Latest Articles (Page 3542)

In a bizarre turn of events, America now sells the most expensive PlayStation 2 consoles in the world. Japan has for a while been at the equivalent of £190, with Europe now competing at £199, and America $299, or the equivalent of £203, C&VG reports. It's interesting also to note that Sony have no plans to reduce the price of PS2 this side of the New Year. While the Americans will undoubtedly bemoan this fact for eons to come, given that theirs is the Greatest Country in the World, but we can't help but titter! A spokeswoman for SCEA explained that they have "never been a company that makes decisions based on the competitive landscape," which sort of begs the question of what they actually do make decisions based upon, "and we're not going to be competing this year, or even necessarily next year, for the same kind of customer as Nintendo or Microsoft." While Microsoft will decline to say anything for fear of actually advertising the Xbox in Europe, Nintendo are more than likely to feel they are competing with Sony. After all, they have just sneaked Resident Evil out from right under their noses, and a lot of their games catalogue will also appear on the Sony-made console. Sony ought to take that to heart - after all, who is going to buy a PlayStation 2 and SSX Tricky this Christmas if they can buy a GameCube and SSX Tricky for $100 less and enjoy better visuals and save on load times? Are they planning to market with a 'reassuringly expensive' tag? How about 'why pay less for more?' Related Feature - The Console Wars

The Comanche series has proven popular since its introduction back in 1992, with the original trilogy selling a couple of million copies worldwide. Now it's back for a fourth time with an all-new polygon-based graphics engine and more action-oriented gameplay. We took a trip down to Novalogic's UK offices in London earlier this week to have a play with the latest build of the game.

While ECTS was relatively quiet this year due to a lack of major publishers attending the trade show, the quality of games was as high as ever, and not all of them were from companies that we already knew. One of the pleasant surprises which we stumbled across between meetings was Team Factor, an online-focused tactical action game in the vein of Counter-Strike, created by a small Czech developer called 7FX and due to be published by British upstarts Singularity Software within the next few months. After the show we caught up with 7FX's Pavel Sinagl to find out more...

Down on their luck Future Publishing suspended shares this morning preceding a "financial announcement". Speculation was rife about what that might entail, and eventually it was revealed that the company's loss before tax for the six months ended June 30 2001 was some £106.8 million, a rather mighty figure by anyone's understanding. After a day of waiting, Future announced a new rights issue to raise £34.6m and appointed a new chairman. The six for five rights issue at 20p per share is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Beeson Gregory, MCV reports, and the firm has also secured a £35m five year revolving debt facility. Roger Parry takes over the role of chairman from Chris Anderson. So there's no buyout, which had been offered as a potential solution, but Future's troubles are far from at an end…

Ubi Soft has today announced an exclusive publishing deal with Eidos Interactive. The agreement will see the French publisher releasing "Salt Lake 2002: The Official Video Game of the Olympic Winter Games" (blimey) on the GameBoy Advance in January 2002. The game will feature six official events, environments unsurprisingly based on Salt Lake City and will allow up to four players to join in the fun ("on one machine" according to their press release, but we guess that's a clerical error, and they actually mean on one cartridge).

Eidos have unveiled the PlayStation 2 version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire : 2nd Edition, which is set to feature a lip-synching digital rendition of Chris Tarrant. Sporting no less than 20,000 polygons and looking slightly more wrinkled and plastic than we remember him being in real life, there's something not quite right about the model, and the result is rather .. well, scary. PlayStation 2 owners can also look forward to the dubious pleasure of hearing Tarrant's voice emerging from their speaker system, asking them a range of over one thousand questions and gently prodding them as to whether that's "your final answer". Helpfully the game will now remember which questions it has already asked you and avoid asking them again until every available question has been used up, which should make the whole thing somewhat less repetitive than it was last time round. All the usual lifelines and multiplayer modes are also included, with a range of pre-recorded voices saying "ooh, I don't know" when you call a friend and ask them what the capital of Mongolia is, and of course the option to go 50-50 by having the computer remove one wrong answer and one right answer. Probably. The game even shows your own name on the cheque at the end of the game, although sadly you still can't cash it. Maybe next time?

Titus, the French company behind Virgin Interactive and Interplay, have announced that they will be releasing a chess game for the GameBoy Advance titled Virtual Kasparov. Designed by the brains behind the PC game Virtual Chess and sporting a selection of opening moves plucked from past master Garry Kasparov's repertoire, Titus are hoping to "checkmate even the most ardent chess fan". Naturally a two player link-up mode will be on offer, as well as a selection of 31 AI opponents, each apparently having their own personalities and preferences. Those of you not familiar with the one of the world's oldest and most popular strategy games can hide your shameful ignorance by working your way through a series of fifty tutorial modules, and there is even a "story mode" which allows you to unlock additional games and opponents as you progress. At the end of the day though it's chess, so let's face it, there's a limit to how exciting it can be. Look for Virtual Kasparov appearing on the GameBoy Advance some time in January.

Massively multiplayer role-playing game Anarchy Online should be appearing on store shelves across Europe today, three months after it was released in America and its native Scandinavia. But although the game has been improving after a shaky start that saw it afflicted by bugs, lag and security concerns, last week's patch raised a whole new set of issues, sparking a revolt amongst hardcore players with many claiming to have deleted their accounts. Unfortunately this soon turned ugly as the game's official messageboards became clogged up by abusive and repetitive comments, leading to a number of people being banned from the forums and a new policy being introduced which will see more stringent moderation of messages in future. The biggest problems were caused by improvements to the "AI" which allowed monsters to cast nanotech spells on themselves between battles and made them more likely to rush to the aid of nearby allies. Unfortunately while this seems to work quite well for lower level monsters and characters, some of the more powerful creatures become virtually invulnerable, sparking widespread complaints from veteran players. An update on the game's community website later admitted that as a result of the patch "sometimes people will be unable to do damage with their normal attacks, and some monsters seem to have too many nano points". A new patch was released early on Monday fixing many of these issues, but player feedback suggests that some balancing still needs to be done for higher level creatures, while other players are complaining about the "nerfing" of certain skills to make them less effective. In the meantime Funcom have promised more rigorous testing of patches in future, and now that European players are entering the game the long-awaited storyline should start some time next month. There are also long-term plans to add more monsters and pre-designed missions for high level characters to supplement the random mission generator system, although whether this will be enough to lure back disgruntled players who left after last weekend's problems remains to be seen. Funcom's first massively multiplayer game launch has certainly been a baptism of fire for the Norwegian company, but hopefully a new influx of European gamers, improving stability and an on-going storyline should help put things back on track. Related Feature - Anarchy Online preview

CDV have revealed that their official add-on for hit real-time strategy game Cossacks will now be released in January, a little later than originally planned. Judging from what we saw at the recent ECTS trade show in London though, the wait should be worthwhile. Titled Cossacks : The Art of War, the mission pack includes two new nations, five new single player campaigns and an array of historical battles and stand-alone missions, all of which effectively doubles the size of the game. A properly supported map editor will also be included in the pack, allowing fans to create their own scenarios, and a whole host of new online options are included to make the game's multiplayer more flexible.

Id Software has updated its ubiquitous first person shooter Quake III Arena to version 1.30. The update, described as a 'minor fix' can be downloaded in full at a whopping 25.5Mb, or using the reasonably speedy automatic update feature that came with version 1.29f for a smaller download of around 8Mb. Amongst the bugfixes are a 'sound bug', which apparently crashed some modifications, a few miscellaneous logfile issues, and a fixed autodownload toggle in the user interface. The Linux version of the patch will follow shortly, Graeme Devine of Id Software confirmed. If history is anything to go by, the rampaging hordes of Quake fanboys will spend the next 24 hours descending upon FilePlanet and just about any other file resource in order to update their copies, but we had surprisingly little trouble getting hold of the files just now. We recommend the automatic update feature (which can be found in the Start Menu Quake III entry) if you use Windows. Perhaps you will have luck with the big FTP servers though, who knows. Unlike the Half-Life and Counter-Strike patches of last week, this is just a bunch of minor fixes bound together by a meaty executable. You might be lucky, we were.

Eight characters, loads of tracks, GP and Time Trial modes, support for one to four players, onboard save features and a GameBoy Advance exclusive. Sound familiar? That's right, I'm talking about Konami Krazy Racers. Reviewed back in the haze of the GBA launch, I commented from my experience of Mario Kart Advance (as it was then titled) at ECTS 2000 that there wouldn't be much to distinguish the two. How right I was. But now that it's here, I genuinely prefer Mario. How does that work then? Goemon and co. are an amiable bunch, the tracks were classy, the graphics cutesy; Krazy Racers had so much going for it. Unfortunately, the thing it cannot compete with is Super Mario Kart's sparkle. It's the original. Even when it was new and companies were trying to sideswipe it, Mario Kart was a world apart. It had the memorable tracks (who can forget the original Rainbow Road) and it had the visuals. It pretty much defined the genre, and nobody has done a great deal to redefine it since then. Mario Kart on the N64 was a muted success, but Mario Kart Super Circuit is a return to form. That said, this isn't the game to redefine the karting genre either. In fact, I'm beginning to doubt that anybody will ever take it in new directions now. Mario Kart Super Circuit actually features over forty tracks, more than twice the number Krazy Racers did, and its characters are far more memorable than the occasionally anonymous ranks of KKR. There are eight characters, but they fall into six categories this time. Mario and Luigi are the all-rounders; Peach and Toad are nippy but lack weight; Yoshi is slightly heavier but moves quickly; Donkey Kong and Wario move quite slowly but pack a lot of punch; and Bowser is the slowest of the lot, but solid as a rock.

We've known for some time now that a sequel was in the works to the award-winning sci-fi adventure game Outcast, which we picked out as one of the best games of 1999. Featuring a bizarre alien world quite unlike anything seen before or since (partly thanks to its detailed voxel graphics) as well as an interesting storyline, a cast of great characters and an incredible soundtrack performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, it was truly a groundbreaking title.

Yesterday, Telewest Blueyonder herded a bunch of journalists and suits into Covent Garden's glitzy Nutopia, an all-white dungeon populated by tropical fish and broadband-connected computers. Plying us with champagne and increasingly bizarre and occasionally appetising morsels of food, the cableco. unveiled its new broadband entertainment portal, which will launch to the public shortly. The portal itself is made up of several distinct sections, with music, games and films featuring prominently. The gaming section drew particular interest, we're pleased to say. As many of you will know, EuroGamer's technology division is responsible for designing and implementing a great deal of it, working closely with the ex-Wireplay employees at Telewest. Shortly after midnight last night, the "Blueyonder multiplayer gaming" was officially launched to the public. You can find it at http://gaming.blueyonder.co.uk, although the DNS is apparently still propagating, so be patient. Telewest Blueyonder customers will get the most from the service, which allows you to purchase 'credits' to dynamically book and launch servers, but anybody can take advantage of features like the server and community areas. Veterans of the Wireplay forums will no doubt find all their old friends here, and included into the bargain are an advanced web-based IRC chat client (aimed at newcomers, but worth marvelling at even if you are an mIRC diehard), and an instant messenger service which allows you to chat with your friends while you browse the Blueyonder multiplayer gaming website and forums. The service also features up to date gaming content straight from EuroGamer. Although the gaming service caters to the hardcore more than anything at the moment, when the main blueyonder site relaunches, casual gamers will be able to take advantage of all manner of web-based games including Pool, crazy golf (mini golf to our friends from foreign lands) and more. Tom Cotter, head of games strategy, Telewest said: "This is an unparalleled combination of services and support that individual and multiplayer gamers have been demanding from the market for some time. It has been developed by gamers, for gamers and will enable people to enjoy games the way they were always meant to be played - fast, stable, low latency, sociable and easy to set up."

Microsoft has sketched out details regarding its plans for the Tokyo Game Show (otherwise known as the TGS) this Autumn. The show is currently scheduled for October 12-14 at the Makuhari Messe, and Microsoft has reserved 150 kiosks, the largest amount per single company there. Core Magazine is reporting that 20-30 playable Xbox games will be on display, although most will be American in origin. This is the first time Microsoft have bothered with serious publicity since E3 in May, as they scrapped proposals to show off at ECTS. Of the 20-30 playable games, one Japanese title has so far been confirmed; Dead or Alive 3. Most of the rest will be American in origin. Given the large number of Western journalists in attendance this will probably come over all right, but some will doubtless accuse Microsoft of 'missing the point' of the TGS altogether. Microsoft are also planning a full stage presentation and a theatre (read: cinema) with 5.1 channel surround sound. With a month to go before the Xbox's American launch, perhaps the Tokyo Game Show will be a suitable platform from which to announce details of the various topics Microsoft has been avoiding, including our favourite, the elusive online strategy. The last time we spoke to a Microsoft spokesperson about its online plans, we were told "it's a question of staying tuned". All very well, lads. That said, he did say that Microsoft "will certainly be making announcements before we launch the console". If not TGS, then where? Related Feature - Is Xbox the future of online console gaming?

After excursions into the action and platform genres with games like From Dusk Till Dawn, Devil Inside and Gift, French purveyors of the bizarre Cryo are returning to their familiar stomping grounds in the adventure game genre next month with the release of Atlantis III : The New World. As the title suggests this is the third installment in the popular series, and will feature the traditional mixture of mind-bending puzzles, gorgeous pre-rendered scenery, scantily clad blue women and atmospheric world music, this time produced by Peter Gabriel's guitarist David Rhodes.

Mythic Entertainment have inked a deal with French publisher Wanadoo which will see their massively multiplayer role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot distributed in the UK, France and Germany from January 2002. Meanwhile French online gaming company GOA will be setting up local servers for European players, and beta testing on these should start soon. Mythic president Mark Jacobs is said to be "expecting great things from our partnership", while GOA were quick to return the loving, with managing director Ghislaine Le Rhun commenting that "we are proud to offer such a high standard game to European players".

Main game is where you'll do most of your cussing. The premise is that you control a monkey in a ball, and by using the analog stick you have to move your monkey around increasingly complex courses and through a goal. Although the camera tilts and swings around with the movement of your analog stick, the arena doesn't actually tilt Kirby style, but it's enough to induce motion sickness in those unlucky enough to suffer from it. Main game can be played by up to four players, who take it in turns to play. The winner is the first person to complete all the levels or the one who lasts the longest. Although the idea of moving your monkey through a couple of goalposts probably sounds easy, it definitely isn't. The various courses throw up all sorts of obstacles, and narrow gangways. If you fall off, you have to start again, and you only have a finite number of lives and continues. There are three difficulty levels; beginner, advanced and expert.

Sony have reduced the price of Playstation 2 to £199.99 as of this Friday. This confirms earlier details leaked to us by sources in retail. We do not yet know if Sony plans to cut the price of PlayStation 2 in the rest of Europe or the United States, where it still retails for $299.99. Sony were not available for comment. Their voicemail revealed that most of them were on holiday or off sick, which is nice. Related Feature - PS2 price cut to £199?

Conceived by former id Software and 3D Realms designer Tom Hall, Anachronox is an epic role-playing game inspired by classic console game like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series, but rendered entirely in real-time 3D on your PC, right down to the carefully choreographed cutscenes.

Bam recently revealed that they would be publishing the GameBoy Advance version of classic point and click adventure game Broken Sword : Shadow of the Templars, and with the game due out early next year they have sent out a new batch of screenshots. These are the first new pictures showing off the impressive conversion since it was announced by developer Revolution back in April.

Nintendo of America today announced the final 75-million-dollar stage of its GameCube launch campaign for North America. NoA executive vice president Peter Main said that the campaign has one central strategy; to help gamers get their hands on Nintendo games. The campaign will feature television advertisements airing on many different channels from primetime to MTV to Saturday cartoons, and preceding blockbuster movies in November and December, as well as print adverts and a roadshow. The campaign pales in comparison to the 500-million-dollar budget equivalent for Microsoft's Xbox, but ironically many journalists are now wary of the console because of the lack of specific information available, and the fact that Microsoft's marketing department seems to be pushing the multi-media capabilities of the console above all else. "Nintendo GameCube is built from the ground up for one purpose only - to play games," Peter Main explicated. Events in the run up to November 18th - the launch date of the console - will culminate in a Cube Sunday on the day itself, coinciding with the beginning of the most important retail shopping week of the year. Nintendo is employing the services of top production talent for the television advertisements including the director of photography for "Seven" Darius Khondji. Shootings, editing and post production work has been carried out in the United Kingdom, Italy, France and the United States. One of the advertisements features more than 500 cast members. Apart from the usual television appearances, cinema-goers will spot GameCube advertisements prior to films such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. GameCube will also appear in print media during the next few months, from magazines like Sports Illustrated for Kids to men's magazines like Maxim and Stuff. Nintendo has green-lighted more than 95 full-page print advertisements across more than 50 publications. Defying convention, Nintendo will forgo the pleasantries of a truck tour and instead will open Nintendo Cube Clubs in 12 cities across the United States, transforming lofts, vacant office buildings and other "offbeat" venues into fully interactive clubs with DJs and more than 32 gameplay stations running on Panasonic HDTV monitors. The Cube Club Tour kicks off on September 28 in Atlanta, with sponsorship from Stuff Magazine, Maxim, DC Comics, Yahoo! and GamePro amongst others. Information and free tickets can be uncovered at http://www.nintendogamecube.com. This website will also act as the centrepiece to Nintendo's online efforts, with regular updates and information. Nintendo will also hold cheesy "What would YOU do for a Nintendo GameCube?" contests that will "appeal to fans that will eat a bucket of worms orshave their head in order to win an early Nintendo GameCube". Dedicated game websites will launch nearer the console's release. Nintendo also plans to have consoles available for preplay at retail chains in advance of the launch. Related Feature - Hip to be Cube!

Codemasters have announced that they will be publishing a mission pack for Operation Flashpoint, titled Red Hammer. Due out in December and expected to cost £9.99, the pack will add a whole new campaign giving you a chance to fight the war from the Soviet side. Included are twenty new missions and a new character to play, a tough Russian veteran called Dmitri Lukin. Although the pack will use the same islands and storyline seen in the original game, it should offer a new perspective on the action, giving you the chance to take part in the invasion of Everon, fight your way out of a resistance ambush and find your way back to Soviet positions on Malden after being trapped behind enemy lines.

Akihabara, September 14th, 2001. As the shutters roll up, street-long queues shuffle forward, patiently waiting for the chance to spend their hard-earned yen on Nintendo's latest console. The majority will purchase Luigi's Mansion with their console, then spend the rest of the day huddled unceremoniously next to a television in their tiny living rooms, getting to grips with Nintendo's GameCube.

Rumours are spreading rapidly on the Internet that mighty Japanese developer Squaresoft will side with Microsoft in the ongoing console wars. Apparently, the developer of Final Fantasy and other titles plans to announce some sort of alliance with Microsoft to produce several exclusive games for Xbox. If true, such a deal could be the keystone in Microsoft's bridge to the Japanese market, which until now has looked flaky at best. We're often told that the Japanese market is very different to the US and European markets, but for console manufacturers the overall outlook has to be the same. They still need exclusives to sell their loss-making consoles, and popular games give way to sequel upon sequel upon sequel, which means lots of money. The difference is in software; the unrestrained popularity of RPGs for example, and dulled impact of Western sports franchises and mindless action games. For Microsoft, Japan is a big problem, because most of their games are Western sports franchises and mindless action games. There are next to no heavy-hitting RPGs on the company's release schedule, and far fewer developers for Japan than any other country. Which brings us back to Squaresoft, a name synonymous with RPGs of exceptional quality, and one of the battle standards of Japanese RPG fans. If Microsoft has wooed the company into some sort of lucrative development deal, it can be almost assured of success on Japanese soil. The games we are hearing about are no ordinary RPGs either. Final Fantasy XI, which will appear on several consoles, Xbox perhaps amongst them, Chrono Cross X, the sequel to the devastatingly popular PlayStation title, which was in turn a follow-up to one of the Super Nintendo's best RPGs, supposedly an exclusive, and not content with that, Seiken Densetsu 4, which Westerners would recognise as Secret of Mana 3, also exclusive. Further rumours concern Bushido Blade X and other titles. The question on everybody's lips is, what on earth would possess Squaresoft to side with Microsoft? The answer, quite simply, is PlayOnline. Once again Squaresoft have elected to dump their minder, just as they did with Nintendo when they clapped eyes on the N64, and the reason for this is that Sony was planning to stifle PlayOnline in order to push its own online gaming network forward. It's highly likely that Microsoft promised not to restrict their online plans for Xbox RPGs, and offered an enormous sum of money at the same time. Of course, at present this is all rumour and hearsay. Another rumour that has been kicking about is that Microsoft aren't the company involved, but Nintendo are. As ever, more on this as we get it. Related Feature - PlayOnline trials in Japan, but service is threatened

Terra Mobile's iobox subsidiary has inked a deal with Midway to bring some of the company's arcade classics to hand-held devices. Starting in mid-October, games such as Defender, Paperboy, Marble Madness and Gauntlet will be coming to PDA systems running EPOC, WinCE, PalmOS and Linux. Terra Mobile are said to be "really excited" at the prospect of bringing these gaming dinosaurs back to life, including the possibility of players being able to take part in retro gaming competitions and to post their performances via SMS or the internet to global high score tables. It's like having your own personal arcade, but without having to keep feeding the damn machine with loose change...

We've known all along that Serious Sam was to be released in episodic form, and last week Take 2 officially announced that they would be publishing a sequel to the surprise hit, which came out of leftfield to take the hardcore gaming community by storm back in April. Imaginatively subtitled The Second Encounter (oh dear), the sequel is due out this Christmas and will pick up where the First Encounter left off. As well as new monsters, new weapons and a new setting to replace the Egyptian theme of the original, tweaks have been made to the already impressive graphics engine and additional multiplayer features are being promised.

To a large extent, the difference between the BattleTech board game and the MechCommander 2 computer game is in attention to detail. BattleTech is a game where tension springs from elaborately decorated playing cards, and entire games can be won or lost on the thermal properties of a certain piece of equipment. While MechCommander 2 is based on the technology and background of the board game, it shares relatively few of the carefully scrutinised details that have drawn players to the former, and those present seem to have been dumbed down noticeably. This will no doubt prove slightly discomforting for fans approaching FASA Interactive's latest release with a board game background. Never fear though - even if MechCommander 2 is slightly less meticulous in its attention to painstaking detail, it is still a most enjoyable game in its own right. The story is fairly light-hearted - you are a mercenary mech commander, paid to deal forcefully with a recent surge in attacks on a couple of noble houses; Davion and Steiner. They are hardly allies, but the two do recognize the mutual benefit of your employ and allot a certain amount of funds between them to support your dirty work. Things progress in a predictably startling manner, proving for the umpteenth time that things are never precisely as they seem. I've seen a lot better, and I did at times feel that the storyline served as an interruption to clarify the slaughter rather than a realistic chain of events. As such the story was not willing me on, merely occupying the quiet moments here and there before the carnage went off on its natural course again.

Since the advent of Ultima Online way back in 1997, the massively multiplayer role-playing genre has become increasingly crowded, with dozens of new online worlds expected to launch in the next two years. One of the most promising of these true next generation online games is Midgard, set in a world based on Norse mythology and developed (appropriately enough) in Norway.

CDV have uploaded a new demo version of their adventure game Mystery of the Druids, which was released in the UK just over a week ago and is due to arrive in America at the end of October. The original Druids demo featured only a tiny fraction of the game and ended unexpectedly, but this new version gives you the entire first chapter of the game to sink your teeth into. As detective Brent Halligan you must investigate a bizarre murder in Epping Forest, getting help from forensics experts at New Scotland Yard as you try to work out how the victim died. Weighing in at just 48Mb, you can download the demo from the Mystery of the Druids website.

The eagerly anticipated demo of castle building sim Stronghold has finally been released, with the full game currently due out in the UK on Friday 12th October. Available to download from Gigex, the demo weighs in at a modest 57Mb and features two levels from the game to sink your teeth into. Developed by veterans of the Caesar series of city building sims, Stronghold sets you the task of designing, building and besieging medieval castles, taking the player from 11th century Norman keeps to spectacular Edwardian fortifications. With a mixture of sim and real-time strategy elements, not to mention a healthy dose of boiling oil, it should be well worth a look if you fancy something a little different.