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Since they split away from Descent developers Parallax a few years ago, Volition have made something of a name for themselves with the Freespace series of space combat sims. Although the actual gameplay owed a lot to the Wing Commander series, what Freespace lacked in innovation it more than made up for with graphics.

Following on from the recent unveiling of the new "id technology licensing program", Todd Hollenshead, id Software CEO and the man in charge of Quake engine licensing, has responded to some of the questions raised by the document. Despite the apparent change of heart from id, who in the document talk about their traditionally "low-key approach" to engine licensing, it seems that this part of their business is still very much playing second fiddle. "Engine licensing is something we do because it makes sense to do it. It's certainly financially significant to us, but it's a long way behind game development."

The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies in Cambridge have come up with an interesting new use for id Software's "Quake II" engine, using it as the basis for a project to recreate Cambridge University's new computer research building in digital form to allow them to show it off to sponsor Bill Gates before it is even completed. Instead of spending a small fortune on creating a virtual reality simulation of the building, they simply turned it into a Quake II level with custom textures and models. Project leader Paul Richens compared it to using a more traditional architectural virtual reality system, commenting that "we get slightly better results using a £30 game running on a £150 graphics card".

It's several years now since the original "Panzer General" blitzkrieged its way on to the PC gaming scene, opening up the turn-based wargame to a whole new audience. Previously the domain of the hardcore gamer and table-top generals, wargames had never been so sexy.

The licensing terms for the engines that have powered id Software's Quake series of games have largely been the realm of conjecture and hear-say until now, with rumours maintaining that getting hold of their latest generation of technology involved handing over a suitcase full of used ten dollar bills to the tune of $500,000, only to receive a largely unsupported code dump and little else. Now id have lifted the lid on this previously neglected part of their business with a new "id technology licensing program" that takes in all three generations of their Quake engine. According to the new page, which appeared on id's corporate website last night, the company is continuing its policy of arranging "a limited number of technology licenses with top-shelf developers who have the ability to produce hit titles", but at the same time they are opening up previous versions of the Quake engine to developers further down the pecking order.

Looking for something to keep you occupied this weekend? Action fans with copious amounts of bandwidth available to them may want to take a look at the new improved demo for "Gunlok" (98Mb), which features both training and real missions from the impressive looking 3D science fiction stealth 'em up. The demo for "Blair Witch : Legend of Coffin Rock" (93Mb) has also been released, giving you a taster of the atmospheric Nocturne powered action-adventure game from Human Head. Set in 1886, it thankfully has little in common with either the bizarre first film or the diabolically bad sequel.

Gaming service providers have had a hard time of it over the last few years, with the pay-to-play model largely thrown out the window (unless you happen to have your own successful massively multiplayer game) and older services like DWANGO and HEAT.net going to the wall. Owned by Havas Interactive, the French company which runs Half-Life publisher Sierra, Won.net was one of the survivors, running a mixture of servers for hardcore action games and fiendishly addictive web games like Scrabble-style board game Wordox. Now they have relaunched as Flipside.com, a free online gaming service with that same mix of hardcore and web games.

American gamers rejoiced earlier this week when they learnt that the "Dark Conspiracy" mission pack for hit 3D strategy game "Ground Control" would cost them a mere $4.95 if they sent Sierra proof that they had already bought the original game. That sounds like a really good deal, but I've got a better one. How about .. I give you a pound, and you give me a penny change?

After a flurry of new releases last week (although admittedly of rather varied quality), today has proven to be relatively quiet. Undoubtedly the biggest release is Microsoft's PC port of "Metal Gear Solid", which brings the classic PlayStation "tactical espionage action" game to our beloved beige boxes. Fans of the genre will also want to check out the stealthy action-adventure game "In Cold Blood" from UbiSoft and Revolution. Meanwhile flight sim fanatics will be glad to hear that the DVD edition of "F/A-18E Super Hornet" is now available as well.

Having recently fought off a take-over bid from French publisher Infogrames, Eidos are looking to recover their fortunes with an impressive line-up in the run up to Christmas. Their latest release schedule indicates that the PC version of console hit "Resident Evil 3 : Nemesis" has been pushed back a few weeks to November 17th though, with "Hitman : Codename 47" also suffering from slippage and now due on December 1st. We should also see Lara's latest exploits in "Tomb Raider : Chronicles", Michael Crichton's "Timeline", movie tie-in "Chicken Run", and stealthy action game "Project IGI" (known as "I'm Going In" on the other side of the pond) around the end of November, giving Eidos a strong showing on the PC. Missing out on the Christmas rush though is "Startopia", whose developers at Mucky Foot have been given a couple of months extra to polish the game, now due in February 2001.

Vikings were nasty chaps. They used to land off our coast before venturing onto our land to rape our women, pillage our towns and kill our men. They were bastards, quite clearly. But then blow me if they haven't gone and inspired a damn fine God game! While Cultures shares not only its creator's CV but also its general aesthetic with classic strat-fest The Settlers 3 (and its esteemed lineage), it's a very quirky and entertaining game in its own right when you get down to the nitty gritty. Your objective in Cultures is to turn a group of nasty, loathsome and downright stupid Vikings into a successful, educated and prospering community with the ability to survive the onslaught of their pillaging ilk and live harmoniously with the locals. It's a tall order but it can be achieved. But what is it that makes a Viking want to settle down? Apparently it's a mixture of the religious and the coincidental. Our Viking troop was growing tired of pillaging, its homeland already destroyed, and when a comet explodes and rains down upon them they treat it as a sign from their Gods to move on, shifting their butts into longboats and rowing to the continent of North America, with the firm intention of overcoming and colonizing it. The game starts out with you helping them through a campaign of mapping and populating the West.

This week offers a much more bountiful collection of games for console owners, with several long-awaited titles on both PlayStation and Dreamcast.

Stupid Invaders won the "Best of" award for the adventure category at E3, and it won our hearts at ECTS with its comical approach to point-and-clickery and its unusual sense of humour. The content will appeal to adults of all ages in the same sort of way as Ren & Stimpy, a duo who coincidentally share a voice director with the game. Available soon on Dreamcast and PC, we have some exclusive screenshots of the PC version in action. Also due to be available before the end of this year is Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally 2. Following on from last week's shots we have a further selection of exclusives taken from a preview version of the game at about 80% completion. Although CMR2 faces stronger competition that its predecessor, it looks pretty special and should do nicely in the run up to Christmas. Both sets of shots were taken on an GeForce 2 GTS with full-scene anti-aliasing disabled to present a good overall approximation of how the game will look on average gaming systems this Christmas.

Just a routine mission, that is what government agent Regina was led to believe as she accompanied an elite task force headed for Ibis Island. Their assignment was simply to find a certain Dr. Edward Kirk and return him to the home country unharmed.

Konami have unveiled their third person action-adventure game based on the hit movie "The Mummy", due to appear on PC, Playstation and Dreamcast in November, as well as gracing the GameBoy in some form. The game puts you in control of the film's hero Rick O'Connell as he takes on the living dead in Egypt across twelve expansive levels featuring "trap doors, secret corridors, mysterious hieroglyphs, and even the great plagues of Egypt". And then at the end of it all you will have to face the evil priest Imhotep. Obviously not an advert for the Egyptian Tourist Board then... For the full story, read the press release.

Revolution Software, the developers behind classic adventure games like "Beneath A Steel Sky" and the rather more recent action-adventure stealth 'em up "In Cold Blood", are apparently now planning to produce another installment in their popular Broken Sword series. It's not clear at this point whether it will be a traditional stand-alone boxed game or released in episodic form, but either way veteran adventure gamers are likely to be glad to hear that a new Broken Sword game is in the works. Other details are scant at the moment, although it looks like the Templars will be involved somehow, harking back to the original game.

In light of recent worries over whether Sony could deliver all the units of its next-generation console the Playstation 2 to its pre-order customers, we have now received confirmation from Sony that they are indeed promising to deliver them "as soon as possible". There is still no exact delivery date available for individual customers, but the console is officially due to launch on Friday 24th November. You can read the mail we received below:-

It would seem that Intel are less than bothered about their standing with Rambus now, as despite the fact that Intel is contractually obligated to support them, they have no qualms about slagging them off in interviews with the Financial Times. In this case the slagger is Craig Barrett, an Intel Chief Executive, who goes on record as saying that Intel "made a big bet on Rambus and it did not work out" and that "in retrospect, it was a mistake to be dependent on a third party for a technology that gates your performance." Intel's history with Rambus has been unfortunate. Already the 810 and 820 chipsets have made use of Rambus but due to SDRAM's undwindling popularity the motherboard manufacturers were forced to use the Memory Translator Hub to allow the use of SDRAM. The MTH just happens to be buggy and unfavourable to most, so unless people used Rambus the 810/820 boards became a moot point. Actually, this wouldn't be the first time that Intel has said something rather uncouth about the company's relationship with Rambus. In July Intel announced that although the company was virtually married to Rambus due to the contract, it would be producing motherboard chipsets capable of operating with standard SDRAM for its Pentium 4 processor. After attempting to salvage its Rambus relationship by reworking the RDRAM core in August, it now seems almost certain that Intel is just waiting for the clock to tick down on its contract so it can escape the hindrance once and for all.

Nikkei Computer is a Japanese news service, and unlike services in the West that are often biased in favour of rumour or circumstance, is often capable of unearthing gossip with a darn sight more truth to it than you'd expect. Which is why this particular gem of an item is regarded with a bit more validity than some of its Western chums. According to the Nipponese news feed, Squaresoft are not only developing for the Xbox, but have been since day one. Since even the initial development kits were released to potentials this summer, it says. Rumours of Microsoft's involvement with Square reached an apex at the Tokyo Game Show last month and it seems that the celestial RPG producer may have another Final Fantasy game up its sleeve; fittingly this would make it Final Fantasy X, both in terms of its platform and of course its Roman numeration. But if not, the other possibility is Final Fantasy IX, currently in development and scheduled for release in the summer of 2001 with a massive online element to it. If this were to be the case, it would as IGN points out imply that the PlayOnline service Square are touting would work for both systems potentially allowing PS2 and Xbox gamers to meet up and battle together into the sunset. Nobody involved at any level seems to be available for comment, least of all Microsoft and Squaresoft, who seem to view this information leak as an egg-on-face situation.

Amongst the annals of history some games truly stand out, marked in neon letters fifty feet high with the words "Do Not Touch"! One of the worst examples in recent years was the tasteless isometric action game "Postal", and so it perhaps comes as no surprise that the developers at Silverback, founded by former members of Postal developers Running With Scissors, are quick to deny any link to the game. "While some of us did work on minor parts of Postal, we are not the Postal team", lead programmer Andy Muir insists. "Truthfully, we had nothing to do with Postal's design, and little to do with its implementation."

Think of all the things you would class as necessary for inclusion in a Spider-Man game. For me there's web-slinging, henchmen, bank heists, the Daily Bugle and J.J. Jameson, Dr. Octopus and all of the rest of his villainous entourage, Venom, Scorpion and the other famous enemies and above all a classic wrongly-accused plot centring around poor old Spidey. Well this game has all that and more. The main menu offers you plenty of options; you can start the single player game, mess around with various setup options, enter the "Special" menu (for cheat insertion, selecting previously completed levels, credits and changing Spidey's outfit), take part against the clock in various special tasks or train, with help from the game. Last but not least, you can view the Gallery (a wonderfully superfluous feature allowing you to peruse all of the cutscenes, comics collected, game covers and character models - with voiceover bio's from Stan Lee!) The single player game is obviously the main focus of the action, and this plot-driven Spider-Man adventure is where you'll rack up the most time. The story is that Dr. Otto Octavius' speech at the Science Expo is interrupted and his latest technological invention stolen, by Spider-Man! Except not, because Peter Parker is busy reporting on the event from the floor. This impostor isn't the only thing out of place at the Expo; Parker runs into Eddie Brock, better known as the human half of the symbiotic Venom! Something is definitely amiss in NYC, and Spidey has to get to the bottom of it.

Microsoft are justifiably smug about the performance of their medieval real-time strategy game "Age of Empires II : Age of Kings", which recently dropped out of the UK's top ten PC games chart for the first time since its launch a year ago on 23rd October 1999. With over 250,000 sales in the UK alone and fifty weeks in our top ten, it is now officially the longest running top ten title in PC gaming history on this side of the pond, and apparently missed out on yet another week in the charts by just 34 units...

Probably the most promising looking adventure game due in the run-up to Christmas is not Lucas Art's "Escape From Monkey Island" (there's only so many times you can laugh at a rubber chicken) but Xilam's "Stupid Invaders". Based around the hilarious exploits of the eponymous dumb aliens, and featuring the vocal talents of actors better known for their work on cult television shows like "Ren & Stimpy", "The Simpsons" and "Futurama", Stupid Invaders is certainly looking a real treat for PC and Dreamcast owners alike.

A few weeks ago Sega's US branch of Dreamarena announced that users could win themselves a car, and we commented at the time that most of the funky stuff American users were getting to experience with Dreamarena would never make a transition over to these shores. Well slap us about the face and teach us not to second guess Sega why doncha? Today the company has announced that its users in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Spain have the opportunity to get their grubby mits on a Vauxhall VX220, worth over £23,000. To those of you who don't know, the VX220 is the impressive new sports car the previously unexciting car manufacturer has recently blown away Jeremy Clarkson with. But moving on, it has a wide array of fans, and all you have to do to win one is answer questions based on the company's latest title, Metropolis Street Racer (more commonly known as MSR). Each week Dreamarena users will be asked three questions based on the game's three major cities, San Francisco, London and Tokyo. Players race against the clock to answer questions and win kilometres, which will be totalled to produce European league tables. Yes we know it sounds like reader's digest or something equally pathetic, but this is Sega so hopefully we can expect something a little more impressive. There are all sorts of other entertaining sections like the "high risk" questions to gamble your kilometres. This sounds nice, but why couldn't the competition involve multiplayer Dreamcast games and not a quiz show? The full press release can be read here.

Japanese publisher KOEI have a long history of producing games based on far eastern history and legends. In fact, one of the first PC games I ever bought was a turn-based strategy game by KOEI called "Genghis Khan", released way back in 1990. It proved so addictive that I've continued playing it on and off for the last ten years, and one of its sister titles ("Romance of the Three Kingdoms") has since spawned no less than six sequels.

It looks as though Swedish hardware distributor Dustin AB is in for a severe ticking off via Microtronica / AMD this afternoon amidst discussion over the former's pricelists and the presence of a certain "AMD-K7 ATHLON THUNDERBIRD 1330 MHZ FÖR SOCKET A". It's been rumoured for some time that AMD may have the 1.33Ghz part on sale for the end of this year, and it seems that this story may confirm it. The Register was able to contact the Swedish retailer only to learn that the "product shouldn't be out on the market yet" and that AMD called them from the US to inquire after the pricelist. As such it looks like this was no typo, but instead an accidental slip on the part of the retailer. AMD will not be pleased. Or will they? While our friends at The Reg don't think AMD have the volume production capabilities to mass produce a 1.33Ghz chip in time for Christmas and therefore would be unlikely to publicize such a possibility this side of the New Year, the more cynical among us think that perhaps a little gamesmanship is involved. After all, the high profile news story appearing on so many of the Internet's technical websites that AMD may have such a part out in time for Christmas will do Intel no favours, even in spite of its new November 20th launch date for the Pentium 4. All this said though, a staff member of the Swedish company has now told the press that there will be 1.33Ghz Athlon stock available at the beginning of December. Lets hope AMD haven't started producing paper releases in the same vein as Intel did with its 1Ghz part.

The Pentium 4 is going to be a very important move for Intel, considering AMD's current position in the market at least, and the company came out in the open last night and promised to have the chip readily available in large quantities for its launch on November 20th of this year, likening the campaign to that of the Pentium II and not its flakily available successor. For Intel to meet this goal, they will need to make several positive moves, by decreasing the chip size and improving the yield (last reports suggested 30% of current yields went bad!) and getting some new fabs online.

Half-Life - Admin Central have posted basic and advanced server setup guides for Counter-Strike

The "Age of Empires" series has proven to be something of a renaissance for Microsoft's oft-maligned games division, which was previously best known for producing uncountable editions of their "Flight Simulator" and golf games. It was therefore something of a surprise when Microsoft published "Age of Empires", a real-time strategy game which mixed elements from Civilization and Command & Conquer to come up with a classic historical strategy game. Now you can own the entire series with the imminent arrival of "Age of Empires : The Collector's Edition". Not only does this include every Age of Empires title ever released, but you also get a soundtrack CD featuring music from the games and a pack of Age of Empires trading cards. Ooh.

Massively multiplayer games are all the rage at the moment, but while most of them are huge sprawling affairs with sophisticated 3D graphics engines and all mod cons, British developers SageSoft are breaking the mould with "Adellion", a role-playing game which is based around VRML and runs from within your humble web browser! Before you all run for the hills screaming though, the sage of Adellion himself (aka Nathan Cukryznski) assures us that "we are doing our best to make sure that the stereotype of VRML (slow, laggy, ugly) is broken by our game".