Latest Articles (Page 3574)

It seems that Sony's ambitions to dazzle the world (or at least Japan) with a usable fibre optic network for PlayStation and PlayStation 2 users is getting closer to realisation. Yesterday, Ken Kutaragi, president of SCE, joined the general session at the SGI Solution Forum 2001 and gave a keynotes address on the subject of "Broadband Revolution and the World of Evolving Computer Entertainment". During the speech, Mr. Kutaragi said that he expected "fiber-optic broadband Internet connections" to take off in Japan this year. "Once this environment, which enables 100-Megabit transmissions, is set, two-way broadband communications are sure to explode among PlayStation and PlayStation 2 users". He then continued to evangelise broadband connections to his audience. Maddeningly, Mr. Kutaragi neglected to elaborate on whether the 100Mbit figure was the total bandwidth to be shared between users, or whether the connection would be 100Mbit per individual, so it's a little hard to speculate on the system's success or failure at this stage. However, it was reported late last month that tests of the fibre-optic network which offered approximately 3Mbit of bandwidth per user were underway. Either way, as we said in our article on the subject, some of Sony's ambitions for the system won't be possible unless they address the issue of individual bandwidth, supply and of course contention. Mr. Kutaragi feels that "this broadband capability that will allow the world to come together as one," although no trials of the fibre-optic system have been scheduled for any territory outside of Japan.

It seems that several websites have gotten their hands on advanced copies of "Zone of Enders", Konami's latest release in Japan, which comes with a fully-featured Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. The demo features a short section of the beginning of the game, which we glimpsed first during the promotion movie at E3 and ECTS last year. The opening FMV sequence is apparently remarkable, and reveals Snake's cosy, figure-hugging camouflage outfit remains as he smokes a cigarette, but it becomes rather redundant as the entire first section of the game is set on a cargo ship, which he boards via the George Washington Bridge and a Goldeneye-style bungee cord. New character details have also emerged, including news that Colonel Sergei Gurlukovich, whose name will ring a faint bell with fans of the original, is a major player this time around. The demo doesn't make it clear whether or not Revolver Ocelot and Gurlukovich are gunning for the same side, but their relationship will no doubt be as bubbly as ever. According to The GIA, the knife-throwing girl seen in the movies is Olga Gurlukovich, the Colonel's pregnant daughter. We hope to have our own copy of Z.O.E. which includes the demo disc very soon. Stay tuned for more.

Lucasarts' latest Star Wars cash-in, the surprisingly good-looking "Star Wars Starfighter" uses Macromedia Flash Player technology to enhance its user interface, both companies happily announced recently. The game shipped yesterday to territories in the United States, and already sites like Daily Radar are saying that the game will "satisfy your inner space jockey quite nicely," which sounds like an offer. In a rather amusing statement, Macromedia pres' Kevin Lynch pointed out that the "Macromedia Flash community has long been rebelling against the dark side of boring, static user experiences. The great experience in Star Wars Starfighter shows the incredible flexibility in delivering Macromedia Flash content across a wide variety of devices." The actual application of Flash sits on top of the proprietary 3D engine developed by Lucasarts and handles tasks like menu selection, and general administrative stuff. Using the Macromedia development kits to develop Flash-based UIs is actually quite a good idea. God only knows how many times we've had to slag off games for their interface ineptitude - Flash offers a pleasant mix of visual jazz and functionality.

Sega yesterday announced a first for them, a console-based first person shooter tournament. The event, "Un-Civil War" (clever!) is to be the first in a series of online console tournaments, and is being touted as the first ever of its kind, rather like the ChuChu Rocket tournament they ran last year. Short memories at Sega? The Quake III event will actually take place over a number of days, from yesterday, the 22nd of February, through till the 2nd of April. Players can register using their Dreamcast (and judging by our luck not their PCs) at http://www.sega.net/tournaments. The main catch being you have to be in the United States. The tournament apparently consists of two competitions; what's described as a time flexible Open Ladder, and a fixed-schedule knock-out phase. During the four weeks of the Open Ladder stage, players will be ranked on the basis of points (hopefully not just kills) to determine the top weekly finalists who will be allowed to advance to the main tournament. SegaNet servers will host the Open Ladder, with all SegaNet subscribers, trial members and, er, Sega.com Society members proving eligible. The structure from there is pretty rigid. Players will be sorted into several regional 32-man knock-out tournaments, with one week of preliminaries, national finals and three eventual winners. Unlike the ChuChu Rocket tournament Sega held over here last year, the competitors can take part in the events from the comfort of their own home, as all the action will be hosted on SegaNet servers. Winners will take home a customized blue and orange Sega Dreamcast engraved with their name and championship title, which is pretty swish. Usual goodies like T-shirts are on offer to runners-up, or as the yanks would have it, just plain losers. The rules and whatnot can be pulled up on your Dreamcast at http://www.sega.net/tournaments.

One of the biggest challenges facing the internet today is the fact that nobody seems to be willing to pay for anything. Readers expect content that they would pay for in a newspaper or magazine to be free just because it's not printed on pulped wood, companies pay a pittance for online advertising because they can't see beyond click through rates, and millions of people around the world swap music on services like Napster and Gnutella.

Eidos sent word that they will be releasing budget versions of hit PC titles "Thief II : The Metal Age" and "Tomb Raider : The Last Revelation" on March 23rd. These two new releases will also mark a revamp of the publisher's popular "Premier Collection" range of budget re-releases, which have previously appeared in the old-style cardboard boxes. Both games will be released in the snazzy DVD-style plastic boxes which have been taking the gaming industry by storm over the last few months, and several previous budget hits including "Commandos", "Championship Manager 3", "Gangsters : Organised Crime", "Tomb Raider II : Golden Mask" and "Tomb Raider III : The Lost Artefact" will also be seeing a new lease of life, facing another re-release with the new packaging.

"Cossacks : European Wars" is an epic game in all senses of the word, covering a few centuries worth of warfare across the whole of Europe, and featuring vast maps to battle over with support for up to 8000 units in any single scenario. To celebrate the imminent release of the game, publisher CDV have announced that they will be holding the "16 Nations Challenge" all-nighter in London on the weekend of March 24th. Volunteers are being requested to represent each of the 16 countries included in the game, which should be fairly easy for the likes of England, France, Holland and Spain, but may prove rather more challenging for Algeria, Poland, the Ukraine and Turkey.

While most of the gaming industry was whining about slow-downs, poor sales, too much product on shelves, the late arrival of the PlayStation 2, transition years, the way the wind was blowing and anything else they could think of, THQ have bucked the recent trend of doom and gloom announcements by revealing that their profits actually rose sharply last year. Profits in the final quarter of last year were up by an impressive 45% on revenues which were 50% higher than for the same period the previous year.

I first saw Severance in action way back in September 1998, before EuroGamer was anything more than a twinkle in the milk man's eye. It's certainly been a long time coming, but the good news is that despite the somewhat protracted development cycle the game is actually rather good...

Mobile phones are pretty useless as serious gaming platforms these days. They're good for the odd bit of Snakes here and there, perhaps a bit of Hangman-via-SMS, but unless you use them as a means to channel gamers, as Sony and NTT DoCoMo intend to do with the i-mode adaptation, there really isn't much to them. The reason being that nobody has really taken control of the mobile graphics market just yet, which is something Imagination Technologies are very eager to change with their PowerVR MBX chip, which will work hand in hand with ARM processors in most mobile phones. The MBX includes a VGP; vertex geometry processor, which will also be capable of rendering small amounts of transform and lighting operations. Imagination Technologies are in talks with plenty of major players in the mobiles industry to secure the future of their startling new product, which is attractive because it not only performs well but requires little in the way of memory bandwidth and actual juice from the mobile battery. No doubt with a speculative grin on his face, ARM's Steve Evans announced that "With an industry-leading ARM core and PowerVR MBX solution, it will soon be possible for a mobile device to play games with all the features of the latest PC and console titles." The PowerVR MBX itself uses plenty of nice buzzword technologies and trademarks, including "FSAA4Free", which as you'll have rightly guessed, is full screen anti aliasing in a tin, using high resolution rendering and tracing, "Internal True-Colour Operations", performed on-chip in 32-bit colour and "PVR-TC", which applies texture compression to help save space. To pool the mobile's collective resources, the MBX is optimized for UMA, or Unified Memory Architecture, which we explained yesterday in an item about the Xbox. UMA basically allows many different devices to take advantage of the same memory system, saving space, time and pooling resources. The key feature is known as a "Scene Manager", which helps convey the chip's images in a very limited environment with no loss of speed. In short, developers eager to put 3D-heavy applications and games on mobile platforms will finally be able to, and tiny, overly clunky WAP games will be a thing of the past.

NYKO, developer and distributor of the world-renowned "Worm Light" for GameBoy and GameBoy Color, has filed a lawsuit against two companies, Mad Catz and NUBY, according to Yahoo this afternoon. The Worm Light is a peripheral device for the two pocket-sized Nintendo gaming devices, and it enables users to see the screen (which is not backlit) in places where direct light isn't easy to come by. The light attaches to the GameBoy's expansion port, and uses almost imperceptible amounts of power from the console's batteries. It represents an incredibly useful technological innovation that NYKO are understandably very interested in protecting, and made up by itself 25% of portable accessory sales in December 2000. The reason for the lawsuit, as with the five previous suits that NYKO have won on the subject, is that both Mad Catz and NUBY have developed a competing Worm Light. NUBY's "Cobra Light", "Bone Light", "Mech Light", and "Wild Thing" are all manufactured by Mad Catz, and all four are apparently too close to designs protected by NYKO's patents. The intellectual properties and rights to the Worm Light are protected by the patents, so when infringed, NYKO have every cause to sue for damages.

If you thought ADSL was a mess in the United Kingdom, what with inter-company lawsuits and untrained engineers botching up installations, then you clearly haven't been keeping a close enough eye on affairs in the United States. Broadband over there is fairly commonplace, but it seems that the Digital Subscriber Line market is something of a moot point for most. Most recently, DSL provider Verizon has been slapped with a lawsuit by disgruntled customers over its poor service provision in several key areas. Apparently lines drop regularly, transfer rates fall to modem speeds and more - a situation which most DSL users in this country aren't yet familiar with. Not content with that, it seems now that regional service provision subsidiaries of Bells-Bellsouth, already shot of most of their competition, are going to up the price of their digital lines, expecting customers already hooked on the service to eagerly agree to the slight raise. The first changes involve a slight price-hike to $50 from $40, and with 2.5 million Digital Subscriber Lines in the US according to researchers, the increase will be 100% profit. The installed userbase of 2.5m is expected to rise to nearly 17 million by the end of 2004. Despite the hike, which users are none-too-pleased about, the prices still fall some way lower than the United Kingdom's. Over here, it costs £150 for installation and a further £50 monthly to keep the service for residential subscribers. Businesses pay nearly £300 for installation and as much as £200 a month to keep them ticking over.

The MacWorld expo is traditionally full of surprises, and this year's event in Tokyo is no different. Last night not only saw the official announcement of NVIDIA's GeForce 3, but we also got our first glimpse of id Software's new graphics engine, set to be used in their new Doom game. The new graphics card will be available by the end of March, and will appear first in the G4 PowerMac as a $600 optional extra. This is somewhat less than the rumours yesterday were suggesting, but still rather on the pricey side.

The latest release schedule just arrived from GAME Studios (the publisher formerly known as The Learning Company, SSI, Microprose, Red Orb...), with several changes in evidence, including a surprising leap forward for The Moon Project, the semi-sequel to last year's hit real-time strategy game Earth 2150. Previously expected some time in April, it will now be released in March instead, despite the recent financial collapse of the game's original German publisher Topware.

British developer Core Design are best known as the creators of a certain Ms Lara Croft, but while the company has pumped out a regular stream of sequels since then, for the last couple of years the team behind the original Tomb Raider has been hard at work on an entirely new project. Project Eden, to be precise...

More details are emerging concerning the technical specifications of Microsoft's new Xbox console. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Xbox was something of a rebadged PC with a Pentium III CPU and a graphics part from legendary PC graphics component manufacturer nVidia. However further details have come to light, indicating that the Xbox, due at the end of the year in the US, will significantly outperform PCs for some time to come. The key revelation is that the next-gen console will use a Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) where the graphics subsystem and CPU share the same 64MB of fast 200MHz memory. In the PC architecture, the CPU and graphics card communicate via the comparatively slow AGP bus which is why PC graphics cards have their own local memory to speed things along (and make them even more expensive). Not content with the performance gains from CPU/graphics shared memory, the third subsection of the Xbox architecture has also received a boost. AMD's recently announced Lightning Data Transport will provide an ultra fast bus alternative between the CPU and nVidia's Media Communications Processor (MCPX). That's the part that integrates next-generation sound capabilities (64 Dolby Digital channels) with the I/O functions such as hard drive interface and broadband connection. AMD's Lightning Data Transport is rated at up to 1.6GB/s. That's fast, very fast. What does this mean? In practical terms, on the graphics side alone it's claimed that the XGPU (the NV20 graphics part) combined with the 733MHz Pentium III is capable of animating 125 million polygons per second. By contrast on the PC, nVidia's current best is the GeForce 2 Ultra that can only manage 31 million polygons a second. That said, by the time the Xbox is available, you could plug Xbox equal parts (NV20 graphics cards) and even Xbox beating parts (1GHz+ CPUs) into the PC but it will still be held back due to the slow legacy bus system. Interestingly the same aspect of the Playstation 2's architecture is considered the weakest part of the design. The comparatively slow bus speed again holds back performance of Sony's proprietary Emotion Engine graphics counterpart. Perhaps Microsoft has been learning from Sony's mistakes. Related Feature - HyperTransport of the future!

The speculation about Sony's decisions for the next fiscal year was silenced today by a news conference in which SCE president Ken Kutaragi spoke to reporters about the company's planned moves into the arcade market with Sega and Namco, and the i-mode deal with NTT DoCoMo. The big news was the arcade collaboration. Sony will be working with Sega and Namco, two of the world's biggest arcade powerhouses to develop an advanced version of the PlayStation 2's hardware for use in centres. Changes to the technology will include high-resolution monitors, as well as a high-speed fibre optic network that will connect multiple gaming centres across the country by video and in mulitplayer software. The move will likely be more successful than the recent residential trials of ~3Mbit variable fibre optic connections, which we spoke about in an editorial last week. Limited tests of the arcade service are expected to go live this year, with a fullscale nationwide service as early as 2002. The upgrades to the PS2 architecture may take into account the recent graphics chipset updates that Sony have been hammering on about to various e-news oracles, but Mr. Kutaragi mentioned nothing of the sort. Of course, this sort of upgrade could well be made part of a second generation of these machines for mass-production in a similar manner to Sega's old AM1/2/3 upgrades. According to Yahoo, the only concern on analysts lips at the time was of profit - specifically how quickly the company was likely to turn one from the new structure, but the company declined to release information on the costs of the programme so early on. Sony's deal with NTT DoCoMo over its i-mode mobile phones was also discussed. There has been plenty of interest in this of late, what with similar announcements involving NTT's overseas partners and of course mobile phone behemoth Vodafone. Very soon now, Sony will launch a cable to connect PSOne consoles to the i-mode mobile on March 29th, retailing for about $30, as well as new versions of PlayStation software with i-mode support. I-mode mobile phones will now be able to display data on PSOne TV screens, and according to NTT yesterday, Sega arcade machines as well. The various announcements have prompted a slight improvement in Sega's shares, and a modest drop-off in Sony's, presumably because of the non-disclosure of details about the company's expenses in the arcade area. Nonetheless, a lot of companies will come off nicely at the end of the day. Related Feature - Vodafone sign with Sony

According to a release issued by CTW early this morning, Eidos and Nokia have announced a deal whereby the mobile phone giant will allow the games publisher to produce interactive gaming services for its WAP-enabled mobile phone clients. The games will be based on existing Eidos franchises, including Gangsters, and will be offered to customers via wireless operators. Nokia representative Graham Stafford commented that most people who own mobile phones are expected to dabble in gaming on the move at some point in the next few years (a guestimate backed by Datamonitor) and that the services need to be there for them, and represent an incredibly lucrative opportunity for any company quick enough to get their foot in the door, so to speak. "WAP has rapidly become a widely adopted standard for mobile Internet services and phones, therefore it is the ideal vehicle with which to boost a wide selection of new mobile game services," he surmised. Nokia regularly outsources the production of games for their mobile phones, using the "Nokia Mobile Entertainment Service" to help facilitate development. Using WAP and other mobile services seems to be the trendy thing to do at the moment. Rage Software has also signed up to provide game content to Nokia, and just recently Take 2 launched a WAP version of Oni at http://www.wap.oni-game.com. As we reported early this week, console giant Sony is due today to announce its intentions for the deals it has clinched with NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone. We hope to have more news soon. Related Feature - Sony to explain i-mode plans

Monsters are traditionally the cannon-fodder of fantasy role-playing games, often standing around waiting to be slaughtered and then charging straight at your characters the moment you come within range of them. Now Sirtech Canada are trying to "build a better monster" for the eighth installment in their long-running "Wizardry" series, and as such they have decided to appoint writer and designer Charles Miles as "monster wrangler", responsible for keeping track of the 500 different varities of monster you will come across in the game.

There was a time when the GeForce 2 GTS cost £250 or more - when I bought one last year, I thought that was a hell of a lot of money for a graphics card, having spent a meagre £99 on my first, a 12Mb Maxi-Gamer Voodoo 2, a few years previously. I had expected that with constant development, the graphics card market would take on a similar model to the CPU market, with price brackets for each performace level. Whenever a new CPU is released, the lowest specification model is discontinued, and all the other CPUs jump down a few quid to match the price previously occupied by their lessers. It's a sensible system, and it stops CPUs from becoming extraordinarily expensive. Unless of course you're Intel, but that's another story entirely. With graphics cards though, it's (quite worryingly) never been like that. The Voodoo 2 cost £99, the TNT2 cost £150, the GeForce SDR and DDR cost nearly £199 and £250 respectively at launch, and the GeForce 2 GTS was going for over £300 when Hercules launched their 3d Prophet II. Today, people still sell 64Mb GeForce 2 GTS cards for close to £300, and the absurdly-priced GeForce 2 Ultra goes for £450 at its peak. EuroGamer is in the process of testing an Ultra just at the moment, and to be blunt, it isn't worth the extra cash on top of a 32Mb GTS. All this brings us to NVIDIA's next big thing, the so-called NV20, which is now known in retail circles as the GeForce 3. The GF3, it has long been thought, would signify a change in pricing, and slip to about £400 - a price some people consider to be the upper echelon of what they are prepared to pay anyway. Well, we have news for you. This morning, x-bit labs, a specialist harware site, revealed more details on the GF3, only a week away now from the 27th February date when the first cards will start making themselves known. Their details include information on the first ASUS card, the V8200, and ELSA's Gladiac 920 (which we hope to review shortly after its release). The specs for the graphics card are as follows:-

Politicians really ought to hire consultants when they are tapping out their policy plans and such - otherwise minor blunders like the astonishingly broad parameters of Monday's "Terrorism Act 2000" slip through relatively unnoticed. Under the new law, people who plant bombs and such remain terrorists, but cybercrime is also to be viewed dimly, with hackers being written into the definition of a terrorist for the first time. If you "seriously disrupt an electronic system" in order to promote "a political, religious or ideological cause" to the government or public, then sorry old chum, you're a terrorist, and that's some very hot water you're in. Of course, such a vague law will be difficult to enforce. In the best case, junior hackers who really are of no danger to anybody could be strung up by their entrails for next to nothing, and in the worst case, the "unfortunate, over-wide draft," as one lawyer put it, could implicate newsgroup readers and Internet Service Providers in cases of terrorism. As reported on The Register, under Section 12 titled "Support", the Act makes it an offense to arrange, manage or assist in arranging a meeting (private or public) in which one of the "terrorist organisations" meets. It seems unlikely that the government really knew what it was doing at the time, and many have questioned just why exactly they didn't consult extensively before passing such an unworkable law. Lawyers, however, are not being so quick to slam, saying that it will be important to see how the first Jurors take it into account. So presumably, the next time a young, freckled scamp is pulled up before the Old Bailey for attempting to change the score on his mocks, we'll know for certain just how far the law stretches.

The original Grandia was released in this country sometime last year on the PlayStation, and it met with a rapturous response from enchanted RPG gamers, who couldn't get enough of it. Of course, owners of Sega's Saturn were utterly distraught by the release. In Japan, the game had been released on the Saturn quite early on, along with other monumentally popular RPGs like Shining Force III and the Saturn's version of Phantasy Star (the online sequel to which Sega are in the process of launching right now), which have never seen translation in any territory outside of Japan. Despite this, the game was still played by many who struggled with shoddily translated texts distributed on the Internet and other guides. It's very hard to play an RPG with quite as much devotion though when every so often you have to hit the next button on Internet Explorer to load up the next page of dialogue. Training yourself not to skip ahead is a challenge unto itself. It's fair to say then, that Dreamcast owners deserve a brilliant sequel to Grandia II, and in our opinion, this is it. However, it is not without flaws, and the flaws are going to make it very difficult for fans of the series that have been lusting after this game for so long to enjoy it. For starters, Grandia II hasn't sold well in Japan. That sets the warning klaxons firing in itself, but upon closer inspection (and certainly for the entire first afternoon of playing it), we had no idea why this could be. The game seemed to precisely what we had hoped for: it features a loveable lead character; it quickly introduces an obvious romantic interest; the dialogue is pretty well founded and occasionally very witty, and the voiceovers while occasionally suffering from incorrect-tone syndrome, are on the whole exceptional. Nonetheless, it dawned on us at about the three-hour mark just why the Japanese hadn't lapped it up.

The record of computer games which have been turned into movies over the last couple of decades has been pretty poor - need we mention the dreaded "Wing Commander"? Or how about "Street Fighter"? The latest video game franchise to come to the big screen is "Tomb Raider", due out this summer, and judging from the trailers we have seen so far it actually looks surprisingly entertaining. But whether or not it manages to break the "film of the game" jinx, it looks like plans to turn it into a movie franchise may have to go on the back burner for a while.

When Westwood released their first real-time strategy game "Dune 2" way back in the mists of time, it helped to shape the genre that we all know and love / loathe (delete as applicable). It also introduced fans of the Dune novels and movie that the game was based on to a new House, "the insidious Ordos", who took their place alongside the familiar Harkonnen and Atreides. Now Westwood are hard at work on their first 3D real-time strategy game, "Emperor : Battle for Dune", and along with the three major Houses from their debut game there will also be several new factions taken from the Dune series.

On Saturday in Tokyo, Mitsubishi Motors held an event called the "CHAMPION'S MEETING with EVOLUTION", to thank their fans for all their support during the recent FIA World Rally Championship. Mitsubishi set up areas all over the paddock where upcoming Sony title Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec was demonstrated to adoring fans. With predictably smooth graphics and startling realism, the game is likely to become one of the most popular PS2 titles of the year, and Sony's first real killer-app. Fans of the game include Tommi Makinen, one of the WRC drivers, who gave producer Kazunori Yamauchi a master class in time trialling. "As was expected, he's completely different. His first trial time is almost as fast as ours, and we had to play forever to get that time," Mr. Yamauchi told Famitsu at the event. Makinen used Mitsubishi Motors Lancer Evolution VI's rally spec for the time trial, a vehicle that will be included in the final version, when it ships next month.

Sony are to present a briefing on Wednesday during which they shall announce their plans for the next fiscal year, including the development of their deal with NTT DoCoMo over their i-mode Internet mobile phones, writes Yahoo. During the briefing (which will be attended by SCE President Ken Kutaragi), the firm will explain the linkup and the rest of its business strategy for this coming business year, which begins at the start of April. Among the topics will be the allocation of PlayStation 2s that the company intends to ship in the next 12 months, a figure many claim will bring the total sold to approximately 20 million. An SCE spokesperson, speaking to Yahoo, confirmed that the company will not be addressing the assembled guests with information about revisions to the PSOne shipping schedule. Although they are eager to become associted with online functionality, Sony's attempts to integrate the PlayStation and its successor with Internet-ready appliations probably shouldn't be viewed in quite the same light as Sega or Microsoft's. Many argued that sega's decision to include a modem with the Dreamcast was ill-advsed because it bound them to the bottom rung of the ladder - Sony want options, and using i-mode phones is just one. Related Feature - Vodafone sign with Sony

I woke up recently and thought "lets run gallons of water into my extremely expensive computer and see what happens". Admittedly it sounds like rather an odd thing to suddenly lust after, but actually, when it comes down to it, it's both quiet and more efficient than regular heatsink and fan cooling setups. Quiet, because it features only the one fan, and more efficient, because… didn't you learn this stuff in school?

AMD's Athlons will be breaking a new barrier in the new future, with the release of the 1.3GHz DDR part. HardOCP had a picture of one last week, with a surprisingly striking purple/blue core, and according to The Register this morning, PC Pro magazine features a Dabs.com advert for the chip, pricing it at £220 with either a 200MHz or 266MHz DDR core. Despite the bold advertising coup, competitors (and consumers) are complaining that the company's AMD processors page lists nothing above the 1.2GHz part, which, at the time of writing, they claim to have an unlucky 13 of in total, priced at £210 plus VAT. Even if the advert may have come as much as a week or more ahead of the official release (and the company's stock), it's an interesting indication of price. With VAT and shipping, customers looking for a 1.3GHz part should expect to pay £260, which is about what a 900MHz part cost three months ago. Technically the KT133 chipset doesn't actually support 200MHz at 13x, so you may ask just what is the point in offering a chip that nobody can use? Well, remember a few days ago we spoke of some 1.2GHz Athlons somehow gaining a few MHz in FSB when upped to 12.5x, apparently for no discernible reason? We fancy this is AMD's way of providing a 1.3GHz core on the KT133 chipset. The other implication here is that some current 1.2GHz chips have 1.3GHz cores, or at least use the same stepping. Related Feature - Overclocking roundup

"Zone of the Enders", or "Z.O.E", as it's known, is set in a post-terraforming era of the Earth's history, when colonists from the little green and blue planet, called "Enders" (good grief -Moral decency Ed), finally get round to spreading themselves over the farthest reaches of the solar system, and for the first time, experience slightly less than plain sailing in the shape of a Martian force in the moons of Jupiter. Of course, instead of giving the player control of an all-out interstellar war, Z.O.E. offers control of a prepubescent munchkin of a child called Leo Stenbuck, who just happens to stumble upon a giant "orbital frame" and who by some bizarre freak of nature is in possession of the precise knowledge required to operate it. It doesn't just stop there, either - the young lad discovers a young lady, occupant of another great robotic construct, and fears the worst, that she has no soul. So in spite of the rather more pressing matter of a cataclysmic, galaxy-threatening conflict which threatens to engulf life as just about everybody knows it in the fires of war, he has to try and remedy young what's-her-name's soul problem. You can tell that the Japanese are going to love this one already, can't you? The thing is, Z.O.E. is merely one half of producer Hideo Kojima's job at Konami too. Remember Metal Gear Solid 2? He's doing that one, as well. And if Z.O.E. wasn't already looking at sales in the hundreds of thousands in the Far East, it will also play host to the first playable demo of, you guessed it, MGS2. Anyway, the general point of this item is to inform you that Z.O.E. isn't simply a proving ground for the demo of said stealth-em-up. And you can finally discover just how and why for yourself, with the somewhat highly anticipated release of the game's opening movie, in Windows Media form. The file can be had from the GIA, and if you think that looks good, we also recommend you take a look at some of the in-game screenshots.

Originally intended to go on shelves this week to tie in with the cinematic release of the hilariously bad Dungeons & Dragons movie here in the UK, European publisher Virgin has announced that the "Baldur's Gate II Premium Pack" will now be out on March 16th instead, along with the long-awaited DVD version of the game and Icewind Dale add-on "Heart of Winter" (not to be mistaken for "Winter's Heart", the latest hefty tome in the Wheel of Time saga).