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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

British e-commerce barons Gameplay have been doing a bit of extra-curricular work these last few days, badgering developers and publishing houses with the results of their poll into the interests of retro-minded GBA owners. They asked "What classic game would you love to see on the GameBoy Advance?" A total of 2518 responded, with games as varied as Tempest 2000, Monkey Island and Paradroid making up the numbers. Top of the tree was the topical Grand Theft Auto, with 32% of the vote, but clutching gallantly onto 20% of the vote in second place was Frontier Developments' classic Elite. Apparently Frontier's David Braben was surprisingly receptive when Gameplay gave him a ring. "I'm pleased to see yet another demonstration of the strength of support that Elite and its sequels still enjoy amongst the game-playing community," David Braben himself was heard to say. "In fact we have been planning some form of Elite sequel for GameBoy Advance for a while now. We are just about ready to open talks with publishers about it, so unfortunately I'm not in a position to reveal any more detail at this stage." "We are very familiar here at Frontier Developments with the GameBoy Advance architecture, and are confident we can produce a new game that captures the appeal of Elite for today's mass audience whilst remaining true to both our track-record of innovation and the spirit of the original games." As long as Braben and co. stay true to the original game, we can probably expect this one to run and run. The GameBoy Advance has a few games that might be described as killer applications, but amongst more mature gamers none would be so meaningful as this.

While the triumvirate of Dead or Alive 3, Halo and Project Gotham Racing got most of the attention at the Xperience press event in London last week, the other title which really caught our eye was hidden away in a dark corner at the back of the venue. Step forward Wreckless.

In the wake of the US release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, id Software's resident Brit Graeme Devine updated his .plan last night to remind people of the dangers of piracy. The official line from id is that nobody has yet managed to crack the Quake 3 engine's CD key system, and Graeme pointed out that "many so-called cdkey generators are in fact virus attacks that steal your own good cdkey, or worse, corrupt your files". And although I'm sure we don't need to tell you this, given the number of idiots who spam our forums every week trying to blag CD keys for games, it probably bears repeating that if you own a legitimate copy of the game giving out your key to other people is a big no-no as well. "As we see cdkeys being distributed over the Internet those keys are being added to our ban list", Graeme announced. "It is very important to not share your own cdkey with anyone else." Verstehen sie?

Novalogic have released a new demo version of their helicopter flight combat game Comanche 4 to replace the earlier test release. Coming in at a modest 60Mb, this one features the Eagle's Talon single player mission from the game, which sees you supplying air support for a beach landing and then blowing up a cargo ship before returning to help escort a secret agent back to his extraction point. You can grab the demo from the following sites -

The Xbox is rapidly earning a reputation as the enthusiasts' console, with tinkering and investigation reaching levels not witnessed since the dying days of Dreamcast. Xbox owners have already established how to cajole Halo into playing against other gamers online. They have ripped the console to pieces in the hope of upgrading various components - development units featured 128Mb of RAM they moan, why not solder some more onto the board? They have also discovered that some Xboxes did in fact ship with a 10Gb Seagate hard disk, despite claims to the contrary, although some shipped with an 8Gb Western Digital model as promised. There are also rumours afoot that the 'special surprise' for Xbox owners hinted at by Microsoft will reveal itself on the Thanksgiving holiday of the 22nd of this month, and that it may involve one of the female characters from the early Xbox tech demos. It's interesting to see so much enthusiasm for a console a lot of people were willing to write off a few short months ago. Our Xbox is currently making its way through various shipping channels, but expect a full breakdown when we do finally get hold of it. Related Feature - Play Halo over the Net

Nintendo has confused gamers and journalists alike by claiming victory in the console race Stateside. Combined US retail revenues for GameCube (hardware systems, games and accessories) come to more than $98 million. Nintendo are comparing this to the three-day opening weekend ticket sales of the Harry Potter movie, which topped $93.5 million. Nintendo's executive veepee of sales and marketing Peter Main was on hand to celebrate. "Some 700,000 NINTENDO GAMECUBE hardware systems moved to retail locations in time for our launch, our largest first day supply ever," he told journalists in a prepared statement. "But right now it appears that none of them may be left by this weekend." The official press release suggests hardware sales were more than twice that of Xbox. We find this quite hard to believe though, because Xbox shipped 300,000 units, and if Nintendo shipped 600,000 GameCubes they would be discussing retail revenues of $120 million… Of course, that depends on your interpretation of "combined retail revenues", but if Nintendo wants to peddle ambiguity they shouldn't be surprised if it bites them in the behind. The fact of the matter is that 700,000 units is more than double that of Xbox (which is in very short supply right now, and may not even reach 700,000 units shipped until mid-December), and more than Sony managed to ship at last year's PS2 launch to boot. Nintendo also claims that Luigi's Mansion was the most popular title, followed by the brilliant Rogue Leader from LucasArts and then Wave Race: Blue Storm, and that GameCube has proven more popular even than GameBoy Advance in sales terms. Related Feature - GameCube Sunday

Your name is Aurax, and you are an alcoholic. As the game begins you are recovering from the mother of all hangovers after celebrating your coming of age, but things are about to get much worse. First your sister reveals that she is a magician and that you too have the power of magic, then skeletons attack your town and slaughter your neighbours, and to cap it all an evil warlord kidnaps your sister to turn her to the dark side. What starts off as a rescue attempt soon becomes an epic quest to defeat the armies of chaos which are threatening your land as it becomes obvious that the force .. sorry, magic is strong in you. Sadly any impact that this might have had is marred by the game's shoddy dialogue and flat emotionless voice acting, which is about as exciting as Stephen Hawkings reading out a shopping list. The only silver lining is the occasional moments of humour (intentional or otherwise), such as the pair of evil wizards who sound uncannily like Arnold Schwarzenegger and spout lines which make Conan The Barbarian look like William Shakespeare. The game itself is a blend of real-time strategy and role-playing elements and revolves around controlling "places of power". These earn you the mana points which you need to cast spells and summon creatures to fight for you, and as a result most battles tend to devolve into grabbing as many of them as possible while chasing down an enemy hero. There is some variation in mission objectives, such as rescuing missing kids, taking part in a bar-room brawl or recovering a magical item, but generally everything boils down to finding and defeating one or more enemy wizards.

Early-adopters of Microsoft's Xbox may have established how to play Halo over the Internet, and while we can't test this theory for ourselves, we thought we would reprint it so that anybody zealous enough to have imported an Xbox can give it a go. Firstly, you need an Xbox, a network hub and a PC connected to the Internet (preferably over a broadband connection). Give your Xbox an IP address along the lines of 192.168.0.*, where * is any number other than 1 not already taken up by a device on your network. Set the subnet to 255.255.255.0 and point the gateway and DNS addresses to 192.168.0.1. Your PC's IP address should be 192.168.0.1. Depending on the operating system, this next bit may vary, but using Windows XP or 2000, go to Network Connections and create a new Virtual Private Networking (VPN) connection. Put a placeholder IP and username / password in for the time being, but agree to share the connection over the network your PC shares with the Xbox. The reason for all this is simple. Halo requires that any Xbox it connects to be on the same subnet as itself. That means that any Xbox on the same network as another will be able to connect, but as far as the Internet is concerned it's lost at sea. Not so if you fool it with a VPN connection, however. Find someone willing to play Halo with you, and establish the VPN connection we created before with them, filling in their IP address and a mutually acceptable username / password as required. As far as the Xbox is then concerned, you will be on the same network, and all bets are off. As we said at the outset, we have no evidence that this works at all, other than some reports on an Internet bulletin board, but the theory is sound. Good luck too all and sundry that attempt this, and let us know if you succeed! Related Feature - Xperience

Microids have released a demo version of Master Rallye, a motor racing game based on the eponymous endurance race which takes place across stages in Europe, Turkey and Russia. When we saw the game at ECTS back in September it was looking quietly impressive, and now's your chance to give it a try for yourself. Weighing in at a bandwidth-busting 147Mb, the demo lets you drive the Nissan Navara or Schlesser Megane through a stage in France, with a choice of practice, race and checkpoint modes. At the moment the demo is only available from Czech site Tiscali, but more mirrors will no doubt pop up soon.

Microsoft's decision to become a format holder is a step up into the big leagues for them, and unlike PC games where failure is only as great as a single lost sale, complete failure in this arena could mean billions in lost revenue. On the other hand though, it works both ways. Complete success would put Microsoft at the head of another multi-billion-dollar industry. The stakes are high, but that's the way they like them. When GameCube launched in Japan on September 14 it did so with a wafer-thin covering of launch software. Reports suggest that Nintendo has barely sold 300,000 units in its home country to date, but despite that GameCube definitely has class. Games like Luigi's Mansion and Super Monkey Ball are easily palatable on such a cheap console - Cubes have been making it into this country for less than £200, even via the usually extortionate importers, and gamers are impressed at the potential. Xbox is going to be a harder pill to swallow for the consumer, simply because it costs more. Its launch titles have to justify $300 to the American consumer, making it much harder to construct a killer app for the Xbox than the GameCube once the relative price tags are taken into consideration. Amazingly though, going on the strength of the Xbox launch titles seen in London this weekend, it already has several. Even if, in PR terms, the event dubbed Xperience was a blunder. Back at the beginning of September, Nintendo put on a show in Westminster to demonstrate GameCube to hundreds of journalists and gamers. The event wowed visitors. By comparison 'Xperience', the Xbox equivalent staged in Covent Garden's Nutopia this weekend, has failed dismally to arouse excitement amongst its guests. It may yet be a success - it continues for the next few weeks, with excursions to other cities around the country along the way - but the crowds at the Nintendo Show were buzzing, while the only frenzied swarm we saw in the unusually dingy Nutopia this weekend was around the exit.

Nintendo's GameCube launched in the USA yesterday morning, with some 700,000 units available at retail. Plenty were snapped up as pre-orders, but the majority will be staring at gamers from store shelves for the princely sum of $199. 700,000 is more than double the number of Xboxes that shipped on Thursday of course, and if both companies' projections are on the money, Nintendo will have more units all the way up to Christmas. Whether they will all ship is another matter. There was a definite clamour to get hold of GameCube in several of the largest US cities, but with the consoles in bountiful supply, a lot of people were happy to pick one up on Sunday morning or during the day. Peculiarly, the games have been available for a week or more now, as the GameBoy Advance games were. We have a copy of Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader here to show for it. It works a treat on our Japanese / US modded GameCube! We predict Rogue Leader will be one of the biggest earners at launch, with Luigi's Mansion and co. quite a way behind. GameCube launches with plenty of software titles, including exclusives like Rogue Leader, Luigi's Mansion and Wave Race: Blue Storm, along with meatier titles like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. Related Feature - Hip to be Cube!

bleem!, once a serious thorn in Sony Computer Entertainment's side, has given up the ghost this weekend. A full-page image of Sonic The Hedgehog weeping over a tombstone is all that can be found at bleem.com today. Many are speculating on the possible reasons for bleem!'s demise, but the most obvious one is that people simply don't need PSOne emulation any more. bleem! for the PC was a useful tool, but it was always fickle, falling apart at a moment's notice. And bleemcast!, the Dreamcast-based PSOne emulator, was excellent up to a point, emulating one game at a time and only three total at the time of the company's closure. The Dreamcast itself is no longer in production. It's not hard to see how a company built around emulating a six-year-old console on dying formats with the legal wrath of Sony against them would throw in the towel. Dreamcast has been in short supply for a while, and uptake of bleem! products at retail has always been sluggish. Nowadays PS2 is the dominant console, and bleem! is irrelevant as far as that's concerned because one of that console's most prominent features is backwards compatibility with the PSOne. If anything, it's surprising that they lasted as long as they did. We hope that bleem! founders Randy Linden and David Herpolsheimer find new work in the industry without delay. Related Feature - The bleem! Team

Burnout is a peculiar breed of racer. At its core it's the tried-and-trusted racing formula - rolling cityscapes and countryside, fast cars and powersliding, and a single overall objective: to win. There are two things that set Burnout apart from the likes of Ridge Racer, though: speed and danger. The sense of speed - even in the smaller 'easy' cars - is blistering. The game runs at a phenomenal, non-stop 50 frames per second, and the sense of speed when you're carving your way through traffic at 150mph is in a class of its own. This atmosphere of intense speed is accentuated by the overt and ever-present danger of ploughing into the back of the next car, or worse still oncoming traffic. As your speedometer warbles into the red the traffic seems to swell into a larger body and picking a path through it is none too easy, requiring split-second decisions with each passing metre. And if you come unstuck, you will know it. Burnout's crashes are some of the most extraordinary, spine-tingling, jaw-droppingly obscene I have seen in any racer. If you hit the front of an oncoming car at over 100mph the bodywork crumples and glass breaks all over the place, at enormous expense. Immediately after you crash the game shifts into a stunning action replay segment which shows off your feat, before charging you a wallet-bulging 'insurance' fee, righting you and sending you on your way. The crashes are like an exclamation point to the adrenaline-pumping fury of the previous straights and turns, and I often found myself bellowing in disgust as I smacked into the back of a transporter whilst powersliding out of a corner. You lose time and money, and worst of all speed. Burnout is all about speed. You need it to reach the next checkpoint, to stay ahead of your opponents and to win the race.

It's rare these days that we come across a title that makes us stop and actually watch, letting the game quench the thirst of our drinking eyes. Flight sims in particular have become rather stagnant in their progression, and it's easy to discard new sims with little regard for the wares they may be touting beneath their unimpressive facades. Not so with IL-2 Sturmovik. This is the most attention-grabbing flight sim we've clapped our eyes on in quite a while, and one that absolutely deserves to be called beautiful. The game features some thirty-one types of Russian, German and American planes dating from 1941 to 1945, each one featuring a different camouflage pattern depending on the time of year and environment. The attention to detail in all aspects of the game is staggering, especially when it comes to the intricate plane models. We wouldn't blame you for switching the autopilot on just to take the time to switch between camera angles and snoop around the lovingly modelled cockpits as your fighter swoops majestically over the landscape. Maddox Games have put a lot of effort into really suspending the player from reality. Dip into the clouds and condensation or rain will build up on your cockpit windows, and as the sun glints on lakes and rivers below and tiny buildings (all of which can be destroyed) dot into view between the clouds, the effect is breathtaking. A great deal of thought has gone into creating an inspiring environment for your battles, and an apparently small touch like the "real" clouds does wonders for altering the way you think about playing.

Mumbo Jumbo's Californian office, which was responsible for the recently released Myth III, has either been closed down or "consolidated" into the company's Texas headquarters, depending on who you ask. Either way though it means that the majority of the staff that worked on the game in California are now looking for a new job. According to designer Andrew Meggs, "there was no next project lined up and funded, nor was there expected to be in the near future, [and] it's expensive to keep a team of salaried people around doing nothing". As a result of the lay-offs, future support for Myth III is in doubt. A patch addressing some of the bugs and other issues that afflicted the original version of the game is apparently almost finished, but the team have spent most of the last two weeks looking for new jobs and clearing out their offices, so it's not clear when it will see the light of day. The fate of the game's ranking system and long-promised editing suite is also up in the air, with at least one of the game's programmers working on the tools from home. "I'm very proud of the work we've done as the game stands on its own, and even more so in light of the fact that we did it in only eleven months from start to finish", Andrew Meggs told fans. "Despite the somewhat unhappy conclusion, I don't think a single person from the Myth III team regrets their decision to be a part of bringing this game into existence."