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Sony have announced a deal with RealNetworks to embed RealPlayer 8 and other Real client technologies on PlayStation 2, and a similar deal with Macromedia for its multimedia content. The deals will allow users to tune into their favourite Real audio and video broadcasts over the Internet, and experience Flash animations and websites, effectively bringing the multimedia Internet to the console. The deals come only days after Sony's talks with AOL once again hit the headlines. Back in December AOL's pitch was deemed to be one of many, but six months later it's become clear that the two have finally agreed on terms, clearly in an attempt to outshine Microsoft/MSN at E3 when the sun rises on Los Angeles later today. Microsoft will use E3 to announce the real details of the Xbox - its launch date, starting line-up and such - and Sony will be hoping that these forward-thinking Internet deals will draw attention away from that. AOL's Instant Messenger and net access software will be ported to PlayStation 2, and Netscape Navigator will join it. Internet Explorer is not an option for obvious reasons, and although we quite like Opera AOL would prefer to stick to what they know. Sony, for their part, will ship a modem (or "network adapter" according to their press release). Sony's press release also includes details of a new hard drive for the PlayStation 2, and XGA LCD panel (similar to the fabled PSOne LCD panel), mouse and keyboard. The aim is to give the PS2 the ability to stand on its own two legs as a home computer substitute. As The Register pointed out, Sony's shadowy relationship with Be, makers of BeOS and BeIA, might be worth a bob or two if they need something to drive their console-come-PC. New revisions of the PlayStation 2 software development kit will feature AOL-inspired features, allowing developers to integrate the services in a way barely possible on the PC. For example, with tight integration of the AOL Instant Messenger, gamers would be able to chat away with people inside and outside the gaming environment. Given today's announcement regarding RealNetworks, we'd be surprised if the SDK doesn't go under the knife again to help take advantage of that. We certainly admire Sony's courage in making a move on Microsoft's PC domain. Finding alternatives to things like DirectX, Internet Explorer and Windows Media may seem easy in the short term, but we fear for the company in the long term. DirectX 8 is one of the most advanced graphics APIs we've encountered, and the Internet Explorer 6 preview we've been playing with is superb. As for Windows Media, Microsoft's WM8 page features some very speculative claims about the technology's compression algorithms. For example, Microsoft claim to have near-DVD quality video compressed to 500Kbps, enough to transfer over a standard ADSL line. Real media has a long way to come in light of that, and some would argue that it hasn't really done anything to combat Windows Media since RP4 besides bloatwaring itself anyway. And as for Macromedia - any technologies it lends to PlayStation 2 will compete directly against themselves on Xbox. Sony's overall strategy is gradually becoming a little clearer, although at the moment they seem to be stepping toward making the PS2 into a full-blown computer. One supposes that this is intended to directly compete with Microsoft for the same market share, but with Xbox due before the end of the year and already well into the development stage, it's alarming that Sony are already playing catch up. Related Feature - Broadband Consoles - A Pipe Dream?

Just a couple of months ago French developer Kalisto seemed to be on the verge of collapse, with disastrous results seeing the company losing over $25m after its earnings for last year came in almost ten times lower than expectations. Today we're happy to report that the company seems to be on the mend, with first quarter revenues for this year up to Fr32.8m (about $4.4m), which is almost double what it earned in the whole of last year!

According to a report on The Evening Standard's website, Britney Spears is about to follow in the footsteps of Queen, KISS and Iron Maiden by becoming the star of her very own computer game. Apparently she has signed a deal with Sony, and although The Evening Standard admits that "details of the game are sketchy", they say that more information is expected to be released at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles this weekend. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen, but it's a fun little story.

When UbiSoft bought out German publisher Blue Byte earlier this year, it picked up a number of well-loved games and franchises, including cutesy strategy series The Settlers. Now the company has announced that it will be publishing both an official add-on and a mission pack for the recently released Settlers IV. The mission pack will be released in Germany in July and in the rest of Europe this September, adding five new campaigns and a total of fifty missions to the game, as well as (for the first time in the Settlers series) a map editor and random scenario generator.

During the internet boom Gameplay was the market's golden boy, with shares rising into nose-bleed territory and peaking at over £10 a pop just before the big dot.com crash in March 2000. The soaring share price had funded a string of ill-advised take-overs across Europe, and when the bubble burst Gameplay found itself spiralling into debt as its bloated organisation floundered. Earlier this year it laid off around 275 workers as part of a restructuring plan, and admitted that it was looking for a buyer for part or all of its operations.

Sierra has announced that its first title for the Xbox is to be Jonny Drama, described by a poor confused PR bod as a "stealth-shooter action title", which we think means something along the lines of Metal Gear Solid. The game promises to bring us the "excitement and intrigue of classic spy movies with hip, retro style to create a refreshingly new gaming experience", and features some rather funky looking cartoon-style graphics which bring back fond memories of Stupid Invaders.

In one of the most creative press releases we've seen in recent years, the CPL has announced that it is "changing gears", which (loosely translated into English) means that they couldn't find enough sponsors and have had to cancel two of the four events which they had planned for the USA this year - August's Counter-Strike tournament and October's Quake III Arena event. Of course, this isn't in any way to be construed as a reduction in the CPL's activities in its native country, merely a "revised approach to competitive gaming in the United States [which] promises to yield stronger growth for the CPL through consolidated efforts".

Back in March we got to feast our eyes on some Japanese Panzer Front code at JVC's London headquarters, and since then it's been knocked about every which way and slammed into a PAL CD for PSOne owners in Europe. The resulting changes are difficult to distinguish (we did only get 20 minutes or so with Panzer at JVC, and all the menus were in Japanese!), but a worrying cloud has formed above our original synopsis, that arcade and simulation fans should both be right at home. The most striking thing about Panzer Front is its control system. It takes quite a while to get used to and adds a mountain or two to the learning curve, but ultimately it's quite rewarding. The system mimics that of classic (okay maybe not so classic) future-tank simulation Wild Metal Country from DMA Design. You control each of the tank's tracks independently of one another, allowing you not only to handle them together (for forward or backward motion) but also left and right in a manner more akin to actual tank control. You've got to admire Enterbrain's courage here. We'll have to take their word on the level of authenticity. It looks well researched, and they've neatly allowed you to control the tanks of any nation you like, rather than shoving you into the cockpit of a yank Panzer. One suspects that this probably has something to do with the fact that it's a Japanese game, but it's a welcome change from those blindly patriotic simulations of the past.

Rumours have been spreading for some time now that Rogue Software (the company behind American McGee's Alice and official mission packs for both Quake and Quake 2) was working on a follow-up to the wildly popular team-based Half-Life mod Counter-Strike. Then yesterday came news that the game had been cancelled by Valve following the recent departure of Rogue's co-founder and president, Jim Molinets. Rogue CEO Barrett Alexander confirmed the reports, telling news site Voodoo Extreme that "I think they made a bad decision". The company is now in crisis, having had a PlayStation 2 port of Alice pulled out from under them by a cost-cutting Electronic Arts just a few months earlier...

Although the VIA 686B southbridge issue has been in the press a lot recently, we're starting to see a lot of scare stories that simply don't make sense. For instance, when VIA released their latest service pack yesterday (4-in-1 version 4.31), people were standing on the sidelines crying "I'm affected too and I'm using xxx chipset! I need a fix too!" Lets consider the actual problem here. From what VIA have said, we can be assured that it affects the 686B southbridge chip, which appears on all KT133 / KT133A motherboards and a number of others (e.g. ASUS' A7M266 DDR board, which uses the AMD761 northbridge and VIA 686B southbridge). The symptoms of the problem are large transfers of >100Mb between two IDE hard disks on alternate controllers failing, but not corrupting data. The problem is aggravated by the presence of a Soundblaster Live! in the system. Some say a specific model. According to VIA again, it is an Athlon motherboard issue, and others are not affected. But VIA have now fixed this in their latest service pack. Hell, this writer has confirmed that the service pack fixes the issue on the three 686B-based motherboards here. So what's left to complain about? This article at Realworldtech draws attention to the problem on non-686B boards. True, most reports of problems have been from KT133(A) and 686B users, but apparently the writer was able to reproduce the problem on some 686A motherboards and even a 694X board. The forums on VIAHardware.com amongst others are heavy with reports of errors on non-686B boards as well. It all seems very conspiratorial, but VIA are keeping schtum. There are no problems on our KX133 (ASUS K7V) board here, which features the 686A, and our KT133 system, which did exhibit problems was fixed by the 4.31 service pack. Are users taking this latest problem and using it to try and justify the misconfigurations and muddled computers they work with? Perhaps, perhaps not. Ultimately one has to suspect this is not the last we'll hear of the 686B problem. Related Feature - VIA acknowledge problem

PC peripheral specialist Belkin is to branch out into gaming. This is a bit of a departure - they're famed for things like computer cables, surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies. The company has six new devices planned; five for PC and one for PlayStation 2. The first five PC devices take advantage of a central tool, the Nostromo Array Programming Software (NAPS) interface, used in Windows to control programmability features amongst other things. The lineup includes two PC gamepads, the N40 and N45. N45 features 13 programmable action buttons, USB connectivity, Enter and Escape buttons for basic Windows functionality, capped off with dual analog inputs ala the PS2 Dual Shock controller and 70 different functions available for programming in NAPS. As an added bonus, it features a mouse-mode toggle for giving the analog sticks control of the Windows pointer. The N40 is the same as the N45, but with only 10 programmable action buttons, no mouse-mode and a smooth directional pad rather than dual analogs. Next up in Belkin's lineup is the N50 speedpad, which sounds similar to The Claw, which we reviewed several months ago. The speedpad aims to take up the keyboard side of the gamer's controls, eliminating the useless buttons we tend to hit accidentally (think Windows key) and instead focusing on directional control and the like. The N50 can be used in conjunction with the N30 GameMouse (three programmable buttons, scroll wheel and USB connectivity) as a double-handled control system, just as The Claw could be used with a basic mouse. The GameMouse is equipped with an iTouch-like technology known as TouchSence courtesy of a company called Immersion. It enables you to feel objects on-screen to interact with them. Finally, the N60 Pilot Stick features all manner of flight sim features, including precision twist rudder, a realistic rotary throttle, an 8-way point-of-view hatswitch, 14 programmable buttons with secondary hatswitch, USB connectivity and up to 57 different programmable functions courtesy of NAPS. Belkin also have their sights set on PlayStation 2, aiming to provide a new GamePad, the P45. [Is this some sort of amusing going away present for Belkin employees? Imagine developing the P45 - Ed] Similar to the N45, except lacking Windows functionality, the P45 features 14 analog action buttons, rumble functionality, a macro button and a mode button with analog, digital and steering modes. The lack of NAPS on the PlayStation 2 means most of the work will probably revolve around the macro button and careful manual juggling. Building your line around a central software suite is important, and Belkin presumably picked this up from powerhouses Microsoft, Thrustmaster and the like, but build quality and reliability are equally important, and we can't gauge that from a press release. Good luck to 'em. Related Feature - The Claw Review

Virgin Interactive have announced that they are working on a new science fiction action game called Maelstrom, powered by the latest version of the Unreal Warfare engine, boasting a plot penned by Judge Dredd writer Robbie Morrison, and featuring a range of new characters designed by Judge Dredd and Batman artist Jim Murray. No expense spare then for the first new game to come out of Virgin's revamped in-house development team.

French publishing behemoth Infogrames has today announced the line-up of games which it will be demonstrating at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles this weekend, with the existence of several previously rumoured games finally being confirmed. Chief amongst these is Unreal Championship, which is thought to be an enhanced Xbox version of Unreal Tournament, with Unreal 2 also set to be shown off at the exhibition. Also mentioned is a PS2 Superman game which we don't recall hearing about before.

The gaming community was surprised last year by the news that Microsoft had cancelled two titles under development by Digital Anvil, Loose Cannon and Conquest : Frontier Wars. Since then Microsoft has bought the troubled Texan company and the designers of the two canned games have been busy searching for alternative publishers. Now that search is at an end, as UbiSoft has announced that it will be publishing both PC titles, as well as new console versions of Loose Cannon.

UbiSoft has good news and bad news for flight sim fans. The bad news is that the release of the eagerly anticipated IL2 Sturmovik, which UbiSoft acquired the publishing rights for during their recent take-over of Germany company Blue Byte, has been delayed until November. The good news is that this extra time is apparently going to be used for "additional fine-tuning" and to "add even more polish to the game". According to UbiSoft's Vincent Munoz, "whilst gamers must wait a little longer, a November release allows us and the developers at Maddox Games time to ensure that the final game is even better and becomes a benchmark title in the genre".

Almost 50 staff have been told their jobs are under threat amid speculation that troubled dotcom, Gameplay, is due to make an announcement about its future. A company meeting had been scheduled to take place this morning but has been postponed until later this afternoon. During the day 44 people have been told that their jobs are at risk. It is understood that those who've received such notices in the past have never returned to work at Gameplay. According to insiders, 27 of those work in Gameplay's technical and marketing departments.

Take 2 has announced that it will be releasing several games for Nintendo's garish next generation console the GameCube, including a version of the long overdue first person shooter Duke Nukem Forever. This comes hot on the heels of the recent news that Max Payne is being ported to the PlayStation 2, as Take 2 puts more effort into hardcore games for the console side of its business. Also confirmed by the publisher is a new Duke Nukem title for the GameBoy Advance, which we will no doubt hear more about at the ubiquitous E3 trade show in Los Angeles.

Just over a year ago the internet was the future, and investors were throwing money at the most hare-brained schemes. Then came the dot.com crash, shortly followed by a total collapse of the online advertising market in the second half of last year. Today most online companies are losing money hand-over-fist, and in the last few months this has started to effect the gaming community with a string of high profile websites, networks and service providers closing up shop.

Advanced Micro Devices have officially released their mobile Athlon and Duron parts, a press release told us this morning. The characteristically long and boring release featured a handful of interesting points about the CPUs, so we'll focus on those. Compaq are the first to offer notebooks based on the new AMD Athlon 4 processor in its Presario 1200 series. We'd really like to find out about battery life on these machines (in unbiased testing, of course) because technically it's the first time we've seen PowerNow! applied for Athlon (Palomino in other words). HP are also planning to introduce new notebooks based on the processors. The most interesting news is the pricing. Although fairly irrelevant (since we don't buy individual laptop CPUs...) it does give you some idea of the rest of the machine. The 1GHz, 950MHz, 900MHz and 850MHz mobile AMD Athlon 4 processors are priced at $425, $350, $270 and $240, respectively, and the 850MHz and 800MHz new mobile AMD Duron processors are priced at $197 and $170, respectively, each in 1,000-unit quantities. Athlon 4, the processor, features a new lower power design for notebook computing, 384 KB of on-chip, full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch (256KB of on-chip level (L2) cache and 128 Kbytes of on-chip level (L1) cache), a superscalar floating-point unit, support for AMD's 3DNow! Professional instructions for enhanced multimedia capabilities, and AMD PowerNow! technology for extended battery life. We pretty much knew most of this, but it still gives us a tingling feeling when we realise that it's finally hit notebook systems. After all, coupled with a NVIDIA GeForce Go! chip, these things could actually yield a decent gaming platform. [Pet-hate alert: these flamin' exclamation marks all over the place. I mean! What's! the! point! We get the picture either way! - Ed] Expect Athlon 4 to hit desktop systems very soon now. Related Feature - AMD Athlon using DDR SDRAM

Konami looks set to unveil a whole host of new titles at E3 this week, giving even THQ a run for its money in terms of numbers. Systems featured include PSOne, PlayStation 2, GameBoy Advance and Xbox. Unlike THQ, the signal:noise ratio is actually quite encouraging from the hardcore gamer's perspective, but even so there's a lot of substance. Anyway, here's the list!

RealNetworks, best known until now for their bloated media player, today launch a public beta version of their much mooted RealArcade gaming service. This allows you to download or stream games from Real's servers, ranging from the usual mainstream tat like Hearts, Poker and Mahjong to entertaining 3D accelerated titles such as Super Bubble Pop and Monolith's bizarrely named mecha combat game Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles, exclusively available through Real. There are even a couple of massively multiplayer games - a baseball management sim and a fantasy strategy game called Evernight.

XGAMING, INC, one of a growing number of developers specialising in peripherals, is set to demonstrate its latest technology at E3 this week. The X-Arcade is the world's first multi-platform gaming device using XGAMING Inc's patent pending X-PORT technology (note: definitely not related to Datel's X-Port). The technology is apparently receiving industry wide recognition, and works with PSOne, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, PC, MAC, Xbox, GameCube and even Nintendo 64 amongst others. Thanks to its modular approach, a single adaptive device is the only thing needed to ensure compatibility with new consoles.

Santa Monica-based Activision have announced that they are developing "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" and "Spider-Man: The Movie" for GameCube, and "Supercar Street Challenge for PlayStation 2/PC". The company is working closely with Nintendo on the two GameCube titles, and was amongst the first wave of publishers to announce its support for the console. On the PS2 front, veteran automobile manufacturer Steve Saleen is to lend its S7 supercar to Supercar Street Challenge, and players will be able to seek advice from the man in the game's design studio. All three titles show great promise. As we know, Neversoft's Tony Hawk's titles are renowned for their addictive gameplay, and the previous Spider-Man game, curiously also based on the Tony Hawk's engine, demonstrated how effective a comic book license can be when treated with respect. Activision's racing sim releases have been a mixed bag over the years, but Supercar Street Challenge almost sounds like a simulation of the Nicholas Cage movie "Gone in 60 Seconds", and we're loathe to argue with that... Pitting the gamer against enormously powerful supercars in a race through cities all over the world (with 27 course locations in total from Monaco to Rome to Los Angeles), SSC looks exhilarating. Supercar Street Challenge will launch this summer on the PlayStation 2 and PC. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Spider-Man: The Movie should launch with the GameCube in the West. Related Feature - Spider-Man PlayStation Review

British author Douglas Adams last night died after suffering a heart attack in California, aged 49. He was best known as the creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which started off as a BBC radio drama before morphing into a television series and a five part "trilogy" of books, with a Hollywood movie inspired by the series currently in the works. To the gaming community he was also known for his work on a classic Infocom text adventure based on the Guide, and more recently he co-founded the Digital Village to develop an original adventure game called Starship Titanic. Many of that team are now working on a new game of the Guide for Swedish publisher Pan Interactive.

German publisher CDV burst on to the British gaming scene late last year with the release of Sudden Strike, a mixture of real-time strategy and tactically-complex wargame which proved a hit with critics and gamers alike on this side of the Channel.

While we've grown used to seeing games arriving here in Europe months after their American or Japanese release, it's not often that this delay results in anything other than frustration and grey imports. So it comes as a refreshing change to find that the publisher with the painfully hip name (that's "SWING! Entert@inment Media" to you) is adding some new features to Skysurfer for the game's "eagerly-awaited" European release on PlayStation 2.

Last autumn saw the first beta release of AURAN Jet, a 3D "game authoring environment" from Australian developer Auran, the company behind real-time strategy game Dark Reign. Now Auran have announced their own first game based on the engine, and as you can see from the screenshots it's looking rather nice. Excalibur is a third person action game set in an Arthurian fantasy world of battling knights and powerful magic, with both single and multiplayer modes planned and a range of melee, ranged and magical attacks available to smite your enemies with. There's even talk of boiling oil, which can't be a bad thing (unless it's poured on your head of course).

It doesn't seem so long ago that Artifact Entertainment was in deep financial crisis, with their massively multiplayer sci-fi role-playing game Horizons apparently about to sink without trace mid-way through development. Since then the company has recovered though, and the latest group to invest in the game is NCsoft, who will now be publishing Horizons in their native Korea and across the rest of Asia.

British-based publisher Eidos Interactive has revealed some of the games that it will be demonstrating at E3, with highlights expected to include Commandos 2 (confirmed for PC, PS2 and Dreamcast, despite recent rumours to the contrary) and the much-hyped Republic, from Demis Hassabis and the boys at Elixir Studios. Also present will be the sequels to both Blood Omen and Soul Reaver (both on PlayStation 2), a new Xbox action-racing game called Mad Dash, and two new titles from Core Design - the odd-looking Herdy Gerdy and third person action-adventure game Project Eden.

Activision has announced that it has secured the worldwide rights to develop and publish games for "current and next generation Nintendo platforms" based on the popular kids' cartoon series Jackie Chan Adventures, which is in turn based on the eponymous real life movie star. According to the press release, the cartoon series "highlights Jackie's amazing athleticism, humor and real life super hero qualities". We weren't aware that Jackie could run faster than a speeding bullet or leap over tall buildings in a single bound (or at least not without some aid from the special effects department), but hyperbole aside he is certainly one of the world's best known martial arts actors, alongside the likes of rising star Jet Li and the late Bruce Lee.