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After a turbulent history which saw three big events being announced and then cancelled one by one, and eventually the whole franchise being shut down and sold on to a new organiser, the all-new CPL Europe is hoping that this time things will go a little smoother. The full details of their debut event, taking place in the German city of Köln next month, have now been announced, including information on the settings and prizes for the Quake 3 tournament.

Sequels are either better or worse than their predecessors, and this is how they're judged. The concept of a sequel being its own game is completely alien to the average gamer, and it's for this reason that Driver 2 suffers so badly. In its own right it could be just about playable, but with the original still fresh in many people's minds it's going to take a lot of flack. This is because, if we're honest, Driver 2 isn't a very good game. Reflections have decided to focus on minor niggles in the Driver code instead of tightening up some of the big issues that plagued the previous game. As such these problems (including pop-up amongst other things) are accentuated, and because the engine is so over-stretched in places, the game even locks up at times, and the framerate is ghastly. But where did it all go wrong? Well it starts right at the beginning. The whole concept of you, Tanner, the undercover cop was clichéd to begin with, but by focusing so heavily on the driving angle the first game worked. It started out hard by making you learn advanced techniques in the underground garage and it then let you sit back whilst it eased you gradually into higher gear until you were fighting the steering wheel against the clock in later missions. Even so, the challenges were definitely proportionate to the feeling of satisfaction gained from victory.

According to the latest release schedule which just arrived from UbiSoft, the latest Everquest add-on "Scars of Velious" is now due for its European release on December 15th, just in time for elf-lovers everywhere to stuff it in a stocking and hang it from a Christmas tree. Probably. With some winter-themed new lands to explore and a more linear campaign to partake in rather than the usual free-form style of play, it should make the perfect festive gift for the tree-hugger in your life...

In the ever growing sport of professional gaming, Johnathan "Fatality" Wendel is the most successful competitor in the world right now. In the last twelve months he has won several tournaments, including the Razer-CPL event, the BattleTop Universal Challenge, and the World Cyber Games Challenge. He's only been beaten once this year in a major tournament, has taken home over $80,000 in prize money, and is likely to pick up even more at the Babbages CPL event in Dallas next month.

British developers Climax have been busy chaps recently, and their latest announcement has revealed a new PlayStation 2 game engine known as "Climax Motorsports". As the name suggests, it's been designed by Climax's Brighton office and is intended specifically for motor racing games, whether they be track based, off-road, urban or free range. Climax are claiming that the engine can handle twenty cars on screen at once without any slowdown, and an impressive polygon throughput of 320,000 triangles per frame. All of this comes with a range of special effects, including everything from motion blur and heat haze to motion captured spectators! Certainly what little we've seen of it so far looks quietly impressive, and hopefully we should know more soon. In the meantime, feast your eyes on these brand new screenshots of the engine in action.

Over the years BritSoft developers the Bitmap Brothers have built up an enviable back catalogue of classic games, including the likes of the Xenon and Speedball series, and of course the innovative real-time strategy game "Z". But since Z's release way back in 1996 they have been remarkably quiet, with only their recent PlayStation release "Speedball 2100" breaking the silence.

It doesn't matter who started it, and it doesn't matter who is the king of the hill at the moment, but what does matter is how astonishingly fast the tactical action genre has moved forward in the past couple of years. What began as a relatively niche market with the likes of Novalogic's Delta Force has now wrapped its camo-clad fingers around the gaming world, and it isn't going to let go for the foreseeable future.

Codemasters will be kicking up a cloud of gravel this Christmas with a pair of fast paced driving games. First off the marks is 4x4 off-road racer "Insane", due on November 24th. Although the game promises realistic handling for all of its vehicles, it's more of an arcade racer at heart, with the focus on adrenaline-pumping action rather than sim-like realism.

"Settlers IV" seemed to be in trouble when publisher Blue Byte recently announced that the planned public beta test of the game had been cancelled, and so it comes as little surprise to hear that the game's release has now been delayed until next year. Before fans of the popular strategy series start leaping off tall buildings, the good news is that the new release date is expected to be January 2001, so you won't have too long a wait if everything goes to plan. The delay will also "allow more time for the game's development and quality assurance", which has to be a good thing.

After Terminal Reality's extremely polished Rustin Parr offering only a couple of weeks ago, I had high hopes for the second in the series, The Legend of Coffin Rock, but after playing through the entire game in a solid afternoon I feel rather let down. Unlike its predecessor, Coffin Rock has been developed by Human Head Studios, a third party employed to help speed along production of the Blair Witch games. Unfortunately, the whole experience seems to suffer as a result, leaving a sour taste in your mouth. If you remember, Rustin Parr was lovingly termed an extension of Nocturne, the engine upon which the game was based. Like Nocturne, it used the mythical Spookhouse organisation, giving you control of a couple of central characters and asking you to investigate the original Blair Witch mystery. In Coffin Rock, the American Civil War has just ended, and you take on the role of a dazed and confused army veteran stumbling around the woods having lost your memory. A little girl named Robin Weaver finds you and takes you back to her Grandmother, who tends to your wounds and dubs you Lazarus. However instead of bidding a fond farewell to your newfound friends and starting a new life for yourself, you are pressed into helping locate young Robin, who has gone missing in the woods despite implicit instructions to stay away. Just before you set off to help find her, you suffer a flashback, which opens up a Pandora's box of spooky imagery from your life before. Picking up whatever weapons you can, you scurry off into the woods with the townspeople of Bukettsville.

Owners of the GameBoy Color haven't had all that much to shout about lately, no thanks to the GameBoy Advance, so it's quite pleasant to be in a position to report that Infogrames may be in the process of acquiring the rights to a Dragon Ball Z license for the system in the next few days. The famous cartoon series' last outing was on the PlayStation in the form of Bandai's abysmal Dragon Ball GT Final Bout, which flopped rather dramatically in 1997. However despite the series' gaming lineage being somewhat lacklustre, it is still one of the most popular cartoon series in the world, and regularly pops up as one of the ten most searched for phrases on major Internet search sites. Although Infogrames have not yet confirmed that they are developing anything relating to Dragon Ball, IGN managed to extract a standard but hopeful response from them on the topic, saying that they are "still in the planning process", and that they intend to "make an announcement on Dragon Ball Z soon". Promising stuff. It has been suggested that alongside a GBC title the company may also be working on PlayStation 1 and 2 incarnations in tandem, but as we've seen you would be hard-pressed to get anyone to confirm either way. All things considered this cannot be bad news for GameBoy owners. The Cartoon Network TV channel in the USA still broadcasts the show several times a day, 7 days a week to millions of adoring fans, so there is certainly a lot of money to be made should such a game be on the cards. Presumably this is why Infogrames are not rushing to announce anything, lest they increase the uncertainty. For those of you who aren't aware, the series itself focuses on a multitude of sagas pertaining to several good and bad characters. The one you have probably heard of or at least seen is Goku, a good guy renowned for his rather impressive Anime hairdo amongst other things. If as a GameBoy owner you're not sure why you should be excited about DBZ coming to your system, check out the flasy official website and try to track down a couple of videos. It's top stuff.

Massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game "Asheron's Call" celebrates its first anniversary this month with another new event, "Should The Stars Fall". A new chain of islands has been discovered, home to two previously unknown settlements, two new monsters, and lots of other dangerous creatures to fight. And as if all that isn't enough, a new threat is wandering the land of Dereth, "a very grave evil" which is "primordial to the world itself".

London Mayor Ken Livingstone had the surprise of his life on Tuesday night when he was accosted by a trio of sheep at a party in London to mark the lighting of the city's Christmas illuminations. They were there to advertise Empire Interactive's Lemmings-style puzzle game "Sheep", which is due for release in the UK on Friday 17th November. The game sees you guiding the hapless wool-coated animals through a series of fiendish obstacles and hazards on the way to Mount Mouflon, and is certainly one of the more bizarre games we've come across lately, as well as being strangely addictive.

Gunman has been a long time coming. Originally intended to be a freebie Quake add-on, it later switched to the Half-Life engine and caught the attention of developers Valve. Eventually publisher Sierra became interested in the former "total conversion", and agreed to release Gunman as a full stand-alone game.

Offroad racing games vary hugely in their stance and influences. Games like Monster Truck Madness look to the American monster truck passion for their inspiration, whilst 4x4 Evolution is more focused on how much damage you can do on uneven terrain with a Land Cruiser, yet both fall under the same generic umbrella. In deference to MTM, it has its fans, but on the whole, the best way to impress your clientele is to give them jaw-dropping graphics from every angle, and that means throwing them off cliffs, into the ocean and over precipices until their knuckles ache from wrenching the vehicle back and forth. And that's just what Terminal Reality have done with 4x4 Evolution. It's offroad action at its slickest, giving you one objective, to get through checkpoints, and telling you and your computer controlled opponents to do this in any way you see fit. Thanks to the vivacity that TRI have injected into the locations and the differing characteristics of the cars, finding the most efficient way to get to your objective can be quite difficult, but the rewards are great thanks to the World Rankings system, which allows you to put yourself up against the world's finest by uploading your lap times and high scores.

In a story based upon Nikkei Electronics Asia's recent write-up of the Nintendo GameCube's internal architecture, IGN have compiled an English-language version of the original article. The details focus upon the Flipper LSI and its ArtX graphics chipset, the 3.1Mb of embedded 1T-RAM cache, the DSP sound system (similar to the recent Imagination Technologies sound card chipset) and also information on the GameCube's main system memory. Of most interest is the news that the Flipper LSI will be a densely packed 51 million transistor beast, which indicates that it will be more complex in construction than the PS2's Emotion Engine, but not necessarily as Byzantine as its sister-component in Microsoft's Xbox.

A bit of a consumer-interest story, this one. If you have upgraded your PC recently, you will no doubt have noticed that memory prices are at an all time low. At a decent dealer such as Scan, a 128Mb stick of 133MHz SDRAM will set you back a paltry £47 plus VAT, whereas only a month or two ago it was literally twice that. If you were stung by the price fluctuations and had to buy some at full whack, you could certainly be forgiven for wondering just what was the determining factor here. You see, big OEMs like Dell, Evesham, Time etc, all buy memory direct from the manufacturers are a fairly set price. Whatever is left over is then sold on to the rest of the market, the domestic buyer in this case. Because of the Taiwanese Earthquake last Christmas there was a big shortage, and supply went down to a trickle. At this point, the price to OEMs rose about 10%, but as you will have seen, the price to the consumer leapt by as much as 50% or more, and continued to rise until recently. With only about 20% subject to supply-and-demand pricing, if the OEMs want more, they get it, and we suffer. However recently, the OEMs haven't wanted as much for whatever reason, presumably because of alternative solutions which require RAMBUS or other types of memory. As such, the amount of memory available to the average consumer has grown exponentially, and so the retailers are left with a big surplus that the OEMs won't touch, and frankly not too many consumers are interested in either. As such the prices are dropped to compensate, and the consumer gets a bit of revenge on the tight-fisted retailers, whilst the OEMs are still paying the higher prices. Power to the people!

Just two years ago 3dfx bought board manufacturer STB so that they could design, build and sell graphics cards based on their own Voodoo family of processors. At the time 3dfx were at the top of the PC graphics industry, their Voodoo 2 was the fastest 3D accelerator on the market, and you could buy graphics cards based on the chip from half a dozen different board manufacturers. But the STB buy-out proved to be an ill-fated decision, upsetting 3dfx's former partners and distracting the company from what they did best - designing graphics chips. Profits at 3dfx have slumped since the take-over, and a series of costly product delays has forced the company to slash prices so that their cards could compete at the lower end of the market. Meanwhile all the jilted board manufacturers dumped by 3dfx in 1998 have turned to NVIDIA, whose GeForce family of cards now dominates the market, and is available in literally dozens of different brands and variations.

If you want to get in some jaw-on-floor practice, we suggest you check out the latest Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within theatrical trailer. The trailer focuses on Aki Ross' dream, which may have originated from an alien force, but Grey is caught in the middle. If you've ever wondered what a completely life-like rendered movie would look like, check this out. If you'll excuse the editorial outburst, oh my God!

Yesterday afternoon we discovered that technology site Australian IT had benchmarked and reviewed a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 system, labelling it as an over-priced, under-performing paperweight which would prove unreachable for most and only as impressive comparatively as an Athlon of about 1.2GHz or thereabouts. The review, which is fairly sizeable, includes a demonstration pic of the processor itself, showing its size to be somewhat larger than current flip-chip and Socket A processors. Ultimately though, the reviewer, the reputable Dan Rutter of DansData.com fame, couldn't get past the fact that you would need nearly 4,000 Australian dollars to pay for the CPU, motherboard and memory alone, whereas an Athlon machine of similar power could be had for nearly a third of that. Elsewhere, ZDNet has a story about the Pentium 4's imminent launch on Monday and how it thinks the processor will grow in its market share towards the end of next year. It seems however that they are reluctant to use Intel executive VP Paul Otellini's comment about "aggressive pricing" outside of quote marks.

UbiSoft have signed a deal with Crave Entertainment to distribute their games in nine European countries, including the UK, France and Germany. The agreement takes in twenty games due for release between now and March 2001, including five PlayStation 2 titles such as "Kengo" and "Evergrace", as well as everything from "Mort The Chicken" and "Men In Black 2" to "Wave Runner" and "Ultimate Fighting Championship" on the Dreamcast and PlayStation. Beyond that there are more titles in the works for PC and next generation consoles. For the full story, read the press release.

While most of the attention and glory in computer games is focused on the graphics, the sound is just as important a part of the overall experience, and one which is often neglected. But have you ever wondered what goes into preparing the sounds for a game? No? Neither have we really, but thanks to the guys at Swedish developers Termite Games (formerly known as Insomnia Software) we now have some idea of what goes on behind the scenes as they develop their first person shooter "New World Order"...

It's about time that the GameBoy got its own card game. The PC versions of Solitaire, Hearts and Freecell which have been included with Windows since the dawn of time have for all intents and purposes become the most popular computer games in history. Along with Minesweeper, the games have defined gaming with a PC, and if my own laptop is anything to go by, see more use than any work-related program out there for mobile businessmen. As such it's really quite startling when you realise that before Uno, the GameBoy Color had very little in the way of card games to keep the player occupied. No wonder then that developers HotGen decided to work on it whilst other programmers in the company beavered away on the GBC conversion of Resident Evil, it's the perfect stop-gap. But at £20, it is just a card game. How worthwhile is the expenditure at such a price? And how good an implementation of the classic holiday card game is it?

It is nearly the season to be jolly, for oh so many reasons, but despite AMD debuting a 1.5GHz part at Comdex (see previous story), Intel have got the jump on them by announcing that its own 2GHz Pentium 4 will be alive and jumping as early as January of next year. According to the chip giant, yields are proving very impressive, and it should be no time at all before the core is regularly producing 2GHz capable parts, far and away the most impressive processor ever seen on the market. According to an anonymous VP at Intel, "yields on P4 are excellent and there are going to be lots of parts available much earlier than originally anticipated". So AMD basically has two options; to hope and pray Intel's CPUs underperform in the vital areas and work on a 'performance not numbers' advertising campaign, or to throw everything it has into the development of Sledgehammer, which is already assured of compatability with Microsoft's forthcoming 64-bit operating system. Rest assured though, that the ongoing saga of Intel versus AMD will continue well into next year.

Ever wondered what a 1.5GHz PC looks like? Well, it looks like this. Of course, the undulating crowds trying to get a peek at it during this week's Comdex show weren't going to be impressed by this simple readout of speed. But surprisingly, this is pretty much all the general public got, although technical demonstrations (a few simple benchmarks) were available from an on-hand AMD fellow. The question, though, as we approach the end of the year 2000, is how close the Athlon core has come to its peak. When the 1GHz barrier was broken by both AMD and Intel, their respective Athlon and Pentium III processors were considered to be at the high-end of their capabilities, and yet here we are looking at AMD's output for next year, an Athlon approaching 1.5GHz, a mark only the Pentium 4 has been able to lay claim to before today. Ultimately, AMD hope to have a 1.7GHz Athlon available to consumers next year, although they aren't willing to put a lid on things just there. If they can, we forsee them attempting to pump the Athlon core up to 1.75GHz and perhaps even 2GHz for the latter stages of next year. With Intel promising similar things from its P4 core and then some, AMD may need to find a new line to market its processors before they are superseded by Intel's speed demons. However in the mean time, all this good change, depending on whether or not AMD can sort out a stepping of the Athlon which can handle higher frequencies.

The big Comdex electronics trade show is now underway in Las Vegas, and a veritable flood of new product launches are starting to emerge as computer hardware companies unveil their latest doohickeys. One of the biggest announcements so far is probably NVIDIA's long awaited entry into the laptop market - the "GeForce 2 Go", which the company are describing as the "world's first mobile GPU". Although the announcement doesn't come as any surprise (we've known for some time that NVIDIA were planning a mobile solution), we do at least now know all the gory details...

As recently as September's ECTS trade show in London, 3dfx were demonstrating a near-complete sample board of their Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card. Powered by four VSA-100 chips supported by 128Mb of memory, the card would have set you back $600, making it purely for the hardest of the hardcore gamers. Over-powered, expensive and ridiculously long, we described it as the "stretched limo of graphics cards". It even required a seperate external power supply! The Voodoo 5 6000 really was a ludicrous piece of hardware, a triumph of brute force engineering, but there was something strangely alluring about this foot long lump of silicon, and it was undoubtedly a strong performer.

Razer broke into the hardcore gaming scene recently with their Boomslang mouse, which featured above average sampling accuracy and a rather .. unique design. The bizarre shape of the mouse means that it isn't for everyone though, and Razer have a new mouse called the Mamba in the pipeline, based on feedback from Boomslang users and extensive testing with professional gamers. Due for release next summer, "the Mamba will be lighter and more maneuverable than the Boomslang" according to general manager Robert Krakoff, aka Razerguy.

The weekend of November 10th - 12th saw the latest in the Multiplay i-series of LAN parties, with up to 1000 players assembling at Newbury Racecourse in wet and windy Berkshire. Having missed out on i4 and i5, both of which have been highly praised, I was not about to make it a third missed event in a row. So, with fellow Dark Republic clannies Comatosed and Xena crammed in the car, we braved the M25 tedium and headed for Newbury.

When the Unreal-engined Viking action game "Rune" was released recently, it fell slightly short of our high expectations. The graphics were beautiful, but the combat was rather hit-and-miss, and the opening levels were rather repetitive, mostly thanks to a serious lack of variety in the monsters you were facing. In a recent online chat session, developers Human Head admitted that "we probably should have spent more time balancing the early levels with different types of monsters, but didn't have the time due to deadline pressures".