Pale imitation iof a classic

Re-makes are difficult enough at the best of times, but games that attempt to "re-imagine" something as seminal as The Great Escape are attempting the near impossible.

The problem with taking a classic like The Great Escape as your source is the audience's familiarity with the subject. Thanks to countless bank holiday re-runs, there can't be many people over the age of ten who haven't seen The Great Escape at least a couple of times.

It's a fantastic movie with an incredible soundtrack. Everyone has a favourite bit - the motorcycle chase, the sneaky Germans speaking English to catch our heroes at the train station, or Charles Bronson's claustrophobia. It's become something of an institution.

So how does the game of a 40-year-old movie fare? The answer is pretty badly.

To play, it's like countless other sub-Tomb Raider/Metal Gear clones. Your character has to escape (naturally) and to do so he must carry out a series of minor (and rather boring) missions such as obtaining wire cutters to slice through the barbed wire or obtaining tools to disrupt the stalag's power supply. So far so hum-drum. This wouldn't be so bad if The Great Escape left you to it. Instead, the game insists on hand-holding to a ridiculous degree with "helpful" messages popping up all over the place. Stealth gaming veterans will be infuriated.

There's the usual cast of characters (including Virgil Hilts, the iconic GI as played by Steve McQueen in the film) who fill the roles of locksmith, gadget man, undercover agent and action hero. You can play as any of them.

The "intelligence" of the enemy guards is as dumbed-down as the rest of the game. In the early missions, it's simplicity itself to sneak up or around them. Annoyingly, though, when you do spot them the whole base is on red-alert regardless of whether or not you take them out of the game immediately. It would have been more exciting, and realistic, to have a few precious seconds to knock out a guard before they can sound the klaxon.

The graphics are muddy-looking and simplistic but at least the on-screen action is smooth. Just don't expect to be slapping this in your Xbox drive when you want to impress PS2 owning pals.

At least the movie franchise guarantees The Great Escape a decent soundtrack, but if that's all you want I'd be tempted to forgo this game and head for the music section of your local HMV instead.

MACE GRIFFIN BOUNTY HUNTER Publisher: Vivendi Universal. Platform: Xbox Price: £39.99.

AHH just what the Xbox needs - another first person perspective shoot 'em up (FPS). As if anybody required another example of this over-populated genre now Microsoft is so close to publishing Halo 2.

Just like so many others, Mace Griffin is set in a bleak future where humans live in an industrialised landscape populated by dingy corridors and lots of boxes. The title character is a former Special Forces operative (Aren't they always? The Army must be the biggest employer in the 23rd century) who has jacked in his day job in order to earn more cash as a bounty hunter.

Unfortunately, this new career goes belly-up when Mace finds himself imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. The game starts with a prison break-out and asks you to guide Mace on a pan-galactic quest to clear his name.

To differentiate this title from the scores of others, Mace Griffin mixes up the usual run/hide/shoot gameplay with sections set in outer-space, when our hero takes the controls of a spacecruiser for a spot of dog-fighting. They may lack true variety but when a space battle arrives it makes for welcome relief.

As you'd expect, Mace can equip himself with extra weapons. There are ten to be had offering different levels of firepower. A couple of levels are infuriatingly difficult; I lost count of the times I attempted to infiltrate one particular room only to be shot by a guard. The computer's infallibility made me question using stealth tactics at all. Eventually, I was forced to take my chances with a full-on assault - something that took me back to the earliest days of the FPS when games like Doom were nothing more than digitised carnage. Nowadays, gamers expect something a little more, er, cerebral.

It's a cross-platform title but the Xbox version is the best bet boasting, as it does, in-game surround sound and sharper visual effects.

Still, it's a good looking game and Xbox newbies still building a decent library of titles may find lots to enjoy. Just don't play it straight after finishing Halo.

Virus Watch

THE dangers of going on-line unprotected have been graphically illustrated this week. The MSBlast virus can infect an unprotected PC within 30 seconds of logging on. No e-mail or downloads are required.

Virus specialist F-Secure reckons more than 70,000 machines are being infected every day. The virus is now ranked at the highest level alert on F-Secure virus warning "radar."

F-Secure connected a "naked" PC - one without anti-virus or firewall software - to the Internet. It took just 27 seconds before the PC became infected. Jason Holloway, UK general manager at anti-virus specialist F-Secure, says: "This outbreak has moved incredibly fast. The results of our test show that Internet users simply must have a configured firewall and anti-virus protection that is kept up to date."

Holloway says that although a patch to fix the security hole which the virus exploits has been available from Microsoft for around a month, only half of all computers running a vulnerable version of Windows would have applied it. The worm is only a problem for users of Windows 2000, Windows XP and possibly NT4. Windows 98, Windows 95 and Windows 3.11 are not at risk.

Holloway says that MSBlast is far more sophisticated than previous worms, and will be more difficult to defend against, as it is not spread by email. Instead, it scans random Internet addresses, looking for machines that are not protected with a firewall. If it finds a point of access to the PC, it can take control of the machine.

* For more information, updates and downloads, visit www.f-secure.com.

Published: 15/08/2003