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Relief for the UK contingent at LAN Arena, Paris as the UK team manage to stave off a two-game winning streak by the French, taking the final game 98-89. Despite an initially shaky start, they dominated the proceedings from around six minutes in. There was a real scare around 14 minutes with French pulling back to 56-58 and another heart in your mouth dump in your pants moment at 16 minutes with a score line of 66-67. UK rallied however and kept their nerve under intense pressure from the French. The final score- 3-2 to UK! Good game all!

Exciting stuff! The score line sits at two games all in the UK vs. France exhibition match at LAN Arena, Paris ... tantalisingly close to both victory and the prospect of a warm bed for both teams. We've posted the third match report up on our coverage page here and we'll try and stay alive long enough to bring you demos afterwards.

Despite the players having to prop their eyelids open with matchsticks to stay awake, the five game series of the UK vs France exhibition match at LAN Arena 5, Paris has just begun. The first game was a victory to the UK but the final result is yet to be decided. Go over to our event coverage to get the gory details including match demos when we get our hands on them.

After a seemingly never-ending series of delays here at the LAN Arena 5 event in Paris, it now looks as though the UK vs France international Quake 3 match may be about to start. Originally scheduled for last night, we are now just waiting for one French player to return from dinner before we begin the night's fragging. Selected by the OGA and a panel of experts from the British Quake community and sponsored by AMD, the UK Quake 3 team includes some of the country's top players. Back in late 1999 our UK Quake 2 team defeated the French by five games to nil, and the home team are looking for revenge this time round. Will they manage to overcome the odds and teach the Brits a lesson, or will it be another Waterloo for them? EuroGamer are providing full coverage of the clash throughout the weekend, so stay tuned to find out what happens next!

Thanks to UK Team sponsors AMD and our hosts at the LAN Arena event.

Quite how long the realm of reality can be plundered and stuffed into the first-person shooter genre in various guises is something critics have been pondering over for a while now. The idea of experiencing a game from the eyes of a pre-determined character with a gun strapped to their chin is growing all the more stale, and the quest for originality has been significantly dampened throughout the course of only a couple of years. Of course, there are a few innovators every so often that tend the break the mould and set landmarks for all developers to aspire to; Half-Life, Thief and Deus Ex are just a few such titles. So then, it would come as quite a great surprise to find that one of the newest innovators of the genre happens to be a Norwegian outfit called Innerloop, previously recognised for an acclaimed flight-sim released three years ago called Joint Strike Fighter. On first impressions, you'd be forgiven for mistaking IGI for yet another bandwagon-jumping realism-fest, in the same vain as Rogue Spear or Delta Force, yet Project IGI's success lies in its subtleties. Project IGI's plot (IGI stands rather cheesily for "I'm Going In", by the way) is set in the former Soviet Union where the game's protagonist, David Jones - an ex-SAS soldier turned freelance Allied governments operative - is tracking down Jach Priboi, the man responsible for the theft of a nuclear device. As Jones finally manages to hunt down Priboi, he learns of the buyer of the weapon and what their plans are for it. Although the game takes a fairly linear mission-by-mission approach, the unfolding storyline lends the game a narrative credibility not usually associated with this kind of structuring.

There has been a lot of talk recently about DDR memory and how it will revolutionize our gaming systems. Coupled with the latest Athlon processors, it's been touted as the next big thing. Companies like VIA and Intel, big motherboard chipset manufacturers in their own right, are even making plans to build chipsets with support the Pentium 4. But one of the biggest problems for the potential buyer is understanding just what to buy. With all these new names and standards fogging previous conceptions, it can be mightily easy to get lost in the how and the why, and judging by the emails we have received lately, one of the biggest concerns is buying the correct sort of DDR memory. Normal SDRAM, which is what ships with practically every PC on the market these days, comes in three standards; PC66, PC100 and PC133. The number denotes the actual clock rate the memory is capable, so in this case, PC133 = 133MHz. That's the maximum front side bus the memory is rated to support. Any faster and you run the risk of instabilities and crashes. Most PCs come with PC100 SDRAM. DDR memory is different, because the standards refer not to the clock rate, which is of course the same as the SDRAM doubled by the motherboard, but the peak memory bandwidth. The two choices at the moment are PC1600 and PC2100. The 1600 in PC1600 denotes that the memory is capable of shifting 1.6Gb per second at its peak. 2100 indicates 2.1Gb/s. These are theoretical peaks, and in general use are rarely achieved. The clock rate in each case is fairly standard, 100MHz in PC1600's case, and 133MHz for PC2100. So if you intend to buy a DDR Athlon setup and the dealer tells you that it includes 128Mb of memory running at 266MHz, you know already know that the memory is PC2100 (running at 133MHz doubled by the motherboard), and that if you want any more, you should enquire as to where one can buy PC2100 DDR memory. If the dealer offers you an Athlon machine with 128Mb of 200MHz memory, because the motherboards support both speeds, you can say to him "look here, I'd like to run a 266MHz bus," and he will do the honours, no doubt passing comment about how well-informed you are on such matters. At which point you pass us a fiver and disappear into the sunset.

"The RoQ video compiler is now in the tools directory on our ftp server," said Graeme Devine at about 4am our time. "I've included several sample param files from id's games to get you all going. If you have specific problems getting it to work, email me and I'll try to help." RoQ is the type of video footage compiled for the cutscenes in Quake III, so if you are a modder, you might do well to take notice. Graeme goes on to talk about the nature of the RoQ system and which areas of the game use which sort of filetype. The different dimensions for the images are included too. If you are interested in this information, you can have a butchers at the rest of his .plan here.

Fans of the seminal Delta Force series of games in this country were in jubilant mood today at the announcement of the game's release on February 2nd, a month from now. The game no longer relies fully on the power-hungry voxel engine and shifts some of the burden over to the user's graphics card, the main side effect of which is that it looks prettier than previous incarnations whilst retaining the long draw distances. The single player campaign will purvey the startling difficulty of war when the weapons really do kill with one shot. If you like a challenge and weren't all that perplexed by the impressive Project IGI, then this could be the ticket. Furthermore, the developers managed to include proper multiplay this time, via NovaWorld 2. Several multiplayer game-types will be backed up by the now popular world ranking system (similar to, say, ngWorldStats that featured with Unreal Tournament). Built-in voice communication is also a first, according to the press release. Look for a review on these pages closer to the game's release.

While the rest of us were nursing hangovers the size of many small Eastern European countries, Massively Multiplayer Online RPG creators Verant and owners Sony were raising their glasses for the second day running to their most successful day of EverQust play ever. Before New Year's, Sony estimate that its 38 San Diego-based servers were playing host to some 60,000 to 70,000 players simultaneously at peak hours, but on January 1st, it is said that the peak total for the most players logged on simultaneously rose to an astronomical 81,858, approximately a quarter of the 330,000 subscribed EverQuest players in the world. The total is said to have steadily increased since the release last month in the States of mission pack The Scars of Velious. The mission pack is due out over here sometime this quarter.

It's never a pleasant thing to have to report on the demise of a fellow website, so it's especially distressing when an entire network is forced to close up shop. C|Net, the company responsible for the recent acquisition of ZDNet, has closed down the hosting side of its gaming operation, GameCenter. The gaming portal itself will remain open, but its many hosted sites, including Stomped.com, Counter-Strike.net and Unreal Universe will all either be forced to close or look for hosting elsewhere. There has been much debate over the reasons for the closure, and in an interview today on GameSpy.com, GameCenter representative Josh McCloskey answered a few questions on the topic. His answers are deliberately vague, but he did point out that the Alliance's main aims were "to increase traffic to Gamecenter, and to promote independent Web sites that offered high-quality gaming editorial," and that C|Net "will now be able to re-dedicate resources from the Alliance directly back into Gamecenter, thus making Gamecenter more profitable in the future." It seems likely that C|Net chose to abandon the program once they had discovered that the advertising revenue streams didn't pay the rent, so to speak. The same was true of the GameFan Network, which also shut up shop quite recently. Industry analysts suggest that without a radical shakeup, many more networks will go the same way in the coming year. In similar news, it seems that content staff returning to GameLoft this morning the world over were told that there was no longer a job there for them. Rumour has it the content staff from every territory in the world is being laid off, with cutbacks scheduled for other parts of the business soon.

yesterday went live with previously unseen images of the Xbox console; the same images seen in the latest issue of American games magazine EGM. Microsoft demanded their removal, but at the time of writing they were still available. The shape of the console is somewhat similar to your average VCR, with an embossed 'X' easily discernible against the outline. Pictures of the controller are also included. Many have questioned the validity of the screenshots due to the lack of USB ports on the front of the unit, where they had been expected for interfacing with the joypads and other controllers. The pads shown in the images at PlanetGeForce look like a cross between the Microsoft Sidewinder and Sega's Dreamcast controller, with an analogue thumbstick on either side of a big Xbox logo as well as a D-pad, what looks like four buttons on the right as well as the usual Select and Start buttons. Shoulder buttons seem to be visible as well. The console itself has four controller ports, again like the Dreamcast. One of the biggest criticisms of Sony's PlayStation 2 design is the presence of only two ports. The Xbox has clearly been designed with prominent display in mind. Its curved roof could be joined by a top-loading mechanism, making it a poor bed-fellow for VCRs and other television peripheries. At the rear, the console features an Ethernet port, a digital connector (possibly DVI, which would indicate LCD panel display and monitor capability), a standard power adapter socket and a large fan for cooling. The shots will likely have to be removed within the next 48 hours when Microsoft catch on, so take a look while you still can. In related news, Microsoft has put out a call for youngsters aged 13 and above in the Seattle area near their Redmond headquarters to come along and test the Xbox. Update: PlanetGeForce has gone down. GameBasement is mirroring all the scans in one big image. This may go down at any time.

The first THPS game was widely accepted as the most enjoyable and accurate skating game yet, and this sequel is even better. The whole game has a polished and professional feel, and almost everything - bar the game physics - are true-to-life. A huge array of skaters from the pro circuit such as Bob Burnquist, Rodney Mullen and Elyssa Steamer make appearances, as well as hidden characters such as Officer Dick from the first game, and even SpiderMan, who is of course the subject of Neversoft's other THPS engine title. Even more impressive is the option to create your own skater: choose the body (male only, unfortunatley), face, hair, clothing, weight, skate style and array of tricks, grabs, jumps and grinds, and you can have yourself on screen pulling off all those moves you were too scared to do back in high school. And pulling those gnarly tricks off is no problem. The control system is nice and easy to pick up, with a control system that's both easy to learn and highly customisable. The main buttons are simply jump, grab, grind and fliptrick. Simply get some air, then press one of the buttons and a combination of directions on the D-pad, and you'll be pulling off Japan Airs, Tailgrabs and 50-50 grinds in a matter of minutes. Sadly, the analogue stick doesn't seem to make much of a difference to affairs, so I just stuck with the d-pad. However, this is more than adequate, and pulling off huge combos is a breeze. By doing a manual when you land out of a trick, you can keep the trick multiplier going and get crazy scores well into the millions. Although all the tricks and skaters are true-to-life, the physics allow for improved balance and air time, so as well as being realistic, the game retains a fun, arcade-esque feel, and it pulls the balance off really well.

Yesterday afternoon we reported on rumours that the American branch of Dell Computers was taking orders for "Dimension" series PCs based on the new 1.3GHz Pentium 4 part. Intel had previously claimed that the processor would not see the light of the corporate showroom until the 29th of this month. The reason for the early release, according to an Intel spokesperson quoted at The Register, is that the company wants to offer a "broader range of options" to customers, and that to this end they have started to ship the part to their OEM customers in bulk ahead of demand. The UK branch of Dell is now stocking 1.3GHz Pentium 4 systems for less than £1,000, although for some incomprehensible reason, said systems use TNT2-based graphics cards. In related news, Intel is said to be suing Rambus by CNBC. Details of the suit, if they do exist, are thin on the ground. Related Feature - CPUs on the Move

Although the online gaming community is still fuming over this week's Battle.net hack, Blizzard are now back in the news with the release of the demo version of Diablo II. We reviewed Diablo II a few months ago, and gave it 9/10. Anybody who has not yet bought the game is urged to try it out for free. The demo, which weighs in at 125Mb, is available from the following locations:-

Daily Radar are purporting to have a genuine Grand Theft Auto 3 screenshot. They couldn't get anything out of developers Rockstar (presumably, they say, because they're still supping on Turkey sandwiches and belching wine, but more likely one would think, because the world doesn't turn fast enough). Indicating a rather significant departure from the game's roots, the shot is in full 3D, with a Police car, some bodies and a beaming streetlamp. Although the screenshot looks fairly realistic, there's plenty to be critical of, including the rather bland texturing and the lack of any real action. It looks rather like "Driver" did, but slightly bluer. Daily Radar enthuse that they shall have access to a wealth of new information within the next few days. We will keep you posted. Update - apparently the mystery of where this came from is finally solved. It was provided to Grand Theft Auto mega-site GOURANGA! by Sam Houser at Rockstar, and then "borrowed" by Daily Radar a couple of days later. Top work, chaps.

You could be forgiven for thinking that online stores consider themselves exempt from the expensive luxury of "January Sales", but not Gameplay. The sale, which lasts as long as the stock does, includes titles like Shadowman on the PC for £4.99, recently reviewed Prince Naseem Boxing for only £17.99 and many other games on the PC, Dreamcast, PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Other bargains we have found include Speed Freaks in the PSX section for £12.99 and Euro 2000 PSX for £9.99. It's still the best PSX footy title out there aside from Actua Soccer 3. Elsewhere in the PC section, last year's phenomenal MDK2 is going for a paltry £4.99, and if you fancy a bit of gaming history, Grand Prix II is also available for a fiver. Slightly more expensive is Elite Force, at £14.99, but nonetheless worthwhile. Daikatana can be had for a tenner, incidentally, but we wouldn't recommend it for anything less than comedy value.

This time last year EuroGamer's staff picked out some of the games that we were most looking forward to playing in the year 2000. Twelve months later most of the titles we picked out still haven't been released, and one of the three which actually did appear ("Star Trek : New Worlds") turned out to be something of a disappointment.

Water-cooling has become the 'in thing' for hardware overclockers in the last few months. With the release of the new Senfu water kits, which have introduced water-based cooling solutions to the mainstream cooling market, the uptake has predictably risen tenfold. While there are risks involved, many tweakers have decided to live dangerously, regarding the perils of water-cooling with the same contempt they have come to treat the dangers of overclocking with. Overclocking processors using water-cooling is no longer enough for some of the most prolific though, and the graphics card is the next port of call. Veteran overclocker "Hypothermia" is now offering a how-to on the procedure, to be found here. The process has more to do with cooling the memory of the graphics card than the GPU, and according to the author is for show more than for performance. Obviously though, the possibilities of increased performance through overclocking will draw people to it as much as the prospect of impressing friends with the natty internals of one's computer. Water-cooling is commonly misconceived as the literal application of water to components to cool them. In actuality, water never directly touches any part of the machine. The key components of water-cooling are a "water-block", lots of insulated tubing to pipe the water and a pump. Cold water is placed in a container, sometimes a bucket, and pumped through pipes into a water-block, which is physically attached to the processor or in this case graphics card. The water lowers the temperature of the water-block so much that it cools the component in question far more efficiently than a normal heatsink and fan combination. The water then circulates back out into the container, where it is cooled again. The obvious hazards of such a procedure are that the water has to be repeatedly cooled, the pump, water-block and pipes need to be checked for glogging regularly and that the water-cooling setup really needs to be set going a few seconds before the PC is turned on so as to ensure a good flow of cooling immediately. The usual problems of good thermal contact must be overcome too. Hypothermia's guide shows you how to perform the procedure on your graphics card, and uses another popular component, a Peltier. While Peltiers are not compulsory, they do help to cool even more efficiently, however in the event of a problem, they can be very dangerous to your processor or in this case graphics card. Although the author does insist that the procedure was not carried out just to improve his benchmark scores, his overclocking results seem remarkable post-installation. If you're looking for that extra boost and don't mind living on the edge, water-cooling your processor may be the answer.

After a year of watching Intel and AMD battle neck and neck for the CPU market, it's easy to spot when Intel are worried about something. The most telltale sign is that they defy their own roadmap of releases in order to get the jump on a competitor, and judging by today's news, this is just what they are doing. German group Media Markt has started to advertise a notebook computer based on a 1GHz Pentium III processor. However, Intel's roadmap, which recently underwent detailed analysis at The Register, claims that such a processor will not be available until March. Although normally this would fail to raise an eyebrow, it comes only days after the news that Dell are advertising PCs in the USA which use 1.3GHz Pentium 4 CPUs, which similarly should not be available if the roadmap is to be believed. It is unlikely that the two releases are a coincidence, coming as they do so close to one another. AMD's own mobile Athlon and Duron parts are already ramping up for release, so it is little surprise to see Intel making a move to try and eclipse their media exposure. It has been almost year since the ratrace for the 1GHz barrier in desktop PCs was making headlines. It's entirely possible that Intel are taking no chances this time and opting to subdue the opposition in one fell swoop. Reports at The Register suggest that the mobile PIII 1GHz advertised by Media Markt may in fact be a normal desktop Pentium III, which would likely refuse to operate without a battery recharge after a matter of minutes. A recent article at Tom's Hardware explained the difficulty of manufacturing safe and reliable mobile processors, listing thermal design, active cooling and other issues as the most important aspects of a mobile processor's development. With desktop CPUs, cooling is usually an afterthought thanks to the space available within the average PC case. AMD's "PowerNow!" solution, shown off extensively at recent trade show Comdex, will fight Intel on a different level. With the mobile Athlon and Duron CPUs not expected until the second quarter of this year, the K6-based technology will use only the CPU cycles it needs, operating at idle speeds of some 200MHz and ramping up to speeds of 533MHz under load. The variable power consumption will mean longer battery life, something that Intel have been battling to match in the last year, unsuccessfully so far. Many laptops last less than two hours under average levels of use before requiring a recharge. This writer's PII-400 laptop can handle barely three minutes rendering something complex like Half-Life under Windows 2000 using the battery. PowerNow! can be seen in action in hardware e-zine The Tech Report's coverage of Comdex.

An embarrassed Blizzard Entertainment today announced that its multiplayer online RPG "Diablo II" will be unavailable to some gamers for up to a week while the company tries to restore data destroyed in a hack attack. Hackers exploited a weakness in the servers of Battle.net, the company's online service, allowing them to bring down the authorization process. The hackers then proceeded to take control of some characters and strip them of their items, weapons and other bonus equipment, in some cases killing the character outright, so that when the real player logged back on he or she would be forced to start afresh. The attack has unsurprisingly targeted those gamers with high skill levels and valuable items at their disposal, spoiling literally months of hard work. Blizzard are now in the process of restoring those characters affected from their most recent backups. "We will be reviving all hardcore characters who died between December 19th and January 1st," the company told reporters. "The restored hardcore characters will be revived with the experience, skills and items possessed as of Tuesday, December 19th." The company had no comment to make about the possibility that characters who had died under legitimate circumstances would also receive this special treatment. For Blizzard this turn of events must be very awkward. Many players have been petitioning the company to fix bugs and problems with unbalanced gameplay for many months now after the somewhat unpopular release of the last patch. The way that Blizzard neglected to inform players about changes has also come under fire. Players affected by the problems should be back online and ready for use within a week, as soon as the security hole is patched up. Related Feature - Diablo II Review

The year 2000 turned out to be quite an interesting one for gamers, although most of the excitement came in the tail end of the year. As part of our year end wrap-up, today we take a look back at some of the key events and trends that shaped the year for gamers...

Described as a "transitional year" by the gaming industry, 2000 saw everybody waiting with baited breath for the western launch of the PlayStation 2. And what an anti-climax that turned out to be. But despite developers and publishers alike waiting to leap on to the Sony bandwagon as it hurtled towards the abyss, this year has still seen some truly excellent releases on consoles and PC alike. So to kick off our traditional end of year wrap-up, today we take a look at some of the best games of the year 2000...

Rowan's new game, Battle of Britain, builds on the success of their earlier hit, Mig Alley, long regarded as the outstanding dogfight simulator. Now Rowan have added better terrain graphics, more aircraft, great clouds, a more involving campaign and functioning multiplayer. Surely this has to be a recipe for success? The game offers three modes of play - training missions, individual missions and campaigns. You can fly the Hurricane or Spitfire for the Royal Air Force or the Messerschmidt-109 and -110 and the Junkers-87 for the Luftwaffe. As an interesting sideshow you can even fly as a gunner in the three German medium bombers used in the battle, fending off aggressive British pilots with your single machinegun from one of three positions in each aircraft. In the campaigns you can direct the air war from either side in as much detail as you wish, from giving general directives to specifying raid composition and tactics for individual targets. You can jump in and fly any of your aircraft at any time, scrambling from Manston in your Spit or approaching London in your Heinkel.

Although there isn't much going on, despite the freezing weather keeping everybody inside, it seems in Croatia at least the midnight fires are burning, the product of which is an update patch for Serious Sam's public multiplayer test. This patch fixes the firewall problem that prevented people behind walls / NAT from getting onto servers outside their network, and also a bunch of other, minor issues. The patch resets all your settings to default, but 2.1 and 2.1a are intercompatible.

What is it with game developers these days? Are they just out to make my job more difficult? With every new release it's some bizarre new behemoth of a concept that requires press briefings, extensive playtest sessions and ultimately more time to review than it takes to translate Tolstoy into Cantonese using a pocket calculator. Why has the gaming industry denied its roots so? Every other new release that ends up on my desk is some sort of 'incredible breakthrough' in how we'll see and interpret gaming for the next fifteen years. If I had my way there'd be far more Dynasty Warriors to this world and far less pantomime shoot 'em ups. In a sense then, it's quite pleasant to discover that although Final Fight-clone Dynasty Warriors II isn't quite the game we had hoped it would have been, its shortcomings are more to do with longevity and bad design than with the genre itself showing its age. In fact, if we're lucky, overzealous developers KOEI will flash back to the drawing board and bedazzle us with the coming of DWIII. However, in the meantime, lets put down our collective glass of Christmas sherry and trade our mince pies for broadswords. It's time for battle. Dynasty Warriors II is like playing Golden Axe with crossed eyes. You are fighting in a truly 3D setting, with a third person 'over the shoulder' approach and more assailants to overcome than could be drummed up on a scouring mission through Greater London. Whereas titles like Final Fight and Golden Axe obliged you to trade blows with only a token force, DWII is literally swarming with enemies. You start out by selecting a burly fellow from one of the historically compiled Warlords available, and almost immediately you are swamped by attackers. Thankfully the learning curve is less of a curve and more of a straight.

Of all the sports to pluck from real-life and mould a computer game around, boxing is perhaps one of the most difficult. So many boxing games in the past have promised so much, but failed to deliver the crushing punches expected of them. Unrealistic, sluggish boxing titles simply won't sell.

One of the things that was evident to people who played Gran Turismo when it burst onto the gaming scene several years ago was that it was the kind of game that would spawn plenty of pretenders. The killer combination of a snug physics engine coupled with one of the most varied reward structures ever completely redefined the racing genre for the better. In fact, the only game that it's fair to say has come close to emulating GT's success since then is Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, a game that we felt was so utterly complete that we spent the best part of two weeks sweating over what we could find to criticize about it. Which all in all doesn't bode terribly well for Sega GT, which is as you may already have guessed a Gran Turismo clone. In its own right a fairly entertaining title, GT has unfortunately chosen to arrive in the wake of MSR, and during one of the busiest periods of the computerized racing calendar. With Christmas looming, the game really didn't stand a chance, and thanks to some unruly controls and an unintuitive interface, it sealed its own fate. But nonetheless, from the point of view of the average gamer, beguiled into fritting away his Christmas money in the 'Sale' section of the local electronics gaff, it may represent an interesting diversion from the cold turkey sandwiches and stale wines that otherwise occupy one's time. And so here we are, and I don't know about you but the sandwiches are starting to look tempting...

Last week there were murmurings about a 1GHz processor boost for Microsoft's Xbox, and while these rumours have now been quashed, there has been an update to the official Xbox specification while we were all supping on Turkey. The change concerns the nVidia graphics chip, which has been downsized to a 250MHz model, rather than the proposed 300MHz. Directly affected by this change is the machine's polygon performance, which is reduced from 150M per second to 125M. If you want to see how the Xbox now lines up with the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube, take a gander at Microsoft's official Xbox website. In other Xbox news, Ravisent have announced that they are to be the official provider of Xbox DVD software.

Far into the future life as we know it has ceased to be, and there are as many synthetic lifeforms as humans. The two races do not get along at all well either, and crime is all too commonplace. Law and order is still a requirement though, so at least you are safe in the knowledge that in the future you can still stop a Bobby on the street to ask for directions!