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Maxis have announced that they have suspended work on Simsville, the latest entry in their long running Sim franchise. Due for release as early as February 2002, the game was intended to bridge the gap between Sim City and The Sims. The first screenshots which emerged from publisher Electronic Arts last month were looking quite promising, but apparently Maxis weren't entirely happy with the outcome. The team has now been moved to other projects including the forthcoming cash cow Sims Online, a multiplayer spin-off of the multi-million selling soap opera style game The Sims.

Sony may reduce the price of PlayStation 2 to £199 in the run up to Christmas, Computer & Video Games is reporting. Unfortunately, the story is only backed up by hearsay at the present time, although Sony have refrained from denying the cut outright. When a similar announcement was rumoured at E3, they denied it completely. Although neither Xbox nor Game Cube is launching here in the UK this side of Spring, Sony will be pinning its hopes on an exponential growth in sales this Christmas thanks to the cut and associated software releases. Games like SSX Tricky, Wipeout Fusion, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and Silent Hill 2 are all due out in the run up to the festive season, with the PlayStation giant's own Dark Cloud already available.

In an unprecedented move last week, Capcom pledged allegiance to Nintendo by making its Biohazard series (Resident Evil outside of Japan) a Game Cube exclusive. Series creator Shinji Mikami stood at Shigeru Miyamoto's arm and announced that Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil 4 would be Game Cube exclusives, the original Resident Evil game would be given a glorious visual makeover and released on the Cube, and that each of the other games in the series would be subsequently re-released as well. This week, he clarified the situation to the Japanese press. Apparently Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil 4 and the remake of the original will be the three that take full advantage of the Game Cube hardware. Although Capcom had initially hoped to revamp the whole back catalogue, Mikami said that it would be "impractical" to do so. As such, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil: Code Veronica will be straight ports. Mikami also pointed out that the sooner these three are out and about, the sooner Resident Evil 4 is likely to reach completion. Related Feature - Gore Cube

Featuring a mixture of role-playing style character development, strategic gameplay and spell-based combat similar to that found in collectible card games like Magic : The Gathering, Etherlords is one of the most promising turn-based strategy games due for release this year.

Microsoft have admitted that they may not reach their target of having 600,000 Xboxes ready for the American launch of the console on November 8th. According to a report in the Financial Times today, a Microsoft spokesman confessed that "we won't know day-one quantities until we reach peak production". Some people have estimated that as few as 300,000 Xboxes may be finished by the beginning of November, although that's largely guesswork at this point. But it's certainly worrying that just six weeks from the console's launch they still haven't got production up to speed at the Flextronics factories in Mexico and Hungary which are assembling the Xbox.

In a story which is sure to bring a tear to the eye of Nintendo marketing executives up and down the land, a mother went above and beyond the call of duty after realising that she had forgotten to pack her son's GameBoy in his bag one morning. Unfortunately the boy was going on a school trip to the Scottish island of Iona at the time, and so his mum ended up forking out over £150 for plane and taxi journeys to get her from their home in the southern county of Berkshire to Heathrow Airport near London and then on to Scotland, finally catching up with the poor boy (who was, needless to say, very embarrassed) at the appropriately named Dumbarton.

Denmark is famous throughout the world for two things - the Danish Pastry and LEGO. Sadly nobody has yet found a way to combine computers with the ultimate in sugar-glazed confectionery, but the gaudy little plastic building blocks have spawned a string of games over the years.

Codemasters is the latest publisher to announce that it has a massively multiplayer role-playing game in the works. Dragon Empires is due for release next summer and promises to "raise the bar in persistent-world gaming", not that this should be too hard given the quality of most current titles. Trying to stand out from the growing throng, Dragon Empires focuses on competitive as well as co-operative gameplay, and gives player-run clans the opportunity to rule cities or entire countries while waging war on each other through player vs player combat. According to producer Ted Carron, this means that the game "is more intense and competitive, driving people into groups where the real benefit of online gaming lies".

Third person role-playing game Gothic has been available in its native Germany for several months now, but frustratingly the rest of the world has yet to see it. An English language demo version which we were sent by developers Piranha Bytes way back in July showed that the game had a lot of promise, but there was still no sign of it being released outside of Germany. Then a few weeks ago JoWood signed a publishing deal with Germany's Phenomedia which seemed to pave the way for a Europe-wide release for the game, only for somebody to suddenly realise last week that Egmont Interactive still held the worldwide distribution rights for Gothic, even though it had been sitting on them for most of the year. It began to look as if the game would never be released overseas, although JoWood were confident that a forthcoming sequel would be published by them.

So I was sitting there at 2AM, about 50Mb's worth of downloads better off and wondering how profound the changes would be. The setup module had included calibration of voice communication hardware, i.e. my lovely HP desktop microphone to go with my Vivanco headphones (those in telesales will be delighted to find that they can now claim Half-Life is a training program), and I was aware of plenty of other changes I had read about. As I dived on to the first updated server I could find, I was slightly disappointed. This is always the way with new Half-Life/CS patches though really - you gravitate towards a server playing a map you recognise, then discover that the only thing which looks different is the scoreboard. Still, a few moments later and I wasn't really sure what was new, and I was getting some weird errors in my Half-Life console which eventually dumped me out to Windows again. So I quit out, headed over to Counter-Strike.net.

December will see the CPL's first World Championship taking place in Dallas, with a hundred Counter-Strike clans from around the world battling it out for their share of $150,000 in prize money. British clans will be able to earn themselves a place in the competition by taking part in a qualifier event at The Playing Fields in the depths of London on November 11th, with modest cash prizes and a free flight to Dallas up for grabs. There are also plans afoot for pre-qualifiers at eight online and LAN based venues around the country on November 4th, although precise details are hazy at this stage.

Following on from the success of their Best Sellers range on the PlayStation, Codemasters are launching a new range of budget re-releases for the PC on Friday October 12th, with each game costing just £12.99. Motor racing games are well represented, with Colin McRae 2.0, Insane and TOCA 2 Touring Cars all getting the budget treatment, while sports fans of a more sedate nature will be able to pick up World Championship Snooker on the cheap.

Actually, Rayman M is best described as a cross country steeplechase dodgeball simulation. In one half of the game, you control Rayman or one of his little buddies and have to race several times around obstacle-packed courses on foot, whilst in the other half you have to try and knock coloured lums out of your opponents hands by lobbing balls at them. Collect all the lums yourself and you win. We got our first chance to play Rayman M at ECTS this year. Racing against Ubi Soft's Louise Gabriel, we first had to negotiate some tricky rolling barrels, before racing through some undergrowth and clambering round a massive tree trunk using oddly placed platforms to make our way up the side. Once out the other side, we had to scale some giant steps out of which grew large plants. These plants proceeded to slam us into the ground repeatedly so we couldn't escape, exposing one of the myriad tiny bugs still left in the programming. Frankly I was grateful for the respite, Rayman M seems like a manic, amazingly enterprising adventure game against the clock. Describing it as a racing game wouldn't do it justice. I heard whispering behind me from a few onlookers that the game moved a bit slowly for their liking, and it's true, compared to your average driving simulation or Mario Kart clone things are a bit lethargic, but that really isn't the goal of Rayman M as best we can tell, and to judge it based on our fleeting glimpse at it would be rather unfair.

Namco has moved to strengthen its multiplatform development strategy with the announcement of three further titles for Game Cube. Those games; Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, Smashing Drive and Dead to Rights, will join Soul Calibur 2 and a new version of Ridge Racer on Nintendo's console. Dead to Rights had been considered an Xbox exclusive, but apparently it will be exclusive for three months only, after which Game Cube and perhaps even PS2 versions will be released. Namco's announcement is great news for Nintendo fans - helping to reinforce the belief that Game Cube isn't just a so-called kiddy console. With the Resident Evil series already announced as a new Game Cube exclusive and games from Namco such as Soul Calibur 2 and Dead to Rights, there can be little doubt of Nintendo's motives; it wants to create interest amongst mature gamers to try and steal market share from Sony. The fact that Soul Calibur 2 has yet to be announced on either Xbox or PS2 is of paramount importance. At the moment, Sony control the Japanese console market unequivocally, and their sales figures speak for themselves. They also have something of a monopoly on mature gaming interest, brought through titles like Gran Turismo 3 and Onimusha. Although they can do little but choke on the success of Game Boy Advance, in terms of larger consoles, the PlayStation 2 has little competition. Whether the Namco and Capcom alliances are merely token gestures or part of a sustained plan to target older gamers remains to be seen. Related Feature - Gore Cube

Crash Bandicoot will debut on PlayStation 2 this November in a new adventure subtitled The Wrath of Cortex. In Crash's latest tale, action and platform elements will blend together with new visuals driven by the PlayStation 2's superior hardware, and Crash's running, jumping and spinning will look lovelier than ever. Dr. Cortex is once again the focus of the young Bandicoot's attention, because he's planning to use the power of PlayStation the elements to raise a powerful Elemental Lord to kill Crash. The levels will be themed around each element; Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, and of course the mystical fifth element, Milla Jovovich (fired -Ed), and Crash will have to avoid contact with Cortex' sympathisers along the way. Crash has a new move for the game; tiptoe, and the game will feature more dramatic use of vehicles including gyrocopters, jeeps and a scooter. Players will also get their first taste of action with Crash's friends, including his dame Coco. Expect your head to start spinning in November. Related Feature - Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex screenshots

One of this summer's most entertaining action movies is coming to PlayStation 2 courtesy of Vivendi Universal Interactive. The Mummy Returns will follow the plot of the film closely, action/exploration sections fought either from the perspective of hero Rick O'Connell (played by Brendan Fraser, whose image has been captured perfectly for the game), or his nemesis Imhotep, the Mummy from the first film back to cause mischief on a whole new scale this time around. As Rick, players have to rescue his son Alex and wife Evy from Imhotep and defeat the evil Scorpion King (aka The Rock) using all manner of present day and mythical Egyptian weaponry, while as Imhotep, players must resurrect the Scorpion King so that the dark sorceror can use his armies to take over the world. Pleasant stuff. Levels featured in the game include London, Cairo and Hamunaptara as per the film, and all manner of beasties that came to life in the film will find themselves embodied once again for the game. The Mummy Returns is due out in November. Related Feature - The Mummy Returns screenshots

The radioactive juggernaut that is the Half-Life franchise rumbles ever onwards, with Vivendi Universal today announcing that the PlayStation 2 version of the game will be available in the UK from November. Developed once again by Gearbox, who are carving a niche for themselves expanding the Half-Life universe with console ports and add-on packs, the latest outing for the award-winning first person shooter promises improved AI and graphics along with twelve exclusive deathmatch maps for up to four players to fight it out. The highlight this time is a new co-operative mode dubbed "Decay", which sees two players teaming up to battle their way through the game side-by-side. Which should be fun, for the two people who haven't yet played the game.

Nintendo has reportedly sold 300,000 of the 450,000 Game Cube units it shipped to retail for the console's launch on Friday. The number represents a disappointing undersell, and defied estimates that the console would sell out on day one. Analysts are now scrambling to readjust their predictions. Some, like Credit Suisse First Boston's Jay Defibaugh, is "not too concerned about the lack of lines in Akihabara", and suspects perhaps that consumer confidence and consumer spending may be down in light of the recent terrorist action in the United States. Who isn't blaming that for something these days though, others argue, pointing out that Nintendo's lacklustre marketing campaign is probably to blame for the lack of sales, and that Nintendo will fail to leapfrog Sony's market performance, finding a more likely opponent in Microsoft. As one of the world's most prolific Nintendo fanboys, it pains me greatly to write this report. However, my pain has nothing to do with the unfortunate sales figures, but the fact that the very act of typing at my keyboard drags me away from the attentions of my own Game Cube, which arrived yesterday morning with Luigi's Mansion and Wave Race in tow. That's one knock-on effect; import prices will have to dip, because if the console is readily available, who's going to pay a premium? You can already buy Game Cubes for as little as £310 including Luigi's Mansion, Wave Race Blue Storm, controller, component cable, memory card and stepdown transformer, although shopping around outside of the UK is the best bet, because retailers closer to home are notoriously expensive in these matters. On a more serious note, it's disappointing to see the first major Japanese console release since last March fail to make an impact, Nintendo's first since June 1996. The company's advantages with Game Cube are well defined; lower price, better third party relations, more exclusives - but perhaps we're seeing the first signs of public reaction to Nintendo's Game Cube 'less is more' design philosophy. Announcements like Capcom's recent pledge to develop Resident Evil exclusively for the console can only improve Nintendo's outlook, so a lot of people are still reserving judgement. With the release of titles like Pikmin, Rogue Leader, Starfox Adventures and of course Resident Evil 0, I'm confident sales will pick up. Related Feature - Gore Cube

UbiSoft has postponed the release of Rogue Spear : Black Thorn, the latest in the popular Rainbow Six counter-terrorism series spawned by author Tom Clancy. Originally due out next month, a statement from the French publisher revealed that they have "decided to delay the release of the game and modify the content to avoid stirring emotions unnecessarily and unwillingly offending the public". In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in America the subject was considered to be a little too close to the bone, with the game's plot involving a group recreating some of the most infamous terrorist attacks of recent years.

When I first heard about Clusterball, it was through a friend who had spent a four day weekend moping about the house becoming quietly addicted to the thing. He stumbled upon Clusterball.com in the dead of night on Friday evening, downloaded the game and before the end of the next morning had blown a wad of cash at the developer's website to get hold of extra arenas. Clusterball is unique amongst shareware, with marketing based almost entirely on word of mouth and a revenue structure that focuses on added extras. Players get the game for free, but initially only a few playing fields are open to them. A few pounds gets you another though, and then a few more another. So many people have now succumbed to Clusterball that developer Daydream Software have finally found a publisher and started to distribute the game through retailers. Thanks to Koch Media's Virtuoso group, the game will shortly be arriving on your local gaming emporium's shelves at a wallet-friendly price, and if you're sick to death of mind-numbingly repetitive first person shooters and real time strategy titles, you might want to give it a go. Clusterball is a future sport, but not in the classic sense. Instead of taking away your legs and giving you an orb, or putting you on skates and forcing you to play hockey with electric tazers or something, the game sits you in the cockpit of a highly manoeuvrable aircraft and asks you to collect as many floating magnetic balls as possible before depositing them in a nearby scoring hoop. After an interval, the balls respawn and the mad dash begins again. Up to eight players can be on a server at once, and to make things interesting pilots can also spend time collecting a plethora of weapons and power-ups scattered about the arena, so that if he spies wily pilot number one heading towards the scoring zone with a few balls in tow, he can head him off and pinch his load.

Squaresoft has finally shipped copies of its PlayOnline PlayStation 2 network software to the firm's beta testers according to this report at The GIA. As expected, at least one Japanese beta tester has braved the developer's wrath and posted a few tantalising teaser shots and photographs of the kit he received. In its current form, PlayOnline will be an entirely separate user interface from the PS2, presumably allowing players to dial up the specialist network using the PO disc before swapping in the appropriate game to begin play. The beta kit includes PlayOnline software and Final Fantasy IX's card game Tetra Master, which serves as a proving ground for online play and also features an online ranking mode to track statistics. Players can apparently participate in auctions to buy rare cards, but details of this are sadly few. Players can also download unique wallpapers and download songs for background music. Of course, when PlayOnline makes it out of beta it will presumably facilitate RPGs above more or less everything else, but Square has comfy relationships with companies like Namco and Enix, so we may see some variation there. Ridge Racer could certainly do with some online features. At the moment though, PlayOnline is threatened by Sony's own network services. Regular readers here will be acutely aware of the company's online plans for the UK, which involve trials with Telewest and ntl set-top cable boxes, but in America the service is dead set. SCEA have said that the service will be an 'exclusive' network involving partnerships with AOL, Macromedia and co., and that all content has to be approved by Sony. Cunningly, the company aims to make yet more money from developers by charging them to run their servers. This month's NextGen magazine in the States carries a report on the subject which claims that the service will lock PlayOnline completely out of the picture, and that as such PlayOnline will be restricted to Japan. Which, some have said, is an indication that Sony are reacting harshly to rumours of Square's involvement with Xbox and Game Cube. Related Feature - The Console Wars

Spider-Man 2 became the latest game to fall foul of the terrorist attack on New York as Activision recalled the PlayStation title, which was due for release on Friday. According to a report in trade magazine MCV, the entire shipment will now be scrapped while the developers remove a level which is set in a "building which loosely resembles the twin towers". In other scenes the World Trade Center look-alike is clearly visible on the city's skyline in the background, and presumably these references will also have to be removed. The new version of the game should now hit shelves on October 19th, four weeks later than planned.

Nintendo's GameCube has just launched in Japan with all the ferocity of one hand clapping in an empty forest. Two months from now it will be appearing on store shelves in America, and by then Microsoft should have launched its Xbox as well. But not here. In Europe we will probably have to wait until March to get our hands on these new consoles, although so far neither company has even bothered to tell us exactly when their console will be released or how much it will cost us when it finally does arrive.

Westwood's Dune 2 helped to launch the real-time strategy genre, providing the foundations for the company's breakthrough title Command & Conquer. But that "2" was in the title for a reason. French upstarts Cryo were actually the first to develop a game based on the epic science fiction world created by Frank Herbert and brought to the big screen in controversial form by maverick director David Lynch. Today few people remember the original Dune game, which was one of the first to debut on CD-Rom and featured an innovative mixture of adventure and strategy elements, but despite that Cryo are back for a second bite.

It's five years since Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino released their cult vampire B-movie "From Dusk Till Dawn", featuring the exploits of Seth Gecko and his psychotic brother. Escaping from a hold-up gone wrong, they take a family hostage and head for Mexico, only to end up fighting for their lives against a horde of vampires in a dusk 'til dawn bar called the Titty Twister.

Activision have released an unsupported multiplayer test version of their World War II themed first person shooter Return To Castle Wolfenstein. The multiplayer portion of the game, which is being developed seperately by Nerve Software, features the kind of goal-based gameplay seen in the likes of Team Fortress and Unreal Tournament's Assault mode, and indeed the sole map included in this test version sounds strangely familiar. In it you must storm the beaches of Normandy and battle your way past the Germans to capture important Axis documents and transmit them to your bosses using a radio.

While most rally games stick to the tried and trusted courses of Europe for their inspiration, taking in settings such as the forests of northern England and treacherous Alpine passes, Rage are going for a more exotic feel in their latest effort. Enter GTC Africa, coming soon to the PlayStation 2.

The gaming industry has, like the rest of the world, been coming to terms with the recent terrorist attacks in America over the last few days, and has decided to delay, cancel, redesign or withdraw some games which may be considered to be in poor taste as a result. This mirrors events elsewhere in the entertainment industry, with several movies and TV series now postponed, cancelled or rewritten, and digital effects being used to remove the World Trade Center from sequences already shot in New York.

Sports Interactive will be releasing a demo of their latest Championship Manager seasonal update pack on their website this evening at 6pm British time. The demo will let players battle their way through half a season of football action in any of the 26 leagues included in the full game, giving them a taste of what to expect when the pack launches on Friday 12th October. Those of you who already know you're going to buy the full game aren't going to be wasting your time either, as Sports Interactive managing director Miles Jacobson has revealed that "knowing how popular the demo is bound to be, we also thought it would be a nice touch if players could take the half season we're now offering and import it into the full version of Championship Manager : Season 01/02". Nothing is being promised at this stage, but Miles is "confident that this isn't going to be a problem".

One of Russia's more established gaming companies, Nival Interactive are the brains behind the Rage of Mages series, and more recently the excellent 3D role-playing game Evil Islands. With their latest title Etherlords due for release through German publisher FishTank towards the end of the year, we caught up with Nival's vice-president of marketing Alex Dmitrevsky to find out more...