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Activision surprised the stock market last night by announcing a profit of $29,000 for the three months to June 30th, with revenues up 30% to $110m. That profit might not sound like much (and it isn't) but analysts had been expecting them to post a loss, and given that Activision dropped $5.2m in the same period last year it does mark something of an improvement for the Californian publisher. The company put their unexpected bounty down to the arrival of the GameBoy Advance, with as much as 31% of their revenues coming from US sales of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Bomberman Tournament on the new hand-held. Strong sales of Mat Hoffman BMX on the PSOne also helped boost their figures. Despite this they are expecting a quiet summer compared to last year.

Trains are perhaps not the most obvious vehicle to simulate, locked as they are to two strips of metal which prevent them from doing anything other than going forwards or backwards. But that hasn't stopped Microsoft and British developer Kuju from attempting the impossible. And they have almost succeeded.

ECTS has been in decline for a few years now, but the big name exhibitors are looking particularly thin on the ground in the run up to this year's event. Sony and Nintendo are both running their own shows elsewhere in London, while today C&VG has confirmed that Microsoft will also be a no-show, meaning that none of the console manufacturers will be at Europe's biggest computer games trade show. A sorry state of affairs indeed. An Xbox spokesman insisted that "we're not pulling out : we were never in", although our understanding is that Microsoft did in fact have a large stand reserved for the show at one point.

Konami has announced that its Castlevania title Circle of the Moon has sold 500,000 copies so far in Northern America and Europe. In the same press release, the company also confirmed the development of another Castlevania adventure, and we reckon given the proximity of the two announcements, it will probably end up on Game Boy Advance as well. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was the sixth most popular pre-order on the Game Boy Advance, and met with critical acclaim at launch. Many SNES-era journalists actually had the game implanted in their brains to save on hassle. Related Feature - Castlevania: Circle of the Moon GBA Review

MSR authors Bizarre Creations have confirmed the existence of two new projects, Project Smokescreen and Space Munky. The company refuses to elaborate on details of either though, although spectators have pointed out that its relationship with Microsoft will probably mean they end up as Xbox titles. Project Gotham, Bizarre Creations' first Xbox title, stole the show at E3 in Los Angeles in May. Related Feature - MSR Dreamcast Review

Gran Turismo 3, harshly described by observers as the PlayStation 2's first triple-A title, has sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first two days on store shelves. This figure and the week's sales performance overall makes GT3 the fourth fastest selling game in the UK of all time, although its older sibling GT2 along with Pokemon Yellow and WWF Smackdown 2 still managed to sell more in the same short period of time. The PS2 installed base is estimated at around 540,000, which means one in six PS2 owners bought Gran Turismo 3, a fantastic achievement. Highlights of the successful launch were the TV advertising campaign, which featured footage of the game as well as a glitzy public launch party in Central London with a couple of Page 3 models and superstar designer Kazunori Yamauchi, the man behind Gran Turismo. The party was a triumph for Sony, with plenty of mainstream coverage and people queuing overnight to buy the game, something unheard of in this country. Gran Turismo 3 reportedly accounted for over half of PS2 software sales in the last week. Yours truly's only comment on the game so far has been "veeery pretty replays". Stay tuned for a full review later in the week. Related Feature - Come join the party

Rumours that the launch of Microsoft's new Xbox games console would be delayed sent share prices tumbling last night, with Activision and THQ both shedding about 7% of their value and Interplay falling almost 8%. So far as we know the rumours are totally unsubstantiated, with Microsoft confirming that the Xbox is "still on track for a November 8 launch" in America and that they expect to sell upwards of 600,000 consoles by the end of the year.

I don't know if you've glanced at our Release Dates page lately, but it looks like a financial report. New games are flooding on to the market, but once you strip out the cross-platform conversions, sequels and add-ons outnumber original titles by two to one.

In something of a publishing coup, UbiSoft have announced today that they will be handling the next installment in Team 17 Software's multi-million selling Worms series, previously distributed by Virgin Interactive. "Ubi Soft were an obvious choice as a partner to take Worms to the next level", according to the developer's commercial director Debbie Bestwick. "Team17 were looking for the right leading global partner and with Ubi Soft's world-wide distribution into 52 countries, their strong character marketing approach and their superb developer relations we are looking forward to building a strong relationship between the two companies."

THQ and Majesco have signed an international distribution agreement which will see THQ's European and Asia-Pacific divisions handling ten of Majesco's GameBoy Advance games. Titles covered by the agreement include the likes of Earthworm Jim, Pitfall, Iridion 3D, Fortress, F-14 Tomcat and one as-yet unannounced game. All ten games are due for release later this year along with a plethora of THQ's own titles, taking their total GameBoy Advance release list up to a staggering 25 games by the end of this year.

3D Realms owner George Broussard has penned a characteristically blunt update to his .plan concerning the status of 3DR/Remedy's Max Payne. "Max Payne has been in duplication since July 16th," he says, and "as of tomorrow, July 20th, the bulk of the boxes will have been assembled and ready for shipping." "The final boxes should start to hit the trucks on July 23rd and will arrive in stores around the 26th (in the US). 3DR pre-orders should be shipped very early next week, as we get our shipment from Take 2 on Monday." With a game of Max Payne's calibre, you would normally expect to see reviews dotted all over the net in time for the game to hit store shelves. However, 3D Realms has long been a subscriber to the adage "when it's done", and with that they mean full kit and caboodle. The chances are you'll get to play it just about the same time that we do. Following the release of the game, Broussard says that a demo is in the works which will no doubt bring the Internet to a standstill in a couple of weeks' time. At 120Mb or so they reckon it'll be a corker, and given the lack of reviews gamers will be in the unique (and perhaps comfortable) position of being able to make their own minds up for once. On the size of the demo, Broussard said, "We're basically not going to trim the content of the demo to make it an easy download," but later amended this to say "It's not that we're lazy and leaving data in there. It's that the demo is just going to be that large with the maps we're giving out." Max Payne is currently scheduled for a July 27th release this side of the Atlantic, but that's subject to change.

A new government study funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council has shown that youngsters who play computer games "regularly but not excessively" have the concentration and co-ordination of athletes, generally have more friends than other children, and are just plain "better adjusted" than non-gamers. According to report co-author Jason Rutter, game players "seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination".

Although F-Zero X on the N64 was a tremendous game, most people's memories of F-Zero lie with the Super Nintendo. Almost ten years ago, the original F-Zero trotted out onto the starting line and sold consoles like hotcakes with slick presentation and speed unmatched in rival racers on Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis. Partly because of technological limitations, and partly to cater to the homesick school kid in all of us, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance version of F-Zero is almost a carbon copy of the Super Nintendo version. Developed by second-party NDCube, a company nine years younger than the game they have so lovingly restored, it does almost the same job its predecessor did for the SNES, and forms the keystone in Nintendo's top tier launch line-up. Don't be surprised if you have trouble getting hold of this one, it's selling faster than umbrellas in monsoon season. If you've never played F-Zero, don't be afraid of all this brooding nostalgia; it's immediately accessible. You're a competitor in a hi-octane race series set in the near future. Each race is five laps long and you have to finish in a certain position in the field of eight to continue racing. To make matters slightly more interesting, the barriers on each side of the racecourse are electrified, and if you stray onto them you lose speed and your power bar gradually drains until you die. On larger tracks with narrow causeways, things become quite tricky as a result. Part of F-Zero's charm is that you have to try and stay alive while maintaining a reasonable enough speed that your pursuers can't overtake you.

Having travelled half way across America in recent years, working as level designers on everything from Anachronox and Thief II to American McGee's Alice in the process, Rich Carlson and Iikka Keranen have released their own debut game. Marking something of a step backwards from the cutting-edge graphics and multi-million dollar budgets they have got used to, Plasmaworm is a psychedelic take on the classic Snakes, with a vague backstory involving manipulating the eponymous energy-based annelids to remove reality vortices from an improbability drive.

One of the few big developers to emerge from Spain in recent years, Pyro Studios got off to a great start with their 1998 debut "Commandos : Behind Enemy Lines". Set during World War II and featuring an entertaining blend of stealth, strategy and action, the game was a huge hit across Europe. With the inevitable sequel finally nearing release, we caught up with the guys at Pyro to find out what they have in store for us this time...

Five years after John Romero and Tom Hall co-founded Ion Storm as a developer's paradise where design would be law, the pair have apparently left the company "to pursue other interests", according to a short statement from Eidos USA sent to several websites last night. It's still uncertain whether or not this means the end of Ion Storm's Dallas studio, although the Eidos statement says that "Ion Storm will continue as a wholly owned subsidiary of Eidos and work on the sequels to the awarding winning Thief and Deus Ex titles as well as Deus Ex for the PS2". Given that all three games are being developed at the sister studio in Austin, the future of the Dallas office certainly seems bleak.

THQ have announced their second quarter financial results for the three months ending June 30th, with revenue and profits both up markedly compared to the same period last year. Revenues rocketed up by 70% to $55m, providing the California-based company with a net profit of $3.5m compared to a net loss of $2.7m in the second quarter of 2000. These results also show a big improvement over the previous three months, which saw a year-on-year decline in profits and revenue. At the time THQ commented that "the market outlook for the second half is encouraging", and today CEO Brian Farrell confirmed that "we continue to be optimistic about the rest of 2001". Judging from these figures they have every reason to be upbeat.

Just a few days after police marksmen shot a man dead in Brixton only to discover that the "gun" he had been brandishing was actually a novelty cigarette lighter, police officers have expressed their concern about a LAN party which is offering a deactivated AK47 assault rifle to the player who scores the most frags in its Counter-Strike competition. The event in question is the UK & Ireland National LAN Tour 2001, although coincidentally an identical weapon is also being given away at the RoWeb Terrorist LAN next weekend. The National LAN Tour organisers have given an "assurance that it will only be released to a responsible adult", but let's face it, how many of those do you see at your average LAN?

Publisher Eidos Interactive have released the first pictures from the sequel to award-winning first person role-playing game Deus Ex. Included in the press package were four concept sketches, a rendered mock-up, a pair of screen captures of the level editor in action, and an exciting pre-rendered montage of bathroom fittings which we can look forward to seeing in the game.

You're a gamer. You've come here to read about games, because you know and love games. We all do. One of the great things about being a gamer (besides the games) is that when you're sitting in the pub on a Friday night and somebody says "so, I've just bought Generic Platformer 4 for my Dreamcast, is it any good?", you can wheel round (if you weren't already facing them) and yell, "No! It's pants! You've wasted £35 on something that is better suited to dressing your tackle!" On the other hand though, your reputation as a gamer also singles you out as a fountain of knowledge on the subject of good games. So, while your blurry-eyed friend has to stare ashen-faced at the titles on display in his local gamery, you can glance knowingly at the shelves and spot the titles beaming 'Yes, I am good. Play me.' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and its even finer sequel are both such titles which sit in this enviable position. They are the games which all the other extreme sports games so want to be when they grow up. Can the THPS series ever falter? With the release of the Game Boy Advance version of Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2, we're about to find out. The announcement of THPS2 on the GBA seemed a little strange to me, because back then I was slightly naive of the machine's capabilities and wondered how on earth the same fluid, energetic and (I'm going out on a limb here) almost balletic gameplay could be ported across to a screen slightly smaller than a cream cracker. The team in charge of the port, Vicarious Visions, have actually done a sterling job of recreating each of the PlaySation versions skating locales from a curious fixed isometric viewpoint. The packaging boasts "advanced 3D graphics", whereas the only actual 3D models are the skaters themselves - the levels are no more than pre-rendered backdrops. From this viewpoint, the feel of the game is entirely in the handling of your skater. The way the characters glide into the air out of half-pipes feels almost no different to its more mature console sibling, and this surprises me. A lot. The other major achievement is the control system, which is just as intuitive and easy to manage as you have come to expect from the series. The A and B buttons take care of the grinding and jumping respectively, whilst the shoulder buttons handle the tricks. If you're a THPS veteran, it's a combination that feels natural as soon as you start playing, although the slightness of the GBA's design can occasionally result in aching fingers as you try to get a decent grip whilst pulling off frenetic combos.

Final Fantasy X for the PlayStation 2 has been released in Japan. In time-honoured tradition, popular Tokyo software stores opened as early as 6:30am to let people get their hands on the game, which is part of a 31 million selling series. Square CEO/President Hisashi Suzuki told Reuters that the company had delivered initial shipments of 2.14 million units as of July 17th, and advanced orders of 1.4 to 1.5 million. Which, all in all, is good news for the company. Square's costs have been extraordinary in the last couple of years, with the development of a number of games (from popular titles like Final Fantasy IX to bloopers like The Bouncer), and the simultaneous financing of the full length feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. As an added bonus for fans of the series, Final Fantasy X ships with preview footage of Final Fantasy XI, the game that Square executive vice president Hironobu Sakaguchi described as the first multi-platform fully online RPG only a couple of days ago. The trailer can be downloaded separately from Ruliweb, but given that the page is in Japanese, here's a direct link. Beware that most of the world is currently trying to download this trailer. Related Feature - Square aim for multiplatform

Peter Main, a man whom you may recognise as Nintendo executive veepee of sales and marketing, and a man whose name has appeared on these hallowed pages many times over the last couple of years, has announced his decision to step down as of February 1st next year. His retirement is being scheduled so that he won't miss the crucial launch of the next-generation GameCube. Main joined Nintendo in 1987, and has dealt with the rise and fall of many Nintendo consoles. He's seen the enormous success of the NES and Super NES, the extraordinary growth in console RPG popularity was more or less squarely down to the SNES, pun intended, and during his reign, the Game Boy has become the biggest selling console of all time, with over 100 million units shipped before its successful relaunch as Game Boy Advance. His replacement will be Peter MacDougall, current Nintendo of Canada president, who joined Nintendo in 1989. Current Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa described Main as an "industry legend", saying that most of the day to day business practices of the sales/marketing exec were invented by him over the last 15 years. MacDougall, who will take charge in February next year, also met with praise from Arakawa. "His breadth of success is a distinct asset given the global nature of Nintendo's business," he told IGN. Related Feature - GameCube: The Science Bit

With Microsoft and Nintendo threatening to blow millions on advertising their respective consoles this year, Sony must be feeling a bit left out. The Xbox is due to receive backing to the tune of $500 million alone. It's enough to get a competing executive all hot under the collar. Not to worry though, they've decided (for better or worse) to lavish attention on the games instead, and to begin with, they're hosting promotional Gran Turismo 3 activities at HMV in Oxford Circus all day Friday. Amongst the festivities will be overused rock band Feeder, who will be schmoozing and trying out the game, plenty of machines in-store to play the game on, and the Big Daddy of Gran Turismo himself, Kazunori Yamauchi. The first 50 people to buy a copy of GT3 from Oxford Circus tomorrow will also receive a free steering wheel to boot, and there's no mention of early opening hours, just a 9am kick-off, so if you work in the vicinity, we recommend you head on down. Moving back toward executives getting hot under the collar, Jakki Degg and Jo Hicks are being borrowed from Page 3 to wander around all day promoting the game. Hopefully while wearing very little indeed. So if a day of gaming, freebies, developers, rock stars and topless* supermodels is up your street, make that street Oxford Circus, and make a date for the 20th July, 9am BST in HMV. * We cannot guarantee that they will be topless, but slip 'em a fiver and we doubt they'll argue.

This week will see the UK release of Gran Turismo 3, probably the most eagerly anticipated PlayStation 2 game to date. And to celebrate, PC World will be holding a nationwide competition dubbed "Lap It Up", challenging players visiting their stores on Saturday to put up the "perfect lap". Sony's new game will be running on consoles in all one hundred PC World stores across the country this weekend, giving you the chance to take it for a quick test drive before you take the plunge. The person who records the fastest lap time in the UK will win a cool £3,000 in cash, with another £2,000 in runners-up prizes on the line. To find out more, just drop by your nearest PC World on Saturday.

When we looked at Windows XP a fortnight ago, one of the things we thought most fascinating about it was Product Activation. The reason it seemed so interesting wasn't so much how it worked, but that nobody had managed to crack it. However, much to Microsoft's disappointment no doubt, somebody now has, and with that it loses a little of its intrigue. The key to Product Activation according to German website tecChannel, is a file called 'wpa.dbl' stored in the system32 Windows directory. This file is singularly responsible for telling Windows whether or not it has been activated. You'll recall having read our article that Windows XP will only allow a finite number of hardware changes before it demands re-activation. In practice, tecChannel's latest research tells us, what it does is delete wpa.dbl, which puts the system into Activation mode, effectively barring you from normal usage until you re-activate. The 30 day (14 in the beta) grace period does not reset itself, it just resumes, so that if it has been more than 14 days since installation, you get no more free time. As we said, re-activating is a doddle if you're a genuine owner of Windows XP, because Microsoft is anxious not to set the wrong sort of precedents. However, tecChannel tells us that it is not necessary to re-activate. If you backup wpa.dbl, all you have to do is fool your system into thinking less than three things are different than they were beforehand and it will go on functioning. tecChannel now knows the various things Product Activation looks for, too. In their research, they changed the graphics card, and a network card. These were both picked up by WPA, but it didn't mind since two changes is acceptable. A third would also be acceptable, but a fourth (changing the CPU) triggered the deletion of wpa.dbl, and demanded the system be re-activated. Instead of doing so however, tecChannel dropped into the BIOS and switched off the CPU serial number, meaning that the operating system could no longer determine whether or not it was a different CPU to the original. They then copied their backed up wpa.dbl file into its system32 directory. On a subsequent reboot, the demand for activation was gone, because wpa.dbl could only identify two changes, which was within its boundaries of operation. Bingo. The trick then, is fooling the system. tecChannel's next objective was to use the wpa.dbl file on another computer. To do this, they put the same amount of RAM in it (one point discounted), they changed the volume ID of the new computer at the command line (two points discounted) and they used an advanced network card driver to specify the same MAC address as the previously activated network card (three points discounted). Finally, they used a bit of wit and cunning and switched the computer's hardware profile to that of a notebook. After this, the graphics card and IDE/SCSI controllers are no longer used to calculate the product ID. In effect, they have disabled or faked enough of the hardware in the old wpa.dbl that it doesn't mind running. With that, tecChannel had two computers running on the same activation, and Microsoft was slain. Given that the company is now between Release Candidates 1 and 2, it will be difficult for them to knock Product Activation into shape in time to do hackers and crackers any mischief. All it will take is one compromised Windows XP Product Activation and millions of software crackers will have a field day. Related Feature - The Next Windows

Japanese company Capcom has been around for some twenty years now, with a legacy of great arcade and console games as well as more recent favourites like Resident Evil and Onimusha. Never afraid to milk a franchise (witness the never-ending Street Fighter series), Capcom are now releasing some of these coin-op classics of yesteryear on the GameBoy Color.

Although they seem to average only one big mod per game, Team Evolve have a reputation for quality. Best known of course for their historical Quake modification Painkeep, the company diversified with the second game in Id's series, opting to develop a single player adventure, Zaero, which met with critical acclaim from the online press. For Quake III though, Evolve decided to head back to their roots, and with Painkeep Arena, they've created a first-rate multiplayer modification. Unlike most popular multiplayer mods, PKA is free-for-all deathmatch with a single objective; kill everyone. For gamers who have sought refuge in Counter-Strike after a rocky ride with Quake III, it'll be nice to shoot footsteps for once instead of trying to identify them. The idea in Painkeep is to kill your opponents, but it wouldn't be much of a modification if it didn't let you do that elaborately. The great thing about Painkeep though, is not so much the killing, but the methods for doing so. Apart from Quake's Rocket Launcher, Shotgun and Railgun, players are endowed with crowd pleasers like the Explosive Shotgun, the Chain Lightning Gun (great in a firefight - shoot one guy and the lightning bounces from him to the next guy and so on), a Quake-like Nailgun (with the added bonus being that the nails stick in walls and burn you if you touch them), not to mention the Airfist. This one's great. It fires out a blast of compressed air, which punches an enemy in the face and body, throwing them across rooms or, if you please, propelling you into the air like a rocket jump. Amongst numerous other items, players also receive a glorified grappling hook, the Dragon Tongue. The Tongue can latch onto walls, ceilings and other surfaces, or at a pinch a powerup located on a far off ledge. It's great for getting into hard to reach cubby holes for camping, and particularly useful if you're low on health and being pursued by someone with an explosive shotgun. Another part of your armoury that perhaps doesn't get as much attention are the handheld items. You deploy them by cycling through your inventory and choosing the right tool, then "using" them in the right spot. They can be messy - things like the Gravity Well, which forms a miniature black hole that sucks in and vaporises anybody and anything in the immediate vicinity, or the bear traps, which cause untold pain if you happen to step in them. There are a number of new levels to play around in too, which is great; some where the emphasis is on large open areas for Tarzan-like Dragon Tonguing, and some more claustrophobic levels suited to mad airfisting. At the moment Painkeep Arena is still in a state of development, but Team Evolve have just unveiled the new 2.6 Release version, which (weighing in at 90Mb or so) can be downloaded from one of the locations below (you may have to rename the file 'pkarenax.zip' to 'pkarenax.exe' to get it working though):

Problems in the communications industry and a CPU price war with rivals AMD have taken their toll at Intel, with the world's leading chip manufacturer reporting revenues of "just" $6.3bn for the three months ended June 30th, a 24% drop compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile profits slumped 76% to $854m, although this was actually slightly better than most Wall Street estimates.

Britain's independent game developers association TIGA has been busy, with the group (co-founded by the likes of Elixir's Demis Hassabis and Rebellion's Jason Kingsley) notching up two new high profile affiliate members this month. European Xbox vice-president Sandy Duncan had already announced at TIGA's launch in March that Microsoft would be seeking to join TIGA. Now the company has put its money where its mouth was, with the would-be console manufacturer stumping up a wad of cash of unknown size for the privilege.

CPL-Europe are holding their latest event at the Novotel in Hammersmith, west London on the weekend of August 3rd to 5th. The main attractions are obviously the Quake 3 Arena teamplay tournament and Counter-Strike competition, both sponsored by ELSA with cash prizes totalling €30,000. But there is also a BYOC (Bring-Your-Own-Computer) area where you can enjoy some network gaming even if you're not taking part in the pro-gaming. Big screen action and live commentary from the likes of Sujoy, Killcreek and the ubiquitous Rik Henderson is being promised so that you can keep track of what's going on in the arena, and there's plenty of space for spectators.