SCANNER.
media & technology
Lowdown Games - Web Sites o CD ROMS
GAME
Total NBA 97
(PlayStation £34.99)
The launch of the N64 has forced Sony into some severe price cutting. The PlayStation itself now sells at only £130, and the latest wave of games are significantly cheaper than before. Total NBA 96 was the best sports sim around last year and it’s hard to find fault with the game. Despite that, it has now received an annual update and looks better than ever. Motion capture graphics, a highly intuitive new passing system, and plenty of extra moves make it utterly addictive. And, if you happen to have two Multi-taps, eight controHers and seven friends, you can have even more fun.
GAME
Porsche Challenge (PlayStation £34.99)
If you haven’t got thirty-five grand kicking around, this is probably the closest you’ll get to driving the new Porsche. It seems that even cars now merit a Videogame tie-in, and in this
BT Touchpoint: public information without the connection fee
among the dozen or so companies to have signed up to the scheme. On a more local level, Touchpoint will pro-
TECHNOLOGY It's good to touch
Obviously not satisfied with the meagre profits they make, British latest venture, Touchpoint, could soon be hitting a shopping mall, cinema or sports centre near you. Touchpoint is an interactive touchscreen kiosk that is currently on trial in London. If all goes well, it should go nationwide next year.
A combination of Web browser and telephone, Touchpoint offers news, sport, local information and entertainment guides. Editorially, information is provid- . ed by The Guardian and the Press Association and, i thankfully, you won’t need a fistful of coins as it’s free to browse. BT's hope is that customers will soon be order- ing up the variety of services offered by third party advertisers.
The idea is simple. You find something you want, touch 3 the onscreen ad and pick up the phone to be connected to one of that company’s telephonists. So far, British
vide shopping information and area maps. Hard copy printouts of maps are one of the few things you will have to pay for.
Touchpoint's marketing manager, Paul Gillooly, is enthusiastic about the unit’s potential. ’We're still evalu- ating but we have been getting a million hits per month,’ he says. With only 160 or so machines up and running, that means about ten people using each machine per hour. Gillooly is unwilling to be drawn on whether such a hit-rate will make Touchpoint commercially viable, but
it looks as though the system will require some degree of
critical mass before it is successful.
Enough people will need to be persuaded that there are useful services on offer at their local Touchpoint, and on the flip side, enough companies will have to be persuad- ed that it is a profitable advertising medium. If all these parties are convinced, then the one thing you can be sure about is that Busby will get a new nest. (John
case the graphics have been created by the same 30 modelling software used to design the real thing. As far as gameplay is concerned, you get what you’d expect from something with a
= Porche badge -- fluidity, speed and , action. The detail is stunning, and
there is a two-player option, but whether the game Will attract the same 80s associations as the brand remains to be seen.
I WEB SITE
; The British Monarchy (http://wwwroyalgov.uk)
Why does the Queen keep Corgis? For
the answer to this or any other
pressing questions you might have about the country’s greatest soap ‘
Airways, lnterflora, Thomson Holidays and Barclays are Henderson)
OVER IN adland, things are hotting up as lovely Dani Behr and gangly Whose Line Is It Anyway star Ryan Stiles arrive on our screens to announce a new flavour of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Now Hot ’n’ Spicy may just seem like an tasty new spin on the KFC staple to you and me, but according to sources close to the Colonel, it's a political hot chicken of the highest order. First it was the Poll Tax, now Scotland's tastebuds have been deemed fit to act as a test ground for the new flavour before it’s launched nationwide. So to what exactly do we owe this honour? 'Why launch in Scotland?’ says KFC marketing manager Ana Sanderson. ‘Are the Scots really hotter and spicier than the rest of the UK? Let's
" m ' opera, point your browser at the above 1 address Entirely devoid of innovation, this site sits on the Web with the 5 gravity of a headstone, and in a few years time that might not be inappropriate. As it is, The British Monarchy c0uld not be more bland, and it certainly doesn’t deserve the media attention it has received The
same applies to the Web site, whose i
STRANGE BUT true. Anyone who buys a copy of the glossy men's magazine Bizarre this month and finds a page missing can rest assured that they're not alone. The new bloke-ish bi-monthly carrying tales of weird and shocking happenings from around the world (UFO sightings, German orgies, etc) has encountered the bizarre misfortune of attracting a legal writ forcing it to rip a single page from all 100,000 copies of the magazine.
The writ arrived after Bizarre printed an extract from a book by London listings mag Time Out’s news editor, and was put in place to prevent potentially prejudicial material being published just days before a trial relating to the story was due to begin.
guest book can only suggest that Hyacinth Bucket has at last entered cyberspace.
REVIEWER THIS ISSUE: John Henderson
l
l SCANNER COVERS THE LATEST i DEVELOPMENTS m
i
Copies of the magazine with the wait and see.’ MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY. missing page now carry a warning Hot and spicy? Nice of you to say . , sticker stating its mysterious so. But we all know the real story. ADDRESS COMMENTS AND absence is due to legal action. Could All those years of dedicated pie and QUERIES TO this spell disaster for the future of chip eating have finally paid off to i MED|AL|ST@AOLCOM
Bizarre? Probably not. It’s the weirdest story in the magazine.
make us the deep-fried food test ground of the world. (Ellie Carr) l _,..
.3 Apr 199/ THE LIST 91
Pl l/‘iar-