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Fans of the inimitable Metal Slug will be pleased to learn that Virgin is set to publish the 'unofficial' third instalment, Metal Slug X, on PSone this May.

Microsoft has come under fire in the States over its treatment of third parties, according to the Financial Times website. Certain game developers, speaking anonymously, have bandied together over the issue of preferential treatment for in-house development teams, and enforced software bundles that focus solely on first party offerings. Apart from motivating retailers to sell its own software by providing additional supplies, the group also alleges that Microsoft's forthcoming online games service will require information exchange with the Redmond based monster corporation, even for third party software. In strict fairness to Microsoft though, a unified online service approach is nothing new. Sega's ill-fated Dreamcast rooted all online play through central servers. Apart from offering Microsoft extra revenue opportunities, it promotes consistency of GUI and implementation. Don't be too surprised if Sony's much anticipated online service works in much the same way. All this within hours of MS chief executive Steve Ballmer's speech in Hannover focusing on responsibility. "We can't have business policies that are capricious or variable. We have to be reliable and consistent." This is part of a new Microsoft approach to business focusing on its relationships with other companies. Related Feature - X Marks The Spot

Microsoft's Xbox videogame console launches tonight at midnight, when the console goes on sale at stores all over Europe. In the UK, the console will sell for the princely sum of £299. Celebrating the launch in style, Microsoft has taken over Virgin Megastores' flagship Oxford Street store, and apart from Richard Branson appearing in person, TV and radio presenter Jonathan Ross is expected to turn up to entertain the crowds. Queues will be long and the venue packed out this evening, and Microsoft plans to decorate the store with Christmas lights and other festive symbols, claiming that many people delayed their own festivities for the Xbox launch, and as previously reported, the first lucky Xbox buyer will receive a ride home in a limousine. Related Feature - X Marks The Spot

Interplay has announced that PlayStation 2 hackandslash spectacular Baldur's Gate : Dark Alliance is coming to Xbox later this year. The game's unveiling appeared midway through the publisher's fourth quarter and annual operating results for 2001. The announcement came from Interplay's interim CEO and president Herve Caen. Recently released to critical acclaim, the game concerns the plight of the decadent town of Baldur's Gate and sees players taking up the mantel of a dwarven fighter, an elfish sorceress or a human archer in an unending fight through the depths of countless sewers, dungeons and other foul corners of the world, despatching along the way skeletons, weird D&D inspired blobs and other nefarious denizens of the underworld from the im/mortal coil. Related Feature - PS2 gets Black Isle treatment

Microsoft is to start a new commercial television channel in Denmark using Viasat's digital-TV platform. Transmitting eight hours a day between 3PM and midnight, the channel will demonstrate Xbox games and provide information on the console itself, and starts broadcasting tomorrow, Thursday 14th March, when the Xbox goes on sale. Viasat's digital-TV system has also allowed Microsoft to invest in so-called pop-ups during other television programmes, used to inform subscribers of the new channel. Viasat has a total of 550,000 digital-TV subscribers. Related Feature - X Marks The Spot

The flood of bizarre game to movie conversions continues unabated this week, with Tecmo's cleavage flashing beat 'em up Dead Or Alive the latest franchise to get signed on by Hollywood. Oddly enough the production company behind the bid is indie group Mindfire Entertainment, which was responsible for the hilarious Free Enterprise a few years back. For those of you not lucky enough to have stumbled across this gem, it's a kind of Swingers for geeks about a group of thirty year old kids with a passion for comic books, action figures and obscure sci-fi movies, guest starring Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, playing a washed up actor .. William Shatner. So we do at least have some hope that Dead Or Alive : The Movie will turn out to be more than another abysmal Street Fighter style cash-in, although we're a little baffled that Free Enterprise co-writer and Mindfire COO Mark Altman has declared Dead Or Alive to be "the perfect motion picture franchise", given the game's almost total lack of plot and the fact that the nearest it comes to have well rounded characters is the skimpily clad girls that grace every advert for it. Either way, production is expected to start later this year and the movie should be in the cinemas some time in 2003, so we'll know soon whether Altman and co can make anything of this or if it's destined to be another big budget disaster. Related Feature - Tekken movie in the works

IGN is reporting that a port of Sega's popular Skies of Arcadia RPG to GameCube is underway at Point of View Software. The development firm has plenty of experience, having already ported several games to the console. Skies of Arcadia is expected to arrive on GameCube in the States later this year, and is said to be a faithful adaptation of the Dreamcast code. Related Feature - Skies of Arcadia Dreamcast review

Polish developers Techland have announced another new game based on the graphics engine from their forthcoming tactical shooter Chrome. This time round it's a rally sim called Xpand Rally, introducing "an extreme version of WRC racing" known as WRCeXpanded, with "no limitation of horsepower or tuning modifications". The game will take place across 36 tracks in a variety of weather conditions, from rain and snow to clear sunny days and moonlit nights, with more than twenty vehicles available to tweak and drive. Xpect more details soon. [You're fired - Ed] Related Feature - Techland interview

Britain's biggest LAN party just got bigger with the announcement that German publisher CDV will be offering visitors a sneak peek at some of their upcoming games, including massively multiplayer cyberpunk role-player Neocron, first person shooter Breed and space strategy sequel Imperium Galactica 3. The company will also be sponsoring Britain's first official tournament for their real-time strategy add-on Cossacks : Art Of War, and there's talk of being able to "meet some of the more interesting characters from CDV's games". We have images of a scantily clad Lula lookalike wandering around the venue, but hopefully it'll prove to be more .. well .. interesting. Taking place at the Newbury Race Course over the Easter weekend, i10 has the capacity to cater for a thousand gamers, making it the largest LAN party ever held in the UK. Other sponsors include BT Games Domain and Microsoft, who will be bringing along Xbox demo pods and a Halo network for players to try out, as well as an Xbox themed chill-out zone. The mind boggles. More details of i10 can be found on the Multiplay website. Related Feature - iX

Ananova is reporting that Douglas Maxwell's play Helmet (based on Tekken) is showing tonight at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh as part of the Paines Plough theatre company's 10-week UK tour. Helmet employs digital animation, hip-hop choreography and a pulsating soundtrack according to the news site. If anybody in the area is heading down, we'd love to hear what it's like. Tekken Tag Tournament, the last game in the beat 'em up series upon which the play is based, was recently re-released on Sony's budget 'Platinum' label.

Nintendo is planning to launch the GameBoy Advance in new, jet-black threads to celebrate the release of Super Mario World : Super Mario Advance 2 on April 12 this year. The game, which is a near pixel-perfect translation of the Super Nintendo classic, is expected to follow Mario Kart Super Circuit's lead in establishing itself as one of the GBA's top sellers. The black GBA, the first official re-styling the console has received since its arrival in Europe last summer, will carry an RRP of €99 like its predecessors. The black styling is inspired by Nintendo's GameCube console, which will be available in black from day one in Europe, allowing gamers to colour coordinate their hardware if they are so inclined. Related Feature - GBA price drop

Metal Gear Solid. Those three words still manage to affect people in this industry. If you were at ECTS for its last visit to Olympia, you probably remember the twenty-foot Konami video screen and Europe's first glimpse of Metal Gear Solid 2 : Sons of Liberty. It was about the only thing during those three hot, muggy days of trade show endurance that brought the huddled masses to a standstill. For the five or so minutes it lasted, you could have heard a pin drop. Well, if it weren't for the sound of Russian ID-modified rifles spitting venom all over the place and our gruff, righteous hero pursued by an avalanche of water and debris... In any event, a lot has happened since ECTS 2000. The PlayStation 2 launched to critical acc.. well, just criticism actually. With a high price tag and a lack of truly great games, in a lot of cases it was the promise of games like Metal Gear Solid 2 that sold the console during those early months. Indeed, one of the criticisms levelled at Konami during the development of MGS2 was that the hype machine could be responsible for a backlash if the game failed to live up to the expectations of deprived PS2 owners when it was eventually released. As the trickle of quality games for the PS2 became a full-on torrent this became less of a problem, but with MGS still occupying a special place in many gamers' hearts it was always going to be difficult if Konami failed to deliver on 110% of their promises. Of course, as you may have guessed, they have done just that. Metal Gear Solid 2 is not the best PS2 game out there, and if you're really strapped for cash this month you might want to set it aside for a rainy day and get stuck into the likes of platform favourite Jak & Daxter or his vaguely devilish chum Maximo. Having said that though, this game is a prime example of why the PS2 stands to remain the world's most important videogame platform and beat off its second generation of competition. Take the finest elements of animation, design, music, voice acting and artificial intelligence and use them to present an engaging adventure starring the hero of Shadow Moses and you have MGS2 pretty much wrapped up.

Epic's Mark Rein has revealed in an interview with HomeLAN Fed that Unreal 2 will no longer include multiplayer support. Given the recent announcement of Unreal Tournament 2 this is perhaps not entirely surprising, and Mark admitted that the new multiplayer-focused game was a recent idea which "was not anticipated at any time during the design of Unreal 2 nor during much of the development". The dropping of online support will also help developers Legend to get the game out the door in a timely fashion, as Unreal 2's expected release date has now been pushed back from summer to Christmas. "Now that we have UT2 clearly in the picture and ready to go before Unreal 2, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the dev team to expend their time and energy polishing multiplayer when they can use that time to polish an exceptional single player experience", according to Mark. Which is a shame, because by all accounts Legend had some kind of class-based mode planned for the multiplayer portion of Unreal 2, with players able to capture territory and build force field and sentry guns to help defend their team's gains. On the bright side, we should at least see both games some time this year now, as well as Unreal Championship on the Xbox if Microsoft's online plans get off the ground. Related Feature - Unreal 2 screenshots

Thundering into the European hardware market today is leading American graphics card manufacturer VisionTek with its GeForce4 Ti4600. Having established two regional offices (in the UK and Germany) this February, the company has launched its GeForce4 Ti4600 product borrowing heavily from NVIDIA's reference board design. In fact, a cursory evaluation of both reveals no striking differences. This is no bad thing though, because as we reported last month, the Ti4600 is the fastest graphics card ever produced, towering over its siblings and rivals alike. VisionTek director of business development Dirk Schunk described the launch as "only the beginning," citing the company's continued relationship with leading European retailers as a stepping stone to market dominance. He may have a distinct lack of consumer interest to deal with though, as the VGA/DVI/S-Video 128Mb, 650MHz DDR-driven Xtasy GeForce4 Ti4600 will retail for €549 (roughly £340) from day one, and there is still a distinct lack of games capable of harnessing the board's advanced capabilities. In fact, this writer's own experience of the Ti4600 indicates that in modern PC releases - such as Aquanox and Medal of Honor : Allied Assault - features that push the vanilla GeForce 3 to its fullest are few and far between. Nevertheless, the Ti4600 is not the only card VisionTek plans to ship. The moderately slower (but inevitably overclockable) Xtasy GeForce4 Ti4400 is due to join its big brother on store shelves shortly for the princely sum of €449 (£275), along with two MX based cards, the Xtasy GeForce4 MX 440 (€199 / £120) and the Xtasy GeForce4 MX 420 (€169 / £105). The Ti4400 represents the best 'bang per buck' as it were, outpacing older GeForce 3 based cards with tweakable headroom, and offering a reasonable saving over the meaty Ti4600. Related Feature - GeForce4 Ti4600 review

Tecmo has announced a Dead or Alive 3 "Booster Disc" for American Xbox owners. The disc comprises the bonus content present in the Japanese and European versions of the game, which was added after the original game shipped in the US. The Booster Disc will accompany the June issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, which in time-honoured (but not exactly time-honouring) monthly tradition will hit the streets on May 7th… "The Booster Disc is my way of personally thanking gamers for supporting Dead or Alive 3," said Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of the Dead or Alive series. "We developed Dead or Alive 3 first and foremost for the U.S. market. When we created this bonus material for the Japanese and European versions of DOA3, we didn't want American gamers to feel left out. That's why we're offering these extras free of charge. It's a win-win situation for everybody. Of course, the only system on which this is possible is Xbox, thanks to the built-in hard drive." Effectively a patch then, but one devoid of the usual bug fixes. If this Booster Disc does iron out any problems in the code, Tecmo is pretending otherwise, and we can't blame them, or Microsoft, for not drawing that to our attention. One of the biggest linchpins in Microsoft's console strategy is consumer perception of the Xbox as a distinctive entertainment medium. Not a PC. Not a halfling stricken with bugs and patched software. MS would do well not to make a regular fixture of these Booster Discs, because it promotes similarities between the PC and the Xbox that go far beyond the boundaries previously outlined, and against the very principles of the console. Fixing them at the centre of a tirade of hard disk promotion is a bit of a risky ploy as well, but then again, Microsoft makes its biggest profits skating on thin ice, and Xbox is unlikely to prove an exception. Related Feature - X Marks The Spot

When Microsoft first announced that they were entering the cut-throat world of console manufacturing, many people were sceptical. They were going up against the might of Sony and Nintendo with no previous console experience, and offering what appeared at first sight to be a glorified collection of PC spare parts in a (relatively) compact, non-upgradeable box with all the style of a VCR. And yet, when the Xbox arrived in America last November it sold a highly respectable 1.5 million units over the holiday season, slightly more than Nintendo's much vaunted GameCube. The question is, three weeks after its disappointing Japanese debut and plagued by rumours of technical faults, can Microsoft mirror that success in Europe?

Pro Evolution Soccer is the finest football game ever produced, and has left its competition not so much breathing down its neck as staggering to keep up with its wake. Even Konami is bored of its artistry and dominance, and now plans to unsettle PES fans with the release of a definitive International Superstar Soccer game later on this year. By comparison, Sony's This Is Football franchise, well, isn't, and EA's FIFA series is apparently under the direction of ballet teachers, this year's effort notwithstanding. PES is gritty, it's real and it's instantly discernible as the beautiful game. Whether you agree with my point of view or not is pretty irrelevant, but if PES doesn't float your boat then there are certainly a number of choices to consider in your pursuit of a realistic football game. Footy videogames are a bit of Turing Test for developers these days, rarely living up to their distinctive roots and so often leaving us wondering, will they ever be more enjoyable than the real thing? Who knows, but Silicon Dreams are due some luck, having developed or at least had input into Sega's Worldwide Soccer series, the old Michael Owen World League Soccer games and now the coveted UEFA Champions League license videogames across a number of systems. If you want to save yourself a read, it's still hovering somewhere between FIFA, TIF and the legions of also-rans, so it's not the finest footy game out there - in fact it's not even top three - but it's still a solid effort, and just as FIFA '99 was a game that showed EA Sports' true promise, UEFA Champions League Seasons 2001/2002 is almost certainly the precursor to something good.

Not satisfied with butchering the Wing Commander franchise by writing and directing quite possibly the worst game to movie conversion in history (and let's face it, that's no mean feat), Chris Roberts is now digging up the rotting carcass to produce a Wing Commander TV series. According to the website of his new company, Point of No Return, "Chris Roberts (a.k.a. "gaming God") [sic] does it again", which doesn't bode well. The promise of "in your face action and incredible special effects - TV style" hardly fills us with confidence either. We can only hope that Chris has hired somebody who actually knows what they're doing this time, because we still bear the emotional scars of accidentally stumbling across the Wing Commander movie on a cable TV channel during a visit to New York a couple of years back. Of course, Chris Roberts may decide to go back to doing a job he knows something about - developing games - instead of playing at being a movie director. The PNR website does mention that the company is planning to work on episodic games to be delivered via broadband, as well as films and television series, but as they seem to be under the misapprehension that they invented the whole concept, and then go on to talk about multimedia revolutions and teams of visionaries, we're a little worried that Chris and co may have vanished up their own creative posteriors. Related Feature - Chris Roberts "a bit too ambitious"

Making a first person shooter set in the Command & Conquer universe must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Essentially Westwood have taken the lone wolf missions from the million selling real-time strategy series and given you a ground floor view of the action. Playing as the elite GDI commando Havoc you get to rampage your way through NOD lines, dealing with kidnapped scientists, hideous experiments, tiberium mutants and tactical nuclear strikes along the way. Settings vary from the rubble-strewn streets of an occupied village to the coastal defences of a NOD stronghold, and although the graphics are fairly primitive by modern standards they do an adequate job of bringing the C&C world to life in 3D for the first time. Missions typically begin with a pre-rendered briefing from your commanding officer aboard a GDI ship, although things rarely go according to plan and you will find yourself bombarded with additional objectives from the moment you hit the ground. Radio messages from your CO, local resistance fighters and other GDI units come thick and fast, and you'll find yourself being sidetracked to rescue trapped soldiers, take out SAM sites and blow up power plants along the way to your primary objective. Luckily a vast array of weapons is available to help you make it to the end in one piece, from your basic pistol and assault rifle to flamethrowers, chainguns, lasers, explosives and personal ion cannons. There's even a rather tasty sniper rifle, allowing you to pick off enemies from a safe distance.

Nintendo has repaired the breach between itself and colossal Japanese developer Squaresoft. After five years out in the cold, Nintendo fans can look forward to Final Fantasy games appearing on GameCube and GameBoy Advance, the first of which is anticipated before the end of 2002. The last Nintendo console to play host to Square was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), which went the way of the dodo many moons ago. Squaresoft plans to establish a subsidiary to develop Nintendo versions of its most popular franchise, and this subsidiary will be backed by Fund Q, a videogame development fund started by Hiroshi Yamauchi, long-standing president of Nintendo. Final Fantasy on GameCube could be the key to bolstering Japanese interest in the console. Having recently invested a reported $116 (£81.5 / €132.7) million in Squaresoft, Sony may have something to say about all this as the company's second-largest shareholder. As far as we're concerned though, this is something to celebrate. Related Feature - Final Fantasy X preview

Not content with releasing exclusive new Delta Force games on both PSone and PS2 this year, Novalogic will also be going back to their roots with a new PC entry in the franchise - Task Force Dagger. Due out as early as June, the fourth game in the multi-million selling tactical combat series will be based around an updated version of the Delta Force : Land Warrior engine, with a selection of new characters and weapons on offer. And in a break from tradition you will be able to play as any of ten different special forces units, including the British SAS as well as American Delta Force and SEAL troops. Ironically the developer behind Task Force Dagger won't be Novalogic itself, but Zombie Studios, best known for their own Spec Ops series of military action games and (more recently) the Rainbow Six spin-off Covert Ops. According to Novalogic president Lee Milligan though, "they have the experience, knowledge and ability to work with us to do the Delta Force franchise justice and to deliver a combination of realism and originality that will delight and surprise the Delta Force community". With Task Force Dagger just a few months from release we should know soon whether the combined forces of Zombie and Novalogic can come up with something more involving than Land Warrior, and whether the gameplay can overcome the rather dated looking graphics. Related Feature - Delta Force : Task Force Dagger screenshots

One of the most unusual (not to mention profane) games that we've come across recently is Rock Manager. It's been available for a few months now in its native Scandinavia, but this week it finally gets a wider release elsewhere in Europe. We spoke to script writer Erik Johansson to find out why it's taken so long for the game to reach these shores, and which illegal narcotic the developers were inhaling when they came up with the idea in the first place...

Recall or no, Microsoft's Xbox is no longer on sale at major Japanese retail chain Loax. A notice, which reads "We are suspending temporarily sales of the Xbox console itself in order to supply credible products to our customers," has been attached to display boxes in stores and is apparently a result not only of the console's poor reported sell-through of 124,000 units, but the recent debacle over scratched discs. Whether Loax will resume sales of the system is unknown at this time. Unsurprisingly, nobody from Microsoft was available to comment. Related Feature - No recall, says Microsoft

Microsoft has stood its ground on the subject of technical problems with the Japanese Xbox, which led to some 243 complaints from punters with scratched DVDs. Microsoft's Japanese website update about the incident led to certain observers announcing a full-on recall of the console, but the monstrous Redmond-based corporation has staunchly denied this, stating once and for all: "There is no recall of Xbox in Japan or any other market." Microsoft Customer Care in Japan will look into individual cases and offers to evaluate any system that a customer is concerned about. Any repairs or replacements will be made at the company's discretion. Curiously, Microsoft has chosen to downplay the significance of the issue, effectively telling consumers who have shelled out that small scratches to the outside edge of some game discs is "primarily a cosmetic issue that does not affect performance," before come out with another dubious nugget, "a positive customer experience is of the utmost importance to Microsoft." Microsoft Xbox launches in Europe and Australia (shurely the shame thing? -Ed) on March 14th, 2002. Related Feature - Xperience

Codemasters plans to take on the combined might of EA Sports, Konami and Sony amongst others. Targeting the lucrative football genre, the company has announced Club Football, a game with 15 uniquely branded versions tailor made for supporters of 15 specific clubs. Instead of just rebranding boxes and manuals, the Codies plan to focus each release on the exploits of that particular team, naming them after each team with a Club Football subtitle. The game will first be playable at E3 in May, and Codemasters claim that the game is FIFA/ISS-esque with "the most realistic representations of players even seen in a football title" according to a company spokesperson. Before long, we can expect to see the united colours of Club Football sprinkled around various gaming emporiums across Europe. The teams to be used at listed below, and if your favourite team is absent, it's probably because the Codies couldn't get the license. Never mind though; if successful, one can expect to see annual updates and the like, along the lines of season highlight videos…

Metal Gear Solid 2 : Sons of Liberty has finally gone on sale after what seems like years of waiting. The game that a lot of people bought their PS2s to play is expected to become the fastest selling videogame ever, with figures released yesterday indicating that it will produce £29 (€47) million at UK retail. Highlighting the convergence of two popular forms of media, movies and videogames, Konami has announced that some £9 (€14) million is expected to be generated during the game's opening weekend, a figure which rivals the takings of Disney/Pixar animated spectacular Monsters, Inc. 550,000 copies of the game are available today. "In a period when video game revenue is outstripping that of other entertainment industries, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the biggest game launch the industry has ever seen," says Jon Murphy, Marketing Manager for Konami UK, who will hope that the game can live up to its billing in light of these astonishing sales projections. Of course, the game's US launch in November of 2001 saw it steal an unprecedented 33 per cent share of the games market's sales and generate over $18.8 (£13.2 / €21.4) million during its first week on sale. Metal Gear Solid 2 : Sons of Liberty is, for the moment at least, exclusively available on PlayStation 2, and launching the game a week ahead of Microsoft's Xbox may help to scupper sales of the more expensive console debutant. MGS2 is also available in a system bundle, consisting of the console, a gamepad and the game itself for £229.99 (€373). Related Feature - Hideo Kojima and Harry Gregson-Williams interview

Take 2 have revealed that a sequel to last year's Caribbean dictator sim Tropico is in the works, replacing the cast of Fidel Castro wannabes with famous pirates plundering the Spanish Main. Yes, you too can now rule an island full of cut-throat buccaneers, managing important supplies such as rum, weapons, wenches and .. parrots. Apparently the latter play a big part in the game, as "pirates equipped with a parrot on their shoulders and a scary black hat are more likely to strike fear into their victims' hearts". Although the sequel clearly still has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, the economic model has been turned on its head - rather than growing food, mining ore and producing goods, the wealth of your pirate island will depend on what you can loot from passing ships and capturing prisoners to work for you. A zoning system has also been added to the game, so that wealthy pirates will tend to congregate in the posh areas and upgrade their shacks into impressive looking mansions as they move up in the world. Another change is the company behind the game. Tropico developers PopTop are hard at work on a new game at the moment, and so the sequel is being hand-crafted by Rachel Bernstein and her merry men at Frog City, the team that brought us the addictive turn-based strategy game Trade Empires a few months ago. Tropico 2 : Pirate Cove is currently expected to make landfall in the autumn, so we should know more soon. Related Feature - Tropico review

Sony Computer Entertainment America has unveiled its plans for a national online network for PlayStation 2 owners. After months of preparation, the company has announced that the service will go live in August, just in time to compete with Microsoft's competing network, which is scheduled to go online sometime this year. Both networks will allow players to compete with one another over the Internet, but instead of restricting access to those with broadband connections, Sony plans to release a $39.99 Network Adapter consisting of both Ethernet (10/100Mbps) and a 56K V90 modem. Accompanying the proposed adapter will be a startup disc, consisting of documentation, product registration options and setup files, along with a handful of online game demos. Sony's recent collaboration with many of America's largest service providers means that at least 11 million consumers will be able to take advantage of the PlayStation 2's online network if they please. Sony plans to flood the service with features and games to create a content-rich environment for its customers. In the meantime, a network beta test will commence this March, similar to the one currently underway in Europe. Related Feature - PS2 online for 70% of DSL users in Japan

Thrustmaster has secured a 2002 FIFA World Cup license, allowing it to produce a "team of accessories" to commemorate the occasion. Gamepads, an arcade stick and memory cards are currently planned for PSone, PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube. Incredibly, having already delivered a beat 'em up mat capable of picking up on the movements of able-bodied wannabe martial artists, Thrustmaster plans to manufacture a "2002 FIFA World Cup Football Stadium" accessory, composed of a mat and three vertical sensors, that can detect the player's kicking action and translate it onto the screen. Shoot, pass, lob and tackle will be amongst the actions the Stadium accessory can reproduce. The complete range of accessories will be available at the end of April, with pricing still to be determined.

CMP have realised our darkest nightmares with the announcement that this year's ECTS will sport a radical new look. In the past the event has at least nominally been trade-only, even if some under-age blaggers still manage to find their way through the rather lax security each year. But from now on the show will be open to everyone, although event director Andy Lane did at least offer us a ray of hope, commenting that ExCeL's layout "enables us to have consumer halls sitting alongside trade-only halls". Hopefully this means that there will still be somewhere for journos and retail buyers to get serious business done this year without being trampled under foot by a horde of 12 year old Tomb Raider fanatics trying to get a glimpse of the latest Lara Croft model. CMP describe this as "a radical and exciting change", but it's not yet clear how successful it will be. For starters, just last week Future Publishing announced that they were backing a new exhibition called Games Matrix, which is focused entirely on consumers and will be taking place at Earls Court a few weeks after ECTS. We doubt that there's a big enough market to support two major gaming shows in London in the space of a month, so one (or both) is likely to end up half empty. Will big name publishers wanting to show off their latest games to the public choose to cater for both trade and consumers at the venerable ECTS, or opt for a new and untested central London punters-only event? Or will they just do what Nintendo did last year, and hold their own shows alongside ECTS? Other changes to the traditional ECTS format include national pavilions for France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia ("to provide a place for visitors to meet and greet fellow colleagues") and keynote seminars from prominent gaming industry figures. Retailers will also be catered for, with a new VIP retail lounge to match the developer lounge and ever-improving press facilities already present at the show. "It's impossible to come up with an event that everyone will be 100 per cent happy with", Andy Lane admitted. "But we're confident this is as close as you could possibly get and that ECTS 2002 will be the industry event everyone has been asking for." Does this sound like the ECTS 2002 you have been asking for? Fill out the comment form below and let us know! Related Feature - The Future Of ECTS