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Sony is bringing its PlayStation 2 Linux distro to the US and elsewhere following its release in Japan last June. "We are preparing the finalised Linux kit for the worldwide market," said Shin'ichi Okamoto, Sony Computer Entertainment's senior VP and CTO, speaking at the Rambus Developers Conference yesterday. There's no release date as yet. "We'll announce it soon," said Okamoto. The Linux kit gives the PS2 much of the functionality of a desktop PC. Sony demo'd the open source OS and console running an MP3 player, word processor and spreadsheet, all under the X Window GUI.

Looking for some company next weekend? You silly, twisted boy. Get yourself to a LAN party instead. The ATI-sponsored Savage LAN 3, taking place in Coventry from the 2nd to the 4th of November (Friday to Sunday) costs only £37 for three days of non-stop LAN action. ATI will be putting up the prizes for the Quake 3 events; five brand new Radeon 7500 graphics cards, and other prizes include Savage Clan Ports and a Scan DVD player. The organisers have asked that any players who have signed up should pay as quickly as possible to confirm their place. With the final deadline approaching, spaces are in short supply, so if you haven't booked already it could be first-come first-served. SavLAN3 can be booked online at this address, and you can read the various details of the event here. 160 or so players have signed up thus far, including some top British clans, so the standard of play should be high. Dedicated servers will be running for Quake 2, Quake 3, Counter-Strike and newcomer Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and the main competitions are Quake 2 CTW, Quake 3 CTF, Duel and Deathmatch.

Troubled software company EON Digital is haemorrhaging staff, money and business deals. The company, whose games include conversions of Star Trek Voyager Elite Force on the PlayStation 2 and Worms World Party, has lost a number of staff in development and even some in marketing through outright and voluntary redundancy. The problem for EON is that their two big hopes, International League Soccer and Z: Steel Soldiers simply didn't sell in the UK. Neither charted, and both received a lukewarm reception from the gaming press. Despite the losses, Worms World Party on PSX and GBA is still on target for March, and it's thought that Soldier of Fortune and Elite Force on the PS2 are unaffected by the redundancies, along with The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which will appear on PC and Xbox. The company is certainly taking that line. According to rumours doing the rounds, EON have lost business thanks to the sales slump and their present financial situation, and some think their problems could become terminal soon. Related Feature - Z: Steel Soldiers review

Simon and Schuster Interactive are waving a small flag for common sense, having released their latest title, "Real War" in spite of the horrific events of September 11th. In the period since then the gaming industry has seen myriad high profile cancellations and suspensions, mostly because of depictions of New York City and of buildings being blown to bits, but some of the decisions we've seen recently smack of outright lunacy. Astonishingly then, Real War is a game about stamping Terrorists out in the Middle East. It had always been on target for a mid-to-late September release, but nonetheless one would have expected to see it canned for a while in the current climate. But apparently not. S&S are clearly not driven by media hysterics and have no intention of playing into the terrorists' hands. For this, we applaud them.

On a pre-tax basis, Sega expects to return to profitability this year according to figures released today. First-half current profit is at 4.5 billion yen, and full-year current profit 10 billion yen. The company had been expecting losses of 2.4 and 5.4 billion yen for the first half and full year respectively. Unfortunately, stock donated to Sega by the late Isao Owaka has nose-dived recently, but the overall picture is good, despite the predicted group net loss of 15 billion yen (£86 million) for the twelve months ending March 31st. Ironically, stronger-than-expected software sales for the Dreamcast are partially responsible for the pre-tax improvements.

Back in the day, one of my favourite Super Nintendo titles was an imported shoot 'em up construction kit. Building impossible scrolling shoot 'em ups for your friends and then watching them die horribly and repeatedly as your jaws of death closed in on them half way up the screen was a thrill unlike any other, and I still maintain that my original shooter is a better game than X-Wing Versus TIE Fighter… What the construction kit really proved though was that building a computer game for yourself is almost as much fun as playing it, particularly when all the programming graft is taken out of the equation. Enter, er, Enterbrain, with PlayStation 2 contender RPG School 5 (as it will be called in Japan). This latest title in their role-playing game development series is extra specially exciting, because Agetec is currently in negotiations with Enterbrain to release the game in the West! Players - well, developers - can create role-playing environments in a full 3D engine by placing objects and generating a story. Weather effects, lighting and the topography of the levels can also be manipulated. If RPG School 5 does make it to the West, perhaps I'll be able to create a proper follow-up to Stinging Ninja Phantom Monkey Blaster, but in a different vein…

Sony has popped its head up to condemn ThisIsLondon.com over its 'The Getaway' release date speculation. The London web journal claimed The Getaway was on course for an Autumn 2002 release, but Sony says otherwise. As far as anyone knows, it's still pencilled in for May. Sony is trying its hardest to avoid yet more Getaway scandal. Last year developers of the game were caught out trying to pass impressive renders off as screenshots. The London-based crime caper still looks stunning, but word is it's over-budget, over-staffed and way behind schedule. Landmarks are apparently a moot point, but Sony aims to keep throwing money at it until the fire goes out. With Bizarre Creations' Xbox extravaganza Project Gotham Racing looking like the better game by a mile, Sony may wish to forget The Getaway even exists.

In our recent preview of the game we commented that Command & Conquer : Renegade "still required a lot of work, particularly when it came to the AI" and that Westwood had been curiously reticent about showing the innovative multiplayer modes to anybody outside of the company. Given that it was due for release in just a few weeks this was rather worrying, which is why we are actually glad to hear that it has been delayed yet again, this time to February 2002, almost two years later than originally anticipated when the game was first unveiled at ECTS 1999. In a post on the game's official Westwood forums, community manager Cliff Hicks confirmed that "we are currently aiming for a target release date of February 12th, 2002 and we feel confident this is about when you will be seeing Renegade". Actually, his original post said February 12th 20002, but we suspect that this was a typo. Inevitably there ensued a chorus of whining from the game's supposed fans saying they couldn't wait four months, to which Hicks replied "give us time, we'll give you a great game". A worthy sentiment, and hopefully we will know early next year whether that extra time has paid off or just served to make the already creaky graphics look even more antiquated. Related Feature - C&C Renegade preview

Microsoft have announced they will be running a series of Xbox Xperience events across the UK in the run-up to Christmas, giving gamers a chance to try out the console for themselves some four months before it finally arrives in Europe. No doubt Microsoft are hoping this will throw a spanner in the works of Sony, who are looking forward to a second Christmas sales period in Europe without any serious competition for their PlayStation 2. "Enough of the talking, this is time for gamers to make up their own minds", UK Xbox marketing boss Richard Teversham declared enthusiastically, before going off on a bizarre tangent comparing the Xbox to an album and these events to a single taken from said album. In other words, we get to see the good stuff now and then pay through the roof for a bunch of second rate filler in March. Probably. First party titles such as Halo, Oddworld : Munch's Oddysee and Project Gotham Racing are expected to be on show in the amusingly named "Play More Zone", while a "Video Zone" will bombard gamers with "action-packed FMV's, sound and light demonstrating the awesome power of the Xbox". After that you may well be in need of the "X Zone", a "futuristic chill out area to relax after the gaming fest". You will also be able to pre-order an Xbox on the spot. The first Xperience event kicks off at London's Nutopia on Saturday 17th November, and will continue there every weekend until Sunday 16th December. Meanwhile a tour of the country will take in Birmingham's Custard Factory (November 24th-25th), Manchester Freemasons Hall (December 1st-2nd, secret hand-shakes optional) and Glasgow's Lighthouse (December 8th-9th). All of these shows are open to the public for free from 10am to 7pm, and you can pre-register to get in the "priority queue" for entry to any event at MSN.co.uk/Xbox. Full details can be found in the press release. Related Feature - Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

I'm seldom impressed by third party peripherals for handheld consoles. Even useful peripherals like the wormlight and magnifier seem ludicrous. When it comes down to it, I prefer to cradle the bare console in my hands and plug away, even if that means I have to angle it for the light or squint a little. It's not a view everyone takes, but it's something I'm used to, and the idea of spoiling the aesthetic and portability of the smallest of my consoles is sacrilege. I won't have it. It's surprising then that someone like me has found a very exciting and potentially very useful peripheral, and even a light adapter that could feasibly see a bit of use in my hands. But then I'm sure you'll make your own minds up.

THQ have moved to correct reports from X01 about MotoGP, their Climax-developed Xbox property. For starters, they say, "1. MotoGP is a motorcycling event in the same vein as Formula 1 for cars". We shudder to think who misreported that one, but fair enough. "2. MotoGP is NOT a property owned by Namco." We can certainly understand their consternation over that point, but if they will keep using the name of Namco's PS2 motorcycling game, what do they expect? It was the same with the somewhat ambiguous Advance GT on the GameBoy Advance... And they wonder why people are confused?

Phantagram have announced that the new "Gold" edition of their role-playing strategy crossbreed Kingdom Under Fire will be released in the UK on November 9th. While we weren't the biggest fans of the original game, KUF Gold features a number of improvements and new features to solve some of the criticisms made about it. Losing one of your heroes in the midst of a battle usually results in a game over screen, but you can at least save mid-mission now which should reduce the frustration this often resulted in. The latest patch is included which improves the game's online stability amongst other things, and an enhanced campaign editor is also bundled with the game, along with four new heroes and some new hidden missions which reveal more details about the Xok Knights. Kingdom Under Fire Gold is being pitched as a mid-price game, and should cost £19.99 in the UK. Although it's not the best role-playing strategy hybrid out there - Kohan has won our hearts in recent weeks - at that price it might well be worth a look if you are after a real-time strategy fix and want something a little more traditional than the unusual Kohan. Related Feature - Kingdom Under Fire review

The first reports have finally emerged of the press conference which took place during the X01 event on the Cote d'Azur last week, with Microsoft's European Xbox supremo Sandy Duncan answering a variety of questions from the press and revealing some more details of the console's launch on this side of the Atlantic in the process. Sandy confirmed that "it's our ambition to be market leader", saying that Microsoft "don't like being at second place". Them's fighting words, though he did qualify them by saying that "I've got a very open view of what market leadership actually means". In fact, in this case it seems to be simply selling Xboxes faster than Sony can shift PlayStation 2 units in a given month. As the PS2 will have been available in Europe for almost eighteen months by the time the Xbox launches and should have an installed base well in excess of the current 20 million by then, that shouldn't be a particularly hard target to meet. Many people have commented on the price of the Xbox, which is likely to cost £100 more than the PS2 or GameCube when it is released in March, but remarkably Sandy doesn't seem to think this will hurt Microsoft. "We've done a lot of analysis on price sensitivity, we've sized the markets across Europe. What I care about is shipping my first 1.5 million units and we're very, very confident that price isn't an issue with that. The vast majority of people that will buy an Xbox have probably already got a PlayStation 2. They probably bought it a year ago, because it's kind of an old product now." The bad news for Microsoft is that our own surveys show that even amongst the hardcore early adopters who regularly read our site, less than 40% of existing PlayStation 2 owners are planning to buy an Xbox, and half of those are planning to get a GameCube as well. No doubt that number is lower amongst the more casual gamers who make up the majority of console buyers. Sandy also admitted that past experience shows that only two consoles can co-exist. "I've got to say this haven't I, but I've got to wonder which of the other consoles will be there alongside Xbox". The subject of online support also came up, with one journo who no doubt won't be invited to Microsoft's next PR event suggesting that Sony have out-manoeuvred Microsoft in Europe. Sandy would "completely disagree with that", pointing out that the PlayStation 2's online plans rely on a fairly expensive add-on accessory (the hard drive / broadband adapter) and that publishers will be dubious about developing for something which isn't a standard feature of the console. PlayStation 2 trials with cable company Telewest here in the UK are about to start, while Microsoft have yet to reveal any details of how online gaming will work on the Xbox on either side of the Atlantic. Sandy said that "the spin's great" for Sony's online plans, but then the same could be said for Microsoft's plans at this stage. At the end of the day online gaming isn't likely to shift consoles though, especially if getting them to work online is any more complex than literally plugging-and-playing. It will come down to the quality of the games, and although the European launch of the Xbox is obviously vital, Sandy believes that "next Christmas is going to be the big crunch" deciding which of the new consoles survives and which fails. "If you don't come through Christmas very well it's going to be a hard struggle after that. You don't necessarily have to be leader for Christmas, but I think you definitely have to have a strong Christmas performance next year." It will be interesting to see whether the Xbox can gain the market leadership Microsoft are aiming for next Christmas, if the GameCube will outperform it, or if Sony can continue shifting the increasingly cheap PlayStation 2 consoles as they build up to the unveiling of their inevitable PlayStation 3. Related Feature - Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

The seasonal rush to get games out in time for the Christmas shopping period is once again about to kick off. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire is back on the shelves in the midst of it to catch the eyes of gullible parents searching for something the whole family can enjoy on little Johnny's new PC. But is it just another cash in on a tried (or should that be 'tired'?) and tested formula, in an attempt to steal the limelight from the colossal Anne Robinson bandwagon? Of course it is! Obviously, not a great deal has changed since the previous incarnation of the home computer version of WWTBAM, and the mechanics and playing methods remain exactly the same. The interface has been given a lick of paint, and the graphics have been sharpened up to offer a much slicker presentation than before. In addition to this, all the FMV in the game has been remade to include - hold onto your seats - a studio audience. That the audience are as well animated as Morph after a day on the bottle does nothing to either improve or lessen the experience. In fact, of all the changes made since the original version, the only one that makes a notable difference is additional banter from the lovable Chris Tarrant. This time we get to listen to his adenoidal drone reading the questions to us, which helps lend a greater air of authenticity to the game, but does little to aid our already waning sanity.

THQ have announced a sharp rise in profits for the three months to September 30th compared to the same period last year, despite the terrorist attacks last month. Revenue was up 28% to $68m, providing a 144% boost to the company's net income which reached $3.2m for the quarter. CEO Brian Farrell admitted that this "performance exceeded our expectations", putting it down to strong sales of PlayStation 2 titles MX 2002 and Red Faction, as well as the release of ten titles for the GameBoy Advance. Farrell expects this Christmas to be a bumper season for the company as well, with WWF Smackdown : Just Bring It due out on PlayStation 2, Monsters Inc on GameBoy Advance, and WWF Raw on Xbox in America. "Looking into next year, we expect to see an acceleration of the hardware adoption rate on the new platforms. We expect our recently announced agreements with Sega and Britney Spears to provide even more momentum going into what we believe will be a period of significant growth for our industry." Now all we need is for THQ to somehow combine the Britney Spears and WWF licenses, thereby appealing to trailer trash, latex fetishists and teeny boppers in one fell swoop... Related Feature - Red Faction review

When we saw Advance Wars at the recent Nintendo Show in London it was due for release in Europe some time in October. Unfortunately a couple of weeks after the show terrorists flew a pair of planes into the World Trade Center, and for some reason Nintendo decided to delay the game's arrival in Europe, even though it is already available in America itself. Quite why Nintendo felt the need to postpone the release of Advance Wars is a mystery, because the cute anime-style characters and brightly coloured units of this turn-based strategy game are pretty inoffensive on the wider scale of things. Your little monochrome units are painted in shades of red or blue depending on which side they are on, and scutter across a cartoonish map dotted with forests, mountains, cities and rivers. At first sight it looks kind of dumb, but behind the gaudy graphics is an involving and entertaining strategy game. More than a dozen tutorial missions are provided to ease you into the game, and although this is perhaps a little overkill there is plenty to learn. For starters you have a wide range of units at your disposal, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You will need infantry to capture essential cities and factories, but they move slowly and are easy prey for the enemy's tanks. Armoured personnel carriers and helicopters can be used to move your soldiers around the map more rapidly, but they are vulnerable should an enemy manage to intercept them. Meanwhile heavy bombers, fighter planes and helicopter gunships battle it out in the skies above you. After almost an hour glued to the screen playing Advance Wars, we can testify that the whole thing seems to be very well balanced.

Sierra have released a demo version of Empire Earth, the 3D strategy game from Age of Empires lead designer Rick Goodman and his new team at Stainless Steel Studios. While the full game will span the entire history of mankind from the stone age to the 22nd century, the demo is somewhat more restrained. Four training missions are included along with a pair of single player scenarios, one putting you in command of British troops fighting in the Napoleonic Wars and the other based around the exploits of First World War fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, the notorious Red Baron. Weighing in at around 93Mb, you can download the demo from any of the following sites -

Monolith, Fox Interactive and Sierra have announced that their sci-fi shooter Aliens vs Predator 2 has gone gold, meaning that the game is now complete and on its way to the factory for duplication. Meanwhile a new multiplayer demo version of the game has been released to complement the single player marine demo released in August. The new demo allows you to play online or over a LAN with up to sixteen players, with two human characters, an alien drone and the predator included, along with several weapons such as shotguns, pulse rifles and wristblades. There's only one map included, but it supports both deathmatch and team deathmatch modes. The whole package weighs in at around 64Mb, and can be downloaded from the following sites -

AMD have decided to separate multiprocessing from the desktop market by releasing Athlon MP as an entirely separate line. Unlike Intel, whose Pentium III processors were dual processor capable, AMD believes MP systems are business-orientated, and offer little advantage over the company's desktop chips, particularly given the enterprise-level pricing. Whether that's good news or bad, AMD are certainly right about the MP's application for desktop users; there is virtually none. Although Athlon MP boasts enhancements - it is the first non-mobile AMD processor to offer a full implementation of Intel's SSE instructions - they carry little weight with fragmaniacs. Like the Athlon XP, MP features 3Dnow! Professional and advanced data prefetch routines that aid productivity, those may be useful, but at what cost? In terms of memory bandwidth performance, our dual MP 1.2GHz system running on the AMD 760MP chipset lost out to a single and dual Xeon 1.7GHz system by some 400Mb/s. This will take its toll in the server markets but it does dwarf the achievements of a single Athlon 1.2GHz desktop chip by a similar amount. Interestingly though, if you go back to our review of the 1.53GHz Athlon XP you can see that it doesn't reach the heady heights of either system here in terms of memory bandwidth performance. Not the strongest of starts, but as far as the rest of the benchmarks we ran are concerned, Athlon MP is a belter. Database performance, 3D rendering, Winstone Workstation performance, Linux compilation performance; in all of these tests the Athlon MP came out on top. Overall system performance as marked by SysMark 2001 puts the chip in between the achievements of the single and dual 1.7GHz Xeon systems. Not a bad run as a server! When you put it through its paces as a gaming chip, however, it starts to disappoint. Pit it against its big brother the 1.53GHz Athlon XP (which is admittedly somewhat more expensive) in single CPU configuration and it has difficulty matching the scores. It comes close, but not as close as the £40 cheaper 1.33GHz Athlon. Slot in the second CPU and what do you know, virtually no games support it. As we showed in our original article looking at the dual Pentium III system, you gain perhaps five frames per second by switching on SMP-compatibility in Quake 3-engine games, and little else supports it besides. Windows Millennium doesn't even support SMP, and Windows 2000 and XP only do so if you install with two chips present. And even then, the process of threading the load of an application between the two chips is nigh on impossible. As a desktop user, there are very few occasions when throwing two heavy duty processes at individual processors helps improve productivity. Ultimately, the story is still the same - you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and in this case the dog is the operating system and software we use. Virtually no desktop user runs Linux, and those that do aren't likely to play games on them. That was surely proven once and for all by the recent disintegration of Loki's Linux gaming company. It would be nice to say that the Athlon MP's performance makes all the difference, but there isn't much point buying one of these now, let alone two of them, while the prices of normal Athlons are so much lower, and the various components required to get an Athlon MP system running mount up to a substantial packet. A motherboard for over £300? Why? As a server operator… things look good, but, well, that's not really our concern. Related Feature - AMD Athlon XP review

Hidden away in a dark corner of Sierra's stand at ECTS 2000, far from the flashing lights and explosions of Tribes 2 and the ill-fated Dreamcast port of Half-Life, was a 3D strategy game called Warrior Kings. At the time it was looking fairly crude, but the promise was certainly there. This year the game was back at ECTS in a more complete form and was looking impressive enough to grab our unofficial "game of the show" award. We caught up with developers Black Cactus to find out what they've been up to since then...

On Wednesday, hardware enthusiast website OC Workbench carried news of an Athlon XP recall by AMD Taiwan. AMD Taiwan was asking shops to return unsold XPs because of a recall by the chipmaker, it said. No reason was given. In the midst of denials and rumour-mongering though, we learned that the AMD Taiwan recall was down to nothing more than a courier problem, and AMD has not recalled any AMD Athlon processors. Subsequently OC Workbench have updated their website to reflect the news. We have been thoroughly impressed by the AMD Athlon XP so far, and felt all along that if there were issues with stability, performance or safety, our rigorous testing would have uncovered them. As it is, the only thing wrong with Athlon XP so far is the inflated price tag here in the United Kingdom. We look forward to seeing original Athlon pricing on the chips soon. Related Feature - AMD Athlon XP review

Nintendo has warehoused half of its American launch allocation of consoles nearly a month in advance with the rest on their way, IGN is reporting. The GameCube will launch on November 18th in the US, and the company aims to have 700,000 units ready. This is a figure the company is confident it can supply. Nintendo is confident it will have the full allocation ready for launch. Although this writer's home is a good example of console bulk storage, unfortunately I couldn't possibly comment on whether this is a good number to have warehoused this far in advance. In the event of a crisis though, 350,000 is a healthy enough number to launch with. I'm sure everyone will feel better when the warehouses are full. VP of corporate affairs Perrin Kaplan described GameCube as "ready to roll" and his company as "completely confident". Related Feature - Hip to be Cube!

The gaming industry has been struggling to sanitize itself in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks on America, with some games being delayed (Rogue Spear : Black Thorn, Advance Wars), some games having twin towers removed from them (Flight Simulator, Spiderman) and others being temporarily withdrawn from sale (Red Alert 2, thanks to some unfortunate cover art). But amidst all of this over-reacting, possibly the most ridiculous and downright hilarious move has come from pro-gaming organisation the CPL, which is running a Counter-Strike world championship in Dallas later this year. According to forum posts made by founder Angel Munoz, the CPL will be removing all references to the word "terrorist" from the popular counter-terrorist Half-Life mod. References to terrorists and counter-terrorists will now be replaced by the names of the clans taking part in the competition and the phrases offensive and defensive teams. The terrorists .. sorry .. offensive team (or is that defensive?) will now be trying to activate a communications device instead of planting a bomb, with the .. um .. other side trying to stop them. Meanwhile sound effects of explosions have been stripped from the game to reflect this change in goals. Reports that players will now be armed with screwdrivers and oscilloscopes instead of shotguns and rifles have yet to be confirmed. One thing is certain though - it's a strange, strange world...

Publisher Jo Wood has released a demo version of Bugbear's retro racing game Rally Trophy, giving you the chance to drive a Mini Cooper in a time trial on the crushed rock tracks of Russia. The demo weighs in at a modest 71Mb, and can be downloaded from the game's official website. The full game is due out on November 2nd in the UK, and will feature about a dozen other classic cars from the 1960s and 70s, numerous circuits to race on, and of course full multiplayer support. Related Feature - Rally Trophy preview

VIA is going to build its own Pentium 4, or near as dammit the company has told Microprocessor Forum visitors. Not content with allegedly developing Pentium 4 motherboards without a license, then creating a whole new company to sell them, VIA now intends to build a director competitor to Intel's flagship desktop processor, cloning the very way it does business in the process. The subject is called CZA, The Register reports, and will run at 2GHz with an 18-stage pipeline and a "Pentium 4 bus" (we're not sure about that one). It will be based on P4 design concepts and will fab at 0.10 micron before 2003-2004. Is it me, or is that an astonishingly bad idea? Pentium 4 was released, to the dismay of journalists everywhere, a slower chip clock-for-clock than its competitors. By 2003-2004, Intel's chips will probably have hit 4GHz, and will probably have seen enough revisions to overcome the embarrassing truth that in its current state it does less work per clock cycle than Pentium III did. It does less work per clock than Pentium III because the original design had to be ripped to shreds in the interests of economic sanity, and even then it cost a bomb. The idea of developing a chip based on Pentium 4, to debut at speeds the original P4 hit two years previously isn't exactly sound business sense. VIA have a history of making slower parts than their competitors, and they rarely sell to the desktop market in quantities that deserve attention, and yet the company persists with them. We offer them full marks for creating one of the coolest-running chips in the industry, but is a P4 license really more expensive than the sort of damage Intel could do to them in the long run? Related Feature - VIA to produce its own motherboards

One of the few surprises to come out of Microsoft's flamboyant X01 event on the Cote d'Azur earlier this week was a line in the press release which claimed that UbiSoft had "announced Ghost Recon as an Xbox exclusive". At the time we thought that this was rather unlikely, as we had seen the game running on a PC at ECTS just a few weeks earlier, and UbiSoft's latest release schedule still had the game listed for December 7th in Europe. Today we are happy to confirm that reports of Ghost Recon's exclusivity have been greatly exaggerated. A brief statement from UbiSoft reveals that "there is no exclusivity partnership between Ubi Soft and Microsoft for Ghost Recon on the Xbox, therefore Ghost Recon may be developed on some other systems in the future". Which seems to suggest it may even be released on other next-gen consoles at some point. Even better news though is that the original PC version of the game is now due out in the UK on November 22nd, two weeks earlier than expected. Related Feature - Ghost Recon preview

Sierra have announced that BritSoft developer Argonaut is working on a new entry in the SWAT series for them. Subtitled Global Strike Team, the new game will be released next autumn on the Xbox and "another, yet to be announced, next-generation console". That'll be the PlayStation 2 then. Set some time around 2020, the game promises a variety of missions "unlike any seen before", taking you all over the world as you battle heavily armed bad guys. Worryingly Sierra are saying that Global Strike Team will combine "the strategic elements of SWAT 3 with the instantly accessible arcade action of the Virtua Cop series". We can only hope they don't dumb it down too far, because SWAT 3 was rather good.

Novalogic have today announced that they will be releasing an Xbox version of their latest helicopter action game Comanche 4 towards the end of 2002. Given that the PC version of the game has been tailored to make the most of NVIDIA's GeForce 3 graphics card it's perhaps no great surprise, and the first early screenshots of the Xbox version are already looking even more impressive than the PC version, with smooth rolling terrain and an intricately detailed model for your RAH-66 chopper. "Taking advantage of the amazing technology offered by Xbox, the game will include the most incredible graphics ever seen in a helicopter shooter, including dense foliage and realistic rotor wash effects on the ground and over water", according to producer Wally Wachi. The game will also take advantage of the Xbox's multiplayer capabilities, with "large-scale online support" being promised alongside the usual split-screen options. More details should be announced next year, but we already know that the PC version of the game will allow up to sixteen players to battle it out in deathmatch, teamplay and co-operative modes on a LAN or through the developer's own Novaworld service, and we would guess that the Xbox version will sport similar features. Related Feature - Comanche 4 preview (PC)

The GameBoy Color is on the way out, but it isn't going anywhere without a fight. In a sense, releasing the latest title in the Zelda series on GameBoy Color is a gamble for Nintendo, but on the other hand it's also a perfectly logical manoeuvre. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (or Zelda IV as it's generally regarded) is one of the most popular GameBoy games of all time, and what better way to keep GBC owners happy than to give them back what they love? And of course, every GBC cart works on the GameBoy Advance, so what's there to complain about? Not content with selling the game to both GBC and GBA owners alike, Nintendo has also managed to flog it to each gamer twice over. In a feat of marketing genius that would put Sophie Wessex in a coma, Nintendo have shaped two brand new Zelda adventures out of the remaining elements of the franchise, and both of them are must-haves. Individually, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages are tremendous RPGs, and if you play one to completion, you're rewarded with codes to unlock secrets on the other one. In a sense, the two are linked. Linked, get it? The two games share a lot of elements, but then that's hardly surprising given that they were developed in tandem. Graphically they are more or less the same, and both leave familiar (and catchy) theme tunes ringing in your ears. One of the things they don't share though is plot.

Microsoft has finally broken its vow of silence in Europe to reveal the first concrete details of the Xbox launch on this side of the pond. The console will be released in sixteen European countries on March 14th for £299 or €479, with 1.5 million units expected to be available by the end of June. Weekly stock replacements from the Xbox assembly plant in Hungary are being promised but there is no clue as to how many consoles will actually be on store shelves for launch day. Meanwhile the games themselves are mostly expected to cost £45 / €69. All of which is (give or take a few days and a couple of euros) much as we had anticipated. Amongst the other announcements coming out of Microsoft's X01 event in southern France this week were a handful of new games - a mission-based driving game from Activision called Wreckless, a predictable enough Xbox version of F1 2002 from Electronic Arts, and claims that Ghost Recon from UbiSoft will be an Xbox exclusive. Which is odd, because the game was running very nicely on a PC at ECTS, and the last we heard it was due for release here on the beige box in December. Maybe Microsoft have some strange definition of the word "exclusive". Finally Peter Molyneux was on site to show off another (truly) Xbox exclusive game from one of the Lionhead satellite studios, in this case BC from Intrepid Games. No, we're none the wiser either. No doubt we will soon be hearing more about this title ad nauseam though... Sega were showing off playable versions of GunValkyrie, Sega GT 2002 and Jet Set Radio Future, but all three games were at the Tokyo Game Show last week anyway, as was Tecmo's Dead or Alive 3. Eidos had the Xbox version of Championship Manager up and running, which must really have pushed the console's graphical capabilities, while Infogrames demonstrated Transworld Surfing for the first time. UbiSoft showcased Rayman M and Batman Vengeance, but both games had already been pushed on PlayStation 2 at the ECTS trade show in London just last month. To round things off THQ gave the first European demonstration of the Xbox-exclusive Moto GP. So that's it, for now at least. More details should start to leak out over the coming days as the lucky handful of journalists who were invited to the event recover from their hangovers and the Carl Cox DJ set that rounded the night off, and maybe one day Microsoft will even explain how the console's online gaming capabilities are going to work in Europe. For now though they are preserving their .. um .. mystique. Related Feature - Is Xbox the future of online gaming?