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After the somewhat bungled price drop of the PlayStation 2 in this country, Sony is hoping for better things from its initiative in Japan. The cost of the console at retail has been reduced by 2,800 yen from its price on the Internet, to just 35,000 yen, or £199 at current exchange rates. Sony's new Japanese pricing strategy should help bump up sales prior to the release of Microsoft and Nintendo's consoles later this year. The console started life on Japanese shelves in March 2000 at a price set directly by the retailer, generally around 39,800 yen (£225). Sony has just posted its third quarter financials, and the figures are in line with their expectations. Pre-tax profit fell to 133.1bn yen from 165.9bn in the third quarter of 1999, while net profits slipped from 93.6bn to 72.2bn. Revenue rose from 1.92tn to 2.11tn yen. Full year profits are now expected to be as much as 50 percent less than originally projected. This is being blamed mostly on the expense of PlayStation 2 R&D.

Operation Flashpoint topped the PC games charts in the UK last week, apparently shifting around 16,000 copies in the two days it was on sale and knocking Westwood's long awaited 3D strategy game Emperor : Battle For Dune off the top spot in the process. Not bad for the first title from a small Czech developer. UK-based publisher Codemasters was understandably well chuffed by this, with Michael Hayes declaring that "Operation Flashpoint is an exceptional game and we're ecstatic with its success at launch". With excellent reviews and strong word of mouth, it will be interesting to see how long it can hang on at the sharp end of the charts, especially with the expected arrival of Commandos 2 next week.

The press release proudly announces that "ATI reports improved Q3 results", but dig a little deeper and it becomes obvious that the Canadian graphics manufacturer is still in trouble. The document proudly reveals that sales are up by 10%, but this is compared to the previous quarter's post-Christmas sales lull. In fact the company is still down by over $30m compared to the same period last year, with revenues of $256m - 10% higher than the last quarter but 11% lower than this time last year. Most of this improvement came from sales of chips for laptop computers and other mobile devices though, as rivals NVIDIA continue to steal market share and valuable supply contracts from the former OEM-meisters ATI.

Bacteria is certainly one of the more unusual games we have come across recently, putting you in control of a deep sea submarine which has been shrunken to microscopic size and injected into a dying scientist in a last ditch attempt to save his life from a mysterious disease.

Hot on the heels of the recent release of Roboforge comes another gladiatorial online game, this time with deceptively cute looking armoured cartoon characters battling it out for your pleasure, rather than customised 3D robotic killing machines. Syko Toy creates your own odd-looking toy warrior by asking you a series of multiple-choice questions to determine your attitude (or lack thereof), before giving you the opportunity to buff it up with some training and sparring.

Peter Main, Nintendo of America's Executive Vice President, has spoken out to Japanese magazine Famitsu about his thoughts on the Xbox and GameCube launches. "Microsoft has announced Nov. 8 as its launch date, but I don't think that's final," he said. "Gamecube will definitely launch on schedule though, and it will be a strong contender during the Christmas season." Main also confirmed that "four-five first-party titles" to launch with the GameCube this November in the States, "which will grow to seven by Christmas." In Japan Nintendo will launch with two or three, growing to about five by the close of the year. Main is clearly anxious not to saturate store shelves with games, which would weaken sales overall as seen with the PlayStation 2 and GameBoy Advance launches. Speaking with characteristic incisiveness, Main also commented on the networking aspect of GameCube. "Even if we wanted to release an online game now, we would have no way of knowing whether it would be a hit, so we're not rushing things. The only one rushing is Xbox." You can read the rest of the interview, translated lovingly by the folks at Core Magazine, right here.

After the cancellation of Black & White for the Dreamcast and the mixed reaction to the PC version, it looked like Lionhead were going to settle down and get on with creating a mission pack or sequel to the game instead of drowning the media in useless interviews. C&VG were lucky enough to collar Mark Webley though, one of the company's directors, for a few quick words. During his brief interview, Mark confirms that the PSOne version is "2-3 months" off, while PS2 and Xbox incarnations will be "finished (but not released) in June 2002". Also pencilled in is a Macintosh version. Mark also spoke about Lionhead's work with another team to see if they can get GameBoy Color or GameBoy Advance versions underway. "This is proving to be a hard thing to get moving," he said. Mark also spoke briefly about the ill-fated Dreamcast release. You can read the entire interview at C&VG. Related Feature - Black & White Review

Across the world Super Mario Brothers 3 is still widely regarded as the best Mario title ever released on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In its heyday, it demonstrated well and truly for fans of Sega's Master System just who was boss, and that spiky blue upstarts like Sonic would have to work a hell of a lot harder to outdo Mario. Following the release of Super Mario All Stars on the Super NES, it shot to fame once again, and stayed there. When Nintendo announced that Super Mario Advance would be a conversion, people immediately assumed that SMB3 would be selected, although some petitioned the company for Super Mario World or Yoshi's Island. Then Nintendo told people about Super Mario Advance, and jaws hit the deck. It turned out that although popular and certainly capable of working under the GameBoy Advance, Nintendo had opted not to convert the time-honoured Super Mario Brothers 3, instead favouring its less popular predecessor, a game that hadn't even started life as a Nintendo project. After the muted success of the official sequel to Mario in Japan, Nintendo snapped up popular competing platformer Doki Doki Panic, swapped some sprites around and shovelled it onto Western plates. The original SMB2 from Japan then became The Lost Levels, a much more difficult continuation of the original Mario adventure, which didn't arrive in the West until Mario All Stars immortalised it along with the other three several years later.

Following on from the recent success of Kyro and Kyro II, which are based on the PowerVR Series3 chip, Imagination Technologies have chosen to extend their partnership with bedfellow STMicroelectronics. The pair will now develop and manufacture graphics accelerators based on PowerVR Series4 and Series5 technology designed by Imagination's PowerVR Technologies division. Sticking to their promise of high levels of visual quality and performance without the price premium, Series4 and Series5 will once again draw on the now-famous Tile Based Rendering techniques seen on the Kyro II. If you did not read our coverage of the Kyro II, here's a brief recap on the technology: Kyro II uses something called Tile Based Rendering, where the display is split into small areas called tiles that are rendered independently. The Kyro II also applies Hidden Surface Removal (HSR), where it determines which surfaces are displayed and which remain hidden before creating 3D triangles only for displayed surfaces. It maps textures only onto visible surfaces. All of this results in optimal use of memory bandwidth, a higher fill rate and impressive visual quality with the loss of performance. The reason for its visual quality are plenty. It has the capability to handle 8-layer multitexturing, where up to 8 layers of different textures can be combined together in order to obtain lifelike 3D environments with more realistic details. The increase in visual quality is achieved by texture blending in the local tile buffer and not just laying textures one on top of another. Kyro II also has Internal True Colour at 32-bit, so that all blending operations in each tile are performed on-chip in 32-bit colour with no loss of colour precision during the process. Other features of the Kyro II include Full Scene Anti-Aliasing support, with reasonable results. The Hidden Surface Removal means a lot more bandwidth is available with a higher fill rate, so things don't get quite as choked as they do on rival cards. Another notable feature is Environmental Bump Mapping (EBM), which is used to simulate rough or bump textures with irregularities in their shading. It can do this by, for example, adding a base texture, then a bump texture, then a light texture or an environmental bump. And so on. When we met an Imagination Technologies representative recently, he was understandably antsy about leaking Kyro III details, and we couldn't confirm very much. Rumour has it though that the Kyro III (which will surely come of one of these new PowerVR series), will have a 180-250MHz clock, 4 pipelines with two textures per pipeline, a T&L unit for the first time and will do more tile calculations in hardware. We've also heard internal names for it like STG 5000. Those same rumour mongerers claim the Kyro III will be made on a 0.13 micron fabrication process and will end up with a fill rate some four times that of the Kyro II. It's all speculation for the moment, however, with very little officially confirmed. Related Feature - Visuarvivor

Ubi Soft and Capcom have signed an exclusive publishing contract concerning seven new Capcom titles for GameBoy Advance. The games, which we'll come to in a moment, will be published by Ubi Soft in East and Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and all will be released in time for Christmas 2001 except for a couple, which won't make it until the first quarter of 2002. The early birds will be Super Street Fighter 2X Revival, Mega Man 1, Breath of Fire 1 and 2 and Final Fight One, while the stragglers will be Mega Man 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3. Reading through that list, your humble correspondent's pulse starts racing. What a wonderful line up. The Street Fighter games, at this point can really be taken or left, but Mega Man is an international treasure, and Final Fight, if done properly, will sell in droves. Of course, the most poignant of all those titles are Breath of Fire 1 and 2. The first sign of decent Super Nintendo RPG conversions on the horizon. At this rate, driving up to spend Christmas with the elders won't be such a chore with a GameBoy Advance in your hands. "We are very pleased to inaugurate a new partnership with a video-game giant like Capcom," said Alain Corre, Managing Director for Europe, Asia Pacific and South America, Ubi Soft Entertainment. Ubi Soft's GameBoy Advance launch title Rayman Advance is currently the fourth most popular. Related Feature - Breath of Fire Advance Preview

The GameBoy Advance, which has already sold more than half a million units in the United States, has notched up another record on this side of the Atlantic, with 81,000 consoles sold over its first weekend, completely smashing the previous UK record of about 20,000 units set last year by Sony's PlayStation 2. Although pre-orders of software had shown Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 as the most popular game, it seems that Super Mario Advance was purchased by one in four GBA owners, and it reached the top ahead of the 13 other games available at launch. CTW reports that nine of those games appear in ChartTrack's All Formats Top 40. As predicted, most people just bought a console and one game, with about 90,000 units of software sold. Ultimately the launch generated well over £10 million though, and the systems continue to do well. ChartTrack/ELSPA's first ever GameBoy Advance Top 10 indicates that Mario, Tony Hawk's, F-Zero, Rayman Advance and Castlevania are the five most popular launch titles for the console's first weekend, and EuroGamer favourite Kuru Kuru Kururin snuck into the top 10 as well at number 8. Go Kuru! Our sources in retail tell us that there have been very few (if any) returns for any reason whatsoever. It looks like nobody tried the contrast trick, then. Related Feature - The Portable Avant-Garde

On Thursday a Finnish Army training camp in Räyskälä will be playing host to Mosquito Meeting 2001, a non-profit four day convention for flight sim fanatics run by Finland's Virtual Pilots society. As well as online and LAN-based gaming, the event will also include a number of outdoors activities, a sauna, and even the chance to get glider lessons at a nearby airfield! This is the seventh annual Mosquito Meeting, with previous events supported by the Finnish Air Force and both real life aviators and many of the country's most hardcore gamers attending. If you love World War II flight sims (WarBirds or Aces High in particular) and fancy something a little different from your traditional LAN party, check out the Mosquito Meeting website. Foreigners are welcome as well as native Finns, and most people there apparently speak English. Sounds a blast, but watch out for the mosquitos!

Although Novalogic have been branching out recently with titles like the gothic actioneer Necrocide, they are probably still best known for their various flight simulators and the Delta Force games. So it's perhaps no surprise that today they have returned to their roots and unveiled a brand new helicopter combat sim called Comanche 4.

When Ion Storm was formed in 1996 it seemed to have everything going for it. It was the dream of John Romero, fresh from working on Quake at id Software and promising that "design is law" would be the motto of his new development studio. Co-founders included Tom Hall, the man behind the Dopefish and co-designer on cult titles such as Commander Keen and Rise of the Triad during his time at id Software and 3D Realms.

BT have launched a pilot service for a new brand of consumer DSL- (Digital Subscriber Line) based broadband Internet connection, which will allow users previously rejected because of distance problems to hop on the broadbandwagon. Rate Adaptive or RADSL extends the service's reach from the exchange to 5.5km instead of 3.5km. Previously if your local exchange was more than 3.5km away you were automatically rejected. Downloading material over RADSL results in the same performance as doing so via ADSL. The upstream however, could suffer some deterioration. The service will be available to the general public on July 18th via resellers. The package from BT Wholesale is still BT IPStream 500, but exchanges have been upgraded to be RADSL compliant. Ultimately it shouldn't give ISPs too much bother.

Kärna's Razer isn't the sharpest tool any more - in fact we've heard little about the proposed sequel to their popular Boomslang gaming mouse since last year when images of it appeared on ShugaShack.com. If you visit Razerzone.com today though, instead of hearing about new products you hear about new problems. Speaking through its website, the company has publicly thanked consumers for their support, before issuing the following statement: "Unfortunately, kärna LLC, the parent company of Razer, had a funding commitment fall through and has exhausted its present cash resources. kärna continues to explore all viable funding, alliance and acquisition opportunities in order to find a solution that will enable kärna to continue to develop its award winning computer input device products." In its present state then, we can't expect much in the way of R&D news from the company. It sounds as though things are pretty dire for Razer, although it describes itself as "riding out the storm" rather than going out of business. What will actually happen remains to be seen, but at the present time, technical support, warranties and sales will be handled by partner Labtec. The full statement can be viewed at Razerzone.com. Related Feature - Razer BoomSlang 2000 Review

Sad news breaks today as Midway announce their decision to withdraw from the coin-op market. In a prepared statement the company put the withdrawal down to an "ongoing declining demand in the coin-operated arcade video game market", and estimated that the cost would be fewer than 60 lay-offs. In its heyday, Midway was pumping out coin-ops faster than punters could plug coins into them. Mortal Kombat went through plenty of revisions in the arcade which generated lots of street cred for the company and no doubt helped sales of the titles rocket on consoles like the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and PlayStation. Recently though there hasn't been much to shout about and arcade audiences have been dwindling thanks to the increasing power of home consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast. Arcades are no longer the home of exceptional graphics and lustful new releases, and Midway have recognized this and taken their business elsewhere.

Back in the olden days, Bleemcast was a fabled universal PSX to Dreamcast conversion disc, functioning in a very similar manner to the PSX to PC version. Unfortunately in this format it would never have managed to ensure compatibility with the entire PlayStation industry, so it was decided that the software would be released in several Bleempaks, each of which would harbour the ability to emulate 100 or so games perfectly when presented with the original PSX discs. This was all wrapped up at E3 2000 as far as we were concerned, and expected to hit store shelves in June of the same year. A few ticks and tocks later and it's the end of the year. Still no sign of Bleemcast. We shot off some emails and made some phone calls but nobody wanted to tell us anything. In fact, it wasn't until a couple of months ago that Bleemcast eventually re-appeared on our radar screens, and in a drastic new format. Going from one extreme to another now, instead of supporting all or even some of the PlayStation's enormous catalogue of games, Bleemcast would be released in individual packs, each supporting a single game. Starting with Gran Turismo 2, the range would grow by the week until you could go into a store with a wad of fivers and pick up all sorts of CDs to enable support for your various games. In practice, there were even more delays, and typically we've only just heard about the latest release. Metal Gear Solid, an obvious choice, isn't finished yet, but should be in the very near future. (If you live in the Los Angeles area you can even offer to help test it.) In the intervening period a Final Fantasy IX disc allegedly popped into circulation. Our local EB doesn't have any Bleemcast stock, so we haven't seen anything. A trailer for MGS can be seen on this page, amusingly subtitled "coming soon - unless sony kills it". We should probably describe that as "a trailer for Bleemcast" more than anything though, there's no actual footage of MGS in action on a Dreamcast, just some spiel about how Sony has no intention of letting people play PSX games on the Dreamcasts and that they have resorted to strong-arming retailers not to stock Bleemcast. The entire bleemcast.com website is basically a recruiting poster that asks you to pledge your allegiance by ringing up retailers and demanding that they stock the software. We're not about to take sides in this boring legal dispute, but we'd have a lot more time for the Bleem side of things if they produced an all-purpose emulator as originally planned and didn't expect us to pay five quid per title. Oh, and then there's the rather distinct lack of Dreamcast consoles coming off the production lines. What's next? Bleembox, with Bleemcast emulation? Related Feature - bleemed!

It looks like mead, horned helmets and great hulking swords are going to be big this year, as Vikings are back in fashion. Human Head's third person action game Rune was successful enough to warrant a PlayStation 2 version and a multiplayer add-on, Funcom have announced that their massively multiplayer follow-up to Anarchy Online will be a Norse-flavoured role-playing strategy game called Midgard, and Vikings featured prominently in the amusing cartoon adventure game Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria.

have announced that they are holding what they hope will be the UK's largest ever LAN party over the August Bank Holiday weekend, with room for up to a thousand players to frag it out. Taking place in Derby, the event will last for the full four days (Friday to Monday) and entry for the whole weekend costs just £40. We must admit that we've not heard of these folks before, although they have run over 30 (much smaller) LAN events since way back in 1998.

You may (or may not, depending on how deep under that rock you've been hiding) know that Sega have been through a lot of turmoil recently, with their shifting business strategies resulting in huge losses, developers and publishers retracting support for the Dreamcast, and an ever looming sense of doom as far as gaming on our console of choice is concerned. However, in the midst of all this gloom come a few beacons of hope which could well set the Dreamcast as a format in good stead for the next year or so. One such glimmer of hope has come in the form of Sonic Team's latest magnum opus, Sonic Adventure 2. The original Sonic Adventure was somewhat of a departure for the famed blue spikeball, with the fast-paced action of previous outings taking a sidestep to introduce more sedate adventure stages, which necessitated the exploration of your surrounding world in order to reveal the storyline at your own pace, unlocking and discovering action phases as you progressed in your adventure. While this proved to be a successful blend of the old Sonic formula and an attempt at a deeper approach to engaging the player, it didn't wholly suit the brand of Sonic as we knew him, and we ultimately missed the all-out action the original formula provided. So with the sequel, Sega have taken steps to provide those players with lashings upon lashings of hair-raising speed and excitement from the outset, but that isn't to say that the notion of depth has been entirely outcast. This is the first Sonic title to actively pursue some kind of decent narrative, instead of the usual blind hunt for the Chaos Emeralds for no apparent reason. The tale dates back to when Dr. Robotnik's (or, as the game irritatingly and consistently refers to him, Dr. Eggman) grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, constructed a huge space colony named ARK, aboard which he was conducting experiments into the secret of immortality. A product of these experiments was a curiously familiar looking creature known as Shadow (basically, Sonic's evil twin). When the military finds out about this project, they attempt to capture Shadow in vain, instead killing Gerald's niece by mistake. Shadow is then consumed by the anger of Gerald Robotnik, and vows to assist Dr. Eggman Robotnik in his continuing attempts to take over the world. Yes, highly cheeseball, but what did you expect? What matters is that although the game takes a considerably linear approach to progress compared to its predecessor, the narrative is driven very well simply with the aid of cut-scenes and clever plot crossovers.

Back at the end of April the future of the promising but much-delayed role-playing strategy game Magic & Mayhem : The Art of Magic seemed to be in jeopardy, after the collapse of Nottingham based developer Charybdis. At the time Virgin assured us that they owned the rights to the game and would be passing the project on to another development team for completion, but since then things had been strangely quiet. Until today, as the official Magic & Mayhem website has just revealed that Climax's Nottingham studio will be finishing the game.

August should see the arrival of an innovative new computer games TV show in the UK, with the debut of Mercenaries on satellite and cable channel Bravo. We spoke to the show's presenter and associate producer Jason Bradbury, who was in Brighton checking the first edited episode of the show this week, to find out more...

Five years ago today id Software unleashed their first truly 3D shooter Quake, complete with dodgy brown and grey palette, baffling storyline, anti-climactic final boss encounter, and moody soundtrack by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Although it was primarily designed as a single player game, most people remember it today for its fast-paced deathmatch and the all-powerful rocket launcher. It's also the game that launched 3dfx into the spotlight with the release of the 3D accelerated GLQuake patch. My own first 3D graphics card (an original 3dfx Voodoo Graphics board from Guillemot) was bought entirely for the purpose of playing Quake, and I can still remember the feeling of awe as I loaded GLQuake up for the first time and ran the game at all of 20 frames per second at 640x480. How times change...

We've been wandering around the streets of Watford again, trying to find people sneaking out to buy GameBoy Advance on their lunch hour. Hanging around Electronics Boutique we uncovered a number of people eyeing the racks. One chap, Ted Dunsen, told us that he was actually buying Colour GameBoy games to play on his new console. "There's naff-all of interest yet. I'm buying this for Mario Kart and Mario 3, and those'll be out by Christmas." Why the interest in buying it at launch then? "If you can afford it, it always pays to get the expense of the console out of the way first then shop around later for your extras. I probably won't even play this much for the next few months but at least I won't have to fork out during harder times." Another shopper, a young lass named Jill (who refused to give me her surname, perhaps she thought I was chatting her up?), told us that although she'd kept Tetris, the rest of her GBC games and the console itself had gone. "As soon as I knew when this would come out, I sold them to a friend. I was quite fond of the puzzle games, so I hung onto Tetris, but things like Metal Gear Solid and Street Fighter - they were more my boyfriend's than mine - and I want to play with this on the bus on the way to work." Along with a swanky Arctic GBA, Jill was buying "Tony Hawk's to try and console my boyfriend! Oh, and Mario Advance. Well, you have to, don't you?" We did manage to uncover one old hand who wasn't buying it to help keep his GameBoy collection growing. Kevin Robson claims to have been messing with computers and consoles since the days of the Spectrum. "It was actually my son's Spectrum that first caught me eye. Before long he was just using it to play Wriggler and I was messing around with Basic. Since then my favourite console, apart from the Dreamcast, has been the Super Nintendo, purely because of the RPGs." But there are no real RPGs in the launch line-up, surely... "No, but there's Castlevania. I need no further invitation," he frowned, "but then again, that Breath of Fire... can't wait for that. I guess I'll have to sit there with the SNES and the GBA trying to spot the difference for my little BoF website." Slightly scared by this bizarre display of rampant pointyhatism, we escaped into the back of the shop near the till and quizzed a staff member. "We've had tons of pre-orders, and they were mostly collected this morning between opening and just before you arrived." But what's the most popular game, we wanted to know. "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, without a doubt. It's the closest thing to brilliance on that console, although people should stop bagging on Mario Advance's origins and actually play the thing; it's really good." "The most popular console colour is the see-through Glacier one. We sold out of that a month ago. The pink one.. I think we've sold three in total. You could have one now if you fancy it." Thanks, but we've already got a pink one, because we're elite. Related Feature - The Portable Avant-Garde

While Funcom are only just releasing Anarchy Online, their first massively multiplayer game, this month in America and their native Scandinavia, work is already well underway on a second game called Midgard, which is based on their own country's history. Yes, Midgard looks set to be the world first Viking massively multiplayer game. But it's not just going to be another role-playing game according to Funcom designer Ragnar Tørnquist, who told RPG Vault in an interview that "Midgard borrows as much from games like Civilization, Settlers, and Age of Empires as it does from massively-multiplayer RPGs like Anarchy Online and EverQuest".

A year after the successful launch of Diablo II, Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing has just announced that Blizzard's add-on pack for the game, Lord of Destruction, has now gone gold and will be shipping worldwide on June 29th. Thanks to the massive popularity of the Diablo series in Europe and Asia, the game will be available simultaneously all around the world in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Klingon. Ok, we made that last one up. A Macintosh version of the pack will also be available, but only in English and Japanese. I guess the Pole's just don't think differently enough.

The GameBoy Advance has finally launched in Europe and the United Kingdom after months of waiting. There are one hell of a lot of pre-orders to fulfill, but if you were hoping to wander down to your local EB or Dixons and pick up a bundle, you may be in luck. I've just arrived breathless back from Watford where the situation is pretty promising. Speaking to a minimum wage monkey at Dixons revealed that if I wanted to just hand over £110 or thereabouts I could walk away with a GBA bundle that included console, AC Adapter, worm light equivalent and Mario Advance. Not a bad little deal. Unfortunately, the mail order situation isn't quite as rosy. Earlier this week, Gameplay's Internet manager Mat Braddy told us that his company was having difficulty meeting demand due to problems with supply from Nintendo, and that pre-orders were still raining in, with buyers apparently either unfussed or ignorant of the potential fortnight's wait for the consoles. The situation seemed even more dire when we phoned up to confirm our GBA order. It took a while for the pleasant Scotsman on the other end of the line to hunt down our details, but when he did, we were informed that our order for a "Glacier" GBA was number 209 in the queue, and although originally Nintendo intended to ship them 250 of this colour, in actual fact they had only managed to supply 75. Luckily for us, it seems all GameBoy Advance consoles were not created equal. For many, the transparent "Red" unit is more pink than anything, and it has received the least orders. In fact when we phoned up on Monday it turned out Gameplay still had stock of the Red unit. Of course, EuroGamer staffers like a bit of mystique about them, so we opted for Red units on D-Day at the expense of Glacier cool at D-Day+30. We'll be updating you throughout the day with more information on the GameBoy Advance's European launch. Related Feature - The Portable Avant-Garde

UbiSoft has become the latest company from the land of Evian and rare steaks to report a boom in business, and as with fellow French publisher Infogrames this is no doubt thanks in part to a string of high profile take-overs. UbiSoft has absorbed brands such as Red Storm, Mattel Interactive, SSI and Blue Byte in recent months, and recently picked up the license to publish games based on the stunning martial arts epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It is now Europe's second biggest publisher.

Ring of Red is one of those games that takes a historical event and says, what would happen if things went differently? In this case, the story goes that Japan kept fighting even after the Allies dumped two atomic bombs in its back yard. The planned amphibious invasion of Japan has had to take place, and since the European fight was long-since concluded, Russia dedicated some of its mighty red army to the fight as well. When all was said and done, and Japan had surrendered under the combined weight of two invading superpowers, the country was split up as Berlin once was, with Russia controlling the communist north and a democratic state emerging in the south, backed by the United States and NATO. Both of the "allies" were developing walking mechanized robots during the conflict, and later on in the mid-60s at least one Asian conflict was fought entirely by units of these Armoured Fighting Walkers (AFWs). The occupation of Japan was enough to turn the Cold War into a decidedly hot one though, so instead of retiring the hulking metallic beasts to the coal shed, both sides have trotted them out once more to decide once and for all who controls Japan. It's the present day, and you're called upon to help fight the cause in a far off land using AFW units and foot soldiers to prevail.