Grand Theft Auto 3 Review

A stubble beard, an irresistible urge to greet everyone with "What's up, dog?" and a terrified driving instructor. The result of one month GTA3.





> GTA3 Review




Morrowind Review

With Morrowind, Bethesda promised the most expansive, complete and detailed Elder Scrolls RPG ever. Let's see if they put their money where their mouths are.




> Full Story




New award and score system

Some minor tweaks added to our site. We redesigned the scoreboard and have added a new award system, here they are:





These awards will not be handed out purely on points, but if we feel that it is a milestone or deserves special appreciation in a certain area.

Warcraft 3 fastest-selling PC game ever



Well, big surprise. Battle.Net already was the biggest free online gaming provider, Diablo 2 broke all sales records, and Warcraft 3...is well on its way to confirm the ever-lasting commercial success of Blizzard products. Having already sold 1 million copies, Warcraft 3 is the fastest-selling game ever.
The Reign of Chaos... is making Blizzard wealthy fat cats.

> Blizzard Press Release

> Warcraft III review



Earth & Beyond release date



Westwood's Space MMORPG's beta is up and running. They have even set a release date for the game: get your joystick and helmets ready, because Earth & Beyond is coming your way September 17th.

> Official Earth & Beyond Site





Mafia delayed

Mafia, Illusion Softworks' mob game, is once again delayed. For all of you who hoped to tommygun some punks spaghetti-style this summer, this news might be a bummer: the current release date is August 30th.

> Mafia Official Site














Battlefield 1942 Demo



Battlefield 1942, the dreamed WWII game (combining the best of RTCW, MOH:AA, Day of Defeat and Operation Flashpoint) is nearing completion. A single player demo is available. The game is published by EA and developed by the guys and galls over at Digital Illusions CE (DiCE). Release date is set on September 3rd.

> BF 1942 Official Site

> BF 1942 Singleplayer Demo



NV30 specs

We read these NV30 specs over at XBit Labs:

• 73 million transistors;
• 0.13micron manufacturing technology;
• 450MHz chip clock frequency;
• External T&L unit and TT&L unit (True Time and Lighting) implemented in a companion chip (supposedly working at 450MHz);
• 8 rendering pipelines (about the same amount of pipelines is expected to be implemented in ATI R300);
• 4 TMUs per pipeline capable of laying up to 8 textures in a single pass (loopback);
• 4 Vertex Shaders units;
• 2 Pixel Shaders units;
• 256bit memory access;
• Up to 750MHz DDR memory working frequency;
• 370MHz RAMDAC;
• Quad cache for vertex, primitive and pixel textures;
• Dual (dounble-level, like Hyper-Z?) Z-Buffer for better lossless data compression;
• 12nvx – new anisotropic filtering mode (12x4=48, 48 texture samples?);
• NVAutoShaper prediction unit also responsible for preliminary saving of data samples in caches, which allows operating the data location manually;
• NvBlur: API Glide compatibility;
• DirectX9.x compatible;
• OpenGL 2.0 support.
  

Looks pretty cool all, but the modest increase in transistors (GF4 cards have 63 million), the external T&L unit and the NvBlur capability seems bit strange. These specs though show no breakthrough changes like 3D Labs are claiming with their P10 (no VGA legacy support, complete programmable graphics pipeline).

But hey, these specs are pure speculation and are by no means endorsed by nVidia (well, of course not)

> nVidia




Lucasarts 20th anniversary

Okay, this is old news, but I only recently stumbled across the great subsite Lucas has launched commemorating 20 years of achievement in the PC games industry. If you're a die-hard adventure fan and want to relive the glory of Lucas' former brilliance, check out the site. It has interviews, cutscenes from old games and much more.

Congratulations Lucasarts, and may Galaxies be the best PC game ever (which it appears to become)

> Lucasarts 20th Anniversary Site



Simcity 4 news



Maxis has set up a site in expectance of the next sibling of the legendary Simcity series, Simcity 4. In the site, you can find lots of stuff ranging from articles by Simcity 4 programmers, screenshots and gameplay videos.

Simcity 4 is going to be the most complex Simcity ever, leaving the macro-approach of former Simcity games and preferring a smaller scale micro-environment. While it is not possible to exert direct control over citizens (unlike The Sims), you will need to pay much closer attention to their needs. A good city no longer is a city with high land values, but with happy denizens.

> Simcity 4 Site