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Michael Crichton, the best-selling author responsible for the likes of Jurassic Park, Timeline, Sphere, The Andromeda Strain and lots of other entertaining novels, will join forces with Sega of American to collaboratively develop an original concept upon which to base a game. The partnership will allow Michael to utilise Sega's top game developers in bringing the title to market for 2004.

Capcom has confirmed the asking price for the Steel Battalion, their ambitious Xbox mech "simulation" with a controller almost three times the size of the console itself, along with the game's release date. American fans anxious to get their hands (and presumably cranes, trucks and HGVs) on the game, which is known as Tekki in Japan, need wait only as long as November, when the game will arrive with the simply astonishing price tag of $199.95, or £129 / €203.

UK-based FireFly Studios has finished work on real-time strategy title Stronghold: Crusader, and the game will be on store shelves in time for the end of September. Described as a "castle sim", Stronghold charges you with minding a bustling castle full of Fletchers, Brewers and Armourers, whilst holding off waves of assassins, war engines and the constant threat of fire. Stronghold: Crusader is set in a distant Arabian land during the 11th and 12th centuries, although one imagines that the playtime has been scaled down somewhat.

Today marks a big change for Eurogamer, and for you, our beloved readers. After three years of loyal service, John Bye is stepping down as editor of the site to make way for new boy Kristan Reed.

I'm guessing that only a few of you will have used the previous titles in the Music series from Jester. Heck, most of you probably have virtually no musical talent whatsoever! I certainly don't. As much as I like listening to the odd beat while I'm working, give me an instrument and I'll make some embarrassing twanging noises before handing it back. My musical education ended with grade two piano, and yet with Music 3 I could create a unqiue, fairly ornate sound without breaking a sweat.

Nintendo has officially confirmed that it has sold its 49 per cent stake in UK developer Rare, ending an exclusive relationship which has lasted through several console revisions and handing over with it the rights to such franchises as Perfect Dark and Banjo Kazooie.

In a modern world, where kids can barely conceive of the brick-phones of the early Nineties, let alone a time where mobile phones did not exist at all, the humble pinball machine must seem somewhat of a curiosity. Packing out arcades around the world during the Seventies and competing with the Space Invaders generation in the Eighties, the pinball craze was over before today's games-playing youth were even born.

Disciples II has been available in America for several months now, but thanks to the efforts of Arxel Tribe and Mindscape the game is finally available on our side of the pond this month. Picking up where the original Disciples left off, the sequel is a role-playing strategy game along the lines of Heroes Of Might & Magic, putting you in control of the destiny of one of four factions - the human Empire, the dwarven Mountain Clans, the Undead Hordes and the Legion of the Damned. Each faction has its own campaign (or "saga"), and we'll give you one guess as to which of these is the most entertaining...

Microsoft tells us that most ported games look best and offer the best extras on Xbox, and as far as Acclaim's Aggressive Inline goes, they're right on the money. AI on Xbox offered us an extra level and a custom soundtrack, but the Cube outing is the same old game as its PS2 sibling. However, that's not bad news for Cube owners. AI is, after all, a game we described as our vision of Tony Hawk 4, and the reasoning behind our argument was quite simple: no skater past or present has offered as much variety, progression or entertainment for your money.

Sports Interactive and Eidos, developer and publisher respectively of the massively successful Championship Manager series of football management games, have signed up Future Publishing to launch the Official Championship Manager Magazine - with the first issue going on sale on October 24th, priced at £5.49. The magazine, which will be edited by Mark Sutherns, has been offered unprecedented access to the development team at Sports Interactive, and issue one promises to carry the first concrete information on the highly anticipated Championship Manager 4 - along with a selection of other CM goodies on the cover-mounted CD. Although there is no definite publishing schedule for the magazine, Sports Interactive managing director Miles Jacobson is keen to emphasise that the company will be continuing to support the title throughout the development of CM4 and beyond. "It's going to be an irregular magazine, as we'll do issues of it when there is important stuff to talk about in depth, or when there is something special that we want to covermount. It's not a one off," he told GI.biz this evening. "With over three million copies in its illustrious 10-year history, Championship Manager is probably the only game with a following which can support such an ambitious publication," according to Miles. "We'll be working closely with Future Publishing to give our fans a superb collection of official magazines - with stacks of additional data available only through the magazine and on www.sigames.com." The company also plans to make all covermounted content and screenshots available through its website on the date of publication of the magazine. "This is a unique agreement for Future Games," according to James Binns, publisher of the magazine at Future. "We have had a lot of success with our licensed titles, based around hardware platforms and operating systems - we've never backed a series of games like this before. Championship Manager is a software phenomenon. We're investing heavily in the magazine and look forward to producing a quality publication treated with the love and respect its fans demand." Sports Interactive is also promising fans a major Xbox-related announcement at next week's X02 Europe event in Seville.

Epic has completed work on Unreal Tournament 2003, which heads off to retail shortly after an immensely successful demo won the hearts and splattered the souls of gamers all over the globe. The full game, which ships on three CDs, features the game and its generous serving of 37 levels, along with various tools. These include Maya Personal Learning Edition from Alias|Wavefront, The Karma Authoring Tool, a mod starter kit courtesy of the boys and girls at Epic, and despite it not appearing on the packaging, full Linux support - client and server. Looking outside the box, Epic is promising to continue handing out goodies by way of the Internet, including a standalone server for people who don't own the game - a great way to encourage people to set up servers - and the UDE (Unreal Development Environment) for bedroom programmers. Also promised are a customised version of Gmax (no idea) and the usual array of bonus packs. Plus patches, presumably, which are a necessary evil for this sort of title. UT fans should keep an eye on Epic's Unreal Technology announcement page for various goodies. Related Feature - UT2003 patched

Freek out, it's the Cube version of FreekStyle! Narly and all that. Still, what sort of port is it, and would it be one to spend one's hard-earned readies on? That ultimately depends on how much you like SSX, and specifically, the notion of SSX on a bike. Do you like it? Read on.

Virtual On is coming to PS2. That's about all we know. Oh, Hitmaker - the studio behind the original - will be handling the game, and the title is actually Virtual On Marz. Confused? Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram was an excellent albeit niche action title on the Dreamcast, featuring twelve mechs, a third-person camera and fast-paced battle-till-you're-scrap gameplay. Its move to the PS2 fold will please a lot of people because the DC version was roundly criticised for its lack of a dual-stick controller - a plain necessity in VO. The Japanese got a special peripheral; the rest of the world did not. Thankfully, Dual Shock II is just the ticket, and with any luck, Virtual On Marz will manage to recreate the engrossing gameplay of the original on PS2.

Vivendi has inked a 10-year deal with Marvel Comics to produce massively multiplayer online games based in the Marvel universe of more than 4,700 superheroes. Eurogamer would like to officially bagsy Spider-Man at this particular point in time. No returns. The first game is due for release in 2005, and the deal will see Marvel and VU Games splitting revenues generated by subscriptions, product sales and, ulp, in-game advertising. Vivendi promises more details in the coming months.

Men in Black II: Alien Escape is set to appear on GameCube later this year, after a lukewarm, well, no, after a fairly horrendous outing on PlayStation 2 during August. The film wasn't particularly good either, but nevertheless the game is set to appear on GameCube, no doubt having sold quite profitably on the back of the film's pre-ordained success. Hopefully some changes will be made to the game's formula before it arrives on the Cube - we'll let you know if we hear anything. Related Feature - Men in Black II quick take (PS2)

Acclaim has confirmed that Dakar 2, the sequel to Paris-Dakar Rally, is in development across all three next-generation console platforms and will be released during February 2003. Described as a "radical departure" by the accompanying literature, the game is based on upholding one's courage and endurance across a 6,500 mile course with hundreds of competing drivers. 600 vehicles will be duking it out, including plenty of licensed vehicles, and the course will be checkpoint-based - navigation will of course be just as important as successful rallying. Acclaim is also promising close interaction with the environment, including animals, villagers, water, the bush, trees and even the odd mine. A series of non-specific screenshots has been released to whet your appetite, and you can find those here. Related Feature - Dakar 2 screenshots

Square and NVIDIA are working closely to make sure the PC version of Final Fantasy XI looks its best on NVIDIA's latest line of GeForce4 GPUs. Square has apparently selected GF4 for the development and deployment of FFXI, with president and CEO Yoichi Wada commenting that "we are proud to announce Final Fantasy XI for Windows today and are pleased to be aligned with NVIDIA to take the Final Fantasy series to the next level." Final Fantasy XI was developed using NVIDIA GPUs as the reference hardware of choice for development and quality control testing, we're told, a move that represents a leap forward for the Final Fantasy series. The move is also obviously a big coup for NVIDIA over its main rival ATI, and when copies of FFXI for Windows go on sale in Japan on November 7th, packaging will feature NVIDIA's "The Best Way to Play" logo. Expect the same of the European version, whenever that turns up. Related Feature - Final Fantasy XI preview

When Blizzard Entertainment told everybody that they would be announcing a new game at the Tokyo Game Show, everybody was a bit confused. After all, the firm's last console outing was StarCraft 64 on a Nintendo platform, and that was some time ago. Was a modern-day port really worthy of all this attention? Was it even a port? It turns out that StarCraft: Ghost, the subject of all this speculation, is being built on the legacy of that immensely popular real-time strategy game by Blizzard in conjunction with Nihilistic, whose previous work includes Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption. SC: Ghost is a third person action game which gives players the role of a Ghost trooper called Nova, a Psionic assassin ninja type - one of the most interesting units in the RTS, as it happens. The Ghost unit will be armed with a C-10 Canister Rifle, a Perdition flamethrower and a number of bladed weapons. Blizzard is also promising vehicles, no doubt influenced by the success of Halo's complement, and Ghost also emulates Halo in thrusting you into conflict as part of a much larger team and offensive. The idea being to give the sensation of controlling a single unit in an interstellar war, as though you were sitting under the mouse cursor of a StarCraft veteran. The target is next-generation consoles, rather than the traditional PC platform, although Blizzard is no stranger to the box under the TV, having produced games for consoles since the days of 16-bit. And some bloody good ones, too. Early screenshots of Ghost are extremely impressive, featuring all three StarCraft races and some spectacular kills, and the premise is decidedly intriguing. We'll be watching this one closely, and for those of you with a greater thirst for info, Blizzard has kindly erected a website full of info and other trinkets. Related Feature - StarCraft: Ghost screenshots

On the surface, this week could be considered an embarrassment of riches, but the truth is that we're in that lull now between the end-of-summer onslaught and the Christmas "season". That means that although there are some top games to be had, generally speaking things are a bit thin on the ground.

Strategy games are not, in general, particularly thrilling spectacles. Certainly, they are often involving, challenging and interesting - but in terms of stirring the soul, they're not really much cop. There's not a lot of drama or emotion in play when a tank blows up a couple of lighter vehicles in Red Alert, or when your Zerg lay waste to an enemy outpost in StarCraft - which is why finding a strategy game which has the blood of your warrior ancestors pumping through your veins and the bloodthirsty cries of battle ringing in your ears is really something rather special.

War is due to break out over Europe tomorrow according to Eidos, and to celebrate they're wielding one of the most substantial demos in recent history. The simply colossal 318.4MB demo of Front Line Attack: War Over Europe is enough to scare even the fastest connection out of its wits, but the game, jointly developed by Zuxxez Entertainment AG, Reality Pump and In-Images, tries to summarise one of the world's biggest conflicts between the years of 1941 and 1944, so perhaps it's forgivable. We put the game through its paces last month, and although it suffered from a few rough edges, it was looking quite accomplished. We should learn more when we get hold of a retail copy tomorrow. Related Feature - Front Line Attack hands-on preview

Intel has launched its latest addition to the Celeron family of budget processors this week, a 2GHz chip built on a 0.13-micron manufacturing process. The processor uses the 478-pin form factor and features a 400MHz bus. Expect to see these chips appearing in budget PCs come Christmastime, and if you happen to want a thousand of them, you can get them at $103 apiece. The retail price is likely to include a bit of markup.

Rockstar has released a second GTA Vice City trailer in MOV format, showcasing various elements of gameplay. Like the August trailer, this file weighs in at about 23MB and can be watched in your browser at Rockstar's Vice City website, or you can download them directly, large (23MB, 480x360) and medium (14MB, 320x240). As many of you will remember, Rockstar's official Vice City website isn't the game's only outlet on the web. GTA III was famed for its mock corporations and radio advertisers, with URLs that actually led somewhere. Rockstar has used this to its advantage for Vice City, by erecting Kent Paul's 80's Nostalgia Zone, featuring an 80's throwback reprobate's take on life in the city. All of which should get you in the mood for the highly anticipated game, which we're expecting on November 8th. Related Feature - GTA Vice City screenshots

Despite rumours that the Japanese GameCube modem might not function alongside US consoles, US-based importer NCS has confirmed that the modem is fully compatible, and quite capable of playing the Cube incarnation of Phantasy Star Online outside of its home country. Sales of PSO Episodes I & II in Japan have been quite strong - more than 60,000 units went in the first week, although just over half of these were without the modem peripheral, suggesting that even the hardcore is waiting for the broadband adapter. Related Feature - Phantasy Star Online preview (Cube)

ABIT is making a play for the high performance graphics market with a new cooling system that it claims will allow you to push performance of a GeForce4 Ti4200 chip up to the level of a Ti4600. The company has just completed a European tour extolling the virtues of the Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES, which will be available on 23rd September, and expects a UK street price for the card below £150, so you get Ti4600 for about half the price. It works like this. OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) uses some of the ideas from notebook cooling systems, although it clearly doesn't steal them wholesale, because it's patent-pending. It uses a vacuum to seal the Ti4200 on a copper base, then a 7,2000 rpm fan to cool the system. This of course just gives you a cooler card, so in order to actually deliver the extra performance Abit is shipping overclocking tools with it. There's one easy set intended to make it easier for normal people to mess with their settings, and the real stuff for the hard bastards. Which is interesting, because overclocking is generally the province of the latter category, so can it be consumerised? Possibly not on a really widespread basis, but extending it into the class of people who might if they weren't too scared to looks viable to us. Following up on next week's rollout ABIT intends to put out OTES versions of its higher performance cards, which should appeal to the less financially-challenged overclocker. The company currently has some illustrations and explanations of the technology here, but you can take a look at some better pics at All About PC, here. We realise the article's in German, but we were very taken with "OTES? Who the fuxx is OTES?" as an intro line.

As far as online gaming is concerned, tactical shooters have long since outstripped their forefathers, with the likes of Counter-Strike hogging an absurd percentage of fraggers, and games like The Sum Of All Fears, America's Army and the forthcoming Raven Shield piquing interest all over the shop. It's perhaps unsurprising then that Sony has made Zipper Interactive's SOCOM: US Navy Seals its flagship online gaming title, and that in its first few days on sale the game sold out Sony's first run of network adapters without breaking a sweat.

Dynasty Tactics is not long off, and for fans of the Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre niche of strategy RPG, it's going to be a 100-year war-sized treat. Speaking of treats, publisher THQ has produced a nice little movie to demonstrate the game to potential buyers, and since that's you, we thought we'd give it a home around here. It weighs in at a modest 17MB, and you can find it at our high speed UK-based download location, courtesy of blueyonder. Dynasty Tactics is due out on November 29th in Europe, alongside the Xbox version of Dynasty Warriors III. Related Feature - Dynasty Tactics screenshots

Criterion's Burnout 2: Point of Impact recently went gold on PlayStation 2, and is now fast approaching its new release date of October 11th. Meanwhile, the disappointing Turok: Evolution will appear in an improved state on GameCube on the 27th of this month, with its PS2 and Xbox siblings already on retailers' shelves. Related Feature - UK Release Dates listing

Everglide have made something of a name for themselves over the last few years producing hefty black plastic mouse mats for hardcore gamers with more money than sense, not to mention the bizarre looking Mousebungee and other rodent-related gadgets. The latest such products to reach the UK are a range of imaginatively named Gaming Mats. At first sight these look much the same as your common or garden mouse mat, thin and flexible, but closer inspection reveals them to have a textured surface that provides the same kind of feel and precision that we've come to expect from Everglide's harder pads in the past. They also have a grippy textured underside that virtually glues itself to your desk, almost completely stopping the pad from sliding around, although you can still lift it up easily enough if you need to reposition it. What makes them really attractive though is your choice of five full colour print designs - Asian Swords (three crossed blades on a red oriental-looking flag), Celtic (broadsword and axe on a wooden shield), Cyborg (a marbled looking mix of man and machine), Special Ops (sure to be a hit with gun nuts and Counter-Strike fans) and Works (retro looking clockwork machinery). We've been using one of the Cyborg mats for the last couple of weeks, and it's already replaced our previous Everglide pad in pride of place on my desk. If you want a mat that looks pretty and offers better than normal precision and stability, then this could be just what you're looking for. All five designs are now available from Everglide UK for the princely sum of £10.99 plus postage.

The long-awaited TimeSplitters 2 has slipped further into October. Both the PS2 and Xbox versions are now scheduled for release on the 18th, with the Cube version now ambiguously labelled as an "October" release. This time around, we don't have a flipping great wodge of screenshots to celebrate the fact, but you can leaf through our PS2, Cube and Xbox archives if you want to whet your appetite a bit more. Related Feature - UK Release Dates listing