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Following recent rumours, the Gathering of Developers today revealed that it is indeed closing down. What started out as a developer-friendly independent publisher designed to follow in the footsteps of movie studio United Artists was soon relegated to the status of just another label for Take 2 Interactive. Today the dream finally came to an end with the announcement that Take 2 will be closing down the Texan company and running the God Games label from its own New York offices in future. Founder Mike Wilson will be leaving with several other God employees to launch a video-magazine featuring short films, music videos, documentaries and trailers.

Russian police are apparently blaming Final Fantasy for a series of six teenage suicides over the last four months in a town called Kstovo, according to a report in Pravda headlined "Video Game Killed 6 Teenagers". The paper's English translation is rather hit and miss (mostly miss), but it appears that law enforcement officers are investigating the possibility that the game has a "destructive influence on psychology", or even that there was "some code signal recorded on the CD game which made the guys kill themselves", after three teenagers hung themselves and another three jumped off rooftops.

June 2001. Five Wireplay game server and administration gurus sit heartbroken in Gameplay's plush Vine Hill offices contemplating the dole. The loss of Wireplay won't just affect their incomes, it will also destroy a tight-knit community of like-minded gamers who frequent their servers and message boards. What a waste of a perfectly good online service, they all murmur. Fast forward two months and the same five now ex-Wireplay server admins are united again. "We, the five main ex-Wireplay game server and community administration dudes - drilla, velvet, stikky, amok and babyharpseal - wish to make what we think is a very important announcement to the gaming community," they write on their website at Pish.org. "Back in June we were made redundant by Gameplay plc and have since continued to support the community unpaid. Unfortunately now we understand that Wireplay (including the forums, all the game servers, etc) is about to finally lose its connection to the Internet." "Now here's the good news. In recent weeks we have received many offers to run a similar operation elsewhere. Having seen the plans and aspirations of each of the organisations who approached us, one stood out as far and away the most advanced, forward-thinking and ambitious: Telewest's plans for their blueyonder service." "They are deadly serious about providing the ultimate gaming service and have already signed up game-networking guru Utumno (ex-Barrysworld) and web genius MrVista (ex-Wireplay). They've been busy over the last few months building an infrastructure that will support a high-performance games and community system that will be launched very soon." "All five of us have now signed on the dotted line to join them and we're very excited about working for an organisation that - right up to the top level - at last takes online gaming seriously." "We want to continue the spirit of the Wireplay community within blueyonder, where we believe we'll have the support of a company that is absolutely committed to gaming." "The community liaisons and leaders are up for working with us once the new blueyonder service is set up. And before anyone asks us - yes the new service will be open to everyone with Internet access - although blueyonder customers will get access to special features." "Anyway, we look forward to providing you gamers with a service that we've wanted to give you for years." Let the good times roll!

If ever a reminder was needed that the PlayStation has been superseded, Mega Man X5 is it. A tired relic of a past era, X5 is an example of how comfortable developer Capcom is with milking a franchise beyond the point of no return. Virtually every game on their release schedule is a sequel these days, for better or worse, and almost without exception the new ones spawn sequel after sequel after sequel. That's not to say a lot of them aren't good, but with over 20 Mega Man titles doing virtually the same thing over and over, couldn't we do with a rest? With the exception of Mega Man Legends, for the most part the games consist of steering Mega Man or Zero through eight sets of levels and defeating the boss at the end to gain a new power. By that definition, X5 is standard fare. Levels can of course be completed in any order, and you can simply say screw 'em and head straight for the final levels if that rocks your boat. The point in the earlier levels though is the special powers you pick up, which are intrinsically important to the final stages. Mega Man games are generally quite challenging, but X5 is slightly more difficult than any I've encountered in a while. You really have to take the time to go out of your way and find armour power-ups and health bonuses to get anywhere.

Following yesterday's reports that the Bitmap Brothers were working on a new project called Speedball Arena, the game's lead designer Ed Bartlett sent us a short letter with the first official information on the game, telling us that "we are indeed working on a next gen follow up to the Speedball series, although we were kind of hoping to keep it secret for a little while longer!"

Codemasters have announced that the first "content upgrade pack" for their best-selling action game Operation Flashpoint is now available to download for free from the official website. Included in this point release are the Soviet SU-25 Frogfoot heavy bomber, America's M-163 Vulcan anti-aircraft vehicle, and the much-loved East German car the Trabant. Aw, bless. Meanwhile the bizarre sounding Kozlice (a combination shotgun and rifle) has been added to give the infantry something new to play with, and two additional single player missions and four multiplayer maps are also included.

American readers will no doubt be suffering a certain degree of deja vu at this point. Hasn't Kohan already been released? The answer is yes .. and no. Available since way back in March over in America, UbiSoft will finally be bringing the game to Europe in September, having signed a distribution deal with publisher Strategy First.

The mention of the words "Speed" and "Ball" will no doubt bring a smile to the face of many of our older readers. Originally released on PC and Amiga, Speedball was a fast-paced futuristic sports game involving plenty of full-on contact between players. Although the recent PlayStation version of the game was rather disappointing, fans of the series can once again rejoice as the Bitmap Brothers have revealed that they are working on a new fully 3D game called Speedball Arena.

In a surprise announcement, Oliver Collyer has revealed that he is leaving Sports Interactive to travel the world after spending more than a decade working on the Championship Manager series with his brother Paul. The first game in the multi-million selling series was released in 1992 when Oliver was just 20 years old, and since then there has been a steady drip of new versions and season update packs almost every year.

Anarchy Online developer Funcom has made a strategic decision to move away from console development and concentrate on its online gaming projects. The decision was described by president Andre Backen as one "that makes Funcom more focused as a company". Funcom had previously declared their support for the Xbox, and we have to wonder whether abandoning Microsoft like this may have grave repercussions in the future. Funcom are as far as we're aware the first software company to change their mind about Xbox development. Generally speaking, Funcom's intentions must be to capitalize on the technology they developed for Anarchy Online as pres' Andre Backen claims. Realising a return on the enormous R&D investment is understandably going to be a higher priority than developing from scratch for a new console, which is what the PR says if you read between the lines. Microsoft isn't paying them to develop for Xbox, so they're consolidating projects. Simple as that.

Since the Dreamcast's cancellation, owners of the console have been forced to watch potential dreamboats like Half-Life and Soul Reaver 2 sail away into the sunset never to return. The cancellation of Soul Reaver 2 by Eidos also drew a question mark over its other Dreamcast games, including the much-anticipated Commandos 2. Well, it is with a heavy heart that I'm forced to report the cancellation of Commandos 2. IGN printed the following statement as received from Eidos: "Following Sega's announcement stating the company's departure from the hardware manufacturing business, Eidos Interactive has carefully re-evaluated its investment in the Sega Dreamcast version of Commandos 2 and has decided to permanently suspend development of the game. Pyro Studios will instead focus its development efforts and resources on the PlayStation 2 version of Commandos, which is due for a Winter 2001 release." Please let's bow our heads. Related Feature - Commandos 2 Screenshots

Nintendo has taken great trouble to prevent grey importers profiting from Japanese/American GameCube interoperability. Although ostensibly compatible, consoles from both regions will have lockouts that make playing games from another region almost impossible, Nintendo claims. In the past, console manufacturers have suffered massive losses due to the grey import market, with high street chains like Computer Exchange here in the UK coaxing this phenomena out of the mail order sections of games magazines and into the public eye. 'Mod chips', tiny circuitry modifications easily packaged and distributed have been readily available for many consoles, and even the recent PlayStation 2 is about to suffer the indignity of the 'chip'. Getting import games to work on Nintendo consoles in the past has varied in difficulty. With the Super Nintendo, American gamers' cartridges were of a different size to discourage Japanese imports, although gamers soon learnt that a small piece of plastic could be removed to allow insertion of Japanese carts, but in the case of the European Super Nintendo, 100% success was never achieved, with varying results from different adapters. To play imported games on a Nintendo 64, slightly more involved surgery was required. Although this news won't be much of a surprise to Nintendo followers, casual gamers tempted to import the 'Cube from Japan in September would do well to take notice - if it is chipped, it could well take longer than you expect.

BritSoft developer Argonaut revealed yesterday that it has signed a publishing deal with Vivendi Universal to distribute Malice on Xbox and PlayStation 2. Previously Malice had been showcased by Microsoft and was expected to be published by them exclusively on the Xbox, but now it looks like Sony's console will be getting a slice of the pie as well. According to a statement from the company, "exploiting Argonaut's multi-platform abilities in this way gives Malice a much larger target market and with the marketing and distribution capabilities of Vivendi Universal, we aim to grow the Malice franchise over the coming years". The developer added that "work on transferring the game to PS2 has already commenced", with a release on both consoles expected next year.

Michael Crichton might be a great novelist and script writer, responsible for films like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, but when he turned his attentions to the gaming industry the results were rather less impressive. Timeline Computer Entertainment's eponymous debut game Timeline was based on the Crichton novel of the same name and launched at the same time as the paperback version of the book. It was still a critical and commercial flop, apparently selling less than 50,000 copies worldwide and proving that simply printing the magic words "Michael Crichton" on the front of a box isn't enough to make a game a hit.

Helicopter games are big business on the PC, but it wasn't until Sim Copter that anybody did a fair old search-and-rescue simulation. We imagine this is because generally speaking the idea isn't that enthralling. Syscom would contest that though, and shove console helicopter romp City Crisis under your nose to prove the point. The thing is, despite my lust for original game concepts (I bought Startopia, I can prove it) after a week with City Crisis I'd turn my nose up if given the opportunity again. It just doesn't feel like a finished game. For starters, it looks really pants. Admittedly, I came to it off the back of Gran Turismo 3, surely the bastion of PlayStation 2 visuals, but I doubt City Crisis is even using half of the system's power to flaunt itself. Two minutes in and I'm overwhelmed by the damn interlace flickering, something I thought we did away with about ten steps further on from the console's launch titles. The texturing is of a very low resolution, reminding me of the urban settings from last year's Spider-Man on the PlayStation, a system with only a fraction of the PS2's power, and repeating every five metres in any given direction. Another characteristic inherited from Spider-Man is the hanging drapes effect. Textures don't look like textures, they appear to be bits of cloth stapled to the walls rippling in the wind. They wobble all over the place - it's not pretty.

Light & Shadow Production have officially announced Extreme Ghostbusters : Code Ecto-1, coming to the GameBoy Advance in early November through Wanadoo. Based on the Extreme Ghostbusters cartoon series rather than the original movies, the platform game sees you taking on the demonic Count Mercharior, who has kidnapped key characters Roland and Garett. Along the way you will be busting Manhattan's ghosts as Kylie or Eduardo in settings such as the Broadway Star Theater and Botanical Museum, driving the Ecto-1 ambulance between missions as you race across New York from one location to another, using a Grand Theft Auto style overhead view.

It has been revealed that Nerve Software will be developing the multiplayer part of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, while Gray Matter concentrates on the single player portion. Founded by former id Software level desigener Brandon James and several veterans of Alice developers Rogue, Nerve are based just down the road from id in Mesquite, Texas. Which is handy.

Chat and gaming site theglobe.com is to shut most of its Web business and axe half its staff after falling victim to the online ad slump. The New York-based outfit said on Friday it would close its community site theglobe.com on August 15. It also plans to shut its web-hosting business webjump.com on the same date.

Since coming under new management last year the European branch of the CPL has run tournaments in Germany and Holland, attracting some of the top names from around the world as well as the best local European talent. Last weekend they arrived in London for their third event, with Counter-Strike and Quake 3 Arena teamplay on the cards and €30,000 in cash prizes up for grabs. The real excitement was to be in the Quake 3 contest, with the likes of Germany's Schroet Kommando and Unmatched, Italy's Tulls, Sweden's Ice Climbers and home teams UNR and 4Kings all battling it out for the €5,000 top prize.

According to Future Publishing-backed Games Radar, Return to Castle Wolfenstein developer Grey Matter will not develop multiplayer code for the remake of Id's seminal first person shooter. Instead, the development of a multiplayer mode will be shipped out to an as-yet unsigned developer, who will work on the game's multiplayer exclusively. While we applaud this dedication to task, you have to wonder whether or not the single player and multiplayer will end up distinctly different or not. The last thing this game needs is a bad case of incoherency. The details of the other half of the project will be announced at Quakecon this week. We look forward to it, but not without a touch of apprehension.

In an industry these days driven by the five minute culture of the Internet, it's very easy to misinterpret somebody, particularly if that person speaks a different language to you, and your transcription skills aren't up to scratch. Or if you're on a deadline. Unfortunately, this means that Japanese developers are often the victim of misunderstanding and confusion in the Western press. One such casualty is Metal Gear Solid 2 director Hideo Kojima, who decided to set the record straight recently with regards to his opinion of Nintendo's GameCube, after several Western publications claimed that he regarded it as childish or immature. "I have never made a reply of that nuance," he told IGN. "Many times when I do an interview for a magazine, what I mean is not always re-created in the article with my intentions, but instead are misinterpreted. I personally have high hopes for the GameCube. I would like to develop a game for GameCube." In recent months it has become increasingly clear that the Japanese development community has a lot of time for the GameCube, presumably because they see it as the only Nippon-friendly console in the latest pack. With Sega down for the count, old enemies are congregating at Nintendo's door, and Microsoft's attitude to Japan may have condemned it to slow Xbox sales in the region, with many Japanese executives quietly declaring their aversion to the console to press pundits. Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2 is due out later this year in Japan.

Pearl Buck told us that order is the shape upon which beauty depends, but 3DO Europe would contend that a bit of chaos and metamorphosis is still fun if used sensibly as part of a balanced diet. What am I talking about? Shifters, a new third person adventure title featuring shape-shifting due out on PS2 in November. Not to be confused with the Jerry O'Connell/John Rhys-Davies sideshow TV series Sliders (now irrelevantly starring the delectable Kari Wuhrer), which casual sci-fi fans may have immediately thougth of, Shifters is a creative experience where players can shape-shift into any of 24 different characters, each of which boasts different characteristics. Somewhat reminiscent of last year's sleeper hit Evolva, these forms will be individually important in the completion of your quest, with various attributes like the ability to pass through solid objects, cast spells and cast proximity spells that transform nearby enemies into solid stone. It doesn't sound like there will be any Odo-like practices of assuming the form of a nearby chair and whatnot, but 3DO claim that Shifters, set across 30 different levels will be a thoroughly original and exciting adventure that will thrust players into a quest to discover the uncover the malevolent force manipulating their own destiny. Good and Evil will both apparently be evident. The game will include a single player game and combat training, and focuses on the old "wrongly-accused hero" racket, described as classic by them, but perhaps tired by us. Shifters will materialize some time in November of this year from 3DO Europe. Related Feature - Shifters Screenshots

Nintendo has hired technology firm Matsushita to produce the next wave of liquid crystal displays for the Game Boy Advance. Over the past few months the GBA has come under a lot of criticism over the issue of its LCD display, manufactured by Sharp. Consumers have complained that it's too dark, rendering the machine useless unless under direct light. For games like Castlevania which rely on artificial darkness to accentuate the mood, it has even led to weaker reviews. Many believe that Nintendo's move to deploy Matsushita as a major LCD partner will eventually mean curtains for Sharp's contract. At first the company will produce only 5% of the LCDs for Game Boy Advance, but details have slipped that it intends to spend 2-3 billion yen upgrading its facilities to handle mass production of the component. Many insiders see this as a bad sign for Sharp, who will have difficulty competing if Matsushita offer to produce the LCDs for a lower rate than them. Production of the new displays will be handled by a plant in Ishikawa, and representatives of all the companies concerned have refused to comment on whether the displays will be any brighter. In related news, Nintendo's stock price fell 4% after Nikko Salomon Smith Barney issued a warning to investors in Japan questioning Nintendo's sales projections for the year. It seems NSSB aren't as confident of Nintendo shifting 24 million units this year as Ninty themselves. Related Feature - The Portable Avant-Garde

Space-based strategy game Conquest has had a troubled history, starting off as one of four games under development at the over-ambitious Texan start-up Digital Anvil before being unceremoniously ditched by its publisher Microsoft at the end of last year. Several months later though the game has finally been completed by producer Eric Peterson's new company, Fever Pitch Studios, and French publisher UbiSoft have picked up the title for an October European release.

Publisher Take 2 Interactive announced yesterday that their chart-topping PC action game Max Payne is being adapted for both the PlayStation 2 (by RockStar Canada) and Microsoft's Xbox (by Vienna-based Neo Software, appropriately enough). Both console versions are expected to be released in the USA some time "this Fall", although European release dates have yet to be confirmed.

Trouble is brewing down under, following the shooting of a security guard at a Melbourne abortion clinic. You would think that radical anti-abortion groups might be the most obvious suspects, but the Australian Security Industry Assocation apparently has another theory in mind. It's all the fault of Half-Life!

Although NVIDIA's nFORCE motherboard chipset will launch in Q4 with quite a backing, rival video card manufacturer ATI have their own plans in that area. A3, the codename for their competing project, is coming along nicely, with rumour-mongerers Xbit Labs claiming that the motherboards at the end of the line will probably be Pentium 4 compliant, even though ATI itself is talking about Pentium III and Athlon. ATI holds a license to produce Pentium 4 motherboards, secured earlier this year, but this isn't necessarily binding for them. On the other hand, this may be an opportunity for ATI, since NVIDIA currently does not own a P4 license, and would have difficulty producing motherboards for the new Intel CPUs before mid-2002. Either way, the ATI A3 motherboards will feature an ATI-made Northbridge with a Southbridge part being recommended from Acer Labs to manufacturers. A3 will support PC1600 and 2100 DDR memory, with an integrated clock. A3 sports an external AGP slot, but in its default configuration utilizes an onboard RV200 chip derivative. RV200 is the cutdown (two pipeline) version of the forthcoming Radeon 2 VE card for business/budget consumers. Radeon 2 will hit store shelves in September for desktop machines, and RV200 before Christmas. We reckon A3 will pop up just in time to compete with nFORCE, of which we'll learn more at ECTS in September. Related Feature - NVIDIA Crush on AMD

CPL-Europe's London event will be kicking off in about six hours time at the Novotel in Hammersmith, London. Highlights include Counter-Strike and Quake 3 Arena teamplay tournaments as well as a smaller than expected Bring-Your-Own-Computer LAN party area, plenty of room for spectators and big-screen action live from the competitions, with running commentary courtesy of Killcreek and Sujoy. EuroGamer should be there on Sunday to cover the final rounds of the Quake 3 competition as the likes of UNR, 4Kings, Schroet Kommando and Tulls battle it out for their share of the €30,000 prize purse.

If you live in the States you can already pre-order an Xbox. Although the console won't launch until November, American e-tailer GameStop is offering a number of bundles based on Microsoft's dream machine, the cheapest of which (the "Bronze Bundle") clocks in at $599. To be fair it's no slouch though, featuring the console, two controllers, DVD remote, memory card and three games; Halo, Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey and Dead or Alive 3. Moving up the scale you can buy Xbox Silver, Platinum, Gold and Ultimate bundles, with the latter clocking in at $1,199 with 14 games, a bunch of accessories and a partridge in a pear tree. All the deals feature one year's extended warranty, but unfortunately us Europeans can't order from GameStop. They put a Stop to that one a while ago. If you fancy swooning over the wares on offer though, head here, surely the first of a large number of pre-order sites to spring up as Xbox hysteria unravels. Related Feature - Microsoft farting around

Pan Interactive have announced that October will see the UK release of Rock Manager, described as "the first authentic rock 'n' roll management sim", although its tongue is firmly planted in its cheek. Whether or not your group of musicians has any talent, it's up to you to turn them into superstars by buying your own singles, bribing radio stations, setting up scandalous news stories and any other means necessary. Juggling fame, fortune and the rapidly inflating egos of the band members, you will be responsible for manipulating the media, public and musicians alike. Missions vary from turning the local kingpin's tone deaf daughter into a star to guiding the career of a talented but permanently depressed and media shy young artist. Certainly one of the more unusual games we've come across in recent months...