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Anticipation has been high amongst PC gamers awaiting the arrival of "Commandos 2", the sequel to the massively popular World War II tactical combat game from Eidos and Spanish developers Pyro Studios. Now our console brethren can rejoice, as Eidos have revealed that the sequel will be coming to the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 some time next year, as well as our own beloved beige boxes. Details on the console versions are scarce at this point, but we do know that Pyro are doing them in-house rather than relying on another company to produce a quick and dirty port of their game. And with a whole new range of missions to sink your teeth into, as well as new characters, vehicles and equipment, improved AI and numerous other gameplay tweaks, the sequel should be well worth a look whatever your favourite gaming system is.

So the PlayStation 2 has finally hit store shelves in the West, Northern America to be exact, and early reports indicate that a high percentage of the 500,000 unit allocation has been sold without any discernible marketing push from the company. As IGN points out, for an expensive electronic device like the PS2 to sell itself out like this is quite an achievement. But the question still remains, why on earth is the entire West receiving a measely one million units for this Christmas, a quantity that as has been mooted previously, was sold in just one weekend of sale in Japan in March. The disappointing news is, that there is no news. Sony's latest announcement seems to focus once again on the "difficulty of manufacturing" the console in large quantities, and not as has been presupposed elsewhere, on other factors such as memory card shortages or because the company fabricated the whole thing to increase customer interest. So what's the big story? Well apparently it all comes down to that darling of the press announcement, Sony's "Emotion Engine", and more specifically, the graphics synthesizer part of the equation. The chip, which is solely responsible for ensuring you get visuals out of your little black box, was being manufactured by a single plant in Kokubu, Japan, on a 0.25 micron process, at the rate of approximately 400,000 a month optimum yield. Now, this was supposed to change so that SCE Nagasaki Semiconductor would become responsible for the chip and produce it on a 0.18 micron process, allowing for anything up to 1,000,000 per month, which would have fueled the American launch. Due to a gargantuan foul-up, the Nagasaki company's process was a bit of a lame duck, producing nowhere near the optimum yield and forcing Sony to reduce the allocation to 500,000 units, some of which still had to be produced at Kokubu to ensure they met their launch target. This explains Sony's financial figures, released only the other day, which indicated a substantial loss of money through various sources, including the Kokubu balls-up. It still remains unclear whether the graphics synthesizer was manufactured at 0.25 or 0.18 microns, or if there are a mixture of units on sale. As for the rest of the loss, well imagine having to air lift 500,000 PS2s to America because you're running behind schedule. Ouch.

Freeserve's now infamous "Unlimited" package is, as far as we know at the time of press, no longer accepting sign-ups. The so-called 24/7 package was marketed using slogans like "use the Internet whenever you like, for however long you please", and all for a meagre £10 per month.

Russian developers Nival Interactive were, until now, best known for their "Rage of Mages" games, which met with a rather lukewarm reception and mixed reviews here in the west. Team leader Serge Orlovsky believes that the company has learnt its lessons though, and their new game "Evil Island : Curse Of The Lost Soul" is looking somewhat more impressive. With fetching 3D graphics and a branching storyline featuring 80 missions to take part in, it is a prequel of kinds to Rage of Mages. "The game events still take place in a world split into isolated islands floating in the astral halo, soon after the Great Catastrophe. Each of the islands is ruled and supported by a Great Mage. Some monsters and beasts that inhabited Rage of Mages found their 3D incarnation in Evil Islands."

The third chapter in our series of Colin McRae Rally 2.0 screenshots is here, and it contains a demonstration of the France and Sweden locations within the game. France is a lot brighter, with grassy hills and a less-than-slippery road to circumnavigate. As such the speeds are consistently higher, and cars with a good top speed seem to do best. Conversely, it's the cars which exhibit quick acceleration that do well in the snow-laden Swedish climes, where getting back up to speed is of paramount importance. The snow makes any sort of speeding nigh-on impossible and the going slow, but the beautiful scenery is enough to keep the eyes busy throughout. The way the snow changes direction depending on the orientation of the camera is a nice touch as well. Fans of the series will no doubt lap up CMR2.0 when it hits stores on the 1st of December, and this writer will definitely be one of the first in line if this "80% complete" pre-release version is anything to go by.

Not satisfied with running gaming servers, an editorial website and an online store, GamePlay are branching out into TV with "Blam!!!", set for a 13 week run on leading satellite channel Sky One starting on November 4th. Presented by the leather-clad Julia Reed of "Robot Wars" infamy, and produced by a team of "experienced gamers using their wealth of gaming knowledge to guarantee viewers accurate information", the show will air on Saturday lunchtimes at 12.30pm and Sunday mornings at 10.30am. A bit early to catch the real hardcore gamers, who will no doubt mostly still be in bed at that time of day after all-night fragging sessions...

Capcom's enormous line of software titles will remain multi-platform says the beat-em-up giant. Games like Resident Evil and Street Fighter Alpha will always be available cross-platform and the company sees no reason why future online-enabled titles on different formats should be mutually exclusive either, stating in a release earlier this week that despite some teething problems that will no doubt arise there is nothing to prevent gamers competing against one another cross-format. Despite this cross-platform friendliness, the company is still working on titles for specific formats. We would speculate that this announcement was intended to reaffirm support from various corners where it had been dwindling, especially in light of recently announced titles like Resident Evil 0 and Onimusha, which are as far as we know still to be platform-specific.

Sony's proposed e-commerce push through PlayStation.com is apparently another casualty of the company's inability to meet demand. According to sources within Sony, the website which was to offer PS2s without hindrance to gamers, has been shunted to the back of the line, behind retailers on the street whose needs are more urgent. It's a move that will come as a surprise to few, and was even hinted at back when Sony first cut the US allocation down to half a million units. Official reports claim that Sony will provide 20,000 American retailers with their PS2s, including some that refused to make use of the pre-order system. Those that did not will offer the units on a first come, first served basis, while the others will do so only after their pre-orders have been exhausted. The e-commerce push on PlayStation.com is now due to start in November, although the PS2 will not become a star attraction until Sony has shipped "a substantial amount of PlayStation 2 computer entertainment systems into the market".

The PlayStation 2 is probably the most hyped console in the history of anything, ever - not even the ill-fated N64 was the subject of such controversy and media frenzy. Perhaps the only upshot of the console shortage is that by the time we are all able to buy PS2s in our local electronics store, the initial wave of games will have passed and some truly impressive titles such as Gran Turismo 3 will be upon us. But for fans in the States, this is all largely irrelevant - their day has come. Anxious gamers have apparently been queuing up for some hours now on the streets of America's biggest cities to be the first in line. Electronics Boutique stores have had PS2 displays up for nearly a week, with employees decked out in PS2 garments to boot. Some are even opening as early as 8:00am to help cope with the enormous quantity of expectant gamers. Which games will the punters be picking up with their hardware though? In this country e-tailor Gameplay has been courting the most pre-orders for titles like ISS, Silent Scope and FIFA 2K1, but Stateside it's expected the emphasis will fall on games like Madden, Tekken Tag Tournament and SSX. With just under 30 titles to choose from, some publishers are likely to have a less successful launch than others, but the scope is there for some very bizarre combinations. Related Feature - The Hype Machine

Hardcore beat-em-up fans aside, few games players in Europe will be familiar with Star Gladiator. Probably the least famous fighting game to come from the Capcom studios, the original was one of the companys abortive forays into 3D beat'em'up territory during the PlayStation era, and was a complete flop outside of Japan. Indeed, it didn't sell particularly well in Japan either by all accounts; the only aspect of the game to achieve any kind of popularity was the central character, Hayato, a sword-wielding young chap with a metal plate riveted to his forehead and a torn vest. Hayato can be found in many of the "Capcom Versus" games (including the recent and rather wonderful Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 on the Dreamcast) and there was talk at one point about a spinoff anime television series featuring the character, although whether this ever came to anything is unknown. It is possibly in order to promote this potentially valuable franchise that Capcom have decided to return to Star Gladiator on the Dreamcast - although, perhaps mindful of the low regard in which the original Star Gladiator is held, Star Gladiator Chapter II has been renamed to "Plasma Sword". Like most modern beat-em-up games, the plot is tenuous to say the least; essentially, the action is all set in a Star Wars-esque universe, which is threatened by a terrible evil which was defeated in the first game but has conveniently reawakened in order to provide an excuse for a sequel. This evil seems to rotate around a chap with a ridiculous hat and a bizarre robot that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Buck Rogers; how exactly the galaxy is threatened by this pair of jokers is never quite revealed, but we can assume that they are evil beacuse they're collectively referred to as the "Nightmare of Bilstein", so they can't be very pleasant people. In order to save the galaxy from this unspeakably evil person with poor taste in headwear, a band of heroes need to fight against each other in an apparently random fashion. I use "band of heroes" loosely here, because it's never made particularly clear which characters are heroes and which are villains; Hayato is clearly a hero since he rides a motorbike very fast in the intro, thus marking him down as a Good Guy, but aside from that the characters are a motley crew of furry Chewbacca lookalikes, birdmen, and green cone-headed creatures who wear far too much cheap jewellery.

We're having something of a "Call To Power II" day here at EuroGamer, following a demonstration and hands-on look at the sequel to Acitivision's addictive Civilization spin-off in London yesterday. To kick things off we've just heard that the game has now been confirmed for a November 24th release, just in time to fill stockings everywhere come Christmas. We also have a big new two page preview of the game taking an in-depth look at why you should be so excited about a 2D turn-based strategy game. And to finish off, we have a selection of ten of the latest screenshots of the game for you to admire while you wait for it to be released...

"Civilization" remains one of the most popular and addictive strategy games of all time, putting you in control of a small tribe of bronze age settlers and then allowing you to guide them to scientific enlightenment and global domination over a period of several thousand years.

One of the more unusual games to come across our desks in recent weeks is "Bad Milk", a surrealistic "interactive video art game" which begins when you take a sip of coffee tainted by sour milk and "slip into a dark abyss populated by haunting characters". These include a "dismembered bald head, a disembodied voice, a drowning man, and chronic smokers", who will help you find your way to a new life. Described as a mixture of puzzle game and Myst-style graphic adventure, inspirations are said to include everything from Monty Python to video art installations, by way of Coney Island's haunted house.

If reports on industry-gossip website The Register are true, Taiwanese company Acer Labs are working on a DVD player with a built-in 300MHz Risc processor and emulation software capable of playing PlayStation games. If such news were true it would cause mass indignation from Sony who are well known for their adversity to PS-emulation. With no licensing deal apparently attached, it could mean another Sony versus The Emulator court case for the world to watch. Analysts have recently been pointing out to the electronics giant that by abandoning the PlayStation business and allowing people to develop new, approved solutions for potential PlayStation users, they could end up selling even more games. Imagine, if you will, that Sony concentrated first and foremost on the promotion of the PS2 and allowed other companies to create, for instance, a TV with a built-in PlayStation, or a hifi with a PlayStation separate. Of course, the licensing end of Sony's PS2 business may have already be prepared to allow this (although it seems to have more to do with the immediate licensing of the Emotion Chip rather than the whole PS2 unit's technology). Nonetheless, if Acer are making a move without Sony's guidance or permission they may find themselves in hot water and before long. Interestingly, The Register think that as long as Acer just sell technology to the Chinese OEMs who create many of the West's DVD boxes, it will be hard for Sony to combat them, considering the less-than-strict laws on intellectual property in place in China. Regardless, if this move is being made without the full consent and backing of Sony, history dictates that they'll step in to try and throttle it.

has had a troubled history in Europe, with the original organisers behind the operation failing to live up to the standards of the American outfit, resulting in confusion and eventual collapse as a whole series of events were announced and then cancelled one by one due to an apparent lack of interest and funding. Originally seperate Scandinavian and French opens were planned, then a single event in the Danish city of Copenhagen, before eventually the whole operation shut down.

It's only a few days since we heard from Sega that they are running a competition through their Dreamarena internet service to give away Vauxhall VX220 sports car. And now another company is trying to add to the planet's pollution problems! This time Flipside.com are the guilty party, offering a rather more environmentally friendly VW Beetle to three lucky gamers in Europe. All you have to do for your chance to win is register with Flipside, at which point you will get a "special online keyholder". You can also pick up another key for each week that competition runs, giving you up to ten chances to drive away one of the three cars. Runners-up prizes include a PlayStation 2 and cinema passes, as well as "Flips" - the online currency of Flipside which can be used at their store "redemption centre". For more information, read the press release. If you fancy your chances, just go to your local Flipside website; for the UK that is uk.flipside.com, funnily enough...

The CPL's big event this winter is the Babbages-CPL at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas, Texas. As well as the traditional Quake 3 duel competition, a seperate women-only tournament will also be taking place at the event, sponsored by GameGirlz and Stomped with $7500 of cash prizes up for grabs. You can now register for that here, assuming that you have the requisite sexual organs to take part in the competition, and have first signed up to go to the Babbages-CPL itself. And for the rest of us there is also going to be a $15,000 Counter-Strike competition sponsored by Razer at the event, which you can now sign up for here.

I think it can safely be said that if nothing else, Sega's Saturn had its fair share of decent beat-em-ups. One of the best was Tecmo's fabulous Dead or Alive, preferred by many to Virtua Fighter 2 and Namco's Tekken 3, regarded as the epitome of fighting style elsewhere. As such when Sega announced that the follow-up was winging its way over here, it could be said that a lot of people were a bit chuffed. Quite a while later, and despite the rather risqué advertising campaigns surrounding it, it's here, in all its effervescent glory. Playing DOA2 for the first time is a bit like entering an arcade with bleary eyes and an unhealthy dosage of mind-altering drugs. It's fast, frenetic beat-em-up action with a simplistic control system and a disproportionately large quantity of moves per character. Due to the speed of the game and concise controls (you have a punch, kick and block/hold button, each instantaneously responsive), winning against decent opponents is very much down to the timing, which makes a pleasant change after the thumb pounding of some recent titles. Specialist moves like tagging and throwing can be bound to specific buttons, although as the DC controller has a paltry six this can be somewhat limited in its effectiveness and you'll have to experiment before deciding upon which moves are most potent in the majority of situations.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on how Final Fantasy creators and general RPG aficionados Squaresoft had been in possession of an Xbox XDK (development kit) since they had first become available, and speculated on just what the company was intending to do with it. We pointed to the possibility of FFIX (Square's first real online project), but in retrospect the thought of Xbox and PS2 players interlinking on quests is somewhat unlikely to impress Microsoft. So that leaves Final Fantasy X (a rather fitting title we thought), but now rumours are even pointing to FFXI, and seeing as Microsoft were apparently even contemplating the purchase of Square in whole, it looks as though the two are moving toward a more formal relationship all the time. The other interesting factoid in this little equation is now Electronic Arts, who of course now publish Square's titles in the USA. It's thought the company has been sympathetic to the Xbox cause for some time, and it's just possible that all three companies will be the subject of an official announcement in the near future. Stay tuned.

There are reports today which indicate that Tech Date, a US hardware distributor, may intend to offer Intel's Pentium 4 processor (due to debut at an incredible 1.4GHz and as much as 2GHz by next year) for approximately $1000 in the States along with a bundled stick of RDRAM. It recently became apparent that the i850 P4 motherboard chipset would use RDRAM exclusively, so in order to help sidestep Rambus' flagship product's unfortunate adversity in the eyes of the public, Tech Data have opted to bundle it with the processors which should go on sale before the beginning of December. The American e-tailer is stocking the following bundles.. INTEL Manufacturer Part# BX80528JK140GR Description BOXED PENTIUM 4 1.4GHZ 64M 800MHZ NECC RDRAM $900 TD Part# 277420 INTEL Manufacturer Part# BX80528JK150GR Description BOXED PENTIUM 4 1.5GHZ 64M 800MHZ NECC RDRAM $1050 TD Part# 277421 64Mb of RAM alongside a 1.5GHz processor is taking the mickey a little, but nevertheless. The question now arises though; just who the hell is going to pay over $1000 for a processor alone when the nearest AMD chip (a 1.2GHz Athlon) is less than half that for a relatively small performance differential? If Intel are intending to push the P4 as hard as they did the PII (which is a definite possibility) then surely they will need a price tag that endears it to potential buyers. In this country is can cost nearly £800 to buy a PIII-933MHz at the moment, imagine that price scale applied to a P4. So what we're getting at is.. just how much use is 64Mb of RAM going to be to a 1.5GHz processor owner, and just who's going to be thanking Tech Data for this little "freebie". Update: The same website seems to be offering the Intel D850GB P4 motherboard for $210. A snip, you might say.

The rather twisted Oddworld series has proven to be one of the more successful platform games on the PC in recent years, with "Abe's Oddysey" and "Abe's Exoddus" both proving fairly popular on our beige boxes as well as appearing on Sony's PlayStation. Originally we had been expecting the latest installment, "Munch's Oddysee", to appear on the PlayStation 2, but Infogrames have now confirmed that it will instead be an Xbox-only title, with Microsoft picking up the publishing and distribution rights to the game.

- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)Price - £65 for 750MHz part

In a recent interview with GameSpy, Tim Sweeney, Epic's technological genius spoke openly about his company's work with the Unreal technology with reference to NVIDIA's NV20 chipset, Microsoft's Xbox and other hardware. Ever-anxious not to overpromise, Tim made a point of saying that although his company is working on some very clever pixel-shader rendering techniques for DirectX 8 amongst other things, the hardware isn't in place yet, so he wants to keep the hype to a minimum. As was shown in demonstrations of the UT Tech modeling capabilities a few weeks ago at Daily Radar, Tim's been busying himself with skeletal animation, something he takes very seriously, calling it "one of the three major areas of focus for our next-gen engine". Although it's already included in the PlayStation 2 version of Unreal Tournament and has been implemented in the FPS genre since the latter stages of 1998 it's an ongoing project with no real finite aim other than improvement. The latest additions to suite of development tools surrounding the UT engine are Maya and 3D Studio Max exporters allowing artists to work with the character models in their preferred modeling package. When asked where he felt the industry was going and specifically where his engine would be in 5 years time, Tim first pointed out that as long as we still have gamers driving the industry with their enthusiasm things can't go too far wrong. His verdict about the future? Enormous design teams working on 30,000 polygon character models and games which are visually realistic and very adaptive. Keeping up with the hardware will be an issue, but so will be productivity, and as such the tools will be one of the most important factors in the long run.

Although a cynic might argue that anything resembling gameplay has long since been squeezed out of the Tomb Raider formula, the prospect of a game where our luscious heroine is actually dead does have a perverse attraction.. (A perverse attraction? How is that any different to a normal Tomb Raider game? -Ed) Shut up! You're spoiling the willing suspension of disbelief! (You're fired -Ed) But anyway, in an effort to inject a little originality into the series, creators Core Design have killed our vivacious leading lady and the game begins at her funeral, with a bunch of her friends remembering her life. And it unfolds from there as the group relates tales of her incredible heroism and in true "The Young Indiana Jones" style you play them out. Questions ought to be asked about what happens if you die during one of these recollections, but we reckon that it'd be suitably amusing if one of the other funeral attendees gave the storyteller a kick and told them to "tell it properly". Still, it should be good for some mindless platform action if nothing else, although these screenshots do suggest a more "covert" approach may be needed in some circumstances. The game will obviously be released on pretty much every format under the sun, and at the moment we have shots from the PSX and Dreamcast versions. Enjoy.

The PlayStation 2 is surely the most hyped console in the history of gaming, with the media and gamers alike drooling over the incredible polygon pushing power of the machine. Thanks to the constant hype, the console's initial run of around 50,000 units which are due to ship on the Friday 24th November launch day in the UK had virtually sold out within a few days of the pre-order scheme going live, despite the rather excessive £300 price tag.

Virgin's latest release schedule has just arrived, with the biggest surprise being how little has changed as we enter the final run-up to Christmas. Not only has the title of off-road racer "Screamer 4x4" remained the same for yet another week (maybe they just ran out of ideas - it's been renamed twice already), but even 3D real-time strategy game "War Torn" has managed to avoid slipping, and should appear in stores in the UK on Friday at a mid-range price of £19.99.

We just got hold of the latest release schedule for 3DO Europe from their lovely PR people at Bastion, and as usual it is dominated by the "Might & Magic" and "Army Men" franchises. The plastic soldiers are getting another outing on the PC, with "Army Men : Sarge's Heroes" now due out this Friday, a week later than expected. Meanwhile the tetralogy of "Heroes of Might & Magic Chronicles" games due in November have been joined by yet another re-release of "Heroes III", this time in a "Complete" package which includes the original game as well as the extra "Shadow Of Death" and "Armageddon's Blade" campaigns which have been included in previous bundles and add-ons. Well worth a look if turn based strategy floats your boat, especially if you haven't already got one of the previous releases of the game...

Massively multiplayer role-playing games seem to be the wave of the future at the moment, with games like "Ultima Online" and "Everquest" still holding on to thousands of addicted players, and literally dozens of new titles in the works trying to cash in on the revolution. Amongst the more ambitious online worlds currently in production though is "Dawn", a relatively unknown title from a new Florida based developer called Glitchless, which is apparently just a few months from entering beta. The sheer scale of the game is impressive enough, with room for 100,000 players and over 65,000 square miles of terrain to explore, making it over a hundred times bigger than the already sizeable "Asheron's Call".

Quake 3 Arena - the first beta version of the highly anticipated Pain Keep Arena is now available, featuring two new maps and several new weapons

It seems to happen once every few months, and it happens without hype or explanation, it just turns up and expects a home on BBC2 for a week or two. Like a senile Grandparent, snooker is rather strict and rigid, albeit in an auspicious manner. The "action" may be quite slow, and if we're honest perhaps a little boring, but it's still enjoyable in a passive kind of way. The thing is, a snooker game requires your full attention, and that's probably why they are only ever momentarily entertaining for most, unless you have a real knack for it. Trickshot games like Virtual Pool always tend to do well because they twist the formula and add something original and exciting to it, whereas straight snooker game has trouble remaining compelling. Actually I've always felt a really good snooker game would have to appeal to me on a Solitaire level. What I mean is it would have to be the sort of game you could play for five minutes, then minimize and return to during a spare moment ten minutes on. That's why those Lucasarts Desktop Adventures titles did so well, even if they were shockingly inane and repetitive. Although my prayers haven't been answered, Codemasters have pulled a very realistic and authentic snooker game out of their hat in the shape of World Championship Snooker, featuring pretty much everything you see on the BBC during those spartan moments of John Virgo televisual excitement. The eight exclusive shots were taken from a nearly-complete version of the game that should be out before the end of the year.