Latest Articles (Page 3509)

I'm not sure there are many Tycoons left to make. Ever since the enormous success of Rollercoaster Tycoon, many have jumped on the strategy management bandwagon with a paraphrased moniker in an attempt to get a piece of the action. Microsoft, never being one to miss an opportunity, has skipped on board with Zoo Tycoon. Everything about Zoo Tycoon is familiar. From its feature list down to the interface, this is cut-and-paste game development at its most heinous. If you've played Rollercoaster Tycoon, you will know what to expect in the way of park building and management here. Simply replace the thrill rides and awe-inspiring custom coasters with meandering animal sprites and piles of poop in your mind's eye and you'll get the idea in a flash. Freeform mode gives you a fresh plot of land and a whole wad of cash to do pretty much with as you please and construct your ideal manure-scented world. Construction and item placement are simple enough, and the chunky toy-town interface leaves the user with little doubt as to what they are doing. However, to learn the true nuances of keeping your animals and customers happy, you're better off going the scenario route.

Microsoft has announced that Xbox production is up and running at Flextronics' European Xbox manufacturing facility in Hungary. European Xboxes are already rolling off the production line at what is apparently the first ever video game console factory located in Europe. The Xbox is due out in Europe on March 14th 2002, around the time Nintendo is rumoured to be launching GameCube. Nintendo have still to announce a firm date. "Today is the birth of Xbox in Europe" said an enthusiastic Sandy Duncan, veepee of Xbox Europe. Microsoft have once again decided not to release a launch allocation figure for the time being, but with production already up and running, hope to satisfy whatever demand there is for the console in a timely fashion. "Our ability to deliver substantial quantities on a weekly basis from day one and beyond will ensure that stock is adequate and that the launch is smooth," he added. The location of the plant brings significant employment to the region, which is a nice bonus.

TDK Mediactive looks set to publish for Nintendo GameCube. Titles in development by contractors like Digital Illusions, Vicious Cycle and Prolific Publishing include Shrek, Robotech and Dinotopia. Of the three, Shrek has already appeared elsewhere, as a launch title on Microsoft's Xbox where it met with a pretty average reception. According to reviewers at IGN, Shrek is an exceptional tech demo with a clumsy platformer wrapped around it. Shrek for the GameCube is almost certainly going to be a straight port, but there may be hope for the other two. Kids are bound to enjoy the game regardless thanks to its movie-like visuals.

Last week Nintendo claimed to have sold approximately $100 million worth of GameCube hardware, software and accessories in the first few days of the console's launch in America. A week later and the Japanese gaming giant is finally quoting figures. Nintendo has stated that during its first week of availability in North America, over 500,000 GameCube consoles have been sold. CTW is quoting a figure of 565,000, presumably extrapolated. Luigi's Mansion is apparently the most popular of the console's early titles. About 100,000 units of the launch allocation have been spread over Canada and Latin America, with the remainder going to rental and similar channels. We know that Xbox launched with around 300,000 units, but Microsoft has not released official sales figures yet. That said, it's a good bet that most if not all of them went to pre-orders. With both Nintendo and Microsoft shipping top-ups to retailers at the rate of about 100,000 to 125,000 a week, Nintendo looks set to ship more in the run up to Christmas, assuming there is demand. Either way, it's a good time to be a gamer in the States, with so many consoles boasting high quality software line-ups. Related Feature - Conducting the battle

Codemasters have announced that they will be publishing the latest effort from Britsoft developers The Bitmap Brothers. Due out next summer and provisionally titled World War II : D-Day To Berlin, it's a real-time action-strategy game which sets you the task of driving the Axis forces back across Europe as an Allied commander. With interest in World War II once again high following the recent success of the excellent Band of Brothers and not-so-excellent Pearl Harbour, Codemasters have high hopes for the title. Bitmap Brothers MD Mike Montgomery reports that the company is "committed to creating an experience that will have broad appeal from the core RTS player through to the casual gamer who will be attracted by the game's historical detail", and with the marketing might of Codemasters behind them they "believe [it] can become a major blockbuster". Hopefully it will turn out better than their last effort, the rather rough round the edges Z : Steel Soldiers, which flopped at retail and helped to plunge publisher EON Digital into financial turmoil. Related Feature - Z : Steel Soldiers review

People just will not stop tinkering with their Xboxes! We're all in favour of course, with reservations (the ones that stop us getting sued) so here's a little round-up of things people are speculating on, and some things people have actually done. The first thing we discovered was Icrontic's articles on disassembly and modification. Icrontic speculate on the possibility of upgrading the Xbox's hard disk and getting hold of its contents using a desktop PC. Now, while a lot of people have speculated on the file system used in Xbox, we have our own theory… If you were Microsoft, and you wanted to avoid exactly the kind of thing sites like Icrontic are proposing, you wouldn't just opt for some unusual file system, you would encrypt it. So the chances are, the Xbox hard disk uses FAT32 just as most standard computers, but that it uses proprietary encryption. In other words, encryption that would have to be reverse-engineered (without doubt illegally) in order to gain access to the files. This would be a useful way to block professional emulation too. After all, if you can't emulate Xbox without breaking the law, you're screwed. Anyway, aside from the hard disk, Icrontic comment on the missing RAM modules, which could indeed be soldered on. But the gains would be negligible with every Xbox game developed for 64Mb, and the danger to the Xbox involved would dissuade all but the most skilled. Icrontic also want to modify the Xbox front panel for some sort of USB hub, and as Anandtech noted during their journey into the Xbox hardware, there is a way to put the Xbox into debug mode and presumably enter whatever BIOS setup screens the console harbours. Furthermore, Icrontic managed to improve speeds ripping music to the hard disk of the Xbox by replacing the fairly cheap ATA33 cable. Aside from that, GameSpy have jumped in with their contribution to the Xbox networking arena. After XboxGW used Linux to good effect as a simplistic Ethernet bridge, GameSpy decided some sort of GameSpy Arcade tie-in was a good plan, and they have whipped up a tool which does much the same thing, called GameSpy Tunnel. The venerable matchmaker notes that players will almost certainly need a broadband connection at their disposal to reap the benefits of Halo's multiplayer modes, but at least it's not as fiddly as the VPN connection from the other week. The best place to see the insides of the Xbox (which have been everywhere recently) remains HardOCP, whose Xbox Spread Eagle feature touches all the bases. Related Feature - Xperience

You have to wonder about PC gamers. Clearly bored in the run up to Christmas, with plenty of stuff still not on the market, they have started collecting things that belong to computer game developers. The most prominent example of this is an eBay auction, which closed earlier today. "Fleece top as worn by Lionhead member" concerned a fleece top, as worn by Peter Molyneux in this picture, which Lionhead's Ollie Purkiss found on his desk, and after fruitlessly trying to find its owner, decided to sell. The Fleece went for $61, which is probably still more than it cost. If Ollie wanted to impress any birds, he would probably have donated the money to charity by now, but we'll forgive him that. What next? Romero's hair? Actually, can't you make voodoo dolls using that? Related Feature - Black & White review

Final Fantasy VIII had a lot to prove, coming off the back of arguably the best game of all time - Final Fantasy VII - and many people were disappointed with the result. The team hopes to prove that it can produce a classic with X, and with this in mind they have taken several gigantic steps forward, including the move to a polygon-based world. The last three Final Fantasies have relied upon pre-rendered backdrops and polygonal characters, but X will rely on a fully three-dimensional environment, retaining only the classic fixed camera perspective of the last three games. Another big change is the move to a Chrono Trigger-style battle arrangement, where battles take place on the same screen as the general adventuring. That is to say, practically every battle, because random encounters will still send gamers to a fight screen. Needless to say, this was a design restriction rather than a conscious decision on the part of the team. After a period of confusion, Square now seems keen to move towards a unified battle system. If you're a fan of the Final Fantasy series, the chances are by now you're fairly excited at the game's prospects, but make sure you take a seat for the next bombshell: Final Fantasy X is voice-acted. That's right, defying its traditional subtitle-driven roots, the team behind X is breaking new ground by using voice acting, with matching facial expressions. The voice acting and sub-titles can be toggled as you like, but we are expecting relatively big things from Squaresoft in this department. Anybody who watched the underrated Final Fantasy movie earlier this year will know that Square can handle lip-synch, and then some.

SSX Tricky has shipped on GameCube in the USA, following a release on PlayStation 2 earlier this month. The game is an update-cum-sequel to arguably the PS2's most favourable launch title and features the musical talents of the Beastie Boys amongst others, and uncredited voice-acting from actors and singers including Macy Gray and Oliver Platt. He of Lake Placid (cough) fame. SSX Tricky is one of the most eagerly awaited titles on PlayStation 2 and GameCube around here this Christmas, due out this Friday (the 30th) on PlayStation 2, and on the 8th of March for GameCube if EA's release dates schedule is to be believed. Amidst all this speculation on the GameCube's actual release date in Europe, EA are keeping schtum. Related Feature - SSX review

UbiSoft has added another licensing scalp to its rapidly growing collection in the form of Charlie's Angels. The French company now has exclusive worldwide rights to develop and publish games based on the classic TV series as well as the recent film re-make and its forthcoming sequel. "The Charlie's Angels games will enable us to attract a broad audience", UbiSoft president Yves Guillemot proclaimed. "The series is enormously popular with the over-25 age group and the license lends itself particularly well to the video game medium." There are no details yet as to what form these games will take, when the first ones will be released or which platforms they will appear on, but UbiSoft's licensing deal with Sony Pictures covers PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and GameBoy Advance.

Project Eden is a maze and you are the proverbial mouse. In fact, you're four little proverbial mice, each of which has a particular skill; be it the cyborg with his resistance to hazardous environments, the technician, the computer expert or the leader with his helpful security clearance. Your maze isn't whitewashed, but decked out as a mysterious near-future cityscape with a fetching Unreal-esque visual demeanour, and spots of pure darkness that often disguise doors and archways when they shouldn't. The maze isn't glass-topped - you control your mice from the third-person in fact - but it does take advantage of several unfortunate limitations in an attempt to frustrate you; for instance your inability to jump, even over small distances. The late Douglas Adams taught us that mice are in fact singularly the most intelligent species of animal on our planet, and I'm willing to agree with him. However, I dare say they found this maze stuff extremely insulting, so I am hereby proposing a truce. Given our knowledge of their experience and fortitude and the fact that they have yet to flee our planet, I would like to swap the brain-depletingly tricky puzzles of Project Eden for the inside of a whitewashed maze where even I may flourish. Or a padded cell. (Or alternatively, you could get on with the bleedin' review. -Ed) Ah yes. Project Eden is a conversion of an extremely difficult PC puzzle game featuring three upstanding young fellows and one cyborg, and like so many other PC-to-PS2 conversions the gameplay is completely misplaced for the platform, and on a lighter note (chortle), as a result of the conversion the dark spots in the game have become almost opaque. This introduces a major gameplay problem not found on the PC in that the darker spots often mask doorways and other vital parts of the solution to whichever indeterminable problem you reckon you have probably been thrown at the time. The world is peppered with doors you cannot enter, with the game's approach on this one being to shoehorn one of your characters through a particular door that does open, where he will find some way to contribute to the solution.

The success of the deeply unimpressive Tomb Raider movie has spawned a whole new generation of potentially lousy game-to-movie adaptations, and the latest to join the queue at the bandwagon jumper's guild is Nocturne. Collision Entertainment and Dimension Films (who are currently producing movies based on Max Payne and American McGee's Alice) are behind the effort. Further fear comes from the fact that Mortal Kombat 2 and Hellbound co-writer Brent Friedman is working on the script, although one faint ray of hope is the disclosure that Steve De Jarnatt, the man behind Miracle Mile, is also on board. Other details are thin on the ground at this early stage, but it looks like the movie will rather loosely follow the game's story of a shadowy government agency called the Spookhouse which investigates paranormal goings on. Producer Scott Faye promised that "the film will play like a supernatural Untouchables, retaining the spirit of the game while introducing new characters and a solid, three-act action-adventure story line". And in a fit of exuberant enthusiasm and/or sheer optimism he declared that "Nocturne .. has the potential to become the next Mummy franchise". The game's developers at Terminal Reality are already preparing to cash-in accordingly. "When we began developing the game in 1997, the idea was to open up a franchise that blended pure horror with serialized pulp fiction stories", creative director Drew Haworth confirmed, adding that future Nocturne titles will be released on the latest generation of console systems. "Since PC and console game players are a different audience, we plan on reinventing the franchise with the console games. We'll create a brand-new game experience with a new 3-D camera perspective for a more action-oriented, Hollywood feel, while remaining true to the elements of the 'Nocturne' universe." Related Feature - Nocturne review

A recent update to the official Everquest : Shadows of Luclin website has revealed a rather drastic rise in the expansion pack's system requirements. It seems that a 400MHz Pentium II with 256Mb of RAM and a 16Mb T&L supporting graphics card are now required to take advantage of the pack's enhanced graphics, and a Pentium III or Athlon with 512Mb RAM and a 32Mb graphics card are recommended. Sony Online spokesman Greg Rizzer told CGO that the sudden leap was down to the complexity of the new enhanced character models, and that when the development team loaded them all into the game they suddenly realised that 128Mb of RAM just wasn't enough to hold all that cleavage in. Whoops... The announcement comes as no great surprise to us following the pack's dismal showing at September's ECTS though. The draw distance was appalling compared to every other MMRPG we've played, and as soon as the clipping plane was pushed back far enough for you to see much beyond the end of your sword without the world being shrouded in polygon-concealing fog the game started to chug, despite the fact that it was presumably running on a GeForce 3 graphics card like everything else at the show. Despite the new higher resolution textures the older areas of the game still looked incredibly ugly compared to more recent titles such as Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot and (for that matter) Asheron's Call, while the new Luclin zones weren't particularly astounding either. Which makes it somewhat ironic that Luclin's system requirements are now higher than those for the eye-candy laden likes of Max Payne and Serious Sam. Sadly it looks like a case of the game's underlying technology simply not being up to the task, and it's remarkable that the Luclin pack could get so close to completion without any of the programmers realising that all those new polygon-enhanced character models with their moving eyeballs and heaving bosoms would need a significant amount of memory. Go to the back of the class, that man. Despite this fiasco, our understanding is that Verant plan to continue expanding Everquest indefinitely, with any possible sequel a long way off. Time to start saving your pennies for another upgrade.

Next year's launch of Microsoft's network gaming service for Xbox has been pre-empted by an open source/Linux development, Xbox Gateway. Bill is no doubt absolutely ecstatic about this, but he can console himself with the thought that at least all the work XboxGW has put into the system is on the outside - the box itself remains unsullied by viral GPL-related stuff. XboxGW expands the functionality of Xbox system link games, working rather like an Ethernet bridge, and according to the developers both bridging Xbox game traffic and splitting it up so it goes between the right players. If two people with broadband links use it, then they can play one another across the internet. Microsoft itself proposes to offer this facility, but not until next summer. The system currently runs on Linux servers, but it's not absolutely necessary for users to install Linux (this would kind of reduce the potential market for it), because users of other OSes can just download a boot disk. Obviously you need a PC, and equally obviously you need the teensiest bit of networking to join the Xbox, the PC and the broadband connection together. Limitations at the moment include it not supporting PC Card network adapters or USB broadband connections. The developers are working on implementations for Win32, PPC Linux, Mac OSX and BSD, and say they intend to release the source code when they deem it fully stable. Now, who's going to be the first to get one of these to run on an Xbox?

Sega has just over 200,000 Dreamcast units left to ship in the US, and in the interests of clearing out their backlog, the company has reduced the console's pricetag to a paltry $50. With such an awesome catalogue of software to back it up, we can see no reason for our non-Dreamcast-owning American readers not to rush out and pick one up. The story was heralded with the usual retailer quotes and other opinions, but for us the question is, when are we going to see that reflected in Dreamcast street prices on this side of the Atlantic? Poking around e-tailers in this country reveals few bargains on this front. A Dreamcast shipping with UEFA Dream Soccer and Sega GT is still going for £99.99 at Gameplay, whereas a trip to Amazon.co.uk reveals a slightly more aggressive bargain; the console plus M-SR, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter 3 and a VMU, but with a long waiting period for the console suggesting a complete lack of stock. The truth is, your best bet for Dreamcast these days is a second hand retailer or an auction website like eBay. There are unlikely to be large enough numbers of Dreamcasts left in this country to justify another price drop, and with bundles fairly reasonable priced at the time of writing, there won't be much left to hear about before long. Suffice it to say, if you haven't got one by now, get yourself out there and do it! With Shenmue 2, Headhunters and Floigan Brothers just released, and a stupid number of titles in the range it's something you should definitely own.

IGN is reporting by way of GameCube Inside that Pikmin 2 is on the cards and could take half a year or less to complete. Shigeru Miyamoto, the man responsible for the original Pikmin and virtually every Nintendo game of substance since the 1980s, let slip in a recent interview that he adorns his personal space with post-it notes tracking new ideas and upcoming games, and that a note for Pikmin 2 is already in place. He also mentioned that a sequel could take a meagre half-year to create. When Pikmin launched on the 26th October it sold 127,000 copies in just 10 days according to Famitsu Magazine, and we had heard that taking into account the various other licensed retailers and outlets it may have sold upwards of 190,000 copies in that time. Of course, half a year is an awfully Romero-esque goal, but we were all mad to trust the great charlatan's gaudy hairstyle and rockstar lifestyle in the first place. Miyamoto is a much more dignified game designer and we trust him a sight more… Related Feature - Pikmin preview

One of the things that has made GameBoy Advance less accessible than its predecessor is the price tag on the software. Although Nintendo has always maintained that it does not set a price point, it's widely accepted that the current £34.99 tag found on most new releases in this country is too high, and that Nintendo has the power to change that. According to Computer Trade Weekly, the price of new GameBoy Advance games could be lowered to £29.99 as of next month, with the aim being to cultivate third party interest in the console. CTW cites a senior publishing source. If £29.99 were to become the standard retail price for new software, it would likely reflect in overall GBA software sales, which roughly represent six per cent of the overall software market by value in the UK. At the moment GameBoy Advance is an expensive proposition, and while £29.99 wouldn't necessarily change that alone, it would be a step in the right direction.

As Christmas once again creeps up on us, the sound of chiming cash registers echoes across the land. And nowhere is it louder than in your local games emporium, for every year a veritable avalanche of new titles reach shelves just in time for Santa to stuff them in a stocking and drop them down your chimney. We spoke to Activision and Take 2 Europe to find out what's behind this annual festive insanity...

With Hitchcock : The Final Cut now due out in the UK some time in January, a new demo version of the game has been released to give players a taste of this unusual adventure game inspired by the dead director's work. Taking on the role of psychic private eye Joseph Shamley, you must uncover the fate of a missing millionaire and his film crew, with footage from several of Hitchcock's movies serving as psychometric pointers. It's a novel and stylish game, and now's your chance to find out if there's any substance behind it. The (very) short 85Mb demo can be downloaded from Czech site Tiscali Games. Related Feature - Hitchcock screenshots

id Software have a reputation for pushing the latest graphics technology to the limit. Take Doom, for example. When it first came out I had a 12Mhz 386, and to get the game to run smoothly I had to reduce the area of the screen which it actually rendered to the size of a credit card. Flash forward to 2001. Doom has arrived on the GameBoy Advance, and some things never change - the game is still pushing technology to the very limit, the picture is still the size of a credit card, and the hardware is still struggling to keep up. Doom is probably the most graphically impressive title that we have seen so far on the GBA. It may lack the gaudy colours and crystal clarity of Rayman Advance, but it makes up for this with detailed texturing and sprites which are lifted almost pixel-for-pixel from the original PC version of the game, although sadly the blood has been replaced by Nintendo-friendly green gore. The weapons in particular are beautifully rendered and animated, with the full selection on offer from brass knuckles and pistol all the way up to rocket launcher and room-clearing BFG. The eerie sound effects and cheesy MIDI music stylings of Bobby Prince have also been beautifully transferred, and classic noises like the roaring of imps and the awful ripping sound as they claw at your flesh all add to the atmosphere of the game. Unfortunately two things haven't made it on to the GameBoy though - the all-important boss monsters. Although episode two still ends well even without a cyberdemon to scare the bejeezus out of you, the final map is something of an anti-climax. Gone is the giant robotic spider, and in its place are two rooms full of monsters and ammunition followed by some pointless unlocking of doors to reach the exit. The last few levels of Doom were always the weakest, with an over-reliance on pools of lava, cramped mazes and teleporter puzzles, and the revamped last level just makes this even more of a disappointing end to a great game.

- Bits Studios Advance Wars, although not yet released in this country, has already proved to gamers across the rest of the world that hardcore strategy games are possible to do - and do well - on a portable like the GameBoy Advance, so Bits Studios' latest announcement, a real-time strategy game called Wizards, has a lot of the groundwork laid for it.

In a bizarre turn of events, Microsoft's best-selling real-time strategy game Age of Empires II has been released on the PlayStation 2. Published by Konami to spare Bill and the boys the indignity of having to kow-tow to Sony in person, the result is a very faithful console port of the game, which is something of a mixed blessing. The upside is that PS2 owners get the whole Age of Kings package with only one obvious ommission. The best place to start is the tutorial campaign based on the exploits of William Wallace, which does an excellent job of teaching newcomers to the genre the basics of combat, building and resource gathering. It also serves as a refresher for more experienced players, and although controlling a real-time strategy game with a joypad feels a little odd at first, by the end of the tutorials it should be second nature. The only real problem is the lack of grouping and other hotkeys, for which you will need a USB keyboard. All five single player campaigns from the original game are also included, putting you in the shoes of historical leaders ranging from Joan of Arc to Genghis Khan and then setting you tasks such as building up a settlement, defeating an enemy army or recovering religious artifacts. Once you have exhausted these the random map generator comes into play, offering a wide range of options for setting up skirmish battles against the AI using any of the game's thirteen civilizations. In fact, the only thing missing is online support, although if you happen to have a spare PS2 lying around you can play against a friend using an i-Link cable.

The PlayStation 2 has been coming of age recently, but as Sony pointed out to us last week, tomorrow - November 24th - is the first anniversary of the console's launch in Europe. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Sony is sending out Birthday cards to anybody who was pre-registered with the company when the machine launched. By way of a thank you Sony have sent the foldout cards comprising information on up and coming games like Jak & Daxter, classics like SSX and Gran Turismo 3 and a Dixons voucher which entitles you to £5 off the asking price of Sony's World Rally Championship, valid between November 30th and December 14th. Whether this is the only voucher they are handing out is unknown. If anybody has a voucher for Jak & Daxter though, I'll swap! Anyway, Happy Birthday PlayStation 2, and we look forward to unwrapping a lot more of your presents over the course of the next month! Related Feature - The Second Coming

London's Barbican Gallery has announced that it will be running a major new exhibition on the history of computer gaming next year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original Spacewar. Taking place between May and September, GameOn will include over 250 exhibits ranging from early arcade games and consoles to the latest cutting edge technology and specially commissioned pieces of gaming-inspired art. The whole thing will be split into eleven themed sections, covering topics such as vintage games, rare consoles, gaming culture and online gaming. Naturally there will also be a shop selling a mixture of classic and contemporary hardware and games alongside the usual books and magazines. If London is too far for you to travel to see the exhibition, GameOn will be going on an international tour, starting with a stint in Edinburgh from October 2002 to February 2003, and presumably straying further afield in future. More details can be found at the Barbican website and in the press release.

The latest signing for rapidly growing German publisher CDV is Vultures, a gladiatorial combat game for the Xbox developed by Grin, the Swedish team behind Ballistics. With a range of detailed arenas and a wide selection of classic and futuristic weapons to pick from, CDV are hoping it will follow in the chart-topping footsteps of Sudden Strike and Cossacks. "Not only has Vultures all the features to become a high quality title for console, but [it] also promises to revive the genre", licensing director Johannes Friederich enthused. "Huge arenas, a unique styling and realistic fight scenes make this title exceptional in its genre." Related Feature - Ballistics review

Zuxxez have announced that their Polish development house Reality Pump are working on a new sequel to their 3D strategy game Earth 2150. Imaginately titled Earth 2160 : Online, the sequel will be released towards the end of next year and is being developed using the company's new Earth III engine, which replaces the polygons of yore with Beziere curves. These are then tesselated in real-time to take advantage of as much processing power as your computer can throw at it. The game itself will, as the title suggests, be set ten years after the last installment, while the subtitle gives away the fact that this will be a multiplayer-focused game. More details should be available soon... Related Feature - Earth 2150 review

Digital Worldwide have officially announced the GameBoy Advance version of Midnight Club, a game which they rather optimistically describe as a "celebrated PlayStation 2 free-roaming racer". Our understanding is that it has sold somewhat less than 50,000 copies in the UK over the last year, and it wasn't exactly one of the stand-out titles in the PS2 launch line-up. Despite this less than auspicious start though, Midnight Club is now being brought to the GBA in top-down form, along with the better known Smuggler's Run and Grand Theft Auto 3. The hand-held version of the game features all of the cars from the PS2 original as well as both London and New York street circuits to race on, and a choice of arcade and career modes to tackle. And while we're not sure we agree with the press release's description of the game's graphics as "stunning" and "hugely impressive", the real-time lighting effects should certainly give the night-time races some much-needed atmosphere as you dodge your way through the crowded streets. Expect Midnight Club to appear on GBA early next year with a recommended price tag of £35. Related Feature - Grand Theft Advance

As regular players of Phantasy Star Online will testify, having to connect to SegaNet's dialup can really beat the hell out of your phone bill. In these days of 0800 dialups and free off-peak hours, it's difficult to justify this expense. That's why it's actually quite insulting to see the venerable game maker dumping its SegaNet dialup in favour of allowing users to police their own connection, several months after Phantasy Star Online lost its appeal. Sega Europe is getting shot of its SegaNet ISP in Europe in favour of allowing users to pick their own dialups, which brings the company's products into line with their US equivalents. Gamers over there have been able to specify connection settings for quite a while. In an official statement released this week, Sega sang its praises and announced the release of new Dreamkey software to replace existing version (1.0, 1.5 and 2.0). But with the Official Dreamcast Magazine long since gone, how are they going to distribute this new software? Related Feature - Phantasy Star Online review

We followed the original Spider-Man from its conception and were eventually rewarded with one of last year's finest PlayStation games. As we left it, we remarked only that we hoped the upcoming PS2 version would live up to its predecessor. Well, here we are, over a year later and although Spider-Man The Movie is in development on PlayStation 2, we still don't have a true sequel to Neversoft's third person adventure. Not even a whimper. As such, we were quite surprised when Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro arrived on our doorstep earlier this month, but that didn't last long. Nope, before the sun went down on our first day with the new Spidey our surprise had given way to a sense of loathing and frustration. In fairness, a cursory glance at the packaging should have been enough. All the warning signs were there. Gone was the developmental mark of Neversoft, replaced by the mark of perennial sequel and fodder experts Vicarious Visions. The screenshots were also remarkably similar to the original game, and the game was boasting new advanced web-pulling techniques… If you're new to the series, Spider-Man is an excellent but occasionally troubled third person action game with indoor and outdoor sections, which see Spidey crawling all over the scenery and swinging from imaginary skyscrapers. Unfortunately, what Vicarious Visions have done is to take the quirky but exciting formula of Spider-Man and aggravate all of its various problems.

Goldman Sachs have been busy surveying retailers in the United States about the popularity of Xbox and GameCube systems a few days after their respective launches. Sachs revealed that 73% of Microsoft's Xbox allocation of 300,000 had gone, while a massive 47% of Nintendo's 700,000 units had been sold. Perhaps it's a bit early in the morning for all that. That's roughly 219,000 Xboxes versus 329,000 GameCubes. The survey was conducted amongst 49 retail chain stores in large cities. Microsoft aims to shift another 100,000 units to retailers per week until Christmas, while C|Net is reporting that Nintendo aims to replenish supplies where needed. Better to give the retailers what they want rather than to create a surplus. However, a conflicting report from the Financial Times suggests Nintendo too will flood the market, producing between 1.1 and 1.3 million units for the festive season. That said, the FT also thinks Nintendo shipped 510,000 GameCubes in Japan in its first two weeks of sale, which it did not. Extrapolated figures this writer has seen suggests 350,000 sales so far. The verdict from our roving reporters in the States is that it's much easier to get hold of a GameCube, but that with more than double the number of Xboxes available, nobody finds that surprising. Microsoft were due to ship another 100,000 units to retailers on Monday, but if that shipment did go ahead, nobody has heard of it. A source working for Virgin Megastores in the US suggests this shipment has been put back, and that units are being prioritised based on demand. Related Feature - GameCube sells to the tune of $98m