Richard Burns Rally; Publisher, Sci; Formats, PC, PS2, Xbox; Price, £39.99: Family friendly? It's fiendishly difficult but there's no sex or violence to be seen.

IT'S a nightmare scenario. You're developing a rally driving simulation and, with one eye on the success enjoyed by Codemasters and Colin McRae, you sign up the last Brit to win the world championship.

You announce the game and get cracking - only for doctors to diagnose your big name with a life-threatening condition that forces him to quit the sport.

Sound to ridiculous to be true? Well that's exactly what happened to Warthog Sweden and Richard Burns. Thankfully, Burns is now making good progress after an operation on a brain tumour. And he'll be relieved to know that the game bearing his name is quite an achievement as well.

It's also incredibly hard. Make no mistake (in more ways than one), Richard Burns Rally is a full-on simulation of the sport it represents.

Not since V-Rally on the PlayStation has a game so punished a moment's inattention, a missed gear change or fluffed braking.

Richard Burns himself pops up in virtual form to guide you through the tutorial section and it's worth wading through no matter how good you are at driving games. Listen to the man and act on his tips or you will get precisely nowhere.

Unlike the Colin McRae series - where Codemasters has tweaked the physics to make the cars more forgiving - simply completing a special stage is an achievement. Real life rally drivers went over Warthog's stage notes, point by point, offering help and advice.

Apparently the game owes a big debt of gratitude to late rally legend Possum Bourne, who pointed out where the programmers were going wrong.

There's the full gamut of special stages including the ubiquitous desert and snowbound forests to compete on. You also get a fair selection of cars, including an MG Rover, the Subaru Impreza and the Mitsubishi Lancer.

Each of the computer controlled drivers has their own personality. For instance, the weaker drivers will get tired over the course of a long rally and become more prone to making mistakes.

What's more ,the cars look terrific and move at a cracking pace but there's no chance of stopping to admire the scenery.

You absolutely must spend time setting up your car before an event or it will handle so loosely you will end up in a ditch. The secret is consistency rather than outright speed (something that benefited Burns in his battle with McRae - fast but prone to mistakes - in the real championship).

This is about as hard-core as it gets. If you have the patience there's lots to enjoy about Richard Burns Rally. If, on the other hand, you think a game like Burn Out is a technical challenge then I'd steer well clear.

CHESSMASTER: 10TH EDITION; Publisher, Ubisoft; Format, PC: Family friendly? No violence here but younger kids will find the game of chess a daunting challenge.

IN these days of instant gratification, when games like Doom 3 have taken realism to new heights, is there room on your hard drive anymore for a cerebral simulation like Chessmaster?

Ubisoft reckons this tenth edition will make you a better chess player, regardless of your skill. I took that to be something of a challenge given that as a chess player I'd make a damn good swimmer.

Players familiar with the brand will notice the new, easy-to-navigate interface, a completely new online module, and a new Chessmaster Academy taught by International master, Josh Waitzkin.

Waitzkin personally walks players through the basics of chess and introduces a variety of simple strategies for dominating your opponent. The academy also features the best attacking moves as taught by noted chess champion, Larry Christiansen.

The interface is clear and easy to navigate and the graphics are suitably crisp (but then Chessmaster is hardly Return To Castle Wolfenstein).

By the end of my tour of the academy I may not have been ready to take on Gary Kasparov but I did feel a bit more confident about my strategy. As you improve the game improves with you - beefing up the artificial intelligence to make for more of a challenge.

Better players will enjoy the online element that allows you to go online and join a virtual tournament.

Chessmaster is never going to catch the headlines but if you enjoy the game it could be the perfect accompaniment on a laptop for travellers.

Virus Watch

Bagle.AL

Alias: I-Worm.Bagle.al, W32/Bagle.aq@MM, WORM_BAGLE.AC,Bagle.AG, W32/Bagle-AQ

A NEW Bagle virus is spreading across the Internet like wildfire, although experts at F-Secure say it is hard to say at this stage whether it has just been spammed a lot or if it's really spreading fast.

Bagle.AL is an email worm and like other Bagle variants, sends emails with infected attachments. It locates emails from the local hard drive and then sends itself to those addresses with messages looking like this: From: random email address Subject: nothing. It has an attachment with a name such as new_price.zip, price_new.zip, etc - the name is variable, but always contains the word "price".

The attachment is always a ZIP, although it could sometimes be encrypted. In these cases the email contains the password in an image.

The attachment ZIP file contains two files: PRICE.HTML and PRICE.EXE.

With no dangerous EXE files in sight, many recipients could wrongly assume that the HTML file is just a web page and safe to click at, but when the HTML file is accessed, it uses the Object Data vulnerability in Internet Explorer to load and execute the PRICE.EXE file.

And when PRICE.EXE is run, it copies itself to Windows SYSTEM directory as WINDLL.EXE and tries to add execution of this file to Windows registry.

The worm also locates folders containing the string "SHAR" in their name and copies itself to these folders under several suggestive names, such as "Porno pics arhive, xxx.exe".

Finally the worm contains a backdoor, which allows the author of the virus to control the infected machines.

* For more information on Bagle variants visit www.f-secure.com/v-descs/bagle_z.shtml

Published: 03/09/2004