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In search of further promotion for its already-chart-topping footy title, 2002 FIFA World Cup, EA Sports has simulated the competition, game for game, with the in-depth results available on its website. If you're interested, so far of the 19 matches that have taken place - the 20th, France-Uruguay, is currently at 67 minutes - EA's World Cup game has accurately predicted the scores of six, and overall outcome of ten. If the group results are anything to go by, both the Republic of Ireland and England will be celebrating, and the Italians - one of the cup favourites - will beat Brazil 2-0 in the final. Related Feature - 2002 FIFA World Cup Xbox review

When you think about football management simulations, which game comes to mind first? Championship Manager. There's no disputing the fact that it's the genre's pinnacle, the very bastion of footy management games, and with each new release it gets even better. The other day we talked about accurate player statistics in Pro Evolution Soccer, but Championship Manger is so thoroughly researched that even in small-print the list of contributors is longer than my arm, and the results it produces are respected not only by fans of the game but fans of the sport.

The changing of the guard at Nintendo has brought about a surprisingly glum outlook on the gaming industry's future, with both the retiring 74 year old president Hiroshi Yamauchi and his (relatively) youthful replacement Satoru Iwata both bleak in their outlook. "We can't be optimistic about the game market", Iwata told journalists. "No matter what great product you come up with, people get bored. I feel like a chef cooking for a king who's full." Yamauchi was even more depressed about the whole thing, commenting that "game developers are running out of ideas" and that "delivering surprise is becoming extremely difficult". Which could explain games like Mario Tennis, Mario Golf and Mario Tiddlywinks. Even worse, game development is becoming too costly and too time consuming, leading Nintendo to seek to develop their games more rapidly without sacrificing quality. Which may explain games like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin, both of which are a lot of fun but rather short lived. You only have to look at Square to see what they mean though - having hundreds of artists slaving away for years on a game that costs millions of dollars to develop is rather excessive, however pretty the end result. If it wasn't for the inevitably stratospheric sales that any new (single player) Final Fantasy game achieves these days, we suspect it would be something of a dead-end even for Square. Is this where the industry as a whole is heading?

It's generally acknowledged that Nintendo don't need to win the console wars to make a profit on the GameCube, as strong first party game sales and cheap hardware components help them make their money back quicker than rivals like Microsoft, who lose a small fortune on every Xbox that is sold. That hasn't stopped the Japanese company from setting their sights high though, with their latest forecasts announced today suggesting that they will sell some twelve million Cubes worldwide in their current financial year. That's on top of the four million or so they sold last year. By March 2005 Nintendo expects that figure to reach somewhere in the region of fifty million, or about where the PlayStation 2 is scheduled to be at the end of this year. Whether they can reach these targets remains to be seen though. The console got off to a flying start here in Europe and has been selling quite consistently in America, but in its native Japan it's being completely obliterated by the PS2. So far this year only half a million GameCubes have been sold in Japan, despite the much anticipated release of Biohazard (or Resident Evil, to you and me). In the same period Sony have chalked up nearly two million sales, and the latest figures we've seen from Japan show the PS2 outselling the GameCube by around ten to one. No doubt the arrival of flagship titles like Mario, Zelda and Starfox will help pick things up later in the year, but it's still going to be a steep mountain to climb. Related Feature - Cube cut in Japan

Extreme sports games seem to be all the rage at the moment, but one of the more .. well, extreme that we've seen recently is Codename : Smokin' Barrels from Australian developer Bungarra. Although it's ostensibly a surfing game, it replaces the traditional sun-soaked beaches and sedentary wave chasing of most surf sims with bizarre settings ranging from waterfalls to downtown Venice. Coming across as a hybrid of Tony Hawk on a surfboard and the Arnie movie The Running Man, it has you "riding for your life" as a contender in an oddball TV show, facing threats varying from waterfalls, whirlpools and rapids to boulders, giant swinging axes and bursts of steam. Rather you than me. Along the way you'll pick up points for pulling off outlandish tricks and stunts, from the usual surfing shenanigans to grinding your way out along tree trunks and the like. Expect Smokin' Barrels to appear on the PlayStation 2 some time early next year, with publisher yet to be confirmed. If you can't wait that long, some early in-game footage is available at the bottom of the gallery page on Bungarra's website.

In a frankly bizarre ruling, the Independent Television Commission has banned the Xbox's infamous "life is short" TV advert. Probably the console's best known ad on this side of the pond, it portrayed a baby being shot out from between a woman's legs in a hospital, getting older as it flew through the air, before eventually crashing into a grave as an old man. The punch line? "Life is short. Play more." So what were the grounds for the ban? Misleading advertisement? A chronic lack of in-game footage? Having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the product being plugged? No, apparently it was because some viewers found it offensive. According to a report from Ananova, more than a hundred viewers across the UK complained about the advert's content. Rumours that all of the complaints were typed in block capitals and ended with the words "Xbox $uxs, gameCube R0xors" have yet to be confirmed. Upholding the complaints, the ITC commented that "the man's screams throughout his life's journey suggest a traumatic experience". Insert obligatory joke about the size of the Xbox controller here. The ITC found that these screams, "together with the reminder that life is short, made the final scene more shocking". Or, for those of us who don't have a life mission to make the world as bland a place as possible, more amusing. We're now looking forward to the inevitable banning of the latest PlayStation 2 advert, on the grounds that the sight of a strange French bloke eating memory cards is likely to put people off their dinner. Related Feature - PlayStation 2 with a slice of lemon

The Breath of Fire series' first outing on PlayStation 2 looks 'different'. That's our verdict based on a 97 second video shown at E3 and now available from IGN. We already know something of the game's premise, which we learnt from the developer's expo announcements last month. In a long-standing series tradition the story concerns a young Ranger called Ryu, who lives in the underground city of Shelter, and one day wakes up and decides to head upstairs to see what lies on the surface. Ryu - along with Yorda-esque central female character and some of the enemies shown in the video - boasts a strong black outline, but he and the world he inhabits is far from cel-shaded. The characters aren't as detailed as you might imagine but their environment is dark, claustrophobic and futuristic. The setting is a labyrinthine world built out of the rubble of society in the pursuit of survival, and the desperately constructed caverns are lined with railings, thick glass and gunmetal walls and gangways. In the video, Ryu comes up against lots of spider-like creatures as well as a huge dragon/dinosaur like boss whose roar shakes the screen, but by the looks of things our hero is only accompanied by his love interest, and the level her involvement is unknown at this point. Fleeting glimpses of the battle system suggest a very cinematic approach with heavy blows emphasized by slow motion, and lots of magic, but sadly the movie did not demonstrate the PETS system, which was highlighted in the original Capcom press release. PETS (Positive Encounter and Tactics System) will let people lace the battlefield with traps and decoys to aid progress, and we really want to see how it works. Due out this Winter, we're starting to get excited about Breath of Fire. Can it reinvent itself sufficiently and thrive exclusively within the confines of dungeons? We'll see. Related Feature - Deep Breath

Sony's plans to tightly integrate its suite of multimedia products - TVs, VCRs, DVD players and PCs - include the 30-million-selling PlayStation 2, Bloomberg is reporting, and the first step towards their goals is PS2 Memory Stick support. Shinichi Okamoto, SCEI's CTO and senior veepee, explained on Monday that Sony is "trying to make PlayStation 2 fit in digitalized consumer electronics products," and that the company "will take steps for that this year." PlayStation 2 can already play DVDs, and shortly Sony plans to connect it to the Internet. By providing Memory Stick support through an adapter, the company gives users the opportunity to store countless save games - current memory cards store only 8Mb, whereas Memory Stick can reach more than fifty times that capacity - as well as software and other data. Using the Memory Stick to store music is one suggestion - a clear hint at an Xbox-style game soundtrack solution.

Virtually unknown PC developer Staggan Ltd. has announced its plans for a massively multiplayer online football game, called United Soccer. Footy fans will be able to play United Soccer offline in single and two player modes, before heading online to compete co-operatively with up to 10 other players on the same team, fighting in leagues, cups and sponsored tournaments. If the game becomes popular then this could be great news, but little is known at present about the technology that drives the game, and early screenshots on the developer's website look simplistic to say the least, with no real lighting system yet and not much player detail, even if the stadiums do look quite nice. It is not even yet known if the game will fall under the heading of simulation or arcade game, or what perspective players will take. The developer's overall plan is to produce a number of United Sport games, but this will surely rely on their ability to come up with a decent one to begin with. No doubt the costs involved in this project are quite considerable. With no release date in sight interested parties will have to stay tuned to the company's website, which presently rests at www.unitedsoccer.staggan.com.

Let's make something clear from the outset; Winning Eleven 6 is not the game that will eventually be released as Pro Evolution Soccer 2 in Europe. The final product will hopefully improve upon WE6 in the same way that WE6 improved upon Pro Evolution Soccer - specifically though, KCET is promising to work hard to overcome areas in the Japanese release which fall short of our expectations.

Multiplay UK have built up an enviable reputation over the last couple of years for running the biggest LAN parties in the UK, and their latest epic struggle of man and machinery (catchily titled i11) was expected to take place at Newbury race course on the weekend of June 21st to 23rd. Unfortunately things haven't gone as smoothly as usual this time, with the organisers today admitting that only 67 people have so far paid for their places at the event, which has a capacity of 600. "Whatever the reasons, be it exams or World Cup, the signups just don't seem to be coming in", Multiplay's Craig Fletcher announced this morning. "At the present number of paid people we would have no option [but] to cancel it. We'd rather not do this, as we love LANs just as much as those attending, but being a small family-run company, we simply cannot afford to take a loss of thousands of pounds." The event may still go ahead as planned, but that depends on the number of players booked for the event rising to at least 240 by Monday morning. More details on the Multiplay website.

An MIT graduate student has successfully dismantled Xbox's security system and published (after what appears to have been some discussion with Microsoft and EFF lawyers) the results. Bottom line - Xbox security relies on a "chain of trust" built on a "seed of trust" key that is included in a physically secure, secret boot block and which is identical in all shipped hardware. So if you've got one, you've got them all and Andrew "bunnie" Huang's paper explains how he was able to get them. You can get full details of what he did here, in the academic version submitted to MIT, and bunnie also publishes an entertaining and knockabout history of his Xbox activities here. The Register is particularly taken with his happy announcement "hey! I'm finally done with my PhD thesis on supercomputer architecture...I can finally spend some more time playing with the Xbox" before he gets down to tearing it apart. Most definitely, a crazy guy. Where Microsoft goes wrong in the Xbox security system is that although it camouflages the existence of the secret boot block via a not secret boot block, and makes it very difficult and expensive to access the secret block (it's hard coded into the southbridge system ASIC, which is built in 0.13 micron), the block itself is sent in clear over the HyperTransport northbridge-southbridge bus. Thus, by monitoring and analysing this traffic (bunnie tells how, it involves a belt sander, don't ask) you get the key. It doesn't take expensive hardware to do so, matter of fact it can be done with the kind of hardware an MIT grad student has lying around after doing his PhD thesis on supercomputer architecture. Once you've done so you then have the ability to investigate the bootloader and kernel further, as bunnie says he's doing, and opening out the Xbox for standard peripherals and other operating systems. As he says, "if you ship your secrets in your hardware, it is a good assumption that the users will eventually - and perhaps quickly - know your secrets." On an individual console basis his work suggests that it will be simple enough to be able to run what you want on Xbox hardware as currently constructed, and there are obvious implications for Microsoft as it begins to turn Xbox into a connected device. Xbox machines each have a unique ID, you could no doubt get access to these if you circumvented the security, so there is both a privacy issue and a threat to Microsoft's revenues from online services. The paper offers Microsoft some suggestions as to alternative and more viable security approaches, and no doubt The Beast is working on updates even as you read. As for you conspiracy theorists about to mail us suggesting it's all a plot to get you to buy Xboxes before they put on a better padlock - just don't, okay?

Ah, ISS2 lad, I've been expecting you. Take a seat. Now, I'm afraid we've had to reject your application for best football game ever. I'm sorry son, but in the areas of control, authenticity, graphics and AI, your big brother Pro Evo still has you beat. I know you were hoping to come up with a nice arcadey alternative, but it hasn't happened. Even at its lowest level, Pro Evo is yer daddy. Fortunately for you though, things are looking up with your latest outing. I'm impressed by the speed at which you move, particularly at your ability to get on with the game instead of wasting half a minute per stoppage, and in addition I like your player modelling, which in terms of size, facial expressions, mouths, eyes and whatnot actually outdoes FIFA!

Seagate last night unveiled its latest hard drive, the U Series X, specifically designed for use in a variety of consumer electronics devices, including the Xbox. Coming in 10Gb and 20Gb varieties, it's supposed to be 25% thinner than rival drives, 33% lighter, more shock resistant, more reliable and incredibly quiet. Using a fluid dynamic bearing motor (if that means anything to you), the drive apparently produces just 2.6 bels of noise, which should barely be audible to most people. The new drive is due to ship to "key customers" later this month, and presumably that will include Microsoft, who currently use a mixture of Seagate and Western Digital hard drives in the Xbox. Obviously reducing the weight and noise of the Xbox, however slightly, is a good thing™, and the smaller size of the drive should also improve airflow within the console.

One of the announcements we missed during the chaos of E3 a couple of weeks ago was Activision's absorption of yet another development studio. Z-Axis, the company behind the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, will now become part of Activision's rapidly expanding in-house development stable, with $20m exchanging hands as part of the deal, along with assurances that key staff will stay at the company instead of jumping ship with their windfall. Despite the fact that Z-Axis is now part of Activision, they're still working on the bizarre sounding Dave Mirra BMX XXX for Acclaim. Described as the world's first "adult" (and we use that word in the loosest possible sense) extreme sports game, it adds scantily clad female bike riders into the mix, complete with "realistic physics for their hair, body and clothes" and FMV sequences of strippers being promised. And you thought Dead Or Alive Extreme Volleyball was bad... Related Feature - Activision grabs Shaba

While it received a critical slating from most quarters, the Tomb Raider movie did remarkably (worryingly?) well at the box office, quickly becoming the most successful videogame adaptation of all time. Unsurprisingly then, talk has been rife ever since that a sequel was on the way, with Speed director Jan de Bont signed up to helm the feature in recent months. And today more details have emerged. According to movie rumour site Dark Horizons, shooting could begin at Pinewood as soon as the end of August, with a summer 2003 release on the cards. There's also suggestions that "Cradle Of Life" is under consideration as the sequel's subtitle. Which would be a little ironic, as earlier reports suggested that lead actress Angelina Jolie's plans to start a family could get in the way of filming a sequel, although she neatly side-stepped that a few months ago by adopting a son instead of having her own. Meanwhile the official Red Dwarf website is reporting that Chris "Rimmer" Barrie will be returning as Lara Croft's butler in the sequel, claiming that "Chris was apparently such a hit in the first film that his role will be much increased this time round". Related Feature - Womb Raider

The first teaser trailer for the forthcoming House Of The Dead movie adaptation is now available from the official website. It's fairly low resolution, but features the best part of a minute of early footage from the movie, which only started filming a few weeks ago. Included are several shots of the cast running around in the woods being chased by leaping zombies, as well as some gunplay, a couple of high-kicking fight scenes and a fairly modest explosion. Nothing too enlightening then, and we only get a brief glimpse of Jurgen Prochnow doing his "crusty old sea captain" act (which looks suitably crusty if not particularly old), but if you want to get a feel for what the producers are up to over there in Vancouver, the trailer only weighs in at a couple of megabytes. Related Feature - Movie Of The Dead

European gamers rarely have reason to bicker amongst themselves. Well, unless you count this ongoing procession of aggressive tirades packed full of blinkered gibberish about whichever format the individual purchased which we're being forced to endure. But on the whole we're all a friendly, sociable bunch, with common problems - inexplicable release dates, PAL conversion problems, and publisher decisions which mean fantastic games never make it farther than Japan and the USA.

Kessen II is the latest in a seemingly endless succession of Koei games (very) loosely based on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. This was a time of war and chaos, with the Han dynasty in ruins and the rival kingdoms of Wu, Shu and Wei battling it out for supremacy.

Bioware. Star Wars. Xbox. Combine these three things and you have the makings of a truly stupendous videogame. The masters of the Western RPG get to play with an uncharted area of the Star Wars timeline using some of the most impressive console hardware ever conceived, and with the game due to hit the world market by the end of 2002 you can forget about Xbox failing. It can't.

Syrian game developers have joined the virtual war on terror, with the release of a game called Under Ash. According to a report from BBC News Online, the game allows players to take on the role of a young Palestinian called Ahmad who joins the intifada by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Later on you get to shoot Israeli settlers occupying your people's land, rescue wounded Palestinians, and eventually take on the might of the Israeli army along the buffer zone in south Lebanon. Far from glorifying terrorism though, the game actually penalises you for killing innocent civilians (although presumably the developers didn't afford the same protection to armed settlers) and there's no way to win the war, a sad reflection on the reality of the current situation in the Middle East. "In our modern history there is no solution for the conflicts and the game is some kind of a mirror", one of the designers told the BBC. "There is no solution for Ahmad's case. At the last level of the game there will be no major victory or reclaiming lands." Apparently gamers in Syria have been complaining that the game is too hard, but presumably that's the point. There's no way to fight your way to victory, slaughtering civilians doesn't get you anywhere, and if you're killed it's game over. A bit like life really. Related Feature - Operation Patriotic Video Game : America's Army

Although the GameBoy Advance wasn't really designed with 3D in mind, some developers have been meddling with pushing polygons on the hand-held. Some of the more impressive demonstrations of the GBA's capabilities we've seen to date have come from AGB Games, who have been working on their WFR 3D engine for some time now. The latest screenshots and movie footage to emerge from the developer show a modified version of the opening level from Quake running on the GBA, with AGB claiming it runs relatively smoothly at 15 to 60 frames per second. Obviously it's far from a pixel perfect conversion - the architecture has been simplified somewhat, the lighting looks more like Doom than Quake, and AGB need to work on their texture alignment skills. But the important thing is that the layout is instantly recognisable as the difficulty selection map from the beginning of Quake. Whether the engine is capable of recreating some of the more complex areas of Quake remains to be seen, and we're not sure exactly how you would go about effectively controlling a true 3D shooter with only four buttons and the D-pad at your disposal, but it does show that the GBA is capable of far more than the primitive flat-shaded polygons we've seen to date, and AGB are already talking about the possibility of creating 3D shooters and Wipeout-style racing games on the GameBoy.

In one of the more unusual game-related deaths we've come across, Thai police are apparently blaming Bomberman for the suicide of a twelve year old girl. The girl is reported to have become frustrated at not being able to win the game, and hung herself after another losing session on the game with her sister. "Siriwan often complained that she was unable to finish a game", a local police chief is quoted as saying. "She must have been so stressed out and frustrated." Meanwhile in Hong Kong, a seventeen year old gamer was found slouched unconscious over his keyboard in a cyber café in the early hours of Wednesday morning, having collapsed during an all-night Diablo II marathon. Friends who found him were unable to revive him, and the boy was declared dead on arrival at the local hospital. Doctors suggested he might have been effected by flashing lights on the computer screen, presumably as a result of epilepsy. And finally, we're still waiting for police to make the obvious link between a security van hold-up in France earlier today and Grand Theft Auto 3. According to a report on BBC News 24 this lunchtime, the overambitious robbers forced the van off the road and then got the drivers to open the safe .. by threatening them with a rocket launcher. It's a mad world out there.

There's no shortage of games set during World War II at the moment, from strategy (including Sudden Strike 2 and Blitzkrieg) and simulation (IL-2 Sturmovik and Panzer Front Bis) to all-out action (Medal of Honour and Castle Wolfenstein). One genre that has largely escaped this madness to date is the role-playing game, but all of that is about to change with Another War.

Behave! Konami has officially revealed that the scenes of Solid Snake skateboarding around the Big Shell will not appear in Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. "Mr. Kojima is always doing cheeky things like this," a Konami spokesperson told C&VG. Snake skateboarding is actually part of Konami's other title, Evolution Skateboarding, but it has not been revealed whether or not the scenes of the Big Shell will appear there. One has to wonder what else in the Substance trailer we so warmly received is simply spliced in from another game, or worse, whether some of it will actually appear in the full game at all. Related Feature - Konami releases Substantial video

There's more good news for PDA owners today, as ZioSoft releases its PocketPC version of Ultima Underworld. A truly groundbreaking role-playing game for its time, Ultima Underworld featured huge dungeons to explore from a first person perspective, with graphics that made Wolfenstein 3D (released the same year) look positively primitive by comparison. Beyond the now rather dated visuals, the game also offered a wide variety of monsters to kill, rival factions to interact with, a novel rune stone based magic system, and a princess (well, baron's daughter if you're going to be pedantic) to rescue. If you fancy a little palm-top nostalgia, you can now buy Ultima Underworld from ZioSoft for $29.95.

3DO have signed up British developer Eutechnyx to develop a new street racing game for them, due for release some time next summer on the ubiquitous "next generation consoles". Eutechnyx, based in the wilds of northern England (Gateshead, to be precise), are something of a motor sports specialist, working on Le Mans 24 Hours, 007 Racing and F1 World Grand Prix 2000 in recent years. With their latest project, imaginatively code-named "Street Racing", MD Brian Jobling is promising to "go beyond driving superfast cars" by giving players "the opportunity to experience the whole street racing culture". The mind boggles. "Eutechnyx really has racing games down - it's all they do", 3DO bigwig Jeff Cretcher helpfully pointed out. "Their highly specialized expertise allows us to concentrate on what's really important - making a great game." 3DO? A great game? Shurely shome mishtake? Related Feature - Le Mans 24 Hours review

Independent developer Complex Games is hard at work on a new multiplayer action game called Dungeon : Gladiator. Based around their own modular game engine, known as Multiplex, it promises to offer "grand scale gladiatorial combat", with the ability to customise your character, his abilities, appearance and fighting styles to suit your tastes. As well as the familiar duel, deathmatch and king of the hill gameplay modes, more intriguing sounding options such as Skulls, Chariot and Fortress will also be on offer, while an online ranking system will track the action and let you measure yourself against your foes. Gladiator is still at a fairly early stage in development and the in-game models we've seen so far are a bit rough compared to the arenas in which they're fighting, but the game does show promise. Complex are also planning a single player version of the game known as Dungeon : Shades Below, with a fantasy horror setting inspired by the likes of Dante and HP Lovecraft. More details on both games can be found on the Complex Games website. Related Feature - Dungeon : Gladiator screenshots

Apart from promoting its soon-to-be-released wireless controller, WaveBird, and its mobile monitor peripheral, Nintendo also used E3 to show off a prototype of its new keyboard / controller hybrid, intended for use with games like Phantasy Star Online Episodes I and II. Reports suggest that the controller is the same as the normal GameCube controller, with a miniature keyboard between the left analogue stick / D-pad and the C-stick / action buttons. The controller will be released in Japan, but Nintendo has yet to confirm whether the controller will be made available elsewhere. Related Feature - Nintendo hops on the mobile bandwagon