So you're sitting around the poker table on your usual Wednesday night. It's the night of hump day and you and your buddies have successfully made it half way through your business week. You break out the chips, dish out the cards, and light up your favorite brand of stogie. Two puffs in, the bar owner approaches and says, "Sorry guys, new law passed… you can't smoke in here any more." Everyone freezes, wanting to laugh at what you hope is a joke, but his face is serious. What do you do?

You come back next week with an eco-friendly cigar in hand and it's business as usual without skipping a beat. How? There's a new stogie in town and you could be the first of your friends to know about it. It has an authentic look and feel - the tip even lights up to simulate a burning cigar! For about the cost of one good cigar, you can pick up its tobacco-free counterpart and get between 1800-2000 drags. That's about 10 cigars' worth right there! The "safe cigar" is safe to smoke indoors because there is no flame or odor. The smokey vapor it releases even tastes like a real cigar but it's completely harmless (mostly a water vapor). So enjoy it indoors, save your favorite bar owner some smoking fines, avoid the second-hand smoke and mouth cancer, and still get your nicotine fix in an environmentally friendly and safe way with the safer smoking alternative - The Safe Cigar!

Online games pop out of nowhere! You try to sleep overnight and then the next thing you know, a new online game has already launched yet again. It's fun to try these games once in a while and you have to admit it, it is pretty easy to get hooked to one. If you look at online games and see how fast these babies have grown over the years, you can tell that people who worked hard behind it have a great way to make money online. Also, it is not only the money that makes this type of job fun to do, it is also the way it gets recognized by many. If you have a good grasp of understanding marketing, you will surely have better contributions on how to make money online by working with online game companies.

Everybody loves games! The word everybody applies to people of all ages; from kids to the oldest adult you may have come to know. As to the game that these people play, it varies from person to person, really. However, the greatest and most common means of easy gaming is done online. It simply is because it is faster that way. In addition, how have this become so popular? The dawn of cyber technology have made it all possible, which also gave way to the effective internet marketing strategies that keep game manufacturer on their toes and up the charts with their income.

Posted by Kirk Williford

The Holiday season is here, and that's the perfect time for gaming companies to make special Holiday offers for their consoles…

Well, if you haven't already heard, Nintendo released a new GameCube bundle about a week or two ago. The contents in this pack are:

1 Platinum, Black, or Indigo Nintendo Game Cube 1 Platinum, Black, or Indigo controller And best of all, a new Zelda Collectors Edition Disc that contains 4 all time Legend of Zelda hits:

- The Legend of Zelda

- The Legend of Zelda II: Link's Awakening

- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Not to mention a playable demo of the most recent Zelda game Wind Waker, and some game play movies.

Keep in mind, this is not available for purchase alone in ANY stores, the only way you can get this disc is when you buy a Nintendo GameCube.

However, the Collectors Edition disc runs on EBay for about $40-$60 by the time an auction ends, but if you?re lucky, you'll be able to find a cheap one.

UPDATE: [12/7]

If you haven't noticed, Nintendo.com has a new layout, and one of their features is the announcement of a fully-interactable section of the site called My Nintendo, where you can make wishlists, chat in the NP Chat room, register your Nintendo Products, or even post on the official Nintendo message board. Down the the point, if you look carefully on Nintendo.com's homepage, you'll see a 'Don't Miss Out!' section, with three links. One of them at the moment is a link to where you can get the Zelda Collector's Edition Disc without having to buy a new GameCube. All you need to do, is register for My Nintendo, and register your Nintendo GameCube and 2 of the following games:

- Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

- 1080: Avalanche

- Mario & Luigi: SuperStar Saga

- Mario Party 5

These Games include a pamphlet inside the case, under the instruction manual with a pin number on the back of it. This is the number you need to register your games.

To register your Nintendo GameCube, just look on the bottom of it and right under the barcode there should be a series of numbers. This is your serial number, in which you will need to register your console.

Posted by Peter Cox
From the creator of Lara Croft and lead designer of the original Tomb Raider game comes an epic tale of action, adventure, romance, evil and mystery. SCi Games Ltd is proud to announce the signing and spring 2004 release of GALLEON on Microsoft Xbox.

Step into the shoes of the swashbuckling CAPTAIN RHAMA SABRIER, and journey on an epic quest through the islands of Akbah to unlock the mystery of an enchanted ship, which could hold the key to the most powerful weapon in the universe.

As GALLEON's incredible story unfolds, Rhama must rely on more than his wits to survive, fending off fiendish adversaries with swords, pistols and Qing-Gong, an ancient martial art which allows Rhama to scale seemingly impenetrable walls, jump enormous caverns and swim to incredible depths.

Inspired by a mix of Sinbad, Errol Flynn, Kung Fu films and Disney, GALLEON creator Toby Gard said: "After creating Lara Croft and having been the lead designer of the original Tomb Raider, I wanted to give birth to a completely new type of hero and I came up with Captain Rhama. I am delighted that gamers will soon be able to savour GALLEON."

Dave Clark, Marketing Director of SCi Games commented: "It is tremendous to add GALLEON to our stable of titles, Toby has had a very specific vision for this game and finally gamers will be able to experience this."

GALLEON will be released in spring 2004.

Posted by Peter Cox

WHEN your girlfriend is seduced by a ghost, her classmate becomes an evil demon, the janitor takes on a mad axe murderer role and you're locked in the school late at night armed with just a box of chocolates; then you suddenly realise that fear knows no limits in 4am's latest game release.

WhiteDay is a fear inducing horror survival game viewed, for the first time ever in this genre, completely from a first person perspective.

Unfolding like a movie, the player takes control of a love-sick teenager entering into the local school late at night to return your dream girl's diary, which she lost earlier in the day and to drop off a token of your affection – WhiteDay* chocolates.

Very shortly players are introduced to two of the central characters, talking about ghost stories, in one of the school's many haunted corridors. It isn't long before the first problem of disabling the school alarm system becomes a priority.

During this challenge the game takes a very dark turn, as you witness the janitor club a man to death with a baseball bat, whilst the sounds of young and decidedly spooky children laugh on.

The most keen survival horror games player will find some pleasant surprises within WhiteDay with some real shock scenes that will have normally calm players literally squealing in their seats and shaking like a cowardly wuss!

The action is interspersed with graphically excellent cut scenes that allow the player to make decisions on the direction of the storyline, allowing the game to take one of two different directions.

There are no weapons in WhiteDay, but many ingenious puzzles litter your way throughout the game, seeing the player disable alarm systems, open combination safes and rescuing trapped school kids from weird apparitions. The difficulty setting helps the player to get into the story whilst carefully providing a harder challenge at every turn.

Taking the genre one step further, Sonnori have included a multiplayer feature giving a real time scare factor to the game as online players can pick to play from a host of horrors such as a ghost, devil, or janitor or - as per the single player mode - a hapless and unarmed school kid, to name a few.

Neil Cotton, 4am's Communications Director, said: "WhiteDay is a breath of fresh air for the horror survival genre – particularly when zombie bashing starts to get a little tiresome. It is genuinely scary and I'm embarrassed to admit it; when I saw the hanging sequence in the game a cold chill ran down my spine, but when I unexpectedly saw the dead schoolgirl for the first time I literally jumped out of my skin!"

Developed by Korean-based Sonnori, this unique and outstanding first person horror survival (for Windows computers) will be fully-translated for the UK market and published under license by 4am Entertainment – scheduled for release on Friday 13th February 2004.

Key Features:

Multiplayer option – play as a ghost, demon, school kid or janitor

Full 3D play

Ingenious puzzles that get progressively harder

Movie storyline and cut scenes

First horror survival game played completely in full first person perspective

Genuinely scary

Movie quality soundtrack

SCREENS COMING SOON!

Everybody’s heard about this game, if you haven’t, you must have been living under a rock for the past couple of years. This is the next installment in the near-legendary Zelda series.

I’ll start my review with the main issue that has surrounded this game – the graphics. Many people have criticised this game for the fact it has a new look, with new cel-shaded style graphics. Ok, ok, cel-shading’s been done, but it still doesn’t make the game any less pretty does it? They have complained that they take away the realism of the game…(but then it’s a game, it’s not supposed to be real). The graphics run fluidly and make you feel like you’re playing in an interactive cartoon. Screenshots do this game no justice, when you see it running, the movement is fluid, the colours vivid, and the entire thing will have you grinning like a maniac, and you will soon be immersed in the cartoon style world. There are occasional graphical glitches, such as being able to shove your sword through the wall, or the camera getting stuck at odd angles, but apart from this the graphics are beautiful and don’t deserve the criticism done to them.

Onto the most important thing – game play. Right from the start, you feel right at home, even if you’ve never played a Zelda game before. Even if it seems a little bit daunting or confusing to begin with, you’ll soon be doing actions with ease and the game has quite a user-friendly style. The battle system has remained virtually unchanged, and is still the fluent running, easy to use style we’re all used to, and newcomers will pick the combat up quite easily. As you could guess from the title, the wind plays a major part in this game, and you can use the Wind Waker to manipulate the wind and change it’s direction, which can prove valuable on the open seas. There is the addition of the countermoves, if you press the A button at the correct time, Link will execute a counterattack on the enemy. There are a few additions to game play, such as being able to pickup an enemies weapon, be it to smash down a door, or merely to attack something, and another pleasing idea is that of the Tingle Tuner, which is where you can connect a GameBoy Advance to your GameCube, and have Tingle the fairy help you out with hints, bonus items and whatnot. This is valuable help, because if you are stuck on a certain part in a dungeon, Tingle can give you advice or you can purchase an item off of him to help you, such as a balloon that lets you float on air for 5 seconds can help you clear that near-impossible gap (trust me, I’ve used it a fair few times…) or if you’ve run out of fairies in the dungeon, you can buy some Ting off Tingle for a few rupees. This is brilliantly original idea; nothing like this has been done before. This is one of the best innovations I’ve seen. You can always get a friend to play the part of Tingle, but I found that they tend to think it funny to bomb you…

Another truly classic Zelda trait is the soundtrack. As usual, the game is accompanied by a variety or tunes, each one setting the mood perfectly, be it mellow and slow, or action-packed and fast. And again, music plays a major part in this game, as you are given the Wind Waker to conduct melodies to transport you, change the direction of the wind or to open locked doors among other things.

The thing that makes Zelda games stand out – the story. As in all Zelda games, the story is excellent. I won’t give anything away, but it’s a gem of a story.

In difficulty, I would say that this game is easier than Ocarina of Time, the puzzles and the dungeons are easier to solve, which in some ways is a blessing, but in others an annoyance. The enemies are in no way easier to defeat than in OOT, but the bosses in WW are easier as well. But this is still a fairly challenging game nonetheless, but still not as challenging as many would have liked it.

The controls for this game are easy to use, and basically the same as they were on the Nintendo 64, but modified to suit the GameCube controller. For beginners, they should find the controller easy to navigate and a pleasure to use. Top marks for the controls!

This is quite a long game, and should take a little while to complete, but it still isn’t long enough for some people (the amount of times I’ve heard that…) But aside from this, this game is great value for money, giving plenty of gaming time and even has replay value… You just try getting all the figurines in the Nintendo gallery.

All in all, I would give this game a big fat 9 out of 10, this game loses out on the difficulty and the lifespan, it’s too easy and just that little bit too short. Some people might also try to take a few marks off on the graphics, but, and I think you’ll agree with me, the graphics are beautiful, who cares about realism?!

Posted by Chris Power

Leading videogame publisher Konami of America, Inc., a subsidiary of Konami Corporation (NYSE: KNM), today announced a massive cross-promotion with Playmates Toys. According to the agreement, Playmates Toys will promote the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) videogames by including secret game codes in over 1.2 million TMNT ACTION FIGURES. The secret codes unlock special features in the TMNT videogames that will be released on October 21, 2003.

Additionally, the two companies will add to the rich TMNT world by introducing fans to three new foes – The Foot Gunner, The Evil Turtlebot and The Giant Mouser that will be exclusive to the videogames and action figures. These characters have been created by the videogame development team at Konami Computer Entertainment Studios. In December 2003, Playmates Toys will introduce The Foot Gunner to its line of action figures, and in Spring 2004, the company will launch The Evil Turtlebot and The Giant Mouser action figures.

"As interactive software, videogames are an exciting medium for offering players un-lockable features," said Erica Mason, product manager, Konami of America, Inc. "This innovative promotion gives us the opportunity to enrich the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles world and deliver an added value to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games and toys."

"Working with Konami on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles promotion – the first of its kind - has been outstanding in helping Playmates provide more entertainment value to our line of TMNT action figures and playsets, which will provide more value for our fans," said Jill Will, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Playmates Toys, Inc.

The TMNT videogames feature non-stop, kick-butt action and are based on the hit animated TV series airing Saturday mornings on FOXBOX. The videogames will feature the full cast of characters from the TV show and will star the show's voice actors.

In the TMNT videogames, gamers will battle their way through more than 35 stages of intense ninja-style kick-butt action courtesy of four lean, mean and green Turtles. Featuring vibrant cell-shaded graphics, entertaining gameplay and secret/unlockable features, TMNT shells out action with a punch!

Konami's TMNT videogame will be released on October 21, 2003 for the Sony PlayStation® 2, XboxTM video game system from Microsoft, Nintendo GameCube®, Nintendo Game Boy® Advance and PC CD-ROM.

Posted by: Chris Power

Samuel Hadida is the prolific producer who brought to the screen True Romance directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino, Brotherhood of the Wolf Directed by Christopher@Guns, Spinder directed by David Cronengerg and other famous films. Konami will participate in the production of the film from script supervision, monsters design and sound creation to accurately recreating the universal appeal of the game. The Silent Hill horror action game will evolve from the small screen to the big screen.

Christophe Gans, who directed the blockbuster epic Brotherhood of the Wolf as well as Crying Freeman, has been appointed as the director of the Silent Hill movie. Silent Hill is a groundbreaking game which atmosphere has mesmerized millions of gamers all over the world, it is scary and clever. I am very proud to be associated with this game.

The Silent Hill series (Produced by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, Inc., President: Michihiro Ishizuka) is a horror adventure game set in a town shrouded by fog and darkness, where the player confronts a variety of monsters. Its images have received high acclaim in the North American and European markets, labeled THE MASTER OF HORROR ADVENTUREh with its total combined sales of over four million copies in Japan, the United States and Europe.

Konami will actively pursue film production of its game content, with the aim to further strengthen the KONAMI brand worldwide.

Posted by: Habib Ahsan

The Sims Makin' Magic Expansion Pack has gone gold and is scheduled for release on October 28th, according to word from Electronic Arts. The latest expansion pack to this best selling people simulation series created by Will Wright and Maxis lets players dabble in the mystical arts with a bunch of magic-themed content including new locations, 175 new items, spells and activities that will have you having fun a wreaking havoc on yourself and others. Look for it in stores later this month for around $29.95 USD. This expansion is rated "T" for Teen by the ESRB.

From GamespyDaily