EA have announced that the ridiculously successful benign 'em up, The Sims, is set to extend its evil grasp further, stretching forth its dark hand to Xbox and GameCube players.
PS2'ers recently succumbed to the power that flows from its inky depths, and of course we all know that it's already too late for the poor unsuspecting PC players.

Both versions are due in the Spring. Don't look directly at it! It'll take your soul!!

Two of the current top RTS games have been patched.

First up Warcraft III has been patched to version 1.05, there's currently no download file for the patch but the game will autoupdate if you connect to BattleNet, a seperate download is expected soon.

Next up, the quite brilliant American Conquest has reached v1.46 with the patch coming in a choice of two colours. The first is a "lite" version that fixes some AI issues and server problems, the second is larger and also includes some candy and improvements to the singleplayer maps.

Grab both version from the official American Conquest patch page.

Word has it that the PC version of the Xbox smash 3rd person stealther, Splinter Cell, has been gilded for the PC and should be store-side at the end of February.

A playable demo of the PC version of Enclave has been released. Enclave is currently available on the Xbox, although a PC version has been in the works for a while now. The demo, coming in at 190Mb, offers part of the Light Campaign, and you play as the Knight character.

You can grab the demo from the following mirrors:

It seems that today is Patch Day for a number of games.

Borrowed shamelessly from GamesPress, here is this week's All-Formats Charts:

POS.	TITLE	PUBLISHER	LAST   WEEK
1	THE GETAWAY	SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT	2
2	GRAND THEFT AUTO: VICE CITY	TAKE 2	1
3	SIM CITY 4	ELECTRONIC ARTS	4
4	FIFA 2003	ELECTRONIC ARTS	3
5	HARRY POTTER - CHAMBER OF SECRETS	ELECTRONIC ARTS	6
6	JAMES BOND 007: NIGHTFIRE	ELECTRONIC ARTS	5
7	LORD OF THE RINGS - THE TWO TOWERS	ELECTRONIC ARTS	7
8	DANCING STAGE PARTY EDITION	KONAMI	8
9	DANCING STAGE EUROMIX	KONAMI	11
10	TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER 4	ACTIVISION	9
11	MEDAL OF HONOR: FRONTLINE	ELECTRONIC ARTS	10
12	WWE SMACKDOWN! SHUT YOUR MOUTH	THQ	12
13	THE SIMS: DELUXE EDITION	ELECTRONIC ARTS	16
14	TIGER WOODS PGA TOUR 2003	ELECTRONIC ARTS	20
15	THE SIMS: UNLEASHED	ELECTRONIC ARTS	15
16	PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 2	KONAMI	13
17	TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL	UBISOFT	14
18	TIMESPLITTERS 2	EIDOS INTERACTIVE	19
19	TOM CLANCY'S GHOST RECON	UBISOFT	-
20	LORD OF THE RINGS-FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING	VIVENDI UNIVERSAL GAMES	18

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I used to play the arcade game Super Zaxxon a lot, trying to find the best way to score the highest number of points by collecting those hard-to-reach bonuses.

Twin Galaxies is a website that is dedicated to recording arcade machine high scores, and they are reporting that a gentleman by the name of Donald Hayes has recently been officially verified as having beaten the previous high score.

Ordinarily this wouldn't be much of a story, as high scores are beaten every day, however Dave has managed to add the Super Zaxxon record to his existing record high scores on both Centipede and TRON, but in doing so he has beaten a record that has been in place for more than 20 years.

Dave's new high score of 496,950, scored on January 27^th beats the previous record of 339,750, which was set by Greg McLeod on July 25^th 1983. You can read the full report of the record attempt in the chief referee's report.

S2 Games have opened up Beta applications for their upcoming FPS/RTS online game Savage. The Beta kicks off in mid-February, so head over to their website to sign up.

There are also a number of new screenshots of the game available on the website.

Updated throughout the day. 

Reviews

Bungie have posted six new wallpapers for the sequel to their massively popular Xbox game Halo. The wallpapers, whilst new in themselves, don't offer anything new in terms of imagery from the game itself, as they have been created from previously published sources, such as the trailer video, magazine cover art, or the logo.

If you're a Halo 2 fan, go grab them.

Despite our best efforts, we here at News0r have been entirely unsuccessful in getting a place on the EVE Online beta test, leaving us to rely on the smattering of information being released to the public.

The Eve Online website has been updated with four (count 'em - 4!) Beta Tester Diaries, as well as 16 new screenshots for viewing pleasure.

Updated throughout the day. 

Previews