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What is it about the platform genre that keeps gamers coming back? Except perhaps for the real-time strategy game, there is no other genre where the relentless rehashing of ideas is rewarded so openly. Companies like Nintendo have made leaps forward with three dimensional platformers like Super Mario 64, but the fundamental task of bopping from platform to platform has remained a constant. The graphics may change, but the concepts do not. In terms of creativity, over the last ten years platform game designers have virtually stood still. Rayman Advance shamelessly continues this trend, but sadly takes the lethargic tendencies of platform designers one step further and simply ports the original PlayStation 2D platformer, almost pixel for pixel. As is usually the case, the storyline plays a distant secondary role to the game design. Rayman's arch-nemesis Mr. Dark has captured all the little inhabitants of Rayman's world and imprisoned the Protoons. Protoons are Rayman's source of power and as such you set off on a quest across some 6 worlds and 60 levels in order to rescue the captives. When you first start the game the state of play is linear, but deceptively so, with branching routes that all eventually lead to the same conclusion. Also, you soon learn that you are able to return to any level at any point during your quest once completed. The point being that you have to uncover every hidden cage of Protoons in every level before the game is 100% complete. During the course of the game a lot of the missions you partake of seem completely unbeatable, the reason being that developer Digital Eclipse decided to stagger the introduction of new power-ups across the whole game. These power-ups include the ability to punch, swing, hang from ledges and more. You can then go back to earlier levels and utilise these new skills to access previously unreachable areas, and by extension uncover more Protoon cages. It's all been done before of course, most notably in the Donkey Kong Country series and of course in the original PSX Rayman, but unlike its predecessor, the learning curve has been tweaked so that some levels are infuriatingly difficult.

While we already knew of some of id's strange obsessions, from John Carmack's backyard space programme to Ferrari drag races at a local airstrip, an article in Wine Spectator reveals that CEO Todd Hollenshead and designer Tim Willits have an unexpected interest in vintage wines. Tim has apparently drawn up plans for a 2000 bottle temperature controlled wine cellar between designing levels for the new Doom, and the pair can be seen shopping together and meeting friends to "trade wine tips [and] dine out".

We've heard of some novel uses for the Unreal engine, ranging from NASA's 3D walkthrough of the International Space Station to a virtual reality installation at an exhibition in Germany, but this just about takes the biscuit. According to a recent article in Film & Video Magazine, Steven Spielberg used an Unreal Tournament mod to plan out scenes for his latest big budget sci-fi movie, A.I. Apparently a member of his special effects team recreated the Rouge City set inside the game, allowing Spielberg to work out camera angles and movements in advance for "bluescreen" scenes which would feature CG backdrops added in post-production.

Proving that there's still life left in the old PlayStation yet, even if it is only silicon-based, UbiSoft are scheduling the release of the PSOne version of VIP for December. Based on the TV series of the same name which stars Pamela Anderson as a celebrity bodyguard, the game sees you fighting your way across Los Angeles as the VIP team tries to rescue their boss Pamela and her latest client from the mob. UbiSoft are promising a combination of fisticuffs, martial arts and gunplay, with six different characters including Pamela herself, giving you the opportunity to "take control of her every move". Wahey!

Back in the distant mists of time, before the age of Diablo, Everquest and Baldur's Gate, SSI's Gold Box series was the king of the role-playing genre. Now Stormfront Studios and French publisher UbiSoft are hoping to capture the magic of the original with a new sequel based on the latest 3rd Edition AD&D rule set. We delved into a beta version of the game to find out more...

Yesterday afternoon our pals at The Register wrote about the impending release of the GeForce 3 Ultra this Friday, to be followed on Monday by the GeForce 3 MX. That didn't sound all that likely to us. We trust El Reg' of course, but one thing kept bouncing off the inside our heads; ELSA - usually first out of the stalls with new NVIDIA cards - have just announced their refined Gladiac 920 with overclocked core and memory. Why on earth would they be doing that in the same week that they were planning to release a GeForce 3 Ultra? Nope, it's definitely questionable. Our guess? NVIDIA will announce the GeForce 3 Ultra and perhaps the GeForce 3 MX when we speak to them at ECTS or in the meantime, but we won't see the cards this month, nor perhaps next. We're still waiting to hear back from NVIDIA themselves. It all seems eerily quiet.

Hats off to Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto for concealing the development of the Mario and Zelda GameCube sequels, but perhaps a clip round the ear is due for his bewildering comments to the press yesterday. Either he was on another planet entirely, or sarcasm doesn't carry well from Japanese to English. Needless to say this is ultimately good news. Nintendo is producing two new games based on its most popular franchises; Mario Sunshine, the official sequel to Super Mario 64 will be developed by internal Nintendo boys EAD studios, and the demo at the Spaceworld press conference showed Mario running over rooftops and jumping off walls. On the other hand, the new Zelda game seems to have taken a leaf out of Paper Mario's book, going one step further indeed and opting for a completely toon-shaded look, ala Jet Set Radio. One of our observers thought it could have been ripped from the Cartoon Network. Link is also said to look significantly younger, although he didn't exactly look elderly in his last. The date for the sequel seems to be Christmas 2002. One of the things this writer has always done is evangelise PlayStation 2 snowboarding spectacular SSX. Although it's about a year old, your humble correspondent is, uh, still playing it. I've unlocked everything of course, but it's just good fun to try and tot up the most absurdly high-scoring tricks ever and revel in their glory for fun. Needless to say the thought of SSX Tricky on the GameCube gets me going, but even more so, the latest screenshots of 1080 Snowboarding 2 act like a jaw-stretching device for me. Someone said it looked like SSX. Personally I think it looks like snowboarding. One to watch. Elsewhere, Nintendo announced another game not seen on yesterday's list; Kurby's Tilt 'n' Tumble, or Kuru Kuru Kirby. If the name sounds familiar, it's because the game will be the first to show off the GameCube link feature that can be used to communicate with the Game Boy Advance. You control Kirby with a tilt function cartridge, rolling him around on the screen Marble Madness-style and popping the system to make him jump. We've heard that the game's worlds are slightly reminiscent of those seen in Sega's Super Monkey Ball 3D. It is thought that the game will interface with a new Kirby or Kuru Kuru game on the Game Boy Advance, not the original one. Our personal question is over the developer. We haven't seen beloved first party HAL Laboratory mentioned for a while! The device for connecting the GameCube to the Game Boy Advance by the way, gives the handheld a Bowser-esque pair of dinky horns! We're not sure whether this was a design decision or not. Related Feature - GameCube delayed in USA

After a summer in which we have heard any number of rumours claiming that the launch of Microsoft's Xbox console would be delayed by anything from manufacturing problems to trademark infringement, today the boot was very much on the other foot as Nintendo admitted at Space World that it would be delaying the GameCube's American launch by two weeks. It will now appear on November 18th, ten days after the Xbox. Ironically just a few months ago Nintendo of America's Peter Main was insisting in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu that the "Gamecube will definitely launch on schedule", adding that "Microsoft has announced November 8 as its launch date, but I don't think that's final".

Normally we don't cover kids games, but as a child I wasted countless hours cobbling together bizarre creations using Denmark's most famous export - the knobbly primary coloured plastic bricks known as LEGO. So when preview code for LEGO Racers 2 arrived on my doormat I decided to take the risk. And I'm happy to say that I haven't regretted a moment of it.

Nintendo has taken the wraps off its SpaceWorld lineup. The bad news is that neither Shigeru Miyamoto's rumoured Mario game nor Zelda appear on the list. Miyamoto apparently told the press that neither would be ready for launch. The good news? Well it's huge, and full of interesting titles from Nintendo, Sega, EA and Hudson. From Nintendo we have Luigi's Mansion, Pikmin, Super Smash Bros Melee, Star Fox Adventures, Wave Race: Blue Storm and Doubutsu Bancho as expected, along with Eternal Darkness and Animal Forest Plus. From Sega there will be Sonic Adventure 2, Virtua Striker 3 Ver.2002, Phantasy Star Online and Super Monkey Ball. From EA FIFA 2002 and SSX Tricky, From Hudson Bomberman Generation. And finally, from… From Software, we have Rune, not the converted PC Viking-em-up but a wholly original RPG title. The large number of first party titles and titles born through close ties is typically Nintendo. We'll have more information on the wonders of SpaceWorld during press day, which is tomorrow.

Buckinghamshire-based Internet Service Provider Nildram has knifed rival ADSL providers in the back, unveiling a service for new customers today called MoveDSL. The idea behind the scheme is that existing ADSL users from rival telcos can join Nildram's USB service when their contract is up with a reduced installation fee (£60 instead of £150) and a subscription fee of £45 per month. This lines up pretty competitively with BT Openworld, the ISP that the public apparently loves to hate. Speaking from experience, Nildram's ADSL package has been almost faultless since the day it was installed here. That's nine months of uptime with very little interruption. Of course, your mileage may vary, but Nildram are a very popular choice for gamers, and if you took the plunge with a rival 12 months ago and fancy something new, MoveDSL could be just the ticket. We phoned BT Openworld to find out whether they had a similar service. Apparently they do not. They refused to comment on whether this was down to a lack of demand, however. Related Feature - ADSL for gamers

Sony Online Entertainment and French publisher UbiSoft are teaming up to bring the Everquest Fan Faire to Europe next month, complete with medieval marketplace, treasure hunt, falconry display, ersatz minstrels and a "copious" banquet at the end of the evening. Several members of the development team will apparently be on hand to be bored stiff by your dull stories and to answer your inane questions.

ELSA has launched a new build of its GeForce 3 based GLADIAC 920 graphics card, with a funky new black spray job. On a more practical level it comes with an improved heat sink, and ELSA are claiming that the card is now highly overclockable. Product manager Adam Foat is quoted as saying that "with no additional cooling we have managed to clock the board up to 250MHz on the core processor and 560MHz on the memory, delivering a massive 650 additional points on 3D Mark 2001". This compares to the card's standard operating speed of 200MHz core and 460MHz rated memory, although of course your mileage may vary.

Rage Software have announced their results for the twelve months to June 30th, with pre-tax losses growing from £6.7m the previous year to £17m. Sales actually grew from £3.3m to £5.7m though, and the losses were partly down to the acquisition of five small development teams and the closure of another. Rage also bought the license to develop games based on the Rocky movies earlier this year, as well as rights to produce a football game using David Beckham's name in its title, which must have cost them a few quid too.

If Altar Interactive are to be believed, the key to penetrating the layer of detritus floating on the surface of the real-time strategy genre is to splice in some role-playing elements; like experience points, character development and a decent story. The aptly named Original War sets itself up in Siberia, where a time travel device has been uncovered that sends anything it comes into contact with two million years into the past. The machine is powered by Siberite, a rare element discovered only in the neighbouring area of Russia. The Russian government isn't happy about all this, and doesn't like the idea of Americans exploiting their resources. In an inventive twist, it becomes your job to hop two million years into the past and excavate Siberite deposits, leaving them neatly stacked in Alaska, which was of course just around the corner in those days. It gets better, and the game is delightfully non-linear, encouraging you to write your own ticket. The difficulty of future missions and the choices to be made in them depend on your actions in the present, and there are plenty of different ways to complete the various missions, with the story traced in the sand by some hammy voice acting and amusing characters in your unit.

AMD has launched its 1.1GHz mobile Athlon 4 and a 900MHz mobile Duron alongside it. On the desktop side of things, AMD surprised everybody by launching the 1GHz Duron (codenamed Morgan) ahead of its Palomino Athlons. While the mobile CPUs are quite pricey at the moment (about the same as desktop CPUs were a while ago), the 1GHz Duron desktop chip will slot neatly into the current pricing structure, appearing in new PCs within a couple of months. Of course, given the cost of current Athlon chips (as low as £110 for a 1.4GHz processor), one has to ask quite why we need all these speed grades and so-called budget chips. Why buy a 1GHz Duron for nearly £80 when you can spend the cost of your next game on doubling the performance? Related Feature - AMD Athlon 1.33GHz review

Kids who play computer games are more likely to grow up violent and anti-social. That's according to the latest findings from a study in Japan - but this has nothing to do with the aggressive nature of certain games, as previously thought. Instead, it is connected to the thought processes needed to play computer games - which are too simple to stimulate a vital part of the brain.

Several controversial management decisions have brought the Cyberathlete Professional League into the spotlight in the last few weeks. It seems as though the organisation has decided to gradually revamp itself in a more mature guise, perhaps in an attempt to help realise their ambition of attaining sport status for gaming. Easily the most controversial of recent announcements at TheCPL.com is the news that the CPL will be adopting player surnames instead of aliases. "In an effort to further professionalize the sport of competitive gaming," the self-righteous update beams, "the CPL will no longer allow players to represent themselves with a nickname in league tournaments. The CPL now requires that all players use their surnames in official CPL matches." So from now on, if our gallant Editor-in-Chief John "Gestalt" Bye wishes to compete, he'll have to be known simply as Bye. According to the announcement, the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL) will also adopt this naming format. Now, we appreciate that the CPL organisation wants to avoid obvious embarrassments like abusive nicknames, but why not just subject all entrants' nicknames to a screening process? Openly defying one of gaming's strongest traditions for the sake of a bit of media exposure is ridiculous. Meanwhile, the organisation has announced plans to enforce ESRB age guidelines.

Last week it emerged that Loki Software had filed for bankruptcy protection. Over the last three years the company has ported a number of Windows games to Linux, including the likes of Soldier of Fortune, Tribes 2, SimCity 3000 and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately in the process they have run up debts estimated to be around $1.5m and are now facing oblivion. So what went wrong, and where does Linux gaming go from here?

JoWood's UK office this morning confirmed that their latest two games have gone gold. Isometric action-adventure game Zax : The Alien Hunter was first past the post, and the game is now due for release on September 14th in the UK. In it you play the role of the eponymous adventurer, stranded on a planet which is about to be destroyed by a supernova, and caught in the middle of a conflict between the native people and an angry god.

In April families of the victims of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre launched a legal assault on a number of entertainment companies, accusing violent games of being behind the shootings. Rather than, say, lax gun controls, rampant bullying and persecution of anyone considered "different". Unlike high school bullies though, game publishers are an easily identified and relatively rich target for gratuitous litigation, and the Columbine families and their lawyers are hoping to cash in to the tune of $5bn.

Zuxxez have today unveiled Heli Heroes, a new arcade-style action game for the PC and Xbox developed by Reality Pump Studios. As the name suggests, the game puts you in control of a helicopter gunship battling your way across a range of exotic locations from the Middle East to Alaska in a near-future world, with the emphasis very much on fast-paced action. Indeed, at first glance it looks rather reminiscent of the old Strike series of chopper actioneers, with goal-based missions and plenty of enemy units to blow up as you roam around the landscape.

Mario Kart Super Circuit is due out over here on September 14th. It's charged with cheering up obsessive Nintendo fans snorting in disgust over the long wait from Japanese to European GameCube releases. Unfortunately, gamers who couldn't even wait until September 14th for Nintendo's next big hit have taken to importing the game from Japan and the States. Unluckily for them, it has emerged that Japanese and American carts simply will not link up for multiplay. The difference is the language barrier according to reports at C&VG, and we've seen as much ourselves. As if confirmation were needed, the UK release won't link up with the Japanese, but will happily play alongside the American version. Interestingly though, we tried to play link up Mario Kart Super Circuit on one kart this weekend, and although this facility is publicized in the manual and elsewhere, we had absolutely no luck getting our Japanese console and cart to interact with our UK Game Boy Advance. Whether this is a product of the inter-territory language barrier problem or something more sinister we don't know. GBAs from Japan and the UK are technically identical, so we're at a loss but to blame it on the software. The single player game is stunning, mind. Get your wallets ready for the middle of next month.

As we approach the big console showdown of late 2001, support for Nintendo's GameCube is growing at a rate of knots. It seems like every morning in the last fortnight I've uncovered some new Nintendo revelation over my morning coffee. The PR machine is in full swing. Thus, the latest evidence that Nintendo loves you is the announcement that they have tweaked the GameCube controller design. E3 goers this year seemed almost overexcited about the console, but their coverage of the event drew attention to the slightness of the C-stick on the right hand of the pad, and the shallow grooves on the shoulder buttons. The word from Japan is that the C-stick has been fattened, and the shoulder buttons cut deeper. The red and green buttons have supposedly been switched from analogue to digital, too. The controller will be made from the same material as the PlayStation 2's DualShock 2. We'll bring your more information on the controller and the GameCube in general from the floor of The Nintendo Show in a fortnight's time. Related Feature - The Console Wars

In an update to his personal website Planet Romero earlier this week, former Ion Storm supremo John Romero talked (very briefly) about the aftermath of his company's collapse. "Stevie [Case], Tom [Hall], Lucas and myself are having a great time with everything we're working on - things which are not to be disclosed for a while", he wrote, adding that "I love being able to code again".

In an earlier report we stated that Linux gaming specialist Loki Software had filed for bankruptcy, but this was not entirely true. The ailing company, which has carved a niche for itself porting other people's games to Linux, has instead filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in an attempt to stave off collapse as a result of an alleged $1.5m debt mountain. Things came to a head when a former employee called Mark Lance Colvin won $237,000 from Loki in court after complaining that he was owed salary for most of the 19 months he had worked there, as well as a large amount of money he had loaned the company himself during its financial troubles.

In fact, when we saw the game earlier this week during the dazzling spectacle of the Eastbourne Air Show on the South Coast of England, we were so preoccupied with the gameplay we didn't bother to touch on the subject of story until we were practically out of the door! Top Gun Combat Zones is a flight sim, console-style. The fastidious attention to detail of PC flight sims is observed to a degree, but you'll find no need for joystick and throttle controls, limited force feedback and no five mile high figure of eight dogfights above a mat of crudely painted polygons. Try to imagine Red Arrow fighter planes. What would they do? They'd swoop and swerve, ducking under obstacles to please the crowds while locking on to defiant aggressors with their arsenal of rockets and blasting them into the stratosphere. In Combat Zones, the idea is to punctuate your missions with exactly this sort of ludicrous behaviour. The sort of thing Tom Cruise was repeatedly reprimanded for in the film.

Last year Rage announced that they had signed a deal with Epic to sublicense the Unreal engine to European developers and publishers. We caught up with Simon Donbavand of Rage's European Unreal Engine Licensing team to find out how things have been going since then, and what the latest Unreal technology has to offer for gamers and developers alike.

It's over three years now since Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor founded Gas Powered Games, but it looks like we will have to wait a little longer for their debut title, action role-playing game Dungeon Siege, to be released. A brief statement from Redmond arrived this morning, informing us that "Microsoft and Gas Powered Games have made the careful decision not to release Dungeon Siege in the fall of 2001" as had previously been planned.

The latest ABC figures have shown circulation dropping almost across the board for gaming magazines in the UK during the first six months of the year. Bucking the trend were Computec's PlayStation World (up by 25% to 79,080) and Future's Games Master (marginally up at 44,853), but otherwise it was all bad news. Future's Official PlayStation Magazine lost 38% of its readers (down to 133,168) as Sony's old warhorse came to the end of its life, while their new Official PlayStation 2 title gained just 1% (up to 82,109) compared to its first three months on sale. Other Sony magazines seeing a decline include Paragon's Play (down 5% to 62,805) and Future's "quirky" PSM2 (down 15% to 44,543).