Latest Articles (Page 3593)

The developers of last year's tank action game Recoil have now taken to the air with Crimson Skies, a game that promises to bring the thrills of aerial dogfights to your PC. To this end, the game is set not in the present day, where jet fighters battle with missiles over huge distances, but instead FASA's "Crimson Skies" universe, where propeller aircraft rule the skies and combat is up close and personal.

For the last few weeks veteran Britsoft developers the Bitmap Brothers have been racking their brains, trying to come up with a new title for their 3D real-time strategy sequel "Z2". And now all that pondering is over, with the new title confirmed as "Z : Steel Soldiers". Due for release through new British publisher Eon Digital in the spring of 2001, the sequel moves the action 500 years further into the future and features a brand new 3D engine to replace the 2D sprites of the original. The Bitmap Brothers are describing the game as "arcade strategy", with the focus on fast-paced action and capturing terrain for strategic and resource gathering purposes. Hopefully we should have a clearer idea of exactly what they're up to soon... In the meantime, read the press release to find out more.

British publisher Midas have announced that, having scooped the European development and distribution rights to Japanese PlayStation 2 hit "Dynasty Warriors 2", they will also now be publishing "Robot Warlords" on this side of the pond. Developed by another Japanese company, DAZZ, Robot Warlords is a strategic mecha combat game which sees you controlling a force of giant robots trying to prevent a coup d'etat in modern Tokyo. With customisable mechas, a fully spinny-rotatey™ 3D graphics engine and a colourful rendition of Tokyo city for you to stomp around in causing mayhem, it looks like it could be another interesting PS2 game from Midas to give us a welcome breather from the endless succession of beat 'em ups, motor racing games and sports sims... For the full scoop, read the press release.

Earlier today we reported that Raven's Brian Pelletier had revealed that one of the main reasons why the company's first person shooter "Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force" was a little on the short side was because of limitations of the Quake III engine. At the time we said that "we will have to wait to see whether the other games due for release over the next year which use the engine will suffer the same fate", but now it looks as though oddball third person action game "American McGee's Alice" is having the same problems.

The relationship between the movie and gaming industries has got closer and closer recently, with most hit movies (and a fair few flops as well) spawning tie-in computer games, and several computer games being turned into movies. Generally the result has been disappointing though. The only good movie tie-in games we can think of that have been released recently are "Goldeneye" and "Heavy Metal : FAKK2", while movies of computer games include such forgettable tripe as "Street Fighter", "Mortal Kombat" and "Super Mario Brothers". Other projects have simply vanished without a trace - the "Titan AE" computer game was cancelled after the movie flopped in America, and plans to turn "Doom" and "Duke Nukem" into movies have apparently long since fallen by the wayside.

One of the few widespread criticisms of Raven's recently released first person shooter "Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force" was that the single player game was a little on the short side. Now project leader Brian Pelletier has revealed one of the reasons why the game was shorter than they had originally expected...

Details on id Software's new Doom game are still scant, and we've heard almost nothing about the game since its sensational announcement in frankly bizarre circumstances on June 1st. In fact, John Carmack hasn't updated his .plan (a mixture of diary and work log) since that day. But thanks to a message board post from Jim Dosé, one of the company's new programmers, we now have some idea of what's going on in the early stages of the game's development.

Human Head's third person viking action game "Rune" hasn't even been released in Europe yet, but already the first patch (4Mb) for the full version of the game has been released. Amongst the changes are updated Glide drivers as well as fixes to problems with the inventory, "infinite edge grabbing" in multiplayer, and getting eaten by danglers turning you into the invisible man. One of the mission scripting bugs has also been solved, but at least one more is still at large, and can apparently prevent you from completing the game in easy mode. Still, this patch appears to kill nine out of ten bugs dead and will only take a minute to download, so make sure to grab it as soon as you buy the game.

Despite the PlayStation 2 now being firmly engraved in the minds of the media thanks to all the buzz surrounding its launch, shortages, and the recent eBay bidding for up to several thousand dollars per unit, reaction from gamers seems to be surprisingly hard to find. The best we've found around the web seems to be GameCenter's selective developer soundbites from the likes of Trip Hawkins and Todd Vaughn, all anxious to tow the company line no doubt. So the question is, just what do people actually think of the PlayStation 2 in America? In an effort to find out, I contacted all of my various friends in different corners of the US and discovered that six of them had managed to get hold of a PS2. When asked what games they all bought with the console some of them were a little reluctant to admit atrocities like Madden NFL, but SSX, Unreal Tournament and (a staff favourite here) Smuggler's Run all proved hits. Another popular title is Ready 2 Rumble Boxing 2, which seems to have impressed universally. Todd Graham, from California, commented that he felt the console was "rather too chic for a kiddie's toy" and that the vertical stand position was "perfect for my bookshelf next to the TV". When asked about the more practical aspects of the console, its DVD playback, the controller and other issues, he claimed that "I would never watch a DVD using that console, I have a full A/V media system for that". Each to their own I suppose, but his pal Jason Bradley also from California pointed out that "the DVD playback is rather upsettingly jumpy at times, particularly with films like The Matrix. Moreover," he said, "my old third party PlayStation joypad has been giving me a bit of trouble, with unresponsive buttons and such, whereas the official PSX pads are fine". That, of course, is another thing; what do people think of the console's backwards compatibility with the PSX? Brad Hernshaw from Texas was next. "I've got in the region of 50 PlayStation games; although some are obviously gathering dust by now, so the backwards compatibility was very important to me. I sold my PSX without even questioning the possibility that there would be limitations and now I'm paying the price." According to Brad, several of his oldest purchases are giving him trouble. This doesn't come as a complete surprise though; as early as February of this year prior to the Japanese launch Sony were admitting that there were inherant problems with games "not written to Sony standards" (quote from Kenichi Fukunaga, SCE's director), or to give a more detailed explanation, games that bypassed the PlayStation's APIs and wrote direct to the hardware, a technique which will produce problems for users of the PS2 as the games simply won't know what to do with its graphics engine. That wasn't Brad's only problem. According to his wife, Mary, Brad has spent more time playing Zelda : Majora's Mask on his N64 and MSR on the Dreamcast since he bought the PS2 than before! When quizzed about this, Brad commented that "the first batch of games [for the PlayStation 2] have been varied, but not necessarily brilliant. I'm waiting for some of the truly exceptional titles before I drag myself away from classics like these." One gamer who thought the backwards compatibility was useful was John Banks from Minnesota. John's long been a fan of Gran Turismo and its sequel, and thought he'd give them a go on his new unit. "After fiddling around for a few minutes with the system's options menus I discovered stuff relating to the original PlayStation, and was delighted to find that you can adjust Disc Speed and turn Texture Smoothing on. The former is supposed to affect load times, and does, although GT2 still takes an age, whereas the latter smooths off the graphics and gives everything a slightly nicer tinge. All my PlayStation games look like I imagine them when I close my eyes again - why couldn't the PlayStation do this in the first place?" Well quite. So what's the general reaction? Well the concensus is that the games are varied but not quite as good as we'd hoped, whereas the DVD playback is functional rather than impressive. As for the backwards compatibility, assuming you don't have too many games which fall into the grey spot of incompatibility, you should be fine and more than impressed with the results. Roll on November 24th when we'll actually get to sample this for ourselves!

Eidos are celebrating today after winning two BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards. Popular first person role-playing game "Deus Ex" walked away with the "PC Game Of The Year" trophy. Although the game has had limited success in the USA despite rave reviews, here in Europe the game topped the charts and gave troubled developer Ion Storm its first real hit after triple-A duds "Dominion" and "Daikatana". Meanwhile the official Olympics sim "Sydney 2000" won the "Sports Game Of The Year" award.

Pro Pool is a very good pool game. It's about as complete and satisfying an interpretation as the GameBoy Color could hope to offer. Viewed from overhead, the idea is obviously to pot the balls in a specific order. The first disappointment here is that unless you actually know how to play pool in real life, the first few minutes will be spent guessing which ball is next in the sequence. There are no numerals on the balls to illustrate the order, and there are no actual indicators anywhere onscreen. Thankfully playing a shot is a lot simpler. You position your cue, and then you draw a dotted line from the position of your cue toward the ball you wish to hit. The length of the line is what determines the speed at which the cue ball moves. Although simplistic, thanks to the precise physics, this approach is just as useful as anything high-end PC simulations can offer. The physics are a true achievement; they mimic real life so thoroughly. If you play a ball against a cushion, it rebounds exactly as you'd expect, and it's clear a lot of tweaking has gone in to finely tuning this. Similarly, if you add any sort of spin to the ball, the results are as you would expect.

3dfx have today announced a bizarre tie-in with UCI cinemas, which will see anybody buying a Voodoo 4 or Voodoo 5 graphics card from certain stores before November 20th receiving at least six "two for one" vouchers. These will allow them to get in free to see any movie at 38 UCI cinemas across the UK, as long as they are accompanied by a paying adult.

ADSL in this country has hardly been a rollercoaster, and if it has it's been a really badly designed rollercoaster with stupidly long, flat sections and near vertical slopes to overcome. BT have screwed it up, claiming first that the network infrastructure was insufficient to support the technology, before giving up on that one and deciding to propose that actually it was a lack of eager triallists that was to blame for the delays. With all this out of the way and BT reprimanded by the frequently offbeat industry watchdog Oftel, the only thing that stands between the average punter and ADSL is the conversion of the local BT exchange, a process that is taking place up and down the land.

We all recognize "DDR" as "Double Data Rate". It's an abbrieviation that was batted around with gay abandon quite a lot in the months preceeding the release of NVIDIA's GeForce DDR last year, and now it's the sort of phrase that even Joe Public picks up on. At least, that's what AMD are hoping, as with their new 760 motherboard chipset, they're taking the emphasis away from the processing and steadying its targets on memory performance, by introducing support for DDR RAM, in other words, memory capable of bus speeds of up to 266MHz. The two types of memory supported are PC1600 and PC2100, although obviously this value refers to peak bandwidth rather than clock speed. Essentially it's 100MHz and 133MHz memory, the first capable of 1600Mb/s and the second 2100Mb/s. Because AMD's chipset is capable of sending data on the rising and falling edge of the clock signal, it runs at 200MHz and 266MHz. Be aware though that only the very, very latest Athlons (AMD will be releasing newer versions of its TBird processors to support the change) support the 266MHz bus. Thankfully the 760 chipset also supports 200MHz for older TBirds. Other features that the 760 chipset boasts include capacity for up to 4Gb of memory. While absurd for most desktops, when the SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing, in other words multiple CPUs) becomes available on the 760 chipset with later boards, it will become viable for server systems and this 4Gb capacity will become very important. Elsewhere, there's native support for 4x AGP, which affords ludicrous bandwidth to the graphics card sitting in the AGP slot, as well as ATA-100 hard-disk support, which bring it into line with the latest from rival chipset makers Intel and VIA. So where does that leave the 760? As the most advanced home PC platform currently available, we'd say. But just how much of a performance benefit does this DDR memory support offer? Looking at the results The Tech Report are pulling, it can safely be said quite a bit. Even games like Quake 3 are benefiting from the extra data throughput. Their conclusion? The 760 when coupled with PC2100 DDR RAM and a 1.2GHz Athlon will be a definite challenger to Intel's P4 1.5GHz. With a 1.33GHz chip in the offing and other increases proposed, Intel will have a difficult time of it this Christmas. We'll attempt to bring you a 760 board analysis of our own as soon as they become widely available. You can read AMD's official press release on the topic here.

Funcom, who are best known for their stunning adventure game "The Longest Journey" and the forthcoming massively multiplayer sci-fi role-playing game "Anarchy Online", have just launched the website for their latest project - "No Escape". Due by the end of the year (in Scandinavia and the USA at least), it's an off-the-wall online action game in which up to eight players battle it out across a series of 18 planets for the no-holds-barred TV show "No Escape". Contestants include an Italian secret agent, a psychopathic robot called Barry, a Western gun-slinger, and a militant rock singer called .. wait for it .. Bratney.

Quake 3 - popular Team Fortress clone Q3Fortress has reached beta 1F

Until recently the CPL was best known for its big Quake tournaments, including the $100,000 Razer-CPL event held in Dallas six months ago. Now they are branching out though, with the popular Half-Life mod "Counter-Strike" becoming a staple of CPL events, and a recently announced "Midtown Madness 2" tournament in the USA marking the CPL's first real break-out from the first person shooter genre. According to CPL founder Angel Munoz, this is an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, and to extend the idea of professional gaming to include amateur players as well.

While many publishers and developers have discussed the idea of episodic gaming, selling games one episode at a time over a period of weeks or months rather than producing a single large game, very few have put their money where their mouths are so far. One of the exceptions is Digital Tome, whose role-playing game "Siege of Avalon" was one of the first episodic games to be released entirely over the internet. This process wasn't without its worries though...

Mixing elements from action games, future sports and flight sims, Daydream Software's "Clusterball" is certainly rather different from your run of the mill online role-playing games and first person shooters. Intended to be resistent to the effects of lag while still offering fast-paced gameplay, the basic version of the game can be downloaded and played for free, with several additional maps (known as venues) available for purchase.

In "2001 : A Space Odyssey", Arthur C Clarke described a vision of a glorious future for mankind in which space travel was commonplace and we had permanent bases on the moon, could send men to Jupiter, and had developed an artificial intelligence all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

AMD's double whammy of the budget Duron and performance Thunderbird seems to have caught out Intel, with the computer giant's range of processors in most cases hopelessly overpriced compared to the equivalent AMD chips. Now Intel is fighting back, with massive price cuts planned for their entire product range, all the way from the lowly Pentium III 650 to the over-powered 1.5Ghz Pentium 4. Of course, the Pentium 4 hasn't even been released yet, but that hasn't stopped Intel from cutting its intended prices for the new chips by more than $250 over the last few months.

Our more .. mature readers may recall the old ZX Spectrum with fond memories, right down to its massive 16k of memory (later upgraded to 128k!), its gorgeous 8 colour graphics, and that dodgy black rubber keyboard. Now the twenty year old home computer is apparently back from beyond the grave, resurrected in the form of a budget console system. The offending item was spotted by the folks from British computing site The Register at Springfields, which they describe as a "giant Poundstretcher style warehouse of crap" in Wolverhampton.

Another month, another Capcom beat-em-up. Anyone would think the buying public would be getting sick of the damn things. Over the last few months we've seen the progression of the Marvel vs. Capcom and Street Fighter lines, and even an updated version of Star Gladiator for crying out loud. A cursory glance at Capcom's back catalogue shows titles such as Rival Schools, Pocket Fighter and many more. One wonders how they can get away with it. The simple answer, as I'm sure you know by now, is that Capcom are great at what they do. With Street Fighter, they brought the genre to the forefront of arcade gaming. Over the years they've refined, redefined and added to the fighting game repertoire in a way Rare and Nintendo rejuvenated the platform game with Super Mario 64, and EA the sports game. For me, the fruit of all this effort is Power Stone 2. Original, quirky and devilishly fun, Power Stone 2 takes the traditional fighter, turns it on its head, and is a great game for it. If you play this, your judgement of fighters could be changed too. Of course, if you've never played the game, you'll be wondering what the hell I'm babbling about. I'd better start explaining. The story behind the game is as follows. It's the 19th century, and a group of adventurers are searching for the mystical, elusive Power Stones; gems of great magical power that can make any wish come true. One day, dark clouds form in the sky, and a huge hovering fortress emerges from the mists, its shadow darkening the whole world. The nefarious Dr. Erode resides within, and his collection of captured power stones. Nobody knows what he plans to use them for, but each one of the adventurers feels they must embark on a journey to his castle to retrieve the power stones, each for their own personal motive.

It's grim up north. It's grim down south for that matter as well (too bloody right, it's chucking it down at the moment -Ed). So if you're unfortunate enough to live here in the UK and want something to keep yourself off the rain-swept streets for the next 48 hours, these might just do the trick... For action and horror fans the demo of "Resident Evil 3 : Nemesis" (71Mb) is now available, giving a taste of the PC version of the hit console game, which stars the delectable heroine Jill Valentine.

Although the engines that powered Unreal and Unreal Tournament were designed by Epic, not all of the content seen in the games was produced in-house. Now the talented folks at Unreal co-developers Digital Extremes are hard at work on their own game using the latest version of Epic's engine - an ambitious online first person shooter called "Dark Sector", which looks set to make a refreshing change from the fantasy worlds and one-click combat of most massively multiplayer titles.

I do. I want to "be" a millionaire. I want a massive house, 17 cars, an endless supply of Smirnoff Ice, and more young ladies clamouring for a place in my will than I could possibly dream of. And the only realistic way I can attain that kind of status is through a television game show that has ensnared millions of ITV audience members like the mindless cattle that they are. But enough daydreaming about possessing untold riches (and trust me, as a writer I have to dream about money a lot), let's get on to the game where oodles of beautiful virtual cash awaits us, shall we? You should know what this game is all about by now, but for the benefit of those of you just resurrected from the dead I'll go over it for you, pointing out the video game additions as I go. A contestant enters their name and is promptly presented with their first multiple-choice question of 15, with no real messing about - Tarrant's occasionally frustrating natter is kept to a pleasant minimum, and you don't even have to look at his face. The musical score is right on par as well, and if you've ever seen the TV show you'll feel right at home as the tense ambience is recreated faithfully. As you progress past your first question, the amount of money you earn increments gradually with each successful answer until you reach your fifth, which is a kind of checkpoint. This means that whatever happens, you can leave with a minimum of £1000. This happens only once more when you win £32,000, at which point you have to either gamble big money on questions, or tap the "walk" button in order to leave with whatever amount of cash you've gained. It's around about the £1000 stage that the questions become noticeably more difficult, and the use of your lifelines come into play in order to aid you progression into double-figure sums. You have three of these lifelines at your disposal - 50:50, Phone A Friend and Ask The Audience.

A lot of odd press releases find their way into our mailboxes every week, but this has to be the weirdest one we've seen in a long, long time... British publisher Virgin Interactive are offering a £2,000 cash reward for the capture of the "Lewisham kangaroo", a marsupial which is apparently on the loose in the eponymous borough of south-east London. No, we didn't believe it either, but then we found this news report. It seems that the kangaroo has been spotted by several golfers in Beckenham Place Park, and paw prints and uprooted vegetation have been found in the area, but so far nobody has been able to catch it.

The final run-up to Christmas is about to kick off, and this week has seen three great games coming out for the PC on this side of the pond. Probably the biggest new arrival is "Command & Conquer : Red Alert 2", the sequel to one of the biggest selling strategy games of all time. Appearing in Electronic Arts' new DVD style packaging, the game inside is decidely old school, using a downgraded version of last year's "Tiberian Sun" engine and building on the classic gameplay of the original Red Alert. Given how popular the original was though, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

While their new "VoodooTV" range of digital tuner cards has been available in the USA for a few weeks now, 3dfx announced today that the European version of the card will be released on this side of the pond as early as next week. The "VoodooTV FM", as it is known over here, will include both TV and radio support, as well as a remote control to save you having to get up off the couch. For some reason those venerable couch potatoes the Americans don't get a remote - maybe 3dfx felt they needed the exercise? Regardless, the VoodooTV FM should offer some of the best TV and radio reception you're likely to see on your PC, along with the ability to record your favourite shows direct to your hard drive for posterity.

Reports are emerging in America that Microsoft has been the victim of a hacker attack. Nothing new there perhaps, but what is worrying is that the hackers have apparently had access to Microsoft's own internal network for as long as three months, including (according to rumours) the source code for products such as Microsoft Windows and Office. Microsoft are refusing to confirm what (if anything) was stolen or modified, and are calling the attack "a deplorable act of industrial espionage". At this early stage though it looks more likely that a group of rogue hackers were responsible, rather than another software development company.