X Men 2: Wolverine's Revenge

By PETER ELEY

Surprise, surprise — the autumn's biggie movies, The Matrix Reloaded and X-Men 2, will have games attached to them, Enter The Matrix and Wolverine's Revenge.

Wolverine's Revenge will launch on all platforms, including the GameBoy Advance. The game centres on Wolverine, and takes him back to the secret Canadian Army experiment, Weapon X, that created him.

It turns out a dormant failsafe virus planted in Wolverine has been activated, and he has only 48 hours to live. Wolverine must penetrate Weapon X and find a cure. In doing so, he encounters the full range of X-Men villains, such as Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike.

The game is a mixture of full-on fighting action using Wolverine's super powers and stealth which sees our hairy hero sneak up on unsuspecting enemies. The game deserves its M15 rating as it can be quite brutal at times, although the GameBoy version has been toned down for its younger user base and has a G8 rating.


n A cautionary note: many new games want a Geforce2 or ATI Radeon video card and will run poorly, if at all, on ones such as the nVidia TNT2 supplied with many machines.

The PC is arguably the best gaming platform because of its graphics, online capability and range of games, but it is galling to find you need a video card upgrade, and that it will cost you the same as one of the cut-price consoles with a $100 game thrown in.

But unless you demand the best in performance, you don't need a $500 high-end card. I shopped around last week and got a respectable GeForce4 MX card for $140, and that was with fitting while I waited and GST.

The difference is startling. I can run Command and Conquer Generals with all the options cranked up to high, although it does slow down over 800 x 600 resolution. Black Hawk Down is absolutely stunning.

If you are buying a PC for gaming, make sure it has a modern video card, with 64mb of ram and at least 256mb of system ram. Avoid anything with shared graphics ram — they are for less-demanding applications such as spreadsheets and word processing.

Almost all new PCs have sufficiently powerful processors and enough hard drive storage for games. And don't forget to check the required system specs before buying a game. A pat on the back to those software publishers who publish such information prominently, rather than in tiny type on the bottom of the box.

* Email Peter Eley