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Sega have today announced the radical shift in business plans they have been hinting at since October last year. Sega will team up with British-based PACE Micro Technology, PLC, the leading company in the set-top-box industry, to develop a home gateway product using Dreamcast technology. The product will be introduced to the public by PACE at roadshows, scheduled to take place in Britain and the USA at the end of this month. The set-top-box will incorporate network connectivity as the main feature of the Dreamcast, enabling access to what it describes as "diverse markets outside the gaming industry." Users with a broadband connection (xDSL, CATV, satellite and so on) will be able to watch television and other subscription-based channels, play games, use the Internet and more using a single box. The product moves Sega away from console-dependant business for the first time. The press release stresses the three major technological points quite implicitly. The product will...

Picture the scene. You're hiding behind a crate on de_dust, having just planted the bomb, and you can hear the sole remaining Counter Terrorist padding up to the bomb site to defuse. You crane your neck as if to hear round the crate, when whoosh! You're startled by the increased volume of your PC's many fans from this angle, and you lose your concentration, during which time your nemesis has clambered up onto the very crate you lurk behind, and emptied his M4A1 into your lap. He defuses the bomb, round over.

Buried amongst the flurry of gorgeous 3D accelerated first person shooters and real-time strategy games released in the second half of 1999, one of my favourite games of the year was surprisingly "Age of Wonders", an addictive turn-based game featuring a mixture of role-playing and strategy gameplay which won it a string of rave reviews from many gaming websites and magazines. Although it drew heavily on the "Heroes of Might & Magic" series for inspiration, Age of Wonders stood on its own merits as one of the most addictive games of the year.

Not satisfied with knocking up to 80% off prices for their January sales, Gameplay are now launching a special "privilege card" for its customers, which will give them discounts off Take 2 games. The first title to be included in the deal will be third person action game "Oni", due on PC at the end of February and PS2 in early March. Other games to be included in the promotion later in the year include the amusing Caribbean dictator sim "Tropico" and the impressive looking gangster game "Mafia : City Of Lost Heaven".

Squaresoft has revealed the budget it expects to spend getting Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the company's first FF movie, onto the big screen by July 13th. The CGI-only film will apparently cost in the region of $137m, a figure Square has no doubts it will recoup at the box office. We'll have to wait until then to find out just whether or not they have hit the big time in the movie industry as well with this one. FF Movie media can be found at The GIA, including the full length trailer.

America ground to a halt over the weekend so that half of its citizens could sit on a couch drinking beer, munching tacos and watching the SuperBowl. With so many people watching the event live on TV, advertising slots on that day change hands for sums approaching the GDP of a small third world country, and SuperBowl day often sees a spate of new ads being released. Amongst the usual suspects this year was a pair of new teasers for the "Tomb Raider" movie, starring Angelina Jolie as the amply imbued Ms Croft.

After a week of unpleasant announcements regarding various tech-stock companies and the liquidation of BarrysWorld, it's nice to see that someone in the industry is actually making some money. Guillemot's Thrustmaster steering wheel brand, which took advantage of a Ferrari license now controls 43.4% of the market in units for the Dreamcast, and 21.5% of the steering wheels market full stop. Another of Guillemot's brands, Hercules, also enjoyed success, with its "3D Prophet II MX" budget graphics card the highest performer. The newer dual display version is also enjoying strong sales. The company's other retail cards have sold well and helped to reaffirm its position in the retail sector. Guillemot has also decided to use the Hercules brand for its new sound card range, including the "Maxi Sound Muse," an entry level PCI sound card priced at £24.99, and its enthusiasts' options, the "Game Theatre XP," similar to Creative's "Soundblaster Platinum," it includes a highly powerful PCI sound card and an external setup of some sort. The company also plans to release "CUBE" branded portable MP3 players starting in February. Related Feature - Hercules 3D Prophet II MX Review

Immersion, the developer of the force feedback software used in DirectX and whose chips power most of the force feedback paraphernalia on the market, wants you to get more sensation out of today's games than merely sore wrists. In a joint venture with Logitech they have released a new series of mice called iFeel, which can vibrate to simulate different textures using Immersion's TouchSense technology.

Anyway, pirates. Interstellar ones. Nasty fellows by anyone's reckoning, and causing no end of trouble for a young marsupial called Denis. A Kangaroo by trade, young Denis has been thrust in at the deep end of Titus' latest 3D action adventure title for kids, and it's his job to rid the world of these heartless hinds once and for all. The problem is, they're all over the place! Denis' adventures will take him all over Australia, through the plains, the Tasmanian wilderness, past the Great Barrier Reef and even into space. It looks like his will be quite an adventure too, with plenty of variety to keep the little tykes busy in front of the Dreamcast. Denis skips, swims, snowboards, hang-glides and even pilots jet boats and Martian rocket ships. The style of play mimics that of Crash Bandicoot and occasionally the PlayStation's Pandemonium as well with its quasi-3D platform sections. The graphical engine is superb, with some really impressive visuals. The cartoon element is strong with some rich, glossy textures and cutesy pirates running around all over the shop. The other enemies, some feral, some human, also live up to the billing, and on the whole it's a remarkably enlivening experience to play around with Kao. Denis himself is the bastion of cuddliness.

For twenty years FASA Corporation has been at the forefront of role-playing and table top gaming, producing a string of hit gaming systems including my own personal favourite, the cyberpunk RPG "Shadowrun", something which swallowed more hours of my teenage years than I care to remember. Over the last decade some of their better known games have come to the PC, including the "Mechwarrior" and "Mechcommander" games (based on FASA's "Battletech" system) and the fanciful flight combat sim "Crimson Skies".

It's been a very hectic few hours. Early this morning our time, Gamers.com ran a story reporting the unconfirmed news that Bill Gates and Microsoft will soon be announcing Dreamcast game support as the Xbox's latest feature. From the podium of this spring's Tokyo Game Show, no less.

Take 2 have announced that they will be publishing Ratbag's "Leadfoot" in Q2 2001 (in English, that's some time between April and June), and to celebrate they sent us a batch of brand new screenshots of the game in action. And very nice they are as well. Featuring a championship mode which includes a massive 180 events across 15 series races, three different classes of upgradeable vehicles to trash, and support for up to ten people to duke it out over the net, Leadfoot is already looking rather special. It's also one of the few games to cover the arcane art of "stadium off-road racing", which sees cars tearing around custom-built dirt track courses in both indoor and outdoor stadia. Look out for this fender bending all-action racing game coming to a store near you in the not-so-distant future.

E-commerce is your friend, if you believe the people who live by it, and Play 24/7 has for quite some time been one of the best friends of UK DVD urchins who needed to get their grubby mits on the latest US releases. The prices were quite reasonable, and the delivery time much speedier than ordering from the US directly. And in order to capitalize on that reputation, Play 24/7 have just launched a new games division. At the time of writing, the games area features only PSOne and PS2 games, but we expect that will change, and so does the company's business development manager, Ben Simpson, who says they "have plans to start selling Dreamcast and possibly Gameboy Advanced (sic) titles as well."

Japanese Mech games really do rock. Take "Virtua On" on the Dreamcast for example; whoever the heck came up with that should be congratulated at length. "MechWarrior 4" offers a slightly Westernized interpretation of the Mech, but nonetheless it boasts an in-depth storyline and a bizarre intergalactic war setting to boot. The 3D graphics engine has been entirely redone for the latest installment, so your 40 foot, 80 ton, 90 mile-an-hour war machine won't look too shabby.

SCi is today's walking wounded in the world of tech stocks, as they post losses of some £1.7m from the fifteen month period to September 30th last year. In order to try and recoup this loss, they have to rely on their new US distribution deal with SVG, a three year deal which could make them approximately $4.3m through PR and marketing in the new US office. The CEO of SCi, Jane Cavanagh, was commenting on the deal, saying that "By establishing a North American publishing operation, we will significantly improve margins and increase control over launch dates and marketing." By no means a bad thing. She went on, "By working exclusively with SVG we will minimise overheads and benefit from the strength of SVG's extensive distribution channels." We'll see you next quarter.

In the face of an even greater invasion, from the Burning Legion, the reunited Orcish Horde and the Human Armies of Azeroth have been forced to shift their attentions from in-fighting and general bickering to basic survival. The chaos to come looks insane, and finally, we have some downloadable footage to show for it. The movie, which is about 14Mb in size, shows quite a long portion of the game, unfortunately with next to no sound to show for it. Visually, WarCraft III looks like a highly advanced blend of StarCraft and WarCraft II, with some fabulous spell animations for the magical characters, some that take up the whole screen with their fury. The hud is similar to the StarCraft offering, with animated faces for each of the units and such, and watching the game in action, it looks remarkably similar in style to those classic RTSes of old. Old-hands from WCII days will be thrilled by the new building construction animations too - I know I was.

"House of the Dead 2" has been given a makeover, and this time you're gunning for the evil zombies and other creatures of hellspawn by typing various words as quick as possible. "The Typing of the Dead" is an amusing spin-off the classic lightgun shooter, and it's just your luck that there is now a demo available. Weighing in at a rather large 112Mb, it includes a fair chunk of the first section so you can get used to the action. Even if you can touch-type in the fastlane, you may find it quite entertaining, thanks to the variable difficulty levels. Our full review of the game will be coming soon. Until then, check out the demo:-

Anarchy Enterprises and Unique Entertainment are currently hard at work bringing the ever popular "SimCity" style of game to the final frontier with "Luna : Moon Colony Simulator". Luna does exactly what it says on the tin, putting you in charge of developing and maintaining a sprawling colony on the moon.

Unlike Dino Crisis 2, which is definitely its own game, the original Dino Crisis is more like a side story to Resident Evil, borrowing so much that at the time many used "Resident Evil on speed" and other amusing one-liners to describe it. And indeed, if you go through Resident Evil and replace the zombies with Tyrannosaurs, Raptors and other assorted prehistoric nasties, you do end up with a resoundingly similar picture. Dino Crisis though, puts you in control of a lass called Regina, rather than a lass called Jill, and Regina is a member of a secret government organisation sent to bring an a nasty situation under control at a remote location in the middle of nowhere… Oh shut up. Anyway, the remote spot just so happens to be an island, controlled by the elusive Dr. Kirk, who has been conducting some rather unusual experiments involving prehistoric creatures. Dinosaurs, no less, which in due course break loose and run wild all over the place. Controlling Regina and regularly interacting with other operatives on the island, you must evacuate survivors and try and locate Kirk himself, if he is still alive. Basically it's survival horror by numbers. You have to find keys, push buttons and shoot things to get your way. Thankfully, the shooting and moving sides of things have been speeded up noticeably, so running Regina around is no problem, and the freedom of movement makes dealing with dinos a lot easier than otherwise.

The Pentium 4 has met with a lot of criticism since its launch last year, mostly over its ineffective handling of current programs and its unusual architecture. It seems that the development community is also rather perturbed by it, with Tim Sweeney in an interview today at The Tech-Report, commenting that the Pentium 4 is a good architecture, "it's just not a good architecture for any of the current program executables on the market." "I look at the P4 pragmatically," he continues. "In terms of current applications, the P4 is basically equivalent to a P3 running at a few hundred megahertz lower clock rate. The P4 architecture, with its really long pipeline, doesn't seem to be designed for optimal instruction-per-second throughput -- the P3 probably beats it there -- it's designed to scale up to higher clock rates better than the P3." His comments echo what pretty much everyone on the Internet has been saying from day one, but his intuition stretches further, to its effects on the Unreal engine. "The Unreal engine is pretty sensitive to both memory latency and memory bandwidth. The P4's Rambus focus is OK for this, but it's not optimal. I expect DDR will perform better for most of the high-performance 3D games on the market." When we spoke to Tim just after the launch of the Pentium 4 about the possibility of recompiling Unreal with support for SSE2, his feelings for Intel's current compilers told a story in themselves. His sentiments there are echoed in this interview, where he points out that "it could be a year or more before good tools are available." Elsewhere, he commented that he thinks "'Netburst' is a buzzword, not an architecture." Check out the whole interview for more.

On Tuesday we reported that Sega would cease production of the Dreamcast as of March, and that they would concentrate on software releases. Yesterday evening, the company issued an official press release, stating that "Sega is considering a strategic reform to return the company to profit". The reform will affect worldwide production, sales and distribution of the Dreamcast, effectively halting them. Sales of the consoles will continue until the inventory is exhausted, all as we reported. Nonetheless, fans will not be left in the cold. Sega is "preparing a very solid Dreamcast software line-up with more than 100 titles (including third parties) to be released in the coming year". In other words, if you own a Dreamcast, there will still be plenty to play in the coming year. According to the release, Sega is "negotiating" with regard to the development of titles on other formats, including PlayStation 2 and GameBoy Advance. On Tuesday we quoted figures of five titles for PS2 and two for the GBA. This information wasn't included in the press release. You can read the full press release here.

Delays to key releases and poor sales in the US have forced Eidos to revise its full year profit projections, reports MCV. Commandos 2, Gangsters 2 and Startropia are just three examples of games that have taken longer than expected and hit the publisher hard. The financial results, due to be announced on February 28th, will be lower than originally anticipated. All this occurred despite Eidos grabbing as much as 12% of the UK market in the final quarter of last year, with profits way ahead of expectations. Unfortunately, the company has been hit by what it refers to as a "softening" of the US market. All this caused Eidos' shares to fall by as much as 27% in early trading. They are on the way back up at the moment, but only gradually.

Eastern Europe has been spawning an increasing number of quality games in recent years, and the latest country looking to get in on the act is the Ukraine, home to GSC and their epic real-time strategy game "Cossacks". We took a beta version of the game for a spin to find out more...

Screamer 4x4 is a peculiar beast. It arrives at a time when four wheel drive games are more regular than service stations on the M1, and with next to no fanfare surrounding it. Moreover, it boasts superb handling and to coin a phrase from that fox in the Citroen advert, impeccable road-manners, as well as a varied race structure and on the whole just about everything a good 4WD simulation could possibly require. For starters it isn't a race in the classic sense. Screamer is more like orienteering for cars - which I am led to believe is fairly indicative of the real thing. You are given a tough, gritty off-road vehicle, pointed in the direction of the first checkpoint and told to navigate your way to the end of the road. To progress to the next stage, you have to get yourself into the top three. Unfortunately for you, this is damnably difficult. Not content with dropping you off in the great unknown, the terrain is like a bad day at the crash clinic. Twists, turns, bumps, rivers, ponds, cliffs, bushes, trees… it's as if nature has taken up picketing against off-road sports and wants to shove the sign down your throat. Racing across uneven ground at high speeds isn't always the answer, and that is, in a way, Screamer's attraction, it actually forces you to act as if you are in a 4WD car.

One of the more unusual uses which has been found for the multiplayer first person shooter Unreal Tournament is "Unrealty", a modified version of the game's engine and editor which allows realtors to recreate offices and houses in 3D and then allow clients to wander around the building. Now NASA have taken that one small step further by using the system to show what the multi-billion dollar International Space Station is going to look like when it's finished. Sadly the ISS was not designed with poly counts and clipping planes in mind, and going EVA is a rather tedious affair as your frame rate plummets the second you leave the airlock. The textures are rather washed out in places as well, and I certainly wouldn't want to run a deathmatch in there. But it's certainly an .. interesting application of modern 3D game technology in a completely different context.

Easily one of the most anticipated games of the past few years, Shenmue is the brainchild of one Yu Suzuki - the man who is considered in some circles to be, alongside Sonic creator Yuji Naka, the best game designer currently working at Sega. Currently the head of Sega's AM2 division, Suzuki has been an innovator in the field of 3D gaming for years - producing games such as Space Harrier and Virtua Fighter, which may seem dated now but were groundbreaking in their time. Since the original announcement of Shenmue, every release of images has astounded and thrilled even the most cynical journalists and the most battle-weary console fans with their beautifully realistic depiction of characters and locations - giving meaning, arguably for the first time, to the whole concept of a "next generation" console. Shenmue promised something that no game had ever before even dared to hint at - a fully interactive world, which lives and breathes around you as you play, and in which you can interact with anything and anyone. Believers have enthused about the enormous potential of this for months; sceptics have explained over and over why this is an impossible task. With Shenmue finally on the shop shelves, the question of whether the game lives up to its own hype can be answered at last - as well as the burning question of whether it can justifiably be considered to be the start of a whole new genre, as Yu Suzuki has claimed so many times.

We reported earlier today that Sega would be developing games for other formats than the Dreamcast in a move to try and increase their share of the software sector. Just now we received word from MCV that Sega have announced huge losses, and intend to pull out of the console hardware market ceasing production of the Dreamcast hardware at the end of March. This is Sega's "fourth straight year of losses, mainly caused by Dreamcast," and it has caused a "radical rethink of [Sega's] strategy." The machine will still be sold and marketed throughout 2001, until the inventory is halted. Confirmation from MCV is that Sega has five PlayStation 2 titles in the pipeline and two GameBoy Advance titles. We should have more on these in the near future. As big fans of Sega's consoles over the years, the news is very disheartening for us, the staff of EuroGamer. We can only hope that Sega's games on other formats do as well as we feel its consoles have done.

A couple of weeks ago we reported that the PlayStation 2 version of "Summoner", a new 3D role-playing game from Volition and THQ, was due for release on March 23rd. Now we know that the PC version is expected to follow within weeks, with the latest reports saying "mid April". Claiming to offer over 50 hours of gameplay and featuring some rather nifty 3D accelerated graphics, along with the ability to control up to five characters at any one time and a whole gaggle of different monsters to summon ranging from dragons to minotaurs, Summoner is certainly looking rather promising at this stage. If you're not convinced, why not peruse the latest batch of screenshots from the game?

Sega is apparently developing software for both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox undercover, or so says Japanese newswire Jiji Press. The unconfirmed report has sent Sega's shares up 19%, the stock's biggest one-day gain in over seven months according to Bloomberg. A couple of months ago, the claims would have been laughed back into the ether, but recent announcements from Sega bode well for the news. The company has already stated that it wishes to boost the company's software market share to 25% and they have also admitted to being undecided about the development of a sequel to Dreamcast. SegaNet is the current focus of the company's attention, and as console and PC users can now both use the service, it seems likely that inter-format multiplayer games will be another option for Sega in the future. Heavy investment into the promotion of a universal service like SegaNet shows that the company is looking ahead.

Part of the problem with auction sites is that they do tend to attract overzealous bidders to the table. For example, this auction on eBay reached $425 with 39 bids starting at $9.99 and spiralling upwards. The bid was for "the playstation 2 original box and receipt," with a genuine, boxed PS2 shown in the accompanying picture. As those of you with a bit of bonce will quickly have ascertained, the cunning auctioneer has been deliberately vague in an attempt to get people to bid on what is actually a cardboard box and a bit of paper. Even more alarming is that the woman who won the auction is now claiming that she feels cheated out of her $425, and can do very little about it. You see, the terms and conditions of eBay's auctions mean that once money has changed hands, the person running the auction is under no obligation to refund the buyer unless the goods do not agree with the description, and in this case they do, just about. eBay would not comment on the details of this auction's outcome, despite us phoning them on two separate occasions.