Plenty of topical debate in the Future Gamer Chat Forum this week, as news filtered through of the codenamed 'Project Dolphin' from Nintendo. Opinion seemed to be split down the middle in the Forum on exactly what readers want from the new machine. Many desire backward compatibility, but agreed that it was probably not going to be possible. Others believe that it will not matter what the new Nintendo machine is like, Sony will be so dominant by then that the fight is over already. Another hot topic was the various scoring methods employed by magazines when reviewing games. Marks out of 10? Percentage mark? Between 1 and 5 stars? No ratings at all? Most readers agreed that there is no perfect way to score games, but that the percentage system is probably the fairest and most accurate method out there. Of course, if anyone can suggest a better method, then drop into the Forum and let us know about it. Finally this week, ‘MarkyB’ lost it big time when he was labelled a 'casual gamer' (the horror! the horror!). So, to prove us all wrong he had a couple of games of Wipeout, played Tomb Raider for five minutes then went down the pub. The man is the hardcore games champion of the world, and let no-one suggest otherwise!

Thanks to all those who entered the Actua Ice Hockey 2 competition in FG24. The answer was of course ‘puck’. Sadly, there could only ever be six winners. These spawners each get a copy of Actua Ice Hockey 2 for PlayStation:
gail@davery.freeserve.co.uk;
lee.davies@saaconsultants.com;
Eeysdrn@nottingham.ac.uk
These cheeky monkey-types will be receiving the PC version:
Jim@jimw.u-net.com;
mark-rudkin@goodfella.freeserve.co.uk;
ojms@bigfoot.com
Send us your addresses, if you haven’t done so already, so we can get the games to you.

Check out the Future Gamer website for the latest demos and patches, as well as hints & tips for all your favourite games. We’ve got the latest version of the Expendable demo, weighing in at a slightly more modem-friendly 49Mb. The hottest patch this week is for Championship Manager 3 which updates your database to include all the latest transfers. Recent additions to the hints & tips database include Pool Shark on PlayStation, Snowboard Kids 2 for the N64, Warzone 2100 on the PC and Power Stone on the Dreamcast.