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Onimusha Warlords is the second really thrilling PlayStation 2 game we've seen in under a week. The much hyped, long-awaited PS2 exclusive is a triumphant journey through a land of sumptuous visuals and breathtaking computer generated cut-scenes, and really shows what the oft-criticized console is capable of doing under the right direction. It had one of the biggest budgets of any videogame ever, but instead of blowing it on designer clothes and perms, the developers put it to work where it was needed. Apart from the unrivalled visuals, Onimusha boasts a wonderful orchestral soundtrack performed by the New Japan Philharmonic that fits the game like a glove, and a storyline that plunges you right back into feudal Japan without a crutch to lean on. In short, it's a killer app. Capcom are the masters of CG intros. We already know this from their work with the Resident Evil series, but even so, $2 million is quite a lot of money to spend. The reason it cost so much, and works so well though, is that they didn't collect a circle of trainee artists and get them to animate it using 3D Studio Max, they paid an outside consultancy to create a proper introduction, which lasts five minutes in total and overloads you with excitement and intrigue. Instead of the usual clanking swords of unrealistic warriors, the introduction is eerily realistic, with live action armies slicing and dicing one another. It starts with a battle between two warlords and their armies. At the conclusion of the battle, the legendary Nobunaga Oda, who came close to uniting Japan under his banner in real life, is slain by a rival warlord with an arrow to the throat.

3DO Europe have announced GoDai : Elemental Force, a new PlayStation 2 game due for release in November. Set in a mythical Japan, the game pits you as a young warrior called Hiro who must master the art of Sukoto Ninjitsu, a form of combat based around the four elements. Cue sixteen levels of mystical martial arts mayhem, taking in weapons from oriental swords and spears to shuriken and smoke bombs, as well as a range of elemental magic attacks. Also included is a range of multiplayers options, with eight different gameplay modes being promised. Other details are a little thin on the ground at this stage, but in the meantime you can enjoy a set of eight brand new screenshots of the game in action.

It used to be a hotbed for trying out the next generation of console games, but nowadays we're not in the business of following the arcade terribly closely. For the next generation of gamers, arcade releases aren't as important as they used to be, partly because everything's a quid a go, but most of the time because the version running on your PlayStation 2 at home looks better and features ten times as many levels. Since they made the decision to become platform agnostic though, Sega Amusements' arcade offerings have been spicy affairs. With no console to promote, a Sega-driven arcade acts as a sort of shopping centre for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft when they need a new killer app for their console. A perfect example is this week's arcade offering, Monkey Ball. Developed using the standard Naomi 1 system, which shares a lot in common with Dreamcast technology, Monkey Ball is a simple concept that will likely go a long way and inspire a Samba De Amigo-like cult following. In Monkey Ball, you control a monkey. In a ball. Using the banana provided, you have to tilt the platform your little monkey is sat on so that he rolls around various stages. These stages have sides, off which your monkey can roll if you're not too careful, so there's an element of risk involved. The game can be played by 1-4 players (with linked up units), and if you're good, you can collect extra on-screen bananas to add to your score. The stupid thing is, Monkey Ball is ridiculously entertaining, but it's such a stupid concept. I mean, lets unravel it a bit. It's basically one of those maze puzzles with a tiny marble that you complete by tilting the whole thing all over the place. The only difference is that there is a monkey in your marble. Why? Because you're using a banana to tilt him. It's nonsensical in the extreme. Still, we love it. Monkey Ball is out in arcades this week, and Super Monkey Ball, an advanced derivative, will be release on Nintendo's GameCube some time in 2002 with four player split screen and more.

Sega has published release and pricing details for the much anticipated Phantasy Star Online Version 2. The new game, which will be more of an extension to the original than a true sequel, is Sega's opportunity to introduce a radical new pricing initiative, and for the designers at Sonic Team to implement various things they were forced to omit the first time around. The game will be released on September 11th in the USA, and will include an online payment structure that will be easily affordable for your average gamer, they say. Gamers can subscribe for three unlimited months of play for $15, or they can just say sod it to that and play offline for free. This payment scheme will not be introduced to the original Phantasy Star Online retroactively. For Sega though, this is a much needed new revenue stream, and will presumably apply to versions of the game on other consoles as well. Related Feature - Phantasy Star Online Dreamcast Review

In the days of yore, a laptop was arguably just a computer with a battery. Often two or more inches thick and with a screen only a quarter the size of the flip top, the idea of trouping around with some of those 'portables' is spine-tingling. Fast forward ten years, and compared to your average laptop, it's the desktop PC that's turned into a clunky, beer-bellied lager lout whose only decent application is in loitering around and causing trouble. Nowadays though, a swanky laptop is the epitome of chic. If you work in New Media, the chances are a wafer-thin Sony VAIO notebook slides comfortably into your briefcase, and if you're a mobile exec, you'll be carrying enough power to embarrass most desktop owners.

The Japan Times Online is reporting that Nintendo's kart-racing extravaganza Mario Kart Super Circuit (formerly known as Mario Kart Advance) is due for release this Saturday (21st July) in Japan, over a month ahead of schedule. The move is targeted at the beginning of the summer break for schoolchildren, no doubt with the intention of stimulating sales of the console over the summer months. Mario Kart Super Circuit is capable of up to four player link up gaming, and will no doubt sell through the roof amongst youngsters and older gamers who remember it on the Super Nintendo as well. After a slightly disappointing N64 outing, Mario Kart fans will be hoping for a return to the game's former glory. According to our sources, Mario Kart Super Circuit is still due out in the final quarter of this year in the UK. Related Feature - New Mario Kart

Eidos Interactive has officially unveiled the sequel to the popular PlayStation 2 first person shooter TimeSplitters. Although arguably surpassed by recent FPS spectacular Red Faction, TimeSplitters 2 will again feature single player and co-op modes, but this time the emphasis is on demonstrating the abilities of Free Radical Design's upgraded game engine.

Crawfish Interactive today announced that they have signed an agreement with The Bitmap Brothers to bring their titles to Game Boy Advance. Rather than focusing on modern successes such as Z though, the first few games will come straight out of the archives. Contemporary remakes of Xenon II, Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe, Cadaver, Gods, Magic Pockets and The Chaos Engine are on the cards, and the first confirmed title will be Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe, an advanced adaptation of the Commodore/Amiga version. Made in 1990, Speedball II is still fondly remembered as the game that did future sports correctly. You take control of an up and coming young team desperate to win the Speedball championships and through training and competition you work your way towards that goal. Crawfish's GBA version will be a faithful translation with a few added quirks. The new version will feature multiple teams, players and personalities, additional unspecified gameplay modes and up to four player link up modes. Both companies expressed excitement at the agreement, with Crawfish's Director of Development Mike Merren describing the GBA as "the perfect system to rediscover Speedball II." The perfect system to introduce new people to the wonders of Speedball, too, we reckon.

Squaresoft executive veepee Hironobu Sakaguchi has made encouraging noises about his company's potential involvement with GameCube. When quizzed by the Los Angeles Times about his company's willingness to develop for GameCube and Xbox, he said that "this is certainly a possibility", and that "executives at Square are very enthusiastic about Nintendo." The tone of the interview was generally optimistic. It seems clear that Square would like to develop games cross-format to ensure a decent online experience for all. To do this, "you have to transcend hardware," he told the Times. "If we want to do financially well online, we need to exist across all consoles." The only problem we can see with his theory is that for it to work, the games would have to be nigh on identical. As demonstrated in the past, gamers on different platforms playing against one another incur certain advantages and disadvantages that are entirely the fault of their PC or console's capabilities. The obvious example here is the small window of opportunity that Quake 3 gamers on the PC had to play against Dreamcast owners. Even a half-decent PC gamer using a keyboard and mouse could utterly destroy their Dreamcast counterpart in a matter of moments, and the Dreamcast was unable to handle servers with more than four players, too. Keeping gamers up to date is another problem. Eventually Quake 3 on the PC was patched and the Dreamcast version was left behind. If you're constantly patching the game's persistent online world, you need to be able to do it to every edition, and Sega/Id Software couldn't. If Square don't have a problem with one format's version of a game looking better than another, that's probably all right, but if they do, then we're looking at the lowest common denominator syndrome. A game would have to be made that pushed the weakest of the systems to the extreme so that it wouldn't look out of place on more advanced hardware. We applaud their intentions, but reckon it might be more than they can afford to chew on. Sakaguchi made it clear however that Final Fantasy XI, which he described as "a fully online game", will have to be the first to surpass these boundaries. Related Feature - Final Fantasy not-so-final?

Although Microsoft has already spent a certain percentage of their $500m advertising budget promoting their peripherals and third party contracts in that area, Nintendo, who launch their competing GameCube console two days prior to the Xbox, have kept surprisingly quiet on the subject. On Friday though, they broke the silence and spoke to Core Magazine about hardware and cost. The most obvious extra peripheral here is the supplementary controller. Identical to your average GameCube controller which we examined in depth during E3, the controller will probably come in alternative colour schemes as well (although Nintendo hasn't confirmed this), and will retail for 2,500 yen (£14). Joining the controller (although not physically, as with the Nintendo 64), is the standard memory card, with a 4Mb storage capacity. This will be broken down into 59 storage blocks, to be distributed between games as you see fit. The price has been set at 1,400 yen (£8). Other peripherals Nintendo has mentioned include replacement AC adapters (3,000 yen) and S-Video (2,500 yen) and Component (3,500 yen) cables. All of the above will be available with the console on its Japanese and American release dates. Furthermore, Nintendo aims to make several further peripherals available, although release date and pricing information on those is scarce. Amongst them are the wireless "WaveBird" controller, 64MB SD Memory Card adapter, GBA link cable, 56k modem adapter, and broadband adapter. Related Feature - Nintendo's E3 announcement

A year ago this week former Dynamix employees Rick Overman, Tim Gift and Jeff Tunnell formed a new company called Garage Games, which would be offering a special version of the Tribes 2 engine dubbed V12 to independent game developers for just $100. Although things have been fairly quiet since then, work on the V12 engine has been progressing on both PC and Mac, with a second beta version distributed to testers recently.

Hot Potato is a classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy stands around in street and promptly gets pelted by girls. But with spuds. There's some kind of vague story about an inundation of crazy space spuds from Mars mentioned in the manual, but what it all boils down to is a puzzle game that lands somewhere between Tetris and Bust-A-Move.

Virgin have announced that they will be taking futuristic first person shooter Codename : Outbreak on the road in the UK this summer, joining forces with the first UK National LAN Tour. The tour kicks off in Cardiff on the weekend of July 27th-29th, heads over to Dublin for the next weekend, up to Glasgow a week later, then back down to Manchester, before finishing in London on the already crowded bank holiday weekend of August 24th-26th. If you fancy taking part in the Outbreak tournament at any of these events and getting a sneak peek at the game several weeks before its planned September release, just head over to the event website and sign up.

While the recent release of Anarchy Online in the USA and Scandinavia might not have gone as smoothly as was hoped, plans are already afoot to bring the addictive sci-fi role-playing game to other European countries later this year. The latest deal to be announced will see Bigben Interactive distributing Anarchy Online in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the release due some time in September. Other European countries are also expected to get the game some time in the fall, and further details will no doubt be announced soon...

French publisher UbiSoft has released a demo version of Conquest : Frontier Wars, a space-based real-time strategy game which was originally being developed by Digital Anvil. Late last year though the game was dropped by publisher Microsoft, who then went on to buy the ailing developer, leaving Conquest in limbo. Since then the game's producer has been working on completing the title at Fever Pitch Studios, and our latest information is that it should be released some time in September, a couple of years later than originally anticipated.

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Total Recall, Red Faction puts you in the role of Parker, a Douglas Quaid-like nobody mining a few square feet of rock beneath the surface of Mars. Like your fellow workers, you don't exactly view this as a dream occupation, and the cramped work and living quarters do little to keep you happy. Enter the eponymous Red Faction, a rebellious uprising of your mining colleagues led by the mysterious Eos which seeks to usurp power from the evil corporation that enslaves the miners, from the Cohaagen-like figures at the top right down to the security staff. Once you've broken free of your shackles you take part in the uprising, arming yourself to the teeth and fighting for your freedom. As you advance so does the plot, in a round about way, and rather like Half-Life steady sequences of action are punctuated by impressive encounters with larger entities. Volition deserves some kudos here for not simply tailing things off with a marginal boss encounter, since there is plenty of longevity in here and a fair amount of nail-biting combat sequences.

French game designer Hubert Chardot confirmed that he is currently working on the script for a movie based on last year's survival horror flop Devil Inside. Although the game was certainly innovative, it was perhaps a little too off-the-wall for many - its male hero could change into the demoness Deva at intervals throughout the game to send souls back to hell, while a cameraman trailed you around filming your exploits for the eponymous TV show The Devil Inside, with your score depending as much on provoking a good reaction from the studio audience as it did on simply blasting zombies back into the after-life.

Troubled British publisher Eidos Interactive has released video footage of its forthcoming Xbox title Mad Dash Racing, developed by Crystal Dynamics and due out later this year. In the words of their magniloquent press release, "Mad Dash Racing combines high-speed combat racing and 3D adventure action with a crew of motley characters for an insane multi-player competition!" You take part in a race for survival against the evil Hex and his malevolent followers, with locations including the seventh layer of hell and the peak of an ice-capped mountain. It's all about being first, with power-ups and such strewn around the course to aid you in your battle to do that. Single and multi player modes will be contended for, with seven races in the single player game and a couple of boss encounters to boot. Sounds gripping. Each of the game's nine wily characters will be enamoured a certain ability; Bash, Dash or Glide. Using these skills and power-ups will probably have more to do with the outcome of the race than sheer driving ability, one would guess. Thanks to the Xbox's Internet features, people will be able to download new characters and tracks, which the press release perplexingly describes as "secret". Also included will be options for customizing the look of your racer and the like. For more on Mad Dash Racing, take a look at our gallery of screenshots taken from recent video footage. Related Feature - Mad Dash Racing Screenshots

Bath-based Internet and computer magazine publisher - the Future Network plc - has axed 140 jobs from its UK operation in a bloody Friday-the-thirteenth cull. The losses are understood to come from across Future's operation in a bid to help save the company around £8.5 million a year. Centralised support staff and workers in Future's Internet division and magazine titles have been hardest hit in the cull, although no specific details have emerged yet. A spokeswoman for the company said none of the company's titles would shut as a result of today's action.

Cryo have officially announced that they are working on a new horror survival game based on From Dusk 'Til Dawn, the cult vampire movie from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. In the game you will take on the role of George Clooney's character, Seth Gecko, who is now on a maximum security prison ship heading for New Orleans, just 72 hours from being executed for the crimes committed by his psychotic brother. And as if that isn't bad enough, the ship has been over-run by vampires trying to rescue one of your fellow prisoners, and your only chance to escape now is to fight your way through them and get to the top deck by dawn.

Kärna, the parent company behind the famous Razer Boomslang, has completely exhausted its funding and has had to suspend its technical support and warranty services, at least until a new source of funding is located. In a second "Riding out the storm" update on its website, Kärna once again thanked its customers for all their support, throughout the ups and downs, and blamed a funding commitment that fell through on the unfortunate state of the company. As it said last week, it will continue to try and find some more cash down the back of the sofa to keep its customer services going, but it's looking bleak. Certainly we don't know whether we will ever now see the fabled Razer Mamba. Related Feature - Razer's blunt

While John Carmack is best known as the co-founder and lead programmer of Doom developers id Software, he is also an amateur rocket enthusiast in his spare time with his own company Armadillo Aerospace. All of which we knew before. What we didn't know though is just how far Carmack and his friends have got. According to a messageboard post from the eccentric coder on Slashdot, they are expecting to have a manned version of their VTVL (Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing) rocket ship ready to test within the next few months. "Next year, at the very least, we will have a supersonic manned rocket ship".

Prince Charles is being urged to squeeze computer games into his hectic schedule in an effort to combat his loathing of the pastime. The European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) intends to send the Prince a basket of computer games following his speech earlier this week that told youngsters to ditch their computer games for "worthwhile books".

3DO have been playing with their toy soldiers for the last few years now, producing a string of titles in the Army Men franchise covering multiple platforms and gaming genres. So it came as no great surprise to discover that one of the GameBoy Advance's launch titles featured the little green plastic soldiers. What did surprise us though was that Army Men Advance is actually rather good...

The Half-Life community has been unusually animated lately, with the briefly engaging mission pack Blue Shift passing us by and the Beta release of the high profile fast action modification The Opera. The former you can read about in our in-depth review from the middle of last month, but the chances are that the latter will be new to you. In short, "The Opera" is every action movie scene you've ever witnessed. The emphasis is not on sheer numbers of kills, but the way in which you pull them off. Leap heroically over a banister into the jaws of death with all pistols blazing and you'll accrue a lot more credibility than simply chucking a grenade into a rat hole. The idea is to make money, rather than score frags, and style is far more important to the whole equation than regularity. Perhaps taking a step back from Counter-Strike, one shot kills are something of a rarity, and there are over 20 weapons to choose from. Most of the pistols in your environment can be used akimbo, and according to authors Redeemed Assassins, a lot of work has gone into the act of balancing them with the rest of your arsenal. Complementing this finely tuned arsenal are "Disciplines", of which each character may pick one. Disciplines affect each situation differently. The discipline of precision, for example, improves your accuracy from long distance and things like that. Also, elements of the HUD are discipline specific, so things like the ammo gauge are concealed unless you've chosen the discipline of perception. This flies in the face of virtually every other FPS game and mod I've ever encountered, which is quite something. The Opera is currently in Beta and well worth playing, so if you fancy a break from Counter-Strike, you might like to give it a try. The Opera weighs in at 87Mb and can be downloaded from FilePlanet. Joining The Opera on FilePlanet is the latest cut of the Half-Life jib. Valve have finally released version 1.1.0.7 of Half-Life, and version 1.0.0.2 of Counter-Strike. Before you CS fans jump up and down and get yourselves messy though, the version 1.0.0.2 update applies to the retail boxed CS edition only, and changes (as far as your humble correspondent has been able to ascertain) diddly-squat. Version 1.1.0.7 of Half-Life on the other end, fixes a mountain of bugs and doses around with various bits and pieces that make up Team Fortress Classic and such. Model drawing has apparently been optimized, and an important GL binding bug has been suppressed. Other changes include the official addition of the Deathmatch Classic modification (which really helps pep up the burden of your 15Mb download, given you probably leeched the 7Mb patch for DMC several weeks ago separately), and allegedly a number of other fixes. It bears noting that this release does not mark the inclusion of the much anticipated voice comms system. People eager to communicate with their buddies will at least for the moment be forced to rely on Roger Wilco and Battle Communicator. Ho-hum. If you're currently running version 1.1.0.6 of Half-Life, which is the most likely situation, you can download its specific update (15Mb) from here, or if you're unfortunate enough to require the full whammy, you can avail yourself of that here. Finally, if you're an owner of the boxed Counter-Strike game, you can get the 1.0.0.1 > 1.0.0.2 update here and the full patch here. Related Feature - Half-Life: Blue Shift Review

Exactly one month ago we reported that THQ had secured the worldwide rights to publish video games based on the popular table-top strategy franchise Warhammer 40k. The first new game to be released under the deal was promised for Christmas 2002, but we now know that one important thing was missing - a development team. Today THQ have updated their original press release, announcing that they are "actively seeking partners to develop games based on their recently acquired world wide publishing rights to Warhammer 40,000".

Without a doubt the largest present generation mobile phone to grace the market, the Nokia 9210 Communicator also holds the dubious honour of being the first mobile to feature games which aren't complete pap. We're quite happy to lock horns with the ravenous Snakes elite over this one, especially now that Kuju Entertainment have released some screenshots of their little beaut', Mobile Soccer. The Nokia Communicator features a full colour screen and Symbian's Crystal reference design, so in effect it's almost a full-blown PDA, resembling leading palmtop devices like the HP Jornada and the Psion Revo Plus, but with a full suite of mobile phone functions to boot. Mobile Soccer will be a fully functional football game, and a couple of "screenshots" are already available. One of the advantages of the Nokia Communicator format is that it features an exceptionally large screen, perfect (in this case) for a top down view of a football field. In its present state, the game bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Chapman's classic Net Yaroze PlayStation game, Total Soccer Yaroze (video here, screenshots here) but we fancy that's more to do with the pair's simplistic visual approach than anything else. Kuju Entertainment, who see themselves as something of a market leader in this area (developing for WAP, EPOC and Game Boy Advance) have already distinguished themselves this year with announcements regarding PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and are the force behind the bizarrely entertaining Microsoft Train Simulator. Mobile Soccer will be available through Club Nokia sometime this year. Related Features - Kuju Mobile Soccer Screenshots

British publishers EON Digital have secured the rights to the PSOne and Game Boy Advance versions of Team 17's Worms World Party. The PSOne version is likely to be almost identical to the Dreamcast version, which we reviewed earlier this year, but the GBA version should be interesting. Of course, we've crossed paths with Worms World Party in the past, on the Dreamcast and PC. Our well-documented battle with the PC version's absurd copy protection system (which had us sitting pretty for three whole minutes while verifying the disc) left a sour taste in the mouth. Unlike previous attempts at Worms on a portable format, which fell flat on their faces (see our review of Worms Armageddon on the Game Boy Color for your evidence), the Game Boy Advance provides a reasonably specced platform for the famous multiplayer spineless 'em up. The Super Nintendo maintained a fairly reasonable Worms incarnation, and since the GBA is technically superior to the 16-bit console, we fancy its chances. Always eager to whet your appetites, EON have sent along a few early screenshots of the PSOne version, due out towards the end of 2001. Related Feature - Worms World Party PSOne Screenshots

French companies Kalisto and Wanadoo have formally announced their futuristic racing game NY Race, which is based on Luc Besson's surreal sci-fi movie The Fifth Element. Due for release in November, the game will let you step into the shoes of Korben Dallas and drive around the airways of New York City in a selection of over thirty flying cars, from Korben's yellow taxi to flying police cars.

According to The Sunday Times, David and Richard Darling, owners of Codemasters and valued at £400m between them, are in talks to sell part of their company because they can't afford to fund the costly stream of expansion. Codemasters is the biggest developer/publisher operating in the UK, formed by the two Darlings and their father. Although the company had demonstrated record profits growth for the UK gaming sector, it is now struggling and is expected to make a loss this year. Despite chart-topping successes like Operation Flashpoint and Severance, the company is ruefully having to admit that it doesn't take much to achieve that goal in the short term. Fronting development costs for services like the Codemasters Multiplayer Network has taken a lot out of the company, as have other, more ambitious expansion plans. At the present time, the Darlings are trying to sell a £25m stake in the company to venture capitalists in the city, a move which the Times comments comes only two years after they took a dividend of almost £10m out of the business. Although the Darlings will invest another £1m in the firm, of the £25m figure Richard points out that "we don't have that sort of money". "We have made presentations to a lot of venture capitalists," he told The Sunday Times. "We are expecting the process to come to a conclusion by the end of July or start of August."