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Ever since Monkey Island 3, every new adventure game has been labelled a death knell for the genre, a swansong, and (somewhat unfairly), most have been judged as such. The truth is, the genre is alive and kicking, it just doesn't move as swiftly as its counterparts in the first person shoot 'em up field. It's alive and well, have no fear. With Stupid Invaders just about to be released in this country, and now Escape From Monkey Island, it's a surprisingly busy Christmas period in fact, and a welcome change. Escape From Monkey Island, like its predecessors, is a very funny game. But unlike those previous adventures, it takes on a wholly 3D perspective, using an updated version of the Grim Fandango engine, abandoning the once-great SCUMM system for which Lucasarts became known. The conversion to 3D is faultless, and familiar characters like Otis and Elaine look splendid in their multi-dimensional threads. Guybrush himself is slighty stouter than I remember him, especially after spending time with the elongated characters of MK3, but when coupled with his new setting looks perfect. Elaine is beautiful, and new characters like Mr. Cheese and the villainous Charles Le Charles have been painstakingly modelled. The style is remniscent of Grim Fandango, but different. The cartoony, piratey world of previous adventures is retained, dousing red hot fears that Lucasarts might opt for a more 'realistic' approach with soothing rush of insult firefighting no doubt. The other benefit of using the Grim engine is that control is entirely keyboard based. There's no 'look for an object you can click on and select it' here, you control Guybrush with the cursor keys and wander around the Tri-Island area. The various locations are modelled in true 3D but with superbly-rendered textures. The placement of the camera is perfect in more or less every situation, with none of the obscuring angles that were occasionally criticized in Grim.

The last couple of years have seen something of a boom in the Scandinavian gaming industry, with titles such as Massive Entertainment's 3D real-time strategy game "Ground Control" and Funcom's graphic adventure "The Longest Journey" proving popular with critics and gamers alike. Meanwhile companies like Sweden's Starbreeze Studios and Southend Interactive are hard at work on promising looking debut games.

Of all the PlayStation 2 games I've waded through in the last two weeks, none has been as depressing as Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. It's yet another Japanese translation that sells well based on the reputation of its namesake, yet when released into a Western climate falls into the 'Anime-based video games that really shouldn't have been commissioned' category. It's not as bad as some of its contemporaries, but the characters' weakness and Activision's poor translation have consigned it to the ever-growing pile of substandard PS2 launch titles. The plot is fairly standard RPG fair. You control Orphen, the title character and his young students Magnus and Cleo who are out on a boat one day when a nasty sea monster wrecks their ship and leaves them stranded, washed up on the shores of Chaos Island. From here you have to locate the various pieces of the Crystal Egg, achieved by time-shifting back and forth through the island's history. Henceforth there is little to shout about it. Cutscenes intersperse the action, implemented in a similar way to those in the Final Fantasy games, and battles take place in real-time, where timing your attacks is very important. You have four major offensive attacks, each one bound to one of the four buttons on the right of the joypad, and as you progress through the game you unlock defensive magic and other spells. You can't perform two spells at once, so there's no shielding yourself while you chuck fireballs; the trick therefore is to work out the best way to order your attacks. However, this eventually leads to the battles becoming very repetitive as you learn to adopt a new attack sequence each time. Outside of the battles, it's a startlingly linear game.

Planet Moon's action-strategy game "Giants" has been raising eyebrows for some time now with its mixture of off-the-wall humour and gorgeous graphics, but when the game first started to appear in the USA earlier this week, fans were shocked to discover that the game had been censored. Not only had the traditional splatters of gory claret been replaced by green blood, but the formerly topless Sea Reaper characters had been covered up with bras.

Fans of all the major consoles will have some cause for a shopping frenzy today, with the release of several key games in the run up the Christmas. The newly launched PlayStation 2 can look forward to "Disney's Dinosaur," a game for the kids no doubt, as well as "Midnight Club", the second of Take2's entertaining new racing titles. Following on from a fortnight ago's release of "Smuggler's Run," the game invites you to take part in nocturnal street races, battling for money and bragging rights. Also feeding from the racing trough today is the Dreamcast's "POD 2". The original was a big seller because of its use of Intel's fledging "MMX" technology - yes, it really was that long ago - and the sequel looks magnificent. We shall see though, eh? If you're a Dreamcast fan you may find yourself doing a lot better than PS2 owners this Christmas, as we have tried to emphasize here time and again. This week for instance, heralds the releases of the long-awaited "Quake III Arena", "Dino Crisis", "Super Runabout" and "UEFA Dream Striker". The latter there is the latest from Silicon Dreams, and from first impressions we would say it's as good as its predecessors, although still not quite up there with FIFA. They are very different games, mind. Even the N64 is boasting a couple of new releases this week, with "Quack Attack" (ahem) and "James Bond: The World Is Not Enough". There's one the world's been crying out for. Related Feature - Smuggler's Run Review

If you were fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) enough to be watching The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 at about 8:40 this morning, you will no doubt have witnessed the new Tomb Raider movie trailer. Wasn't it awful? Still, what can one do, perhaps the film in full will shape up a bit better. However, if you didn't catch it, or want to peruse Ms Jolie at your own leisure, then there are plenty of unscrupulous websites that will help you out. If you want to watch her portraying young Ms Croft though, you will have to wait until 4pm this afternoon, when the trailer will be officially available at www.tombraidermovie.com. But seriously, it's pants.

Deep in the heart of Game Valley sits a video game production plant, currently play-testing their latest creation. Unfortunately the developers have run out of heroes to send into the game to rescue the beautiful princess Lolita Globo. That is until Gift, a red-coloured, overweight, big yellow-eyed slob is volunteered for the job.

Advertising for games can be just as awful as it is for toothpaste and other rubbish, but occasionally someone hits the spot. Unfortunately for us, they never seem to hit it within 10,000 miles of us, but thankfully there are fellows like The Gaming Intelligence Agency on-hand to help us out. Their latest perishables include the latest Final Fantasy IX television adverts. We've seen impressive visuals from Square before, mainly in promotional teaser artwork for its new Final Fantasy movie, and this is up to their usual high standards. Each ad' is 30 seconds long with full sound in 320x240 resolution. They clock in at about 6.3Mb and are well worth the 20 minutes or so download time on ISDN.

French publisher Infogrames has swallowed Hasbro Interactive, with the announcement of a mostly paper deal worth $100 million. Infogrames will buy Hasbro's computer games division and enter into a fifteen year licensing agreement, allowing them to make games based on Hasbro properties, which includes everything from popular board games like Monopoly and Scrabble to the classic Atari arcade games of the 1980s. They will also take over Hasbro's brand new online games portal Games.com as part of the deal, which is expected to be finalised by March 2001.

EuroGamer is currently looking for a freelance writer with a particular interest in flight sims. If you know your rudder from your flaps and think you have what it takes to join EuroGamer's team of talented reviewers, drop our illustrious Editor-In-Chief a line at john@eurogamer.net. Please include your name, age, details of any previous experience you have, and a sample of your work. We would prefer applicants to be based in the UK, but will consider anyone who meets our high standards. Writers are paid a regular fee for every feature they produce, and get to keep any games they are sent for review, and with three top flight sims already waiting to be reviewed you could soon be earning yourself some handy Christmas spending money...

As you will remember (and should certainly do now we have taken the time to repost the link), we were desperately underwhelmed by Oni when we saw it at ECTS. It was, we thought, a missed opportunity. We challenged Bungie back then, hoping whimsically that in the space of the few months left leading up to the game's release they would take steps to remedy the problems we had found. And looking at the latest build of the PlayStation 2 version, it's clear that they have come on leaps and bounds. For example, the main issues we voiced concern over were the rather boring fight sequences, graphical glitches and unfortunate animation issues. In this latest version, each area has received attention, and the in-house Rockstar development team to whom Bungie handed the production off have even managed to improve the framerate somewhat. Konoko, the game's central character, is a complex woman, and as you progress, you learn with her. There is a basic training mission to help newcomers, but the whole first section of the game is essentially an advanced training course, teaching the gamer how to make the best use of Konoko's vast array of talents.

It's been quite a week for fans of Quake III, and there is no sign of it letting up. The Babbages' CPL tournament on Sunday was a sight to see, with lots of matches going down to the wire, and later this week we will finally be getting our hands on Quake III Dreamcast. Or at least, you will be, we've had it for nearly a week now! Is it good, you ask? Well, it's a point of much debate; the controls are very difficult to get used to, especially if you play regularly on the PC, but on the whole it's quite a solid, nippy and surprisingly pretty conversion with quite a lot going for it in all departments. Obviously you should wait for our full review before passing judgement on whether or not to buy it... and perhaps you ought to heed the news contained in this very item, because by all accounts, a revolution is nearly upon us. Quake III: Revolution, to be exact; the PlayStation 2 incarnation of Id's ever-popular FPS. EBWorld in the States is claiming we'll see it in March 2001, and although that may be a rather optimistic estimate, it does prove two things; firstly that retailers are in contact with the publisher regularly about it (this is the first anyone's heard of the "Revolution" monker for example), and second, that it is close enough to release for e-stores to be offering it up for pre-order. What we don't know is the state of its multiplayer capabilities. Will players of the Dreamcast and PC versions be able to, ahem, 'interact', with their PS2 counterparts, or will they be reduced to their own separate playgrounds? Watch this space. Related Feature - Babbages' CPL Qualifier Coverage

So then, Deus Ex, the best first person shooter ever? There's certainly cause to think so, and if your PC is up to the task of rendering heavy duty Unreal engine shoot em ups, then there's absolutely no reason for you not to have it in your collection. One of the things that the game was criticized for, though ... no, let me rephrase that ... the single factor that people took issue with in Deus Ex, was its lack of multiplayer. Not just serious multiplayer modes, but a lack of multiplayer, full stop. But as we all know, the developers, Ion Storm, are not the sort of people to let their fans down! (Are you on crack today, Tom? -Ed) In an effort to extend our enjoyment of this timeless classic, they have released a patch, that not only corrects a few erroneous bugs and improves the OpenGL and D3D code, but also includes the much-awaited addition of multiplayer. It clocks in at a hefty 36Mb, but don't whimper, choke your modem on it, because it will be well worth your troubles... Download locations -

Naturally, the greatest aspect of our job is that amongst all the stinkers - all the really dreadful titles that we're forced to play - is that we occasionally get to play some of the greatest games ever to grace gaming-kind. Without beating around the bush here, we'll put one thing straight: Metropolis Street Racer is truly one of the greatest driving games ever conceived. The one thing that makes MSR so fabulous, so unmistakably brilliant, is its unerring originality. When I first read the rave previews about MSR, I couldn't possibly imagine what could differentiate this one driving game from all the hundreds before it, aside from perhaps some improved physics, more cars, better graphics, yadda yadda.. so what? However, upon finally playing the game, after an hour or so we could see exactly how Metropolis Street Racer would conquer the racing videogaming world - Kudos. Kudos is (in the most simplistic term) MSR's scoring system. To explain this can be quite cumbersome and tricky, so please bear with us. When you start the game, you begin a chapter consisting of 10 races. From those 10 races, you must gain a set total of Kudos points in order to proceed to the next chapter. Everything in MSR, how you drive, how fast you drive, how well you corner, how many walls you scuff, effects your Kudos rating at the end of a race. So not only do you have to worry about beating the clock or the other drivers, you also have to worry about taking on the role of a flash git in a convertible, joyriding around the streets of London and impressing your mates by power sliding round 90 degree corners without even coming close to the barriers. Needless to say this is a Hard Thing™ to do, and your progression in the game relies wholeheartedly on your ability to pull this off, but the Kudos system lends the entire game an unmatched sense of originality in the genre… we think maybe the best way to describe it is that it's a kind of driving RPG.

The Americans are a peculiar lot at times. The latest cause for concern is a market research study by PC Data, which claims that the PS One is now hogging 42% of the sales market, followed by Sega's Dreamcast with 27% and the PlayStation 2 with a measely 6%. I suppose that's what happens when you don't actually manufacture any units to sell... We have always had a soft spot for Sega's Dreamcast, and it's pleasant to see it commanding a decent share of the American market. With Sega's recent announcement that they intend to discontinue console development in favour of concentrating on software, the swansong is starting to look more and more appropriate. It's a touch ironic though that Sega's success this Christmas is based almost entirely on Sony's inability to shift PS2s. What nobody had counted on was the continuing sales of the PS One, a console that has been available for several years now in various forms. The buyers may have a point though, the PS2 is shipping in astonishingly low quantities; early reports indicate that there are even fewer of them than expected.

In the wake of the collapse of Digital Anvil, co-founder and soon-to-be-former CEO Chris Roberts has spoken about his decision to leave the company he founded just four years ago. As we suspected, the company's troubles were down to "wanting to develop not only hugely ambitious games, but too many hugely ambitious games", leaving the company's finances stretched after four years without a single game being released - the sole title to emerge with the Digital Anvil name on it was actually mostly developed by a small British company.

Eidos have announced that they will be publishing Dreamcast action game "Spawn : In The Demon's Hand", which is a port of the arcade game based on the popular Todd McFarlane comic book series. Due for release in January, Eidos will be publishing the game in Europe and Australia for Capcom. Colin Grant of Capcom Eurosoft claims that "Spawn : In The Demon's Hand has been created in conjuncture with Todd MacFarlane Entertainment, and is sure to appeal to Spawn fans or anyone looking for all-out great gameplay". With four player split-screen action and 32 characters to choose from, it may just prove to be another fun McFarlane inspired computer game, following in the wake of this year's "KISS : Psycho Circus".

ELSA have launched their new "USB2Ethernet Adapter", which does exactly what it says on the tin, plugging into your USB socket and giving you an instant ethernet connection to hook your computer up to a LAN with. Designed primarily for laptop owners, it saves you a PCMCIA slot, and at just £39.99 it's a fairly cheap alternative to buying a network card. With plug and play installation it should be a doddle to get working as well, and for those of you with a way of destroying your hardware it comes with a two year warranty. The adapater was designed for "organisations where one or more notebook user needs fast and simple access to the office network", but it could come in handy for LAN gamers as well. To find out more, read the press release.

It's just four years since Digital Anvil was created as an escape from the corporate world of Origin in the wake of the company's buy-out by Electronic Arts, but things haven't exactly gone smoothly since then, and today it looks like the dream is over.

PC System Requirements -   Pentium 166 MMX or equivalent   32Mb RAM   80Mb hard drive space   4x CD-ROM drive   2Mb graphics card   All screenshots are from PC version

. "Microsoft® Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Micron Technology, Inc., (NYSE: MU) today announced the signing of a six-year strategic supply agreement in which Micron will supply a majority of the DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM used in Microsoft's Xbox future generation video game console." The interesting thing about this announcement is that it's another manipulation of the Xbox specification. Last time MS went for a complete overhaul, this time it's more subtle, but it's in-keeping with current trends in the PC industry. It also proves once and for all that somewhere along the line we will be getting an Intel-based machine with DDR memory. It goes on: "The 64 Megabytes of system memory for the Xbox will be comprised of 200MHz 2 Meg X 32 DDR SDRAMs with a peak data rate of 400 Megabits per second per pin, delivering an incredible 6.4GB per second of bandwidth to the Xbox platform." For those of you who don't speak, that, what this means is that unlike your average memory which runs at 100MHz (the processor speed is designated by a multiplier number hard-coded to the CPU, multiplied by this 100MHz bus speed), this memory will run at 200MHz. The memory bandwidth is therefore doubled, allowing the Intel CPU and the NVIDIA graphics card (amongst other things) to shuffle data back and forth at will without saturating it.

Thanks as usual to event organisers The Playing Fields for their hospitality and bandwidth, and mad props to Mugwum for reporting on some of the final matches after I had to make a dash for the railway station to get home!

- Mat-TrixPrice - £5 to £10

American publisher Encore Software and British distributor Contact Sales are teaming up to bring all the joys of jet ski racing to a PC or Macintosh near you, with the UK release of "Kawasaki Jet Ski Watercraft" on Friday 23rd February 2001. The game allows you to race five different models of the eponymous jet skis around "50 radical courses" in any of "5 unique race modes". Locations are promised to include everything from the canals of Venice to the open ocean, and from caves to waterfalls. There will even be a random course generator to give you a challenge once you have mastered all of the standard courses. If you fancy taking to the waves on a jet ski, at £19.99 this is probably going to be the cheapest way to do it, and let's face it, the computer games world is hardly overflowing with jet ski games at the moment.

Internet users in this country have been polling BT for unmetered Internet access for quite some time now, with limited success. The recent introduction of BT's SuftTime model has helped to increase the amount of 24/7 unmetered services tenfold, but many users are reluctant to sign up for a new phone model, preferring to look out for a simple 0800 number service.. like the latest one, from NetGames UK. The service will launch on the 1st of January and offer 24/7 unmetered connections on a bona fide 0800 number for £25 a month, quite a reasonable tag considering the service. This writer has been on the NGUK Beta test for a couple of weeks now, using it pretty much 24/7, breaking only to redial at the 3 hour cut-off point. In-game pings to servers on Barrysworld, Wireplay and GamesInferno have all been sub-100, at times as low as 40 on ISDN. Occasional packet-loss problems are what the beta is trying to fix at the moment, but it seems to be being handled remarkably well. If you fancy trying it out for free until the end of the year, click here. Another 24/7 service that has been brought into question lately is "Freeserve Unlimited", a farce if ever there was one. Users of this service who dared to take advantage of the always on, always free ideology have been turfed off en-masse. The new service Freeserve intend to introduce is a FRIACO-based system for £12.99 a month. Hopefully they will think this one through this time and won't end up subsidising the userbase to the tune of £500,000 a month.

It seems that the massive demand surrounding the launch of the PlayStation 2 still hasn't subsided, and opportunistically, a couple of unscrupulous web-vendors have been taking people's money eagerly at the promise of more consoles, then not delivered. PS2storeusa.com and PS2storecanada.com have both been charging between $394 and $599 for the PS2, and the punters, ever eager to try and get hold of one, have handed over their cash expectantly. But it seems that the two PS2store- sites aren't keeping up their end of the bargain. There was someone answering the phones at the company's headquarters, but all he would do was confirm that there was a problem with UPS that was being held responsible. He refused to give his name or title. All sorts of legal mumbo-jumbo has now been put into action to try and prevent the e-tailor from pocketing the money but not delivering on its promises. It seems that major credit card companies, the Better Business Bureau and other bodies are trying to deal with the problem, which should therefore be resolved quite quickly. Sadly though, there is no way to conjure up 15,000 PlayStation 2s, the number the company is said to have received orders for, and gamers may be left without, despite the inconvenience they have been put through.

Although Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president, considers online gaming "a fad", there are tens of thousands of people around the world who disagree with him. Counter-Strike, the online teamplay modification for Half-Life, is currently the single most popular 3D game on the Internet, bar none. Services like iSketch and other simple online games are incredibly popular, and those online casinos... The thing is, even though Nintendo of Japan still think of online gaming in the same way, Nintendo of America do not, and are taking steps to make sure that when the time comes, there is some form of network for the 'cube to connect to. The word is that Jim Merrick, who has overseen hardware development and such on the Gamecube already, has been promoted to take control of the top-secret online network project, Nintendo Online. According to IGN, development kit designer Applied Microsystems, who work for Microsoft and Nintendo on their respective consoles have placed job advertisements seeking online gaming consultants and the like, and Nintendo have recently secured the domain name www.nintendoonline.com. Incriminating evidence, if ever there was any.

It's hardly surprising these days to find Blokey and Timber battling one another in a CPL event, and in a way it was never in doubt that the two would meet. What was annoying was that thanks to some rather unfortunate seeding, Blokey and his clanmate met very early on, where Blokey was reduced to the loser's bracket. In the final only a few moments ago, Timber defeated him again, sealing the event with a blistering performance. Word is that Blokey will still represent the UK in the Babbages CPL tournament finals though, as Timber cannot make the journey. If you weren't able to make your way down to TPF today - er, yesterday! - then make sure you check out EuroGamer's extensive live coverage, including reports on several key encounters. Demos and more are to come, check back on Monday for more.

The Might & Magic franchise is one of the most prolific computer game series we can think of, with a whole host of games now available covering almost every conceivable genre from turn-based strategy to role-playing. But apart from the unremarkable third person action-adventure game "Crusaders of Might & Magic", the franchise has stayed firmly entrenched in its old school 2D ways, from the sprites and tiles of the "Heroes" strategy games to the goofy looking bitmap monsters of the "Might & Magic" role-playing titles.

The EuroGamer crew is now down at The Playing Fields for the Babbages-CPL UK qualifier event. Thanks to the current disruption on the British rail network I arrived at just past noon after a three hour journey (it should have taken less than half that time), but there had been delays at the venue as well. The first free-for-all started more or less on time, but then it was noticed that one of the players was missing and the game would have to be restarted. Unfortunately the wrong server seems to have been restarted, as a result of which the second free-for-all seeding group (including top player Blokey, who was about twenty frags ahead by this point) was cut short twelve minutes into the game. Everything seems to be under control now though, and the first free-for-all games are underway, although the event is an hour behind schedule now.