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Interviews

According to a post on Blue's, Ubisoft have announced that Shadowbane will launch in Europe on January 15^th.

Let's hope they allow a free trial for Europeans when the game - and a couple of new servers - launches next month.

I almost posted about this yesterday but as the associated demo party finished several months ago I didn't. However since Back2Roots have actually put out a press release about it, I thought I'd post it.

Dmitry Andreev, lead programmer for the upcoming FPS game Kreed is also active in the demo scene, and released a demo featuring a lot of the technology used in Kreed in his 64K intro competition entry at Assembly 03.

You can grab the demo (all 64 kilobytes of it) from Back2Roots.

If you have an Amiga or an Amiga emulator you can check out my own listings on Back2Roots:

Atari have launched the official website for Driv3r (or Driver 3 if you don't speak l33t). The website has a few new screenshots, some new wallpapers and the previously released video.

I've been trading a few emails with the technical support staff for Horizons in the US recently. The crux of my questioning regarded access for non-US players to the US servers, the test server Blight in particular.

Attempting to register to play in the US isn't possible, as all non-US credit cards are automatically rejected and players are directed to the European site, although the game installs the game shortcut pointing to the US login page and doesn't give the option to set the European login page as a choice. (Since I was always redirected to the US login page, I had to find the correct URL myself. This was eventually discovered by searching the unofficial forums on www.tazoon.com - at the time of writing the Europe support pages are still unavailable and the official forums provided no assistance.)

After a number of repeated emails, confirmation has come back that the only way to play Horizons is if you register with the local licensee of the game and play on local servers, or make use of an 'International Account'. International accounts are not available yet, and they also cost more on a monthly basis.

Which means that if you want to play on a US server, or play on the Horizons test server, you have to subscribe in Europe, pay the European monthly fee to the European provider, then pay an extra monthly fee to not play on the European servers. (read more...)

(article by Media Create)

Total sales for the TOP 100 this week amounts to 2,123,000 units. This represents 110.65% of the last week's total, and 233.59% of the weekly average.

With increased demand from Christmas, the older titles have shifted favorably this week. Apart from "Mario Party 5", which shifted about 100,000 units, those popular titles the likes of "Gran Turismo 4: "Prologue"", "Resident Evil: Outbreak", and "Mega Man Battle Network 4 Tournament: Blue Moon/Red Sun" have seen increase in sales across the board.

The share of new software, on the other hand, is rather low at 27.36% of the total software sales. A number of new titles made it into the rankings this week was quite high at 25, however, the only new title to break the 100,000 units mark was "Front Mission 4". There were no significant new titles this week, and the market shifted mainly around the older releases.

Merry Christmas!

Updated throughout the day

News:

Tiscali games have opened the beta for their new (well, new to them) MMO game BiosFear. The game, which has been available in Korea under the name Lagheim, is now available in 'English' from BiuosFear UK.

The game is a simple MMO game, with a 3D engine, although certainly not of the calibur of more recent games. Like a lot of asian RPG games getting started is very simple, and the first few levels come in the first hour or so of play.

The beta download client is only 129Mb or so, so if you feel like trying out a new MMO, give this one a shot.

Borrowed shamelessly from Games Press, here is this week's All-Formats Charts. Not much change from last week or the week before.

POS.	TITLE
1	Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun
2	Need For Speed: Underground
3	The Simpsons: Hit & Run
4	FIFA 2004
5	Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King
6	True Crime: Streets Of La
7	Tony Hawk's Underground
8	The Sims: Bustin' Out
9	Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup
10	Finding Nemo
11	Crash Nitro Kart
12	Eye Toy: Play
13	Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
14	Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne
15	Dance: UK
16	Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines
17	Total Club Manager 2004
18	Championship Manager: Season 03/04
19	XIII
20	Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

GAME UK today announced they will be closing the BarrysWorld/rebranded Play.Game multiplayer service on January 23^rd 2004.

In an announcement today whose timing seems deliberately designed to deflect criticism of the decision and push any questioning or complaints about the move to early in the new year, Game have once more shown their commitment to retail game sales.

A FAQ has been posted to answer some of the more common questions, one of them being:

"Is it up for sale?"
We've explored that option but we don't expect to sell the service as a going concern.

According to a report on Reuters, the Chinese courts have ordered the provider of an online game to reimburse a player whose virtual property was stolen in-game by a hacker.

Li Hongchen, 24, had spent two years, and 10,000 yuan ($1,210) on pay-as-you-go cards to play, amassing weapons and victories in the popular online computer game Hongyue, or Red Moon, before his "weapons" were stolen in February, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday.