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bleem! was released back in April of '99, after a storm of publicity. Sony filed a rumoured, multi-million pound lawsuit against them to stop the distribution of their Playstation emulator, despite the efforts of this huge multi-national, bleem! won - three times. bleem! was not the first Playstation emulator, in fact, several months prior to its release, PSemu pro had been made widely available across the Internet, unlike bleem!, this was freeware, but required the image of an original Playstation BIOS to run - as no surprise to anyone, these were widely available across many major emulation sites. The question of course begs, as to why Sony would actually want to prevent the release of this emulation software, bearing in mind they actually make no profit on console sales. The money comes rolling in for the Electronics giant when games are purchased. This doesn't change with the use of emulators; they too require Playstation discs. Perhaps Sony were worried about the piracy issue - the fact that bleem! natively runs pirated discs, where as the console has to be chipped, a complex procedure, which involves soldering a chip into the main board of the console, that bypasses the security routine. So, aside from the legalities, what does bleem! actually do for you? Essentially, it is a program that runs from within the Windows environment, that allows you to play Playstation games on your PC. Further to this, anything above a PII300, with a decent 3D card, actually runs the games a lot better in comparison with the console. Higher resolutions are achieved, 800x600 upwards are quite easily manageable on many computer systems, this, compared to the Playstations 512x240. Cutting the need for memory cards to save, bleem! can dump onto your hard drive, saving you about £15 for every couple of megs you would've occupied on those oh-so-overpriced, but necessary storage devices. Supporting all direct input controllers, you can use your joystick, wheel and pedals, flight yoke, plain old game-pad, or whatever you like to take control in any bleem! supported game. bleem! also advertise the fact that you can play your favourite Playstation games on the go, presumably with the voodoo3-equipped laptop you carry in your attaché case. So then, there must be some downsides, to this so far, wondrous piece of software. Well actually, now you come to mention it, yes there are. Probably the most major factor being compatibility, or rather the lack of it. Sure enough, bleem! does actually support most, if not all of the chart games. But, each and every game has to be added to the library, before it can run - and anyone who's been to their local Electronics Boutique of late, will have no doubt seen the Playstation section covering an entire wall, or two. The incompatibility comes about because bleem! is not an exact copy of the console, and leans to different routines and procedures, so of course, incompatibilities are inevitable. Not to knock the efforts of the developers, to date, bleem! does in fact support over 300 games. bleem! is not the only platform to have problems running Playstation games, you have to look no further than Sony's new beast, the Playstation 2, to find another that lacks support for its predecessors games, and, unlike bleem! there is not an awful lot that can be done to fix these problems. bleem! was the first emulator to have a reasonable success rate with the Playstation. It was perhaps a risk on their behalf to invest so much time in the development on this fine piece of software, not knowing whether they were going to get a return on it. As it turns out, they have in fact made a huge number of sales of the emulator and its attached merchandise, such as the rather fetching bleem! t-shirt. If you're still very much into playing your Playstation games, but crave prettier graphics, and higher resolutions, bleem! could be for you, download the demo at bleem.com, and give it a try.

John Cash, one of the programmers at id Software, has left the company to join Blizzard where he will be working on an as-yet unannounced project. For the full story, check Graeme Devine's .plan. This follows the recent departures of Brian Hook and Zoid, so if you are a games programmer now might be the time to brush up your CV!

GameIDE, the "Integrated Design Environment" for mod coders, reaches v2.5R2

The game itself is ripped straight out of the arcade, and it certainly recreates the feeling of playing a classic arcade style beat 'em up, fortunately without draining a constant stream of pound coins out of your wallet. In fact as soon as you load up the game, there is a distinct arcade look and feel to the menus which is both good and bad, but more on that later… Sadly I think Capcom have skimped a little with this title, and they have leant far more heavily on the Marvel side. As a result many of the 20 characters available in the game are the Marvel superheroes, and there are only a few of the classic Street Fighter's left. Old favourites like Ryu, Chun Li and M. Bison are in the game, but other than that it's a rather poor turnout for the Street Fighter crew. While this is a shame, it does make way for the more well known superheroes and quite a few which I had never heard of. Classic characters like SpiderMan, Venom, The Hulk, War Machine and Wolverine make up some of the more well known characters while Captain Commando, Jin and Morri make up some of the more unknown champions of peace. One thing that the game does bring to the mould is a tag team style of play. Instead of selecting just one character, you get to pick two. This brings with it some merits but it can make the game a little more tactical (and possibly more difficult) to play. While it can be a little confusing knowing who to pair with who in order to create an unstoppable duo, it is certainly a great deal of fun pairing some of the guys together. For example who would have thought of SpiderMan fighting with his arch nemesis Venom as his partner? Of course there is no limit (well almost no limit) to the combinations and putting the diminutive Mega Man with the dominating Hulk does tend to yield some interesting confrontations! Switching between the two characters is fairly easy, and can be done at any time during a fight. It's probably not too surprising to know that changing characters mid match can actually help you get the win, which is probably why the computer does it every now and again. Admittedly it does turn the game into a bit of a WWF fest, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. While there are 20 main characters to pick, there are a whole heap of other which take the form of 'support characters'. After you've picked your fighters the computer will randomly choose your 'celebrity' support. Once again these are drawn from another pool of superheroes, most of which are b-list Marvel stars. There are a few notable support characters like Cyclops and Iceman, and it is a shame that two such awesome fighters have been relegated to a support role. Oh well… The game has a few play options, ranging from the classic arcade style to the must have 'versus' mode, where you get to actually play against your mates - should you have any that want to play against you! One worthwhile inclusion is the training mode. This allows you to check out all of the players against any other computer controlled duo. There is no time limit to this and there is no real health restriction as after any damage is sustained the health bars of both the player and computer are restored to full. You can also change characters mid fight, which allows you to experiment with which characters do better against the others. On the graphical front I felt more than a little let down by Marvel Vs. Capcom. I said earlier that the menu's had a very arcade feel. Unfortunately they look rather dated and would certainly not look uncommon on a SNES cart. Also the whole game looks distinctly low res and certainly isn't pushing the DreamCast to its limits. It is a shame, as in the face of the new breed of 3d style beat 'em ups Marvel Vs. Capcom looks extremely old due to its graphics. While it is very colourful it is a little grainy and some of the textures could have done with a little more work. On the sound front you can expect a cacophony of arcade style audio. With some classic samples of the characters such as Ryu's 'hado-yu-ken' adding a nice touch to the game. The rest of the samples are also very good, and as always can add a much needed bit of comic relief - especially when a character explodes into one of their awesome special moves. Music wise you can expect to be drowned in a sea of electronic music that harks of classic Japanese arcade classics, and after a while the 'tunes' can get extremely annoying, but that is hardly a rare occurrence with console games.

This week's article here on EuroGamer is "Noddy's Guide To Graphics Card Jargon", which explains what some of the key buzzwords that the graphics card industry is using really mean.

The last couple of weeks has seen a frenzy of graphics card announcements and previews, with 3dfx, ATI and NVIDIA all claiming to have produced the best thing since sliced bread. To allay your confusion, EuroGamer has cut through the jargon and hype to help you pick out the contenders from the also-rans.

The official website for Homeworld : Cataclysm has been relaunched by Sierra, featuring information about the semi-sequel to last year's space-bound strategy game, Homeworld.

A new version (Beta1c) of the popular Quake III Fortress mod has been released with a bunch of new features such as three new beta dueling maps, new commands, entities and dozens of gameplay adjustments and fixed bugs, not to mention improvements to the HUD and scoreboard plus new rifle and dartgun models/skins AND new effects like realistic napalm fire and atmospheric rain. For a complete list of 'what's new' head on over to the official webpage. This update weighs in at 4.4 megs and for a complete list of mirrors, visit the official page.

The latest game in the long-running Warlords series, Battlecry has broken from the turn-based days of yore and gone real time. EuroGamer takes a hands-on look at a beta version of the game to see how it's shaping up...

Black Knight Productions have released the first non-beta version of their Quake 3 mod, Prisoners of War, which is inspired by the popular Jailbreak Quake 2 mod.

The chaps over at VE have gotten their hands on a brand new movie of 4D Rulers upcoming first-person shooter, Gore which is just looking better all the time. The movie is available in three flavors, so definitely check out this one -- it'll be worth it. For more information on this upcoming game visit the official webpage but there's no official word on the release date, yet.

Gibstats III is now available, adding support for Quake III Arena logs to the popular stats analysis program.

Playstation Developer:Team 17Publisher:InfogramesPrice: £34.99

This week's EuroGamer interview is "Editing UnrealEd". We talked to Warren Marshall of Epic Games to find out how he ended up at the company, and to talk about his current work on the new version of UnrealEd, the level editor used to create hit games Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

Until recently Warren Marshall was best known for his work as a level designer - producing a string of excellent maps for both Quake and Quake II, running a map review site called MPQ, working with my old company The Coven, and eventually ending up at Legend.

SoF Operations have posted information on and files for editing Soldier of Fortune's models with 3DSMax 3, courtesy of Gil Gribb of Raven

Eyes bleeding from all those high resolution screenshots you've been staring at? Why not try some music for a change? DZVault have posted a short snippet of music from the forthcoming massively multiplayer RPG Dark Zion.

Silicon Dreams are rather like an also-ran EA Sports these days, providing new incarnations of the same stuff every year. At first it was a Michael Owen sponsorship, which lasted a couple of years, but then the price tag for that probably went through the roof, so now it's a UEFA deal that adorns the package. As soon as things kick off, there's a distinct feeling of mediocrity, rather like the visual element of ITV's Champions' League coverage! The short introductory video is of a low visual quality - it's not even as impressive as last year's EA Sports intros. The NHL '99 video with David's Bowie's accompaniment wowed me when I first bought the console, and even watching it a year on it I'm more inspired by it than I am by UEFA's. In-game, UEFA CL is nothing to get all that worked up about either; it's fairly average Playstation fare, and nothing on a par with the likes of Virtua Striker 2 on the Dreamcast. You can put up with it though, and if you haven't been pleasured with the Dreamcast's sumptuous visuals, you probably won't mind. The player animations are the graphical saving grace for UEFA. Facial expressions are indiscernible, but on the whole the players have an air of realism. The menu options on offer to you include "Play Game", "Quick Match", "Options" and "Load Game". The first presents you with a sub-menu allowing you to select what sort of game you'd like to take part in; either a Competition, a Scenario match, a Friendly or some other games types. The "Quick Match" option takes you straight to the Controller Assign screen, where you can pick one of the two randomly assigned teams. My favourite option is to pick the Scenario option, which allows you to take part in classic European encounters from 1960 right through to the present day, including the dramatic century-concluding Manchester United versus Bayern Munich clash.

New today on EuroGamer is our review of the now notorious Ultima Ascension, an RPG better known for its bugs than its storyline. We took a closer look at the "patched" UK release version of the game to see if it's worth your money, or if you're better staying well clear and grabbing a bottle of anti-biotics to be on the safe side...

Today's Quake 3 patch is brought to you by the letter P and the number 7. The latest version (1.17) fixes a serious security flaw in Quake 3 that allowed servers to overwrite any file on a player's computer! Ouch. The new version is, of course, not compatible with any previous version of Quake 3, so you'll have to download it if you want to play online.

The shareware version of GameSpy 2.20 is now available to download, adding support for Soldier of Fortune, Daikatana, Codename Eagle, and Rogue Spear : Urban Ops. Some problems with running the server browser on Win2K have also been fixed.

Our friends over at Cached have an article taking a look at the "pro-mode" for Quake 3, designed by professional gamers for professional gamers. The article takes a look at the major changes they have made to the game, how it effects the way the game is played, and whether it's any good at the end of the day...

For all you Counter-Strike fans out there, the European CounterStrike League is now open for business, and is taking sign-ups before the season starts in a few weeks time. Check their website for the full details...

German publisher TopWare dropped us a line to let us know that they will be publishing the bizarre looking "It Came For Zog!", an adventure game currently in development in Denmark, in which you will play a caveman abducted by aliens. No, really. For the full story, read the press release.

French publisher Cryo will be showing off Test Drive 6 at E3, and sent word that the game will be released in the UK on May 26th. Cryo's other games, including Devil Inside, Hellboy, Open Tennis 2000, and Venice, will all be on show as well.

The Online Gamers Association today announced that it has set up a National eSports Advisory Panel in the UK, made up of representatives from leading gaming service providers and online leagues. The panel's first job will be to help select the UK Quake 3 team, which we will be touring around Europe to play in international tournaments and local LAN events. First stop, LAN Arena 5 in Paris this summer. Read the press release for the full story.

Virgin dropped us a line to let us know that the official website for Shiny's new multiplayer strategy game, Sacrifice, is now online! The site includes information about the game, as well as some screenshots and concept art.

Zdim sent word that Valve are planning to release a new version of the Half-Life SDK, which will include things previously only available in the ProSDK, as well as the new networking code a new user interface toolkit

Despite the games cute graphics, there's still plenty of options and modes for seasoned golfers to get stuck into. Five courses are available to play on, each one with a distinctive style of play. The fairly basic and flat Japanese course offers a gentle introduction to players, while the gusty islands that form the Scottish greens offer a real challenge to the more experienced player. The meat of the game for the solo player is the massive world tour against computer players around each of these courses, but the free play mode has additional tournament, match and stroke modes for added variety. A choice of player character is offered to you, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, with values for statistics like power, luck and spin to consider. Then there's a choice of which set of irons, woods and even which ball type your going to take with you out to the green, although I have to admit that this was getting a bit too involved for me, it does illustrate the depth of options that are available if your brave enough to dig that far. Once on the tee you'll find the game a real breeze to control. The analog stick aims the shot, the Y button will give you some nice camera angles to view and the A button will begin the swing. You can switch clubs using the D-pad and you've got the choice of making a more powerful normal short or a short range, but very accurate cautious shot. Spin can then be added to the shot using the analog stick while the swing is in progress. The easy interface and cute graphics actually disguise what's really a relatively complex simulation, with a large number of options available for each shot. The accuracy and power of the shot is judged using a traditional golf game 'swingometer', using the three-tap system that should be familiar to anyone who's played a golf game before. One tap to start the swing, another to set the power, and a final tap of the button at the bottom of the swingometer to make the shot. It's a good system, but here its made a little too easy by the slow speed of the dial, making miss-swings rare. A successful shot must take into consideration the distance, lie of the ball and the strength and direction of the wind, so its not critical that the emphasis isn't also on lightening fast reactions as well. While the game is visually great to look at, with the courses rendered cleanly and the players very pleasing to the eye, the landscapes are rather short on detail. There's none of the frills like spectators or grandstands that can be found in other golf titles, and while this doesn't detract from the gameplay at all, it does make the courses a little dull. The pre round course flyby is smooth very well put together however, and has to be the most useful flyby in any golf game I've played. A welcome addition to the all ready feature filled package is the slightly weird G-ball game. This variant completely replaces the grass and trees of a traditional golf course, and places the players in futuristic VR style floating arenas to play a ball through the hoop game that most closely resembles crochet. This plays and looks so radically different from the main game that its almost a complete title on it's own, and adds a level of variety and value not often found in golf or indeed any other sports based titles.

I noticed over at Stomped that Steve "magicman" Thoms made a post to the Nihilistic Boards regarding map building in Vampire: The Masquerade: