Latest Articles (Page 3578)

Self-proclaimed "first Gaming Internet Service Provider" NetGames UK, based in exotic Bournemouth, has announced that it will be rolling out a pay-per-play gaming service within the next eight weeks. This new system won't be available in the UK though, it is being set up on the other side of the pond. Details are thin on the ground at this stage, but the company will be opening a new office in Washington DC and recruiting 25 staff to "manage and develop the on-line gaming community" for their new American service.

Windows Codename Whistler is to be known as "Windows XP," and Office 10 is to be known as "Office XP" according to a press release issued yesterday by Microsoft. "The XP name is short for 'experience,' symbolizing the rich and extended user experiences Windows and Office can offer by embracing Web services that span a broad range of devices." "Windows XP and Office XP are important steps toward the Microsoft .NET vision of empowering customers to move beyond disconnected applications, services and devices to complete, connected computing experiences that redefine the relationship between people, software and the Internet." According to CNet, Microsoft will continue to use years to differentiate the names of products within its packages, such as Word 2002 and Excel 2002. You can read the whole announcement here.

Fans of NVIDIA's line of graphics cards can finally say hello to a new official release of the company's drivers, described as the "Detonator 3s," version 6.50 for Windows 9x, Windows 2000 and NT. The official website includes several download locations for the drivers, and after using them for a couple of days, we can confirm that they seem perfectly stable. If you own anything from a TNT2 to a GeForce 2 Ultra, upgrading to these reference drivers could well improve your performance and is worth considering. These drivers (and many versions succeeding them) have been available through the usual channels for some weeks now. It's still not really understood why NVIDIA leaks many of its drivers into public channels, as it is incredibly confusing to the average punter, but on the whole if you stick with the official releases you can't go wrong. With the NV20 only a matter of weeks away, we can expect another release very shortly to boot. Meanwhile, this news comes amidst rumours that NVIDIA will only support 3dfx cards up until the end of March or thereabouts. Drivers are already hard to locate, what with the official 3dfx site going up and down like a yo-yo, but if you own a 3dfx card and need to get hold of some, 3dfxgamers.com has quite a substantial list, and x3dfx.com also has the more popular ones. Related Feature - 3dfx calls it quits

Koch Distribution have announced that they will be publishing "Europa Universalis" in the UK, with the game due for release on March 2nd. Developed by Paradox, the Swedish company behind last year's novel flight combat game "Airfix Dogfighter", Europa is based on the top selling board game of the same name. It certainly looks impressive in scope, offering you the chance to lead any of a dozen European nations from England to Turkey and Sweden to Venice, with over seven hundred provinces across the continent to conquer and a wide range of historical missions to dig your teeth into. There will also be multiplayer support for up to eight people to play together over the internet or a LAN, with diplomacy, economics, warfare and exploration all playing their part.

German publisher CDV has released a free mini mission pack for their hit real-time strategy game "Sudden Strike", which you can grab from FilePlanet. Weighing in at just 322Kb, the free downloadable add-on features five new missions for the game to give you a taste of what you can expect from the forthcoming official Expansion Pack, which is due out in May.

Empire have today announced that they are planning to launch a brand new puzzle game on the PlayStation 2, named Kuri Kuri Mix. Mix is a unique, fast-paced, platform puzzler in which you control two cute little characters called Chestnut and Cream, who are on a mission to find the moon. Please bear with us. The game, despite the slightly disturbing back-story actually sounds fairly ingenious. In the single player mode you simultaneously control C & C using both analogue sticks in conjunction with one another, helping you to overcome various obstacles and puzzles. The example given in the press release is of a makeshift cartoon catapult using a tree, where Cream pins the tree down, allowing Chestnut to load it with the necessary projectile. Mix will also offer a multiplayer mode for two or four players (by way of two players sharing a controller), who will each control one character (more are to be announced, obviously), and will have to work with one another to overcome puzzles, against the clock. There will be plenty of pitfalls along the way and time penalties for standing still. Although only Chestnut and Cream will be accessible at first, eight other characters will be included along the way, with ten cartoon-like worlds in total including Jungle and Water worlds. The idea seems to be to catch both the adult and youngun markets in one fell swoop, with cute, cuddly characters for the littluns and multiplayer mayhem for the adults. Either way, from this writer's perspective, it's a "Disney's Chipmunks" simulation, and that's good enough to pick up on my nostalgia. Related Feature - Kuri Kuri Mix Screenshots

A small Florida-based holding company called Xbox Technologies has revealed that it trademarked the word "Xbox" back in March 1999, before the next gen console was anything more than a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye, and after failed negotations with Microsoft the company is now threatening to go to court. According to a report from the Financial Times, Xbox Technologies "plans to use [Xbox] as an umbrella name for its software companies as well as a name for specific software products", and they were obviously not very happy when Microsoft chose Xbox as the name of their next generation console.

The last few years have seen the age of the console exclusive game fading fast. Sega are bringing their games to other systems following the demise of the Dreamcast, and PlayStation poster boy "Metal Gear Solid" has already been released on PC, with an Xbox sequel to follow. Other console franchises like "Dino Crisis", "Resident Evil" and "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" have also come to the PC in recent years, while games originally designed for the big beige box such as "Quake 3 Arena", "Unreal Tournament" and "Half-Life" are heading the other way, appearing on Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, with Xbox versions likely to follow.

The first thing you notice in Gigawing 2 is just how gorgeous Takumi have managed to make the game. Everything is polygonal, with smoothly flowing backgrounds and sumptuous texturing. The rich colours glow warmly, rather like the sky in summer, and there is a definite sense of gloss resting on everything. Compared to the original Gigawing, it's a work of art. It's still a vertical shooter, but it's definitely the most beautiful I have ever witnessed, far more so than Cannon Spike its ilk. The single player game is over fairly quickly, but it's damnably good fun while it lasts. The camerawork changes tack fairly regularly, letting you zoom in and out of the screen, up and under and all over the place. The game fundamentally still remains a 2D shoot 'em up, but it adopts a 3D guise, similar in a way to the platform sections of the Crash Bandicoot games. It's definitely a lot more enjoyable than it would have been, because of it. Another part of the Naomi setup that Takumi have taken advantage of is the opportunities for musical accompaniment. The game is fully orchestrated, one of the first shooters I can recall being so. And by orchestrated I don't mean that the keyboards were synced to a drum beat or anything absurd like that - it's a very definite musical score, with twists and turns remarking your progress. You can expect choral chants amongst other things - I hope to the high heavens they don't deem this too "Japanesey" for the West, but it really makes the game in its current state.

I have always been a big fan of the 2-dimensional fighting game, from as far back as the original "Street Fighter" and "Mortal Kombat" days. Even on the old 8-bit home computer systems, titles like "Way of the Exploding Fist" and "International Karate" were top of my favourites list. Of course the big heavyweights in recent arcade times have been Capcom and SNK, with their own sets of ardent fans constantly comparing and dismissing the other in a strange battle of 2D fighting wits!

The console war is once again hotting up, with Sega dropping out of the market while Microsoft and Nintendo prepare for an European show-down with current champions Sony some time next year. But which of them is going to come out on top at the end of the day? As part of his newly launched website "Ian Livingstone's Games Room", the chairman of top British publisher Eidos has posted his own thoughts on the matter.

Since its introduction in the mid-90s, Intel's P6 core micro architecture has gone from strength to strength. The initial chip to feature this new design was the Pentium Pro, a chip that most will remember as being the first to integrate the L2 (Level 2) cache with the rest of the chip package, making it extremely expensive. Another benefit of the architecture was its performance running 32bit software. At the time most chips utilised an internal 32bit architecture but only featured a 16bit external data bus. The Pentium Pro extended this to the full 32bits making it far more efficient and significantly faster when executing this type of code. The one drawback to all this performance was the simple fact that very little software took advantage of 32bit processing, and while Windows NT did make extensive use of the Pentium Pro's capabilities the mainstream OS, Windows 95, did not. Combined with the cost issue this meant that the Pentium Pro never became a mainstream processor. And so due to poor 16bit software performance (an issue that was finally becoming less and less important) and high costs the Pentium II was created, still featuring the core elements of the Pentium Pro's P6 architecture, and even with the later arrival of the Pentium III, the core was still based on the original P6. For many years now it has served us well, but never one to stand still, Intel have innovated and designed a new core which forms the heart of the Pentium 4.

"Warcraft III" has undergone a lot of changes since it was first announced at the ECTS '99 trade show in London sixteen months ago, and today new details of the game were released by Blizzard, including a new name - "Warcraft III : Reign of Chaos™". Confirmation also came that the six playable races originally planned have now been reduced to just four, with the demonic "Burning Legion" that figured prominently in the game's first presentation being relegated to a non-playable race which will pop up throughout the single player game to further the storyline.

With the arrival of our review copy from Codemasters comes word that their aptly titled fantasy action game "Severance : Blade of Darkness" is due for release on February 23rd. That's severance as in "severance of limbs" not "severance payments", and for the benefit of the American audience the game will simply be known as "Blade of Darkness" on the other side of the pond. No doubt to avoid confusing the poor lawyer-obsessed parents who might accidentally buy a copy of the game for little Johnny thinking that it's some sort of interactive board room drama, despite the big 18+ sticker and axe-wielding maniacs clearly visible on the front of the box. "Won't somebody think of the children?"

Friday is traditionally the day when new games are released here in the UK, and this week topping the bill are two games which have taken their own good time to reach our god-forsaken shores. First person shooter "Delta Force : Land Warrior" and giant robot fest "Mechwarrior 4 : Vengeance" have both been available in the USA for some time now, but have finally shown up in British stores today. Meanwhile Virgin Interactive have released both "Heist" and the wacky mob-and-mozzarella laden strategy game "Pizza Connection 2", for those of you looking for something a little different.

Eidos have updated their British release schedule, with a number of titles moving. The highly promising sci-fi role-playing game "Anachronox" has slipped yet again, this time to May, while Core's new third person action-adventure game "Project Eden" is confirmed for June on both PC and PlayStation 2. Other movers include strategy game "Startopia" and eagerly anticipated tactical action sequel "Commandos 2", both now expected some time in June. Finally "Three Kingdoms : Fate Of The Dragon" moves from a vague "first quarter" release to a rather more solid March 16th. For all the latest release information direct from the publishers, check EuroGamer's comprehensive UK release date list.

What's the biggest selling PC game of all time? Could it be "Red Alert", or maybe "Doom"? Perhaps even "Tomb Raider" or (god forbid) "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"? Not even close. The answer is actually "Myst", the early CD-Rom adventure game which has gone on to sell over four million copies worldwide, although to be fair it probably falls into the same category as Stephen Hawking's best-selling book "A Brief History Of Time" - everyone has a copy, but most people didn't get past the first chapter...

If you thought you'd seen it all, you were wrong. Hardware fansite HardOCP has picked up on the meddlings of one of its forum regulars, a chap calling himself "awesomedude". Fair enough. Anyway, this young man has decided that he wants an all-in-one PC and Dreamcast, and to this end, has built the Dreamcast's internals into his PC case. And I don't mean simply super-gluing the console to the top either. Front mounted joypad ports, built in DC-to-VGA converter... it's a mod and a half. Take a look at the forum posting here. There are more pictures on the second page, also.

Gameplay, the mail order company turned e-commerce barons have today axed a further 275 jobs from their high street arm, and cut back severely on their international operations. They have also consolidated both their London and Leeds offices by combining various functions into the same space. The move comes as something of a shock, as Gameplay only recently branched out into the high street, with a couple of original stores (including one in Kingston and another in Glasgow) along with the acquisition and conversion of The Dixons Group's @jakarta shops into its own. The cost-cutting measures will apparently result in a saving of some £12.5m annually across the board, and should help get Gameplay out of the muddy waters they have presently found themselves in. It is also believed that even more jobs are to go, after a secret 10am meeting of the various staff at Gameplay's London HQ. The company is believed to be making sweeping changes to its internal structure and almost certainly cutting back on those areas that outsiders suggest are losing it money; Wireplay for instance. Gameplay chairman Mark Strachan described this morning's early announcement as a "broad and decisive restructuring of the business" before explaining to everyone who would listen that he just wants to make some money, for crying out loud. No announcement has been made about further losses this lunchtime, but the news is expected to break through the usual channels within a matter of hours. We'll keep you posted. As will no doubt have occurred to you by now, this is just one of several high-profile cutbacks across the industry that we have reported on in the last week. Sega have restructured on a grand scale, culling jobs at its European HQ, Codemasters axed 90 positions yesterday afternoon, and other gaming-related companies have also announced poor results and potential redundancies; in Barrysworld's case it even stretched to the realms of voluntary liquidation. Update: At the time of writing (11:15am), the outside world's connection to Wireplay's game servers has allegedly been turned off. The internal staff netfeed has also been severed. This is believed to be in an effort to prevent reporters easily contacting staff or vice versa, but it doesn't bode well. The entire London staff has allegedly been sent home for the day, and more job losses are still expected. Related Feature - Codemasters axes 90 jobs

Back in 1999 id Software intended "Quake III : Arena" to be the definitive deathmatch first person shooter, and although the game largely succeeded at what it set out to do, many gamers were looking for something a little more than straightforward toe-to-toe fragging. Enter "Quake III : Team Arena", an extravagant new add-on pack from id which is designed to do for teamplay what Quake III did for deathmatch, while giving the game a much needed overhaul.

Codemasters are a popular company. Their last few games, with the possible exception of "Insane" have all been top performers for their respective genres. And yet, as with so many tech companies, this last financial year has been a troubling one. Many blame the state of the market at the moment. As such, the company has announced to its staff that as many as 90 employees will be liberated from their positions within Codemasters, including the entire London development studio staff, who have been asked either to moves to the Midlands or face redundancy. The survival of the game they were working on, believed to be a next-generation Cannon Fodder title, has been secured. Indeed, no projects ongoing within the company should be terminated, but the redundancies may lead to delays. The official press release can be read here. Codemasters Chairman Jim Darling commented that it was "distressing to lose such talented and loyal personnel," but that "By doing this now we ensure that Codemasters is well positioned to continue its proud tradition of creating and publishing some of the best games in the world thus giving the company an enormous opportunity as the market moves into its expansion phase." Related Feature - Insane Review

Industry journal MCV has reported this morning that Sega intends to lay off a portion of the staff working in its European HQ. Dreamcast hardware production is set to end on March 31st the world over, and as such a number of positions are having to be axed. Although the company was eager to play down this morning's announcement, it was quite inevitable at the outset that there would be losses - the business strategy changes undergone at Sega equate to the requirement of an entirely different staff. Details of who and how many jobs have been lost are scant, but MCV is claiming that the entire third party division, including the tech-support team, translators and other staff have been given P45s with their morning coffee. An official statement from the company was issued as follows: "Earlier today Sega Europe announced a restructuring of its business to enable us to go forward to an exciting future with a focus on software. This has lead to a number of job losses which are to be regretted. However, Sega Europe is now leaner and fitter and ready for the challenges ahead." Related Feature - Sega to become platform-neutral, Team up with Palm

Just a couple of days ago we reported that EA had confirmed the release date for the eagerly anticipated "Black & White" as March 30th. Now things are not so sure, as Jamie Durrant of developer Lionhead insists that the game is still on course for release in late February or early March. "I've just had a word with our man at EA, and he has told me that the date of 30th March is the latest date that the game will be released by. We are all working very hard to get the game to you before that date."

, the self-proclaimed "first Gaming Internet Service Provider" (which is about on a par with everyone's favourite "WuRldS 1st InTerneT GaMinG P0rt4L!") have announced that their new unmetered service will officially go live tomorrow after "a long beta-period and delays for last minute changes". They are limiting the service to just 2500 users to start with, hoping to avoid the overcrowding problems which have plagued other unmetered ISPs, causing slow-downs, outages and engaged tones for frustrated users.

Having contributed to the decline of the Dreamcast by refusing to develop any titles for the console, publishing behemoth Electronic Arts have now decided to react to the news of Sega's refocusing on software development by pointing and laughing. Answering a question about how hard it would be for Sega to adapt to developing games for other platforms, John Riccitiello, EA's President and CEO, is reported by Reuters as saying that "It's not quite as though this is GM saying we'll make BMWs, but it's the same kind of proposition. They may look like BMWs, but I doubt if they'll drive like BMWs."

The Vipers of which the game speaks are actually a bunch of kids, who have for some reason taken to wearing astonishingly bright and colourful armour for no apparent reason. They also have a few bones to pick with a chap called "BM," whose back garden their ball presumably landed in. He's fairly hacked off with them as well, and wants to make them inmates in his shiny new island prison complex. Perhaps it loses something in the translation, but hey, beat 'em ups aren't renowned for their awe-inspiring back stories. First up on the list of improvements (we ran the game next to a Saturn running the original Jap CD), is the framerate. A super-smooth 60FPS is wonderful, and adds enough gloss under its own steam to offer an improvement. The graphics have been spruced up in places, noticeably so on the characters, but they still look blooming awful, with their exceedingly bright Tupperware armour and snakeskin costumes. This is one of Viper's biggest problems; it wasn't actually that incredible a game to start with. The point was that with three years to play around in, and vastly more impressive hardware, everyone had expected great things.

Over the last few years a number of courses in game design have popped up at various universities across Europe, and now publisher CDV is taking the obvious next step by offering scholarships to German students wanting to study level design at the Games Academy in Berlin. "We have to fight a battle due to the huge lack of new talent in our business", according to CDV founder and CEO Wolfgang Gaebler. "By endowing this scholarship we want to give new talent a chance to pursue a highly qualified degree as Game Level Designers."

Unless you're connected with the technical know-it-alls of this world, the chances are the following will seem rather confusing and highly illogical to you, but nonetheless, it accurately describes a real life situation brought about the almost-conspiratorial foolishness of two companies; Microsoft and VIA. Allow me, gentle reader, to explain. When Microsoft built Windows 2000 and Windows Millenium, ATA 100 was a bit of a myth, and the only controller cards you could get for it were rather poor, so as a failsafe measure, they didn't build proper support for it into the operating system, leaving it instead to the ATA 100 chipset manufacturer to come up with the goods. This, they thought, would help prevent them getting into trouble. The fact that it's taken a year for people to stand up and take notice kind of proves their point, and Whistler will no doubt make up for this purposeful oversight. Anyway, it's about a year on, and ATA 100 is all the rage. Its benefits are as debatable as ever, but in an effort to fit one more buzzword feature onto their motherboard setups, ABit, ASUS and co. have included native ATA 66/100 support, safe in the knowledge that VIA's motherboard drivers (those crazy "4-in-1" things they insist you install along with the rest of it) will understand and interpret the higher transfer rates for the operating system. Won't they, VIA? Hello? The point of course is that no, they don't. Even the latest official release of the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (4.25a) doesn't do the job, sticking all of your hard-drives into the vastly inferior PIO mode only, and ignoring any changes you try to make to that setting. Of course, those amongst us that care about such things as the speed of our hard-drives simply will not have this. We will fight them on the beaches, in the swamps, on our desktops and at our command prompts to overcome such an atrocity. And to this end, VIA Hardware.com, a similarly-minded group of fellows, have ferreted out a beta version of the VIA IDE Busmaster driver, in other words, the piece of software that tells your hard-drives and other devices what to do. A beta version it may be, but we've experienced no problems with it. If you download and install this, a little system tray program which you run on startup keeps an eye on what your drives are doing and enables you to tinker with their performance settings to no end! In my case, the performance of my machine under Windows 2000 improved almost as much as it did when I last upgraded my processor - something just about everyone with a new Athlon or Duron system and Windows 2000/Me will want to get their hands on.

Auran, whose Tactics Engine powered the hit real-time strategy game "Dark Reign", have released a second beta version of their latest project - a 3D accelerated "next generation game architecture" called Auran Jet. As with the first public beta, you can download the latest version from the Auran Jet website, and non-commercial use of the engine is completely free.

"We will be withdrawing from the ordinary gaming business that consider game console as a main," says this morning's latest statement from Sega. The company has admitted to be developing three games for the GameBoy Advance, "Chu Chu Rocket!", "Puyo Puyo Summer 2001," and "Sonic the Hedgehog Advance," expected in March, Summer and Autumn respectively. On the PlayStation 2 it has announced five new titles; "Virtua Fighter 4," two sports simulations of unconfirmed titles (Sega Worldwide Soccer is a possibility), and "Sakura War Series," a huge hit already. Elsewhere, "Space Channel 5" will return, as we said yesterday. Related Feature - Sega to become platform-neutral