibition will be moving up to Scotland for the remainder of the year. The show, which covers 40 years of videogames history from Pong and Space War to the Xbox and GameCube, will be taking over the Royal Museum in Edinburgh between October 18th and February 2nd before a possible overseas tour. As well as the wide range of classic games that were included in the exhibition during its stay in London, new goodies including a playable demo of Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness will be added to the original line-up, and the museum will also be hosting a conference during November looking at the potential use of computer games as an educational tool. For more details, check the National Museums Of Scotland website. Related Feature - Game On!

World War II: Frontline Command is getting ever closer to release, with Codemasters touting the game as "the first World War II RTS created using a true 3D engine". The development team at The Bitmap Brothers is going to have to hurry things up a bit if they're going to achieve that feat though, as the similarly titled Frontline Attack: War Over Europe is also due out in the coming weeks, built around the 3D engine that powered the Earth 2150 franchise. Similarities between the two games pretty much end there though. Where Frontline Attack is going for the shotgun approach by covering every front and providing Soviet, German and Allied campaigns, Frontline Command is focusing firmly on the final year of the war, starting with the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and taking you through to the final drive into Germany. Thanks to a slight break from reality, Command's main campaign will end with you taking on elite German troops armed with experimental weapons and vehicles as you head for Hitler's mountain stronghold. And while Attack offers a fairly traditional real-time strategy experience, but without any base building or resource management (in the single player campaigns, anyway), Codemasters are promising that Command will take a more personal approach to the war, with the focus on squad tactics and taking care of your men, whose morale will affect their performance in combat. It will be interesting to see how The Bitmap Brothers handle this, as we could see it being quite annoying to have your men suddenly freeze or stop taking orders in the middle of combat because their morale was too low. Either way, with both games due out this autumn we should know soon which of the two will win the race to the shelves and which is the more entertaining package. In the meantime, we have several new screenshots of Frontline Command in action to tide you over until one or both of these games is actually released. Related Feature - Frontline Command screenshots

Ubi Soft has signed a deal to distribute budget versions of several classic Microsoft games in Europe, Canada, Australia, Latin America and parts of Asia. But not the UK. Those of you on the mainland can look forward to Ubi Soft relaunching Age Of Empires: Gold Edition, Combat Flight Simulator, Midtown Madness, Crimson Skies and Starlancer amongst other titles. The whole range should be available some time this autumn. Related Feature - Crimson Skies review

NVIDIA's unified driverset received a speed bump recently in the shape of Detonator 40. As with previous releases, Detonator 40 will work with virtually any NVIDIA card you could possibly own, and updates multi-screen, image rotation and other functionality to the latest versions, as well as making those critical performance tweaks the Detonators are known for. The drivers are available from NVIDIA's website, and according to articles like this one performance comparisons with previous releases are quite favourable.

Nintendo's European product manager Marco Hein has told C&VG that Animal Crossing is not currently on the way to Europe, but hasn't ruled out a 'crossing' sometime in the future. "I'm not saying we're not releasing it," he said last week. "I'm saying we currently have no plans." Apparently Nintendo believes that its release schedule is sufficiently full. Animal Crossing should not be confused with Animal Leader, which is being published by Atlus in the US later this year along with Nintendo's Animal Crossing. Nintendo will wait and see how AC fares in the US market before making any decisions about Europe, we would imagine. Animal Crossing was once described as a "communication game" by Shigeru Miyamoto in its days of development for the N64. The premise is that you arrive in "Animal Crossing" having picked your name, the name of your town and so on, and you just live out your life, earning and working jobs and interacting with the many distinctly unorthodox and colourful characters. One of the features highlighted by press everywhere was the notion of competing in town raffles and receiving Christmas presents, the prizes and presents taking the shape of NES games like Donkey Kong and Punch Out. Needless to say, the idea of living your life in a forest full of peculiar animals is intriguing, if a little unstructured, and it would have been nice to get our hands on AC in Europe and work out why so many of Miyamoto's fans in Japan rave about it. Back to Marco Hein though, and Nintendo's European product manager also spoke candidly about what governs how he governs the release of games in certain regions including Europe, and that now and then "we try to be a little bit brave". Doshin the Giant was his example - "I think it's a very Japanese game, but it can fit very well into our European portfolio. It's niche, but it's valuable in showing a complete range of GameCube game." Doshin's release is good news for European gamers in more ways than one. Apart from satisfying the legions of hungry consumers yearning for something a little bit different, it also reminds us that games can go from Japan direct to Europe, ignoring the traditional American stepping stone. Doshin isn't coming in the US due to a strategic decision made by Nintendo of America.

Believe it or not, racing these scale models is actually a real sport, and Big Scale sets out to recreate that on the PC. Many of the courses included in the game are based on real world circuits or designed by model race club experts, and the resulting races can end up looking like a shrunken TOCA event, with eight brightly coloured cars going wheel to wheel around twisty tracks, hopping over the kerbs and spinning off into the grass.

The game's ten tracks vary from beaches and seaside castles to military bases, and the focus here is on causing mayhem rather than professional racing. Many of the courses are wide open, complete with multiple routes and shortcuts, and races tend to devolve into a mad dash from one checkpoint to the other, with cars flying in all directions as you jostle for position and dodge obstacles.

3DO are best known for churning out countless derivative Army Men games, but their line-up at ECTS this year showed that the company is trying to establish a reputation for publishing more serious games as well. Heading up the list was Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, a gratuitously gory action game in the vein of Devil May Cry, but with the added advantage of a storyline rather loosely based on Biblical stories of the end of the world. Throw in voice acting from the likes of Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen, not to mention design work from comic book artist Simon Bisley, and you have a game which should be well worth a look if the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. 3DO were also highlighting two brand new motor racing games. Street Racing Syndicate does exactly what the title says, giving players the chance to compete in both illegal and sanctioned events on city streets. The stakes are high, with everything from cash to your opponents' cars and girlfriends up for grabs, and naturally any prize money you earn can be spent on upgrading and customising your vehicles. Jacked, on the other hand, is an action-packed motorbike racing game where players are encouraged to drive dirty, smashing rival riders with bottles, chains and golf clubs in an effort to claw their way to the front of the field. As if that isn't dangerous enough, there's also talk of saw blades, fire pits and car crushers. Motorbikes Of Might & Magic this ain't. Naturally 3DO aren't abandoning their old kiddie-friendly catalogue though, and along with the more adult fare there were some reassuringly familiar faces. The robots from CG-animated cartoon series Cubix will be returning for another outing in Cubix Showdown on PlayStation 2 and GameCube, while several more Army Men games are also on the way for Nintendo owners. Sarge's War on the GameCube is a third person action game in which Sarge has to take on the entire Tan Army single-handed (again) in a variety of real world and outsized locations. The graphics are certainly a step forward for the franchise, although it remains to be seen whether it will have the gameplay to match. Also on the Cube is Air Combat - The Elite Missions, more helicopter-based plastic action in locations ranging from a Japanese garden to the wild west. And finally there's Army Men: Turf Wars on the GameBoy Advance, with (you guessed it) Sarge single-handedly taking on the Tan Army in various "backyard environments" such as sand pits and ponds. I sense a pattern emerging here... Related Feature - UK Release Date List

The first concrete details and artwork from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance have appeared on the Internet, and as speculated it will be an entirely new adventure, from characters and plot to artwork and featureset. FFTA will scrap the PSOne version's rotatable 3D engine as was anticipated, using an isometric 2D engine, which may or may not rotate - that remains to be seen. However, the plot seems to concern a couple of young chaps, the strong-willed Mash and his timid young friend Myu, and a young and intelligent lass named Ritz. Reports indicate that the three are clawed back into FFT's medieval setting from the modern day, and have to make their way like three particularly large fish out of water. There are said to be three new systems in the game; Judgement, Kuran and Region Create. We don't know too much about those at this stage, but "Region Create" sounds like it could be along the lines of Ogre Battle's terrain changing system, where water rose between terms to alter the layout of the battlefield amongst other things. Or, it could be something completely different. Expect to see lots of speculation all over the place until this appears in Japan in time for the end of Square's financial year in March.

Console owners after LucasArts' port of Jedi Knight II will be pleased to learn that the PS2, Cube and Xbox versions will creak under the weight of a veritable Millennium Falcon-sized stash of multiplayer features. In a recent edition of "Ask LucasArts" on the publisher's website, a slew of options for multiplayer modes was confirmed. Amongst them, a two player Jedi Arena with the option of fighting 14 AI-controlled bots, and the familiar CTF, Free For All, Team FFA, Duel and Jedi Master modes. Weapons-only options will be included for those too clumsy to wield a lightsaber. And to satisfy those with a thirst for single player adventuring, LucasArts has found a way to incorporate the much-needed 'save anywhere' option, which will make the somewhat difficult pre-saber stages all the more bearable, one would imagine. Not content with that though, there will be a separate single player campaign called "Mission at Alzoc III", although we don't really know much about it at this stage. Related Feature - Jedi Knight II review (PC)

When it was released a little over two years ago, Shogun was a breath of fresh air for the real-time strategy genre. Not only did it sport a novel setting in the form of feudal Japan, but it also grounded the epic real-time tactical battles in a wider turn-based conflict raging across the whole country, with room for diplomacy and covert action alongside wholesale invasions.

Electronic Arts has agreed to publish a portion of Namco's Xbox and Cube output across PAL territories (including Europe obviously), including Dead to Rights on Xbox, and Pac-Man and Soul Calibur II across both platforms. It's not yet clear how many titles feature in the agreement, but the first games will be released in the run-up to Christmas according to EA. Sony currently publishes Namco's PS2 titles - the next to see release in Europe will be Tekken 4 on September 13th.

We come across some bizarre game concepts in the course of our work, but one of the more unusual ones to crop up in recent days is MEG. The game is apparently based on a best selling novel of the same name, in which a Carcharodon Megalodon (a prehistoric shark of truly scary size) emerges from the depths of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific and promptly terrorises everyone in the area. Unusually you'll get to experience both sides of the story in the game, controlling submersible pilot Jonas Taylor and the giant shark itself. As Jonas you'll get to swim and dive in the ocean, as well as taking control of submersibles, ships and helicopters to help you track the shark. Playing as the beast you'll be able to bash, thrash and bite potential victims, using MEG's huge weight and massive teeth to defend yourself, while a combination of audio and visual cues are used to locate prey. It's certainly a novel idea, although games like Everblue and Aquanox have proven that underwater action-adventure games can be a hit and miss affair. With MEG not due out until well into 2004, everything's a bit vague at this stage, but no doubt more information will gradually emerge over the coming months, like a giant fin rising from the water. Or something.

Resident Evil is launching on the GameCube on Friday, September 13th, but Cube owners won't have to wait the usual year or two for the next instalment of the series. Capcom has confirmed that Resident Evil 0 will be released in Europe during Spring 2003, and although it's difficult to say precisely when, it's taken only four months since its US release for the first game to materialise in Europe, so we'd hazard a guess and suggest March. Related Feature - Resident Evil 0 hands-on preview

Mobile phone games provider IN-FUSIO has unveiled a licensing deal with Vivendi Universal to bring Spyro The Dragon and Crash Bandicoot to handsets. Both franchises have shifted millions of units on various console formats over the years, and IN-FUSIO are hoping that the popular platformer characters will bring similar success to the world of mobile gaming. Details are somewhat scarce at this stage, and most of the press release is given over to gibberish about market momentum and brand consistency, but no doubt more information will emerge later in the year as the latest generation of Java-enabled mobile phones begins to take off. Related Feature - Mobile gaming goes 3D

During the course of ECTS literally hundreds of visitors left their business cards at EuroGamer's stand, which featured a winning combination of really comfy seats and free beer straight from the fridge, not to mention several PCs showing content from EuroGamer.net and sister site GamesIndustry.biz. Some of our visitors got more than a drink and the latest news and reviews out of their visit though - thanks to ATI and Entertain we gave away one brand new Radeon 8500 graphics card for each day of the show. The lucky winners of these desireable lumps of silicon, which offer full hardware support for DirectX 8.1 and all manner of other fancy doohickeys with bizarre names like Charisma, Pixel Tapestry and Truform, were Mark Everett of Nicely Crafted Entertainment, Jim Cliff of the BBFC and Dominic Rayner. We'd like to thank everyone that visited our stand, and we hope to see you all there again next year!

I'm about to state the obvious, but I need to get this off my chest - Splinter Cell looks stunning. Every single thing about the game is stunning, from the characters and their beautiful flowing animations, the design of the weapons and gadgets and the scenery right down to the way a piece of plastic curtain flows and refracts light when disturbed. Our time with the game at ECTS 2002 revealed exactly why we should be excited about yet another Tom Clancy license from Ubi Soft.

ECTS is over for another year - the doors have been closed, our stand has been demolished and our staff have all staggered home under voluminous piles of press packs and demo CDs. Naturally we've not been able to tell you everything we'd like to about everything we saw during the last week though, so our show coverage will be continuing for the next couple of days, with endless galleries of screenshots, a show round-up, news reports and previews, including looks at Splinter Cell, Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and the proverbial much much more. It's been an exhausting few days, but we hope you've enjoyed our coverage as much as we've enjoyed bringing it to you.

A consumer hall was added to the bill for the first time at this year's ECTS, so that the public could get a piece of the action as well as scrounging journalists. Sony's PlayStation Experience filled an entire hall at the front end of Earls Court with hundreds of PlayStation 2 consoles, a handful of PSOnes and a few hundred games to play on them. There was also live music and entertainment, and even a Lara Croft model leaping about enthusiastically, but such frivolities did not concern us - we were there for the games.