Following on from yesterday’s introduction to the multi-player version of GRAW 2, today, we’ll dig a bit further into the detail.
Spawn Camping tackled
Players of multi-player will be very glad to hear that it has an updated version of spawning. In previous games, after death, players were brought back at set spawning points, which lead some naughty-types to sit at these points, just shooting people before they had a chance to escape. These rotters will be frustrated to hear that they’ll no longer be able to do this.
Spawning is now to a region rather than a set point. The spawn algorithm looks at the number of people who have previously been killed there, numbers of enemy soldiers present, etc. On spawning, the player is invulnerable, but able to fire. As soon as they fire a shot, they lose their invulnerability.
Customisation and clans
Building and managing a clan – of up to 100 people – is now built in thanks to Ubisoft’s tool that has been incorporated.
There’s lots of customisation of your player possible with a tremendous selection of clothing and headgear. Ubisoft tells us that lots of clans that have been on the beta have created a ‘uniform’ that all members must wear. Some may be sad to hear that there’s no face-mapping, but it had to go because of the customisation.
One new feature that should provide an extra dimension to multi-player games is the addition of the medic function, giving you the ability to get players back to full health when they’ve been hit with a round that has incapacitated them.
Maps
The developers have spent a lot of time on the multi-player maps, improving not only the quality, but also the details. In their words, they’ve “tried to create spaces that aren’t just normal.”
Examples of this are jungles that aren’t just jungles, but ones that have had a C130 aircraft recently crashed within it, still smoking and a village that has just been ravaged by a Tsunami.
The largest map is now a significant 500 x 500m.
Shhhh, listen to the audio
If you want to get that edge on your opponents, you’re going to have to listen hard, as sound has been brought further in to successful playing of the game. By turning your HiFi and ears up, you’ll be able to track other players simply by listening to their where their foot steps or gun shots are coming from.
To build your adrenaline, the music in the multi-player game changes as things get more difficult.
__Conclusion
The hour or so I had with it, doesn’t give you the opportunity to really get your teeth into a game like this. The real delight of it will be exposed after many hours of button and trigger jiggling, playing via xBox Live.
What I can tell you, is it looks very special with the realistic lighting heightening an already impressive experience.
They’re going to have to do something pretty disastrous between now and the launch to muck this up. To me, this has all of the makings of a hit game.
Buy it on Amazon UK or Amazon US
Have a listen to our exclusive audio interview with Christian Allen, Creative Director of Red Storm.
GRAW 2. Demo of the single player available.
After one battle too many with our ever-flaky Epson printer (see: 
The printer tray at the bottom stores a useful 250 sheets, so you can let it get on with big jobs unattended, with the printer fairly quiet in operation.
SPECIFICATIONS:
Many of the people who had purchased X360’s were finding that their machines were failing a short time after one-year warranty period had expired. The BBC say that 250 of them had 
The case was brought by Copiepresse, a copyright protection organisation that was representing 17 [UPDATE (thanks Michel) French-speaking] Belgian newspapers, complaining that both Google’s search and News service were in breach.
A cavalcade of new phones are continuing to spew forth from the 3GSM World Congress bash in Barcelona, and one that has especially warmed our toilet seats of desire is the ‘G900’ smartphone from Toshiba.
To ensure that the vast display is topped up with fast and fresh web pages there’s ultra-nippy HSDPA connectivity onboard (take that, iPhone!), with 64MB of internal memory and a miniSD card taking care of storage duties.
Extra security comes in the form of a rear biometric scanner, and there’s also Bluetooth with A2DP support, Wi-Fi, USB On-The-Go and Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile 6 OS.
There may be controversy on the catwalks, but thin remains in with the design bods at Samsung, who have just unleashed a trio of anorexic handsets in their Ultra range, the U300, U600, U700 and ultra-thin U100.
Back to the real world, there’s no denying that the U100 is an impressive piece of engineering – and purdy as a picture too – packing in a 3 mega-pixel camera, a 1.93″ color TFT screen and 11 hours of music play time into its 5.9mm wide frame.
Adjusting the BS output to ‘stun,’ the press announcement tells us that the handset apparently exudes “elegance and modern style… for the ultimate sophistication” and comes in a suitably daftly-named set of colours, including sapphire blue, garnet red, platinum metal and copper gold casing. 
Wrapping up the new line-up is the U300, a 9.6-mm clamshell with a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, TV-out capability and 70MB of onboard storage (but no MicroSD slot).
In an advanced Hedge-Betting exercise, i-mate has announced its new range of Windows Mobile devices, with a set of designs mirroring just about every handset currently available on the market.
Christened the “Ultimate” range, the WM6-powered devices – all five of ’em – are numbered 5150, 6150, 7150, 9150, and 8150 (clockwise from the upper left in the compilation photo) – if you’re bored, you can play “spot the inspiration” and see if you match i-mate’s new offerings to current designs by other manufacturers.
Full details of the whole range are still dribbling through, but we’ve learnt that the Ultimate 5150 slider comes with an Intel Bulverde 520MHz CPU, VGA screen, 256MB ROM and 128MB RAM, Wi-Fi, microSD memory card slot and a 2.0 megapixel camera.
Nordic big-knobs Nokia have knocked out another two handsets for your delectation today.
Lurking on the back is a 2 megapixel camera, with the N77 delivering on the multimedia front, offering visual radio and support for MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA media.
Nokia E90 Communicator
There’s also integrated GPS and Nokia Maps wedged into the chunky handset, but all those features are going to come at a wallet-whipping price, with the E90 expected to be priced at around a stratospheric €750.