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bleemcast hasn't been under the spotlight since E3 of last year, and you could be forgiven for wondering why the company is bothering to release it at all, now. Originally if you recall, it was supposed to arrive on store shelves just after E3, but in actual fact the chances are punters won't be able to pick it up until after this one. And what's more, they may not want to. The best thing about bleemcast was the way it could improve PlayStation games, by fiddling with graphics, sounds and load time mechanics. However, come May 1st, when the bleem products will allegedly hit store shelves in America, PSX fans-come-Dreamcast owners may want to re-evaluate just how important the new toy is to them, and whether they really want to shell out on a per-game basis... That's right. Not content with splitting those PSX games compatible with bleemcast into separate emupacks, the company is now set to release little bleemcast discs at $5.95 a pop. Each bleemcast disc will be capable of emulating one game only. So in other words, bleemcast: Gran Turismo 2 (the initial release), bleemcast: this, bleemcast: that and bleemcast: the other. If you own more than 10 games it will cost you more to emulate them using bleemcast than you will likely get for your second hand PlayStation. The problem for bleem now is that they have effectively shot themselves in the foot. As we said at the time, people could well expect to sell their PlayStations in favour of a copy of bleemcast if it enabled them to play all the same titles with added improvements. But even using the emupacks scheme, where games were packaged together at about 100 'emulatable' per disc, the cost would be nearly $60, arguably the cost of a second hand PlayStation. In spite of this, we argued that bleemcast would make up for the loss of the PSX with its improved visuals, sounds and load times. For big console fans though, bleemcast is now a total waste, because firstly they will have game collections that stretch as long as an arm and will require far more bleemcast discs than are in production (many games will probably never be emulated anyway), and at $5.95 per game it's practically more economical to buy a PlayStation 2 and use that for faster load times and improved visuals. The extras the PS2 can provide are very real, whereas bleemcast's claims are unproven. The funniest thing about all this though, is that ironically the system bleemcast emulates is still in production, whereas the one it emulates for is not. It looks like Sony won't have to do much to precipitate the downfall of bleem - their own greed has all but done that for them. Related Feature - The bleem! team

It looks as though as predicted 4K are about to win the CPL Qualifier here at The Playing Fields, after dispatching everybody else on the circuit and conceding only three rounds across their entire spread of matches! Their opponents, M4, won against a courageous cs0 side, whom nobody would have placed in the semi-finals at all this morning. The full results can be found on TPF.co.uk, and we'll be bringing you full coverage tomorrow morning in our extensive write up. Related Feature - CPL Qualifier Update

Although eight clans arrived at TPF this morning, only one has looked dangerous, and that's 4Kings. Utterly dominating their opening encounters and virtually assured of a semi-final place, most of the people on-site are tipping them to take the grand prize and autoberth into the CPL Holland event next month. So far they have dispatched ECSF and cs0, and as far as the scoring system is concerned, without losing a round. Although in actual fact they have lost several as Terrorists in pursuit of a high score, playing as Counter-Terrorists they have controlled their opposition, pumping them full of lead and taking no prisoners. Read our previous news article on the subject of the qualifier for a rundown on the rules. Based on the games that have taken place so far, our tips for the semi-finals are 4K, ECSF, D2C and M4. Eventually we expect to see 4K take the title, and judging by today's performance, we expect to see them do pretty well at next month's CPL event in Holland, too. Related Feature - CPL Holland Counter-Strike Qualifier

While the more outgoing amongst the population are legging it around London in chicken suits, battle-hardened Counter-Strike teams will be trouping along to a semi-invitational tournament at The Playing Fields today to compete for a prize purse of £2,000 and an autoberth into the CPL Holland event next month. The usual CPL rules apply with a few exceptions, which can be found here at TPF.co.uk. As the day progresses, we'll be providing live updates, as well as a full write up tomorrow lunchtime. Of late, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding CS tournament scoring systems, so for argument's sake, here's how it will all work today. A match is played in two twenty-minute halves (it seems that the info on the TPF site isn't 100% correct, so if we spot any obvious differences we'll point them out here -Ed), so that each team can play both as Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. The winner is determined by the number of rounds won, but in an attempt to keep things even, on DE maps the Terrorist wins will be counted (i.e. how many bombs planted or Counter-Terrorist teams wiped out), and on CS maps, the Counter-Terrorist wins will be counted (i.e. how many times all hostages are rescued or Terrorist teams wiped out). In the incident of a tie, two further 3-round halves will be played, and played until a winner is determined. The teams will consist of five players and reserves, although only five may play at any one time. And for the purists, bunnyhopping is banned. On pain of death, we might add. The usual formalities, such as obligatory player registration will apply, and the following maps will be used throughout the day:

When we last looked at Operation Flashpoint back in February we had just received our first batch of alpha code from the game, and although it was looking very promising there was obviously some way to go before it reached its full potential. Since then a demo has been released to give gamers a taste of the action, but to date we had only seen single player stand-alone missions. So it was with bated breath that we installed the latest preview copy from publisher Codemasters, including our first glimpse at the campaign structure and multiplayer options.

Fox Interactive recently took the decision to get out of the publishing game, and as a result their wide range of console and PC games have been looking for new homes. The latest such orphan to be successfully adopted is World's Scariest Police Chases, a PlayStation game based on the TV show of the same name, complete with requisite running commentary from retired Sheriff Jon Bunnell. The lucky foster parents in this case are Activision, who describe their catch as "a wild, no-holds-barred driving game that puts players in control of the action as a police officer chasing and apprehending law-breaking criminals". If chasing drunks down an American freeway or intercepting drug smugglers sounds like your idea of fun, you know where to look...

Max Payne has been in development for longer than we care to remember, but with a mixture of a gritty New York setting, a heart-warming tale of police corruption, and a healthy dose of John Woo style action set-pieces, it might just prove to have been worth the wait. And if everything goes to plan we should know soon, with Take 2 now describing the game as "nearly finished". Meanwhile the publisher has announced that a PlayStation 2 version of the game is currently under development at their Rockstar Games Canada division and due for release some time later this year.

French publisher Cryo Interactive have announced that they will be closing down their UK offices, despite having probably its biggest ever line-up ready for release this year - seven for the GameBoy Colour, nine for the PlayStation 2 and a dozen for the PC. Instead they are said to be close to signing a distribution deal which will see another publisher handling their games on this side of the Channel.

Last time we spoke to Hungarian developers Philos Labs back in March 2000 they had just finished work on Theocracy, an innovative real-time strategy game set in Aztec Mexico. Since then they have been hard at work on a number of new projects, including the impressive looking Escape from Alcatraz. We caught up with the game's lead designer Antal Ruttmayer to find out more...

Virgin / Titus have released new screenshots of four of their PlayStation 2 titles in the run-up to the massive E3 trade show next month, including some previously unknown games. For those of you with a taste for motor sports, we have the first two screenshots from Downforce, a "high octane racing game" being developed by Smart Dog, as well as four new shots of Lotus Challenge from British developer Kuju.

Sega will be back in the black this year, the company promised today after four years of losses. The company said it expects to post a full-year loss of ¥58.3 billion ($477.5 million) on sales of ¥260 billion ($2.13 billion). Central to Sega's financial turnaround is its shift toward software and away from hardware. Certainly it was last year's desperate attempt to cut Dreamcast prices to boost sales that ultimately led to losing money last financial year, which ended 31 March. Ditching Dreamcast cost Sega ¥80 billion ($655 million).

Nearly a week after enthusiasts in Germany uncovered a problem with VIA's South Bridge 686B, several motherboard manufacturers have addresssed the issue with new BIOS releases. The problem, for those of you that missed it, can lock up or "freeze" a system when transfering large files (over 100Mb) from one ATA100 drive to another on different IDE chains. It's quite a specific issue, and seems to be aggravated by Soundblaster Live! cards, leading the world's presses to correctly assume that it's a PCI latency issue with the South Bridge 686B chip. If your motherboard has any one of a number of VIA chips on it, you could fall foul to this under the right circumstances. Nice to know, isn't it? Luckily, several motherboard manufacturers have stepped in to alleviate the problem with a BIOS update that fiddles the PCI latency. First up are KT133A Roundup survivors IWill, who have patched up their KK266-R with an official BIOS release. You can download that file from here, or report to the IWill support pages for more information on it. Another company whose boards are affected, ABit, has released what is described as a "Beta BIOS", version ZT. It's dated yesterday and is believed to fix the 686B problem, but as usual you can find little mention of it on their official pages. If you're daring though you can download that from ABit's FTP, here. Use it at your own risk. Epox have now also released a BIOS, for the EP-8KTA2 and the EP-8KTA3. And if you're unlucky enough to have a board from a company that hasn't been so quick off the mark, VIA Hardware has a cautionary fix for you, which patches the problem by installing a newer driver. You can download that from the bottom of this page. If you don't think you're suffering from the problem, there's nothing to worry about. This writer has used several KT133A motherboards (amongst those affected) and never run into it. The circumstances under which it applies are fairly obscure, but it's definitely worth taking into account these optional BIOS updates if you do run two fast IDE drives on separate chains and regularly transfer between them. Related Feature - VIA KT266 comes under fire

UbiSoft have revealed the future of their long-running multi-million selling Rayman series, with the limbless platform game hero set to appear on a range of platforms over the next year. First up will be the imaginatively titled Rayman Advance for the (you guessed it) Gameboy Advance, due for release this June. Perhaps more interesting though is Rayman M, which is set to bring a "new dimension of multiplayer to the Rayman world" on PC and PlayStation 2 this November, with an Xbox version planned for some time next year.

Any racing game, however esteemed its lineage, is going to have a tough time breaking onto the Dreamcast. The genre is stiff with competition from the likes of Metropolis Street Racer and F355 Challenge, leaving little room for intrusion. However Daytona USA 2001 managed it, we'll never know. Although I had my doubts about Sega's supposedly seminal arcade racer coming to Dreamcast, I've been reassured by the sheer number of things on offer. For instance, the game has eight tracks right from the start, including the three original arcade tracks, two tracks from Daytona CCE on the ill-fated Saturn, and three totally original tracks. As with the original, these can be played as you like - straight up, reverse, mirror, mirror reverse - with season, Single Race, Time Attack and two player VS Battle modes. What's more, every race can be saved to your VMU for analysis or showboating later on. One of the biggest changes for Daytona USA 2001 is its online play, although it does suffer due to poor guestimation on the Dreamcast's part. Using something approaching Quake's pushlatency variable, it predicts where your opponent is driving if the connection is too slow to give exact data in time. However, by its very nature Daytona is unpredictable, and the game gets it wrong more often than not. In a way this removes a lot of the excitement from proceedings - most of the fun in Daytona is cool, calculated overtaking manoeuvres through oversteer into corners, something rendered almost impossible by the positional inconsistencies. Thankfully the framerate remains constant, as with the rest of the game, and the graphics likewise, but the niggling latency issue mars an otherwise excellent attempt to introduce an online racing mode.

Codemasters have released a second batch of screenshots from their World War II action-adventure game Prisoner of War. Due for release towards the end of the year, the game will see you trying to escape from a series of German PoW camps, including the infamous Colditz Castle.

Computer Trade Weekly's annual People Awards were finally unveiled on Tuesday, with the esteemed aid of Peter Kaye, some alternative comedian bloke. Approximately 1,000 people showed up for the ceremony, which was followed by an after-show get together that saw developers and their ilk from all over the country dancing to the strains of current chart-toppers and drinking copious amounts of Vodka. CTW's Rob Fahey informs us that the event was "a hell of a lot more fun than the Oscars", saying that "This was a proper bloody party - the games industry can outdrink film stars any day of the week!" Mr Fahey proceeded to pass out on a nearby sofa, nursing what was described as the mother and father of all hangovers. The awards covered all manner of achievements, including Developer of the Year, which went to Free Radical Design, the chaps behind PS2 smash TimeSplitters, and Journalist of the Year, which went to Owain Bennallack of Computec's "Develop" magazine. There was even a Ligger of the Year award, which went to Tim Wapshott of The Times for his ability to blag free booze, trips abroad and basically act like a party animal. Here's the list of winners, in all its glory.

Tribes 2 is a tremendous first person shooter, but judging by our experiences with it so far, marred by an incredible number of bugs and gameplay flaws. The in-game community features which are groundbreaking in their exhaustiveness, are barely online, and on the game's European release date the authentication server was taken down for maintenance, leaving gamers who bought the game on its first day unable to log on and play it. Dynamix have made apology after apology for the game's faults, but even with this latest patch installed and operating, the game behaves more like unpatched Quake II online than a seminal community-friendly first person shooter. It's telling, for instance, that since the game's release last Friday, this writer has had to download five patches, and even patch the patching utility. Disappointing isn't the word. Still, with every passing day, Dynanix get closer to realising our dream for the game, and the bugs are gradually being stamped out. There are still ugly memory leak errors and problems with connecting to servers, but the netcode is solid, and the Tribes are gradually migrating. Read more about our opinion of the game in next week's review. In the meantime, if you have already bought yourself a copy, firing up the online mode will patch you up just fine, or you can download the individual files, either as an update from version 22228, or as a full executable. Related Feature - Tribes 2 Preview

Snowball is facing more problems this week as the online advertising slump claims another victim. With the NASDAQ index threatening to delist the company because its share price has fallen well below the $1 mark, Snowball has sacked a third of its workforce in an attempt to cut costs in the hopes of breaking even this year. How this will effect the company's various sites remains to be seen, but their IGN brand is host to a range of in-house gaming sites as well as the Vault network, 3D Portal, Gone Gold, WarcraftIII.net and numerous other sites.

Leading CPU manufacturers AMD and Intel have both announced terrible financial results this week, with their profits and revenues slumping markedly. The outlook wasn't quite as gloomy as many analysts had been expecting though, and traders desperate for a glimmer of hope after the recent stock exchange blood bath latched on to the slump in profits as good news. And so bizarrely the paper value of both companies rose sharply, lifting the entire tech sector with them. It's a funny old world...

MTO's GT Advance aims to make embarrassing 2D sprite-a-thons like GBC Pocket GT a thing of the past, with a decent framerate, Super Nintendo quality graphics and enough cars to rival Gran Turismo. Over 40 of the things have been confirmed, drawn and stylised for the game, with models from seven top manufacturers including Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi. There are 32 tracks to race them about on too, including dirt, street and racetrack courses. For those of you who have seen the Japanese version of the game, expect a small amount of Westernisation here. Unlike a lot of its competition, pasting down the accelerator won't be enough to take the chequered flag. A more measured approach, involving actual driving and not just steering will be called for. Developer MTO has placed importance on things like engine tuning, with shocks, fuel injectors, exhaust systems, spoilers and even alternative engines for every vehicle. In order to afford the upgrades and modifications, drivers will have to race for cash, and there will be a Time Trial mode for practice sessions too, complete with Ghost Car feature. Two players will be able to go head to head using the GBA Link Cable, and it will also be possible to swap Ghost Cars to aid each other in practice. One can fully expect to spend hours and hours fighting through business meetings and train journeys trying to shave another fraction of a second from an elusive lap time.

Tribes 2 has finally arrived in the UK, and to celebrate Sierra have today announced that they are organising an official Tribes 2 tournament for British Tribes fans. Teams of eight players will be battling it out online starting in May, and the competition leads up to a head-to-head showdown between the top two teams at the big i8 LAN party over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Prizes and some other details remain to be confirmed, but what we do know is that the competition will focus on the Team Hunters mode, and that the initial online rounds will take place on servers provided by both Gameplay and Netgames UK.

Nintendo of America has announced a $75 million advertising blitz to land the GameBoy Advance in North America. The campaign, which will kick off in the run up to the console's 11th June release date, will target everyone from high school teenagers to travelling businessmen. The company will inject $25m spending into advertising prior to the launch, and $75m by the year's end. According to Nintendo, the campaign is being led by Leo Burnett USA, a Chicago-based advertising agency, and include such spectacles as young women adorned with GameBoy Advance units walking around in public places. The console, which will cost $99.95 when it hits American shores, has already been dubbed the "pocket Super Nintendo" by critics, who are mad about it. With hot properties like Super Mario Advance and F-Zero Advance lining up for launch, the GBA is expected to make inroads on the astonishing 100m original GameBoy sales within its first year. Related Feature - First GBA sales figures

Bloomberg's Japanese division have filed a news report claiming that the GameCube will miss its July release date in Japan. Although nobody here can decipher the original report, both Reuters and Bloomberg now carry confirmation from Nintendo herself, that the Japanese release date will be the 14th September. Reports at The GIA suggest the American release date will slip until mid-November. According to Bloomberg, Nintendo have made a decision to move the release date back after concerns arose that supply would not meet demand. Sony suffered from just such supply issues late last year when it launched its PlayStation 2 in America and Europe - a slowdown in production of the complicated graphics chip was deemed responsible for the stunted number of units at launch. Nintendo recently announced itself that the GameCube's European release date would slip till Spring 2002. It is now expected that a slew of announcements including price-changes will be made at E3 next month. The release date had always been viewed as aggressive, and speculation about slippage has been rife since the original announcement. That said, with the launch of the GameBoy Advance in Europe / North America to look forward to in June, and the console already on store shelves in Japan, it's unlikely that this latest announcement will cause too many problems for the gaming giant. Indeed, analysts at JP Morgan Securities Asia Ltd. were unconcerned, stating that "September and October are better," because they are closer to the festive period.

Tim Sweeney, the brains behind the various incarnations of the Unreal game engine, has never been a fan of tile-based rendering, once calling "the whole concept .. terribly misguided". But with Videologic's new Kyro II graphics chip showing surprisingly good performance at a budget price using this technique, perhaps he has changed his mind? Apparently not...

One of the worst kept secrets in the gaming industry has finally been confirmed, with the official announcement that Raven are working on a sequel to their first person shooter Soldier of Fortune. Set in the present day and loosely based on the real-life exploits of "military consultant" John Mullins, the original game was probably most notable for its excessively gory graphics and the ability to blast away people's arms, legs and heads with gruesome realism. Perhaps unsurprisingly this led to an 18+ rating from ELSPA here in Europe, while the Canadian province of British Columbia went as far as trying to classify it as an adult movie!

Following the run-away success of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast at the end of last year, with the Eidos published title becoming one of the fastest selling games of all time on its UK release, it is perhaps no surprise that rights to turn the latest big British quiz show export into a computer game have also been snapped up. With over eight million viewers here in the UK and an American version of the show about to begin, The Weakest Link is one of the most popular and also one of the most amusing quiz shows currently on television, with Anne Robinson varying from terse to downright rude as a string of contestants are ritually humiliated before being kicked off the show for being "the weakest link".

Stunt GP is very close to excellent, crossing the lure of remote control cars with the brutal gameplay and addictiveness of a Team 17 title. For all its charm though, it's not without flaws. It's easy enough to become proficient at race-winning, but pulling off the necessary stunts along the way can force things beyond the wrong side of easy. One thing we cannot possibly fault here is the visuals. Clean and crisp, every inch of the track is pleasantly textured, and each car shiny and well modelled. There are three different types: Wild Wheels, Speed-demons and Aeroblasters, with 16 models in total. Each is especially capable in one particular area, as the names suggest. For instance, the Aeroblasters can perform some almighty tricks in mid-air, but the Speed-demons are more at home on the ground. There are 24 brilliantly designed tracks on offer. They start of easy, with simple figure-of-eight routines, and become increasingly complex, with loop the loops, transparent pit stop flyovers and sloping corners. It's some of the most original track work I've seen in any racer, let alone an R/C one for a long time. Points are obviously awarded for position at the outcome of the race, but inter-race upgrades, which rapidly become a necessity, are actually purchased with "Aeromiles", won by performing jumps and tricks during the race. Aeromiles are important, but so is winning the race, and it's creating equilibrium between the two that's difficult. The tricks you can perform are somewhat limited, but ones that accrue the most points like the Barrel Roll will take you a considerable amount of time to perfect. Pulling out off-the-cuff manoeuvres in the thick of a race will do you fine, and ultimately you need to place highly above all else, so you have to act sensibly and maintain momentum.

ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, has received two crushing blows in the sentencing of Radomir Lukic and Kevin Bailey, brought to trial by a joint investigation from ELSPA, the National Crime Squad, BT and Telewest. The two were found guilty of trademark offences and conspiracy to defraud at Leicester Crown Court, but in sentencing the pair, Judge Bray took a swipe at the gaming industry.

Despite evidence that here in Europe at least sales were actually up last year, the gaming industry has been whining about slowdowns and transition years to explain away its financial problems. But while some publishers suffer, many others have been announcing that they made more money last year than in 1999. The latest company to beat the market is Interplay, which announced a 13% increase in revenue to $30.8m for the last three months of 2000, along with slightly better full year takings of $104m. The California-based publisher is still making a loss, but this dropped from over $32m in 1999 to just $8.4m last year.

Often on the Internet, special favour is given to websites that can turn a review around in time for a product release. For example, companies like nVidia and AMD often let various hardware gurus like Dr. Pabst and Anand in on new releases and give them ample time to prepare coverage for the morning of the announcement. This approach is favourable not only to the websites in question but also to the consumer, who can tell right off the bat whether Product X is good or not. At least, that's the theory. In actual fact, people who rush out and buy Product X on D-Day may feel more like a guinea pig than a consumer before long. The most notable embarrassment in recent times was Intel's flustered notrelease of the Pentium III 1.13GHz processor, which was eventually withdrawn after issues arose that pegged not only its performance, but also its stability. These were brought to light not by Intel QA but by the hardware community that tested it. The latest fly in the ointment is the VIA KT266 motherboard chipset. The theory worked as far as hardware websites receiving and rating the boards highly. The consumer, on the other hand, discovered that the platform is rife with instability and questionable performance. One of the consumers just so happened to be OCWorkBench, a respected enthusiast website. According to the author of its latest update, there are but a few KT266 boards actually on the market, and "most of them are plagued with performance and stability issues". That's fairly damning. Also, manufacturers are apparently "ironing out the problems", despite having released the boards. Call us cynics, but we reckon it's quite telling that VIA are now stuck in the middle of two possible chipset blunders, which are ostensibly the result of poor QA. It was only a few days ago that an issue with the Southbridge of KT133A boards was uncovered, yet again by enthusiasts - an issue that could cause corrupted data in large files. However, the blame might not lie with VIA. OCWorkBench, again. "Over at our labs here in Singapore and Taipei, we have some early retail boards. Preliminary results are VERY unacceptable for a DDR board and we have decided to postpone the reviews. From our usual sources of information, a R&D engineer has mentioned to me that a number of brands rushed out their boards. Only after a week or so, there is an ECN issued by VIA regarding a change of registers - that is what governs the performance issues. (this happened during my tests of the first and second Gigabyte 7VTX board, as I was told by Gigabyte that they received a new reference BIOS from VIA). It looks like everyone is now rushing out there to correct these problems." There's more at OCWorkBench. The lesson here perhaps is to let someone else be the guinea pig for a while. Motherboards are pretty complicated creatures, and need a few weeks to make sure all their cylinders are firing. Related Feature - April's Marching Motherboards