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With some of the country's top players not present at the CPL-Europe qualifier event in London today, we had been expecting the top seeds (Sujoy, Logan and Luke) to have a fairly easy ride through to the finals of the competition. How wrong we were! In an exciting tournament, two of the top three seeds were forced into the losers bracket against surprisingly tough competition in the semi and quarter finals. Full reports on both of these matches can be found in our coverage of the event, and reports on the final matches will be following early tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Thanks as usual to event organisers The Playing Fields for their assistance.

Game Arts' Gungriffon Blaze is the sequel to a couple of Saturn games I never played, but it has no trouble selling on its own merits. It's a game about big stompy robots, but unlike Mech Warrior's clunky 20 paces per minute behemoths, GB's "AWGs" can cover ground at cheetah speeds and have no difficult swerving out of the way of incoming rockets. Players of PS2 Unreal Tournament and TimeSplitters will have no trouble getting used to the controls of GB's mechs. In familiar style, the two analog sticks handle movement and aiming, while the rest of the Dual Shock buttons are mapped to control strafing, firing, weapon-switching and the like. Using the options menus within the game, you can remap these as you like, so if your Unreal Tournament configuration is slightly unusual, you can come up with a suitably close approximation on the Dual Shock within a couple of minutes. With controls settled upon, it's down to the action itself. Set at the outset of the Third World War in 2015, you take the reigns of the dreaded peace-making AWG mechs, sent into the warzone to save civilians from the vicious forces that endanger their lives. There's something about the USA and an alliance of south-eastern states occupying Europe and Asia too, and a mass migration of the populace to the East, but for heaven's sake this is a game about great big stompy robots and explosions, not politics.

As we revealed two months ago here on EuroGamer, The World Is Not Enough, a first person shooter based on the James Bond movie of the same name, has been cancelled in favour of a more generic 007 title for the PlayStation 2 only. Now known as Agent Under Fire, the game was officially unveiled yesterday and (as we had expected) includes not only first person shooter levels but also elements from what was going to be a PlayStation 2 version of 007 Racing, which has also now been cancelled.

It's become something of a tradition in the gaming industry that whenever a company reaches a certain size or level of success it starts to bleed staff, who then leave to form their own companies in a kind of asexual reproduction (bear with me here). Bullfrog has spawned Lionhead, Elixir and Mucky Foot, 3D Realms has given birth to half the Dallas gaming industry, and it's happened to Blizzard as well. The latest splinter group to leave the company is Click Entertainment, co-founded by veterans of Diablo and now about to release its own action role-playing game, Throne of Darkness.

Sony has narrowed losses at its consumer electronics business and PlayStation division. Overall it has reported strong Q4 profits, but this is because of top arty martial arts flick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the less good movie Charlie's Angels. Group net income for the three months to 31 March was 15.8 billion yen ($130 million). Sony's results last Q4 were spoiled by losses at its consumer electronics business and PlayStation operation. But Q4 at the game unit was better this year with sales leaping 24.7 per cent to 191.4 billion yen ($1.54 billion) and operating losses slimming down 37 per cent to 16.2 billion yen ($130.7 million). Sony's electronics unit saw Q4 operating losses reduce to 8.9 billion yen ($71.8 million), from 24.8 billion yen ($200 million). Sales at the unit, which makes Vaios as well as TVs, and hi-fis, rose 22.3 per cent to 1.4 trillion yen ($11.3 billion). This division accounted for 76 per cent of sales in fiscal 2000. Group net income fell to 16.7 billion yen ($134.87 million) in the year, from 121.8 billion yen ($980 million) a year earlier. This was down to a one off charge complying with US TV and film advertising rules. Sales rose 9 per cent to 7.3 trillion yen ($58.96 billion).

Dreamcast fans upset about the console's cancelation have been quickly revising their thoughts on the whole matter in light of price cuts across the board. Everything from the console itself to its peripherals and now software has undergone reduction. For £75 you can now get a Dreamcast with three games and a controller - a quarter of the cost of the PlayStation 2 from most vendors. Today's big announcement though is the shift from an RRP of £39.99 to £29.99 for all new Dreamcast games, starting with the excellent Skies of Arcadia, released this morning. Soon to follow are Daytona 2001 on 11th May, Sonic Adventure 2 on the 23rd June and Crazy Taxi 2 on the 6th July amongst others. Speaking in a prepared statement, Sega's recently promoted UK General Manager Alan Jones said "We want to show the public that we still mean business with Dreamcast. The new £29.99 price point offers superb value for what is the strongest software line up currently available for any gaming console." A quick scout around the net reveals that Amazon and SoftwareFirst have both picked up on the new pricing, with £27.99 and £25.99 (member) prices respectively. Related Feature - Sega set-top unveiled

The KT133A problem, as it's now known, which causes corrupted data during large file transfers from one ATA100 device to another, and is aggravated by the presence of an SB Live! PCI card, has finally prompted a response from VIA themselves. Confirming the problems (in German, hence the absence of direct quotes), the company said that there is a potential IDE DMA problem with the VIA Southbridge 686B, on KT133A motherboard platforms. The company has erected a board list page with appropriate BIOS updates, and promises updates for boards not yet ready to be available soon. Since we have a few ATA100 devices and an ABit KT7A-RAID currently running on the testbed, we thought we'd conduct our own test to see whether we could reproduce the problem. Sure enough, with or without our SB Live! installed, transferring a 125Mb file from a 15Gb IBM Deskstar 'Telesto' 75GXP drive running at ATA100 to a 20Gb IBM Deskstar 'Ericson' drive running at ATA100 caused some horrible whirring noises and a corrupted file on receipt. Windows 2000 didn't like it at all. Applying the beta patch from ABit's public FTP and performing the transfer again yielded no errors. As stated before, our advice is not to flash your BIOS unless you suffer from this problem directly. Doing so is a tedious process and a bit nerve-wracking. If you do intend to go through with it, just make sure you follow the instructions provided implicitly. Good luck. Related Feature - April's Marching Motherboards

French publishing behemoth Infogrames looked set to deal European gamers a disappointment with the release of Unreal Tournament on the Dreamcast. While the American version of the game (which has already been available for some time now) supports online play through the console's 56k modem, players on this side of the pond were apparently going to have to make do with 2-4 player split-screen action when the game is finally released over here. According to an unnamed source at Infogrames who was quoted on GameSpot UK earlier this week, "Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast will no longer have online multiplayer capabilities".

The American gaming industry is under fire again, along with Hollywood and the music industry, for marketing violent and explicit products towards children, ignoring their own voluntary rating systems. Most of the flak has been attracted by the music industry this time as video games publishers and movie distributors have apparently made some progress since a damning report last year, although the bill's supporters are still not satisfied. "Some video game makers and movie studios, including those that have pledged not to unfairly target kids, are still advertising adult-rated products in places popular with young teens", according to Senator Joseph Lieberman, a long time crusader against violence in the media who was Al Gore's running mate during the controversial US presidential elections last year.

Not content with working on a third game in the series for the PC, BritSoft developer Revolution today sent word that their classic adventure game Broken Sword : Shadow of the Templars is being ported to the GameBoy Advance, with a release expected around the end of the year. Originally released on the beige box just four years ago, it's a testament to the power of Nintendo's new hand-held that developing a fairly faithful version of the game for it is even feasible.

Sierra / Havas / Vivendi Universal Publishing / whatever they're calling themselves this week have announced that they will be publishing a GameBoy Colour title based on the soon-to-be-released action movie The Mummy Returns. Which is hardly surprising given that the movie's distributor (Universal Pictures) and the game's developer (Universal Interactive Studios) and publisher (pick a name, any name) are all owned by the same company.

UbiSoft are rising high at the moment, having built up an enviable collection of high profile games which has been bolstered by recent take-overs of Blue Byte, Red Storm and the publisher-formerly-known-as-The-Learning-Company. Today they have announced that they will be giving the public its first chance to see no less than 15 new games in action at next month's big E3 trade show in Los Angeles, including everything from Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Batman : Vengeance to Myst III and their new Rayman titles.

Tribes 2 has something for everyone. That's the conclusion I've come to after a fortnight's worth of solid gameplay. Every FPS taste is catered for, and the world is already warming to it, with servers across Europe full from dawn till dusk. The main focus of the game is of course teamplay, but you needn't scour the neighbourhood for 15 willing friends before handing over your cash - over the past week I've seen people band together on public servers, creating elaborate networks of motion sensors and defensive turrets around the flag in CTF to weed out stealthy intruders, and incredible battleship offensives streaking across the skies and laying waste to enemy generators and defence systems thanks to well-trained bombardiers. Apart from CTF the game also features Capture and Hold, straight Deathmatch, Hunters (rather akin to the classic Quake Headhunters game), Team Hunters, Rabbit (single flag, many players, with the object being to hold onto the flag for as long as possible to accrue points) and Siege (one team defends a control switch in a base whilst the other tries to capture it). CTF is the best represented, and my personal favourite so far, but the others (Rabbit in particular) can be incredibly intense! Weapons-wise Tribes 2 is a definite improvement over Tribes, with a refined arsenal, including such classics as a tweaked Spinfusor (the weapon of choice for Scout classes), flare gun, missile launcher, grenade launcher, mine launcher, mines, yadda yadda. There's a lot of hardware to play with, depending on your loadout. Speaking of improvement, the graphics (although they have taken a bit of a hammering in certain circles) are fantastic. Play it with anti-aliasing enabled and you won't want to leave. Huge, rolling landscapes and detailed player models and weapons make it one of the nicest looking first person shooters for a while. And that's got to be difficult to do on levels so open and vast. There are even 512x512 high quality player models tucked away on the CD. Aurally the game is nothing to complain about either, with some nice ambient, rumbling backing music to match each level.

Even if you are a Quake addict, it's highly unlikely you've ever seen anything like this before. CQ3A is a Quake III renderer for CAVE, described as the world's best virtual reality platform. Developer Paul Rajlich has created a system that piggybacks Steve Taylor's Aftershock engine, and adds "simple collision detection and improved performance by adding support for multi-texturing and compiled vertex arrays." The game can be used with several VR interfaces, but it's not really a game yet, just a test. Paul is responsible for CAVE Quake II however, which is a proper port of the game. But why on earth put Quake III on a VR projector setup? "In many ways, Quake3 Arena represents the state of the art in real-time rendering," says Paul on his website. "The CQ3A engine implements many of the features that are in the real game including multi-pass shaders, curved surfaces (bezier patches), bsp tree with pvs testing/culling, lightmaps, animations, skybox rendering, etc." "Even if you don't care about gaming, the Quake3 format is a great format for creating original 3D content." There is a lot of umming and aaring on Slashdot about CQ3A, and VRSource.org has also written about it (although the site seems to be down at the time of writing). Of most interest though, are the pictures. Screenshots of this thing are quite amazing, and can be found here. There is also a particularly good one which appears on the main page of Paul's site, here. Naturally, if any of our readers own a CAVE setup and fancy giving CQ3A a shot, then we would be thrilled to hear from you. In the meantime, why not check the website out and just soak up the ownage.

The computing world was shocked recently to learn that Intel intends to cut its Pentium 4 prices by as much as 50%. Now it seems that AMD, whose chips outperform Intel's under a lot of circumstances, have marked their clear intent to drop prices themselves on the 30th of April, a day after Intel's reductions. Although AMD hasn't revealed where it aims to pitch its new pricing, it will have to make some serious effort to improve upon Intel's $352 price tag to retail for the 1.7GHz Pentium 4. At that price, many consumers will be swayed by the numbers. Athlon prices are already at an all time low, so we doubt that the reductions will go as far as Intel's have. At its current price in the States, AMD's 1.33GHz Athlon retails for approximately $220. Related Feature - P4 price cuts!

Click Entertainment is a new company co-founded by Blizzard veterans who worked on the classic Diablo, so it's perhaps no great surprise that their debut effort is itself an isometric hack 'n' slash role-playing game. But with some novel new features and an oriental setting, Throne of Darkness is far from being a straightforward Diablo clone. We caught up with the game's art director and designer Ben Haas during his recent press tour of Europe to find out more...

Last month CSports.net announced that they would be providing the CPL's official ranking system, and today the first part of that has gone live with the unveiling of their Quake 3 rankings, which are based on the results of every CPL Quake 3 duel tournament held since the start of 2000. Ironically the CPL (particularly in America) has been moving more towards teamplay-oriented events in recent months, with the remaining Quake 3 duel events mostly restricted to Europe and Latin America. Official Counter-Strike rankings are on the way though.

Two years ago a pair of teenagers walked into their school in Columbine and shot dead a dozen students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. Soon after the massacre the spotlight fell on the entertainment industry, with parents blaming movies and computer games for the tragedy, a view which was only enforced when a video tape of the two killers talking about their plans was discovered to include comments about the classic first person shooter Doom.

Yesterday we received three Xbox related press releases, from Nuby, Simon & Schuster and Infogrames respectively. For the sake of you lot we thought we'd condense the news into a single item.

Publisher THQ last night announced their latest set of financial results, for the first three months of 2001. Profits added up to a not-so-grand total of $860,000 on revenue of about $59.3m, compared to $3.9m profit from $70.3m earnings for the same period last year. This was well within their predictions though, and the company remains upbeat about the rest of the year.

The term "AXIA" may be unrelated to the insurance company of nearly-the-same name, but buying one of these stellar Athlons will certainly give you piece of mind for the next couple of years. The whole AXIA thing arose almost overnight recently when hardware e-zine Overclockers.com started experimenting in the dark art of overclocking the latest revision of the Thunderbird core. They discovered that depending on the revision (denoted by text etched into the processor's core as it came off the production line), they could attain speeds of up to 1500MHz, using simple heatsink and fan combinations like the powerful ThermoEngine. By correlating data from their tech-savvy readers, Overclockers.com were able to confirm that Athlon processors with the letters "AXIA" at the start of the second line, and a letter "Y" at the start of the third produced the best results. Our own testing has confirmed Overclockers.com's conclusion. This writer is currently using an Athlon 1.33GHz (as featured in our review of the same), which is an "AXIA Y", and it's currently ticking over at 1550MHz (10x155). The problem has been actually getting hold of the chips. You can't simply phone up Dabs or Scan and ask for them to examine the chips and handpick you an appropriate core - it doesn't work like that. Until now, the only route to AXIA stardom has been to head off to a computer fair and ask to examine the chips for yourself. A tiresome process, and one that has kept the AXIA legend out of the news for a few weeks. Fortunately though, some retailers seem to have caught on. As a result, we were very pleased this morning to accept delivery of a 1GHz AXIA Y chip from The Overclocking Store for testing. Early results are... stunning. The first thing we tried was the stock speed of our other chip, 1.33GHz. At 10x133 and default voltage settings, the machine past every test we could throw at it with flying colours. What's more, it actually functioned perfectly well using the default voltage settings at anything up to 1.4GHz. This isn't even a guaranteed chip - we asked for a random selection from The Overclocking Store's stock of AXIAs, and in-house reports from the ecommerce outfit indicate similar results across the line. Upping the core voltage to 1.85 and the I/O voltage to 3.5 (a known tweak), we were able to attain 1.45GHz (or roughly 1466MHz). With a little more tweaking, our chip hit the magic 1.5GHz (1507MHz actually) at 11x137. The Overclocking Store has a decent amount of these chips, priced competitively at £160 including VAT. We fancy they will have sold out within a few days, so if you have a KT133A motherboard and fancy a healthy boost, we recommend you head over there and relieve them of one. In the mean time, here are a couple of screen captures of WCPUID and SiSoft Sandra to keep you amused.

It's not unusual to find little plastic toys in your McDonalds advertising the latest Disney cartoon, or to be bombarded with special theme meals promoting Pokemon ("gotta eat 'em all!"). But now Microsoft are getting in on the act with last night's announcement of a partnership with Taco Bell to "aggressively publicize" their new console with "major in-store promotions to support the Xbox launch" across Canada and the USA. Whatever next, a Windows XP Happy Meal? Sidewinder McNuggets? Or perhaps a Flame Grilled Whistler?

Damaged chip monstrosity Intel is starting to accept the importance of gaming as a revenue stream, according to this interesting report at The Inquirer. The author, Nicholas Knupffer, points out that among price-conscious teenage gamers the Athlon and Duron processors are far more popular, mostly because of shear economics and the recent run on P4 negativity. Intel have just laid down some green to sponsor the American CPL, and already sponsor the Roweb series of LAN Parties here in the UK with switches, servers and Pentium 4-based machines. The company already has designs on a similar move in Europe, says the article. The thing that impressionable young gamers need to see with their own eyes though is improved performance. You can't market a chip that performs worse for more. Granted, SSE2-optimised processes are a little thin on the ground, but perhaps a concentration on the power of Pentium in gaming circles would shift boxes. At last month's i7 LAN Party, it was estimated that over 75% of computers were running on Athlon platforms, and The Inquirer has a similar story to tell about a recent LAN. The presence of the Pentium III, let alone 4 was negligible. Related Feature - Pentium 4 Review

Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi has made a startling revelation about the GameCube's rocky future. Speaking to a Tokyo newswire, Mr. Yamauchi, who is normally over-zealous about such matters, went so far as to say that "If we are unable to see a positive response at E3, this will have a disastrous impact on Nintendo... and we may have to consider freezing the Gamecube business altogether."

-based Flipside now has more than 150,000 registered users, according to a press release issued today. Oddly, the PR points out that this actually means that the Flipside community is larger than the population of Blackburn. That's 150,000 users signed up since October of last year. We're not quite sure why the company has decided to pick on the Lancashire-based town, but we doubt the local authorities will take this lying down, and expect an increase in breeding and expansion talks over the next few months as they fight to narrow the deficit. On a more serious note, Marketing Manager Nick Witcher at Flipside points out that "perhaps the most important element of any online games service is its community and as our user base continues to grow, so too does the sense of community among our regular players. Some of them even meet in real-life to extend their online experience." Flipside hosts a free online gaming service, where players can play a vast range of games, from word, card, casino and board games to things like Quake and Counter-Strike.

The question on everyone's lips over the last few weeks has been whether memory prices are on the up. According to a report on The Inquirer, memory prices are fluctuating at the moment because the big memory companies are trying to reduce stock. In all likelihood, say Korean analysts Daishin Securities, it will be another six months or so before DRAM prices start increasing again.

Tribes 2 may be laden with bugs and require next year's concept technology to run properly, but one has to admit that it's popular. The community that has sprung up around the game in Europe alone already threatens to give Counter-Strike a run for its money. A major Tribes 2 tournament has already been announced by Euro-Tribesplayers.com and Sierra, and the web is now rife with tools and toys to enhance the game. We thought it would be a nice idea to let you in on a couple of them. First up is a tool for frustrated server admins. Tricon 2 is a remote access tool for administrating dedicated Tribes 2 servers, funnily enough, and uses all sorts of tricks and protocols to make things easier for hard-working game admins. There's a nice screenshot of the application at work here. A bit of fun, this time for clients, is Wizpack, available here. It contains a number of handy enhancements that take the strain off players wrestling with the complex control system. Constant repair, for example, frees your hands up to deal with other matters while you fix up a turret or generator, and Jump-Jet maximises the power of the jetpack by jumping a split-second before thrust. The Pilot mode tool enables you to increase sensitivity once piloting a craft (incredibly useful actually -Ed), and the most popular addition is weapon keys, which don't just select a single weapon, but cycle through a certain selection. Great if you need to switch between predefined weaps on the go (e.g. Spinfusor and rocket launcher). Wizpack is currently at version 0.82. Another item we uncovered today was this Tribes 2 tweak guide at 3D Spotlight. Interesting for all manner of reasons, not least of which is instruction on how to install hi-resolution (512x512) player models. The technique just requires Winzip and a bit of file-renaming. Definitely worth taking the time to do if your machine is up to it (the performance hit was acceptable here, even when we swapped out 64Mb Radeon DDR for a 32Mb graphics card). If you've been struggling with Tribes 2 in its infancy and fancy easing your burden, keep an eye on Euro-Tribesplayers, Planet Tribes and the like. The scripting community is already growing, and keeping up will be the best way to help yourself improve. Related Feature - Tribes 2 patched

CPL Qualifiers at The Playing Fields are normally double elimination Quake 3 duel tournaments, so it makes a refreshing change to head down on a Sunday morning and find a Counter-Strike tournament taking place. A more complex, but equally entertaining event, the CPL Holland UK Qualifier is sponsored by AMD and semi-invitational, with eight of the UK's top CS clans fighting for an autoberth into next month's CPL Holland competition. That and the small matter of a £2,000 prize purse.

Just as Mike Magee at The Inquirer predicted a fortnight ago, Intel are cutting Pentium 4 prices across the board, starting with the release of the 1.7GHz processor. From what we can see, this is a massive admission of concern on the part of the CPU giant, lovingly referred to as Chipzilla in industry circles. When we last reported on the subject, the price tag for the 1.7GHz chip was expected to be $361, but since then Intel has confirmed a figure of $352 to OEMs in trays of 1,000. Price for price it now gives AMD's Athlon a run for its money. The move is expected to make the Pentium 4 a more attractive option to OEMs other than Intel stalwart Dell. At the current prices, companies are tempted to move over to an AMD solution. The move will also have a lot to do with Intel's falling net profits, reported last week at a drop of over 80% compared to an increase in AMD's. The Pentium 4 drops coupled with the Pentium III phase-out will likely see 2GHz and above Pentium 4s available at very affordable prices by the end of this year. AMD have enjoyed something of a monopoly on chip sales, with its most recent introduction, the 1.33GHz Athlon (review here), going for $215 according to PriceWatch.com. According to El Reg, as they like to be known these days, the Pentium 4 1.7GHz price will prompt further cuts. The chip is available from today. Related Feature - P4 Price Cuts