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Although most of the media interest in professional gaming has been centered around competitions using first person shooters like the Quake series so far, there is also a big community based around motor racing games. Now British virtual racing group "Team Redline" have announced a sponsorship deal with Thrustmaster, which will see the hardware giant funding them "to enhance the team's performances and provide the support and backing necessary to keep us at the top of sim racing". Having recently won recent "Grand Prix 3" and "Grand Prix Legends" competitions, the team is now "looking forward to a successful future".

For some years now the media and gamers alike have been getting excited about the advent of the virtual battlefield, combining the first person shooter with tank and flight sims to produce an all-encompassing simulation of war. And yet, despite a few brave ("Wargasm") or simply downright foolish ("Codename Eagle") attempts, this apparent gaming nirvana still hasn't truly arrived.

The Online Gamers Association has relaunched its website after an extensive overhaul, with several major new features added. For a start you can now select what kind of OGA news you are interested in seeing, picking which of several categories of news will be displayed when you log into the site. You can even opt to view headlines from your favourite sites listed on the OGA front page - Blue's News, Barrysworld, EuroGamer and other sites are already supported, with more on the way!

One of the most unusual games we've come across so far this year is "Sheep" from Empire Interactive and Minds Eye Productions, which sees you trying to guide the eponymous dumb animals through a series of levels on their way to Mount Mouflon. Now Empire have launched the game's official website - Save Our Sheep - which features information about the characters you will control, the worlds you will find yourself in, and the truth about sheep, who are actually highly intelligent interstellar travellers who have just forgotten why they are here. No, really. For all the latest on the soon-to-be-released game, head over to the Save Our Sheep website now!

3DO Europe have announced that their soccer sim "Alex Ferguson's Player Manager 2001" will be available on PlayStation from Friday November 24th, with PC and PlayStation 2 versions to follow early next year. The game features an all-new engine, enhanced menu system, 122 new motion captured players, a new control system, more stadia, and the proverbial much much more. For the full scoop, read the press release.

have announced that the Counter-Strike teamplay tournament at their debut event in the German city of Köln will be sponsored by Razer, creators of the Boomslang gaming mouse. Prize money for the tournament will total 10,000 euros, with 32 teams of 5 players taking part. Ten of those teams have already qualified from various events over the last few months, but the other 22 slots are open on a first-come first-serve basis, and registration for these open slots will begin tomorrow. For the full details, check the CPL Europe website.

Yesterday marked the release of 3DO's "Action Man : Destruction X" on PlayStation across Europe, with the popular toy starring in his own game developed by BritSoft company Blitz Games. "Dr. X, Action Man's greatest enemy, has hatched a devious plot to take over the world, and only the man of action himself can stop him", according to the press release announcing the game's arrival. "His quest to discover Dr. X's plan will take him across 36 all-action missions from burning desert sands to the bitter cold of the North Pole, testing his courage and determination all the way. Robot warriors, mutant plants and deadly insects are just a few of the surprises awaiting him."

UbiStudios UK are currently hard at work on "Dragonriders : Chronicles of Pern", a mixture of action, adventure and role-playing elements set in the world of Pern created by popular fantasy author Anne McCaffrey. But although the lead character is the dragon-rider of the title, a rugged hero called D'Kor, his dragon Zenth is also a major part of the game.

When "X : Beyond The Frontier" was released just over a year ago, we had high hopes for it. As fans of the "Elite" series right back to the original BBC Micro version of the 1980s, the idea of an open-ended space sim in which you could be a pirate, trader or bounty hunter was enough to get us excited.

The original MDK introduced us all to the joys of the sniper rifle, which has now become an indispensable part of almost every new first person shooter. MDK's stealth suited hero returned in the recent sequel on PC and Dreamcast, along with his mentor the Doc, and a bizarre four-armed two-legged dog with a bad attitude. Now MDK2 is coming to the PlayStation 2 in the form of "MDK2 : Armageddon", a specially enhanced version of the already colourful game.

The first flight simulators were designed not for gamers, but for pilots. Used by both military and civilian trainers, these things make even the most authentic of PC flight sims look like an arcade game. Recently some of the SimHQ team got a chance to visit the US Navy in southern California to see their Miramar F/A-18 simulators, which feature an imitation cockpit inside a dome on the surface of which the sim's graphics are projected, all powered by a room full of mainframe computers. And it doesn't come cheap either - "just to run these two simulators and the massive number of mainframes to go with them, it costs one million dollars per month", and "that's not including personnel, maintenance or anything else .. just the electric bill"! So now all our American readers know where their tax dollars are going...

Microsoft today announced that DirectX 8.0 is now available for download. For those of you living under a rock, DirectX is the API used by many games and multimedia applications running under Windows, and the latest version adds a whole shedload of new features as well as many improvements and performance tweaks to make the API even more credible for game development, gaining support from the likes of Epic's Tim Sweeney of Unreal fame as well as graphics card manufacturers 3dfx, ATI, NVIDIA.

Once again it's been a big week for new releases on the PC as the industry builds itself up into a frenzy in the final countdown to the festive season. The biggest new arrival was probably the latest Electronic Arts soccer sim, "FIFA 2001", which is sure to be a massive hit regardless of what (if anything) has changed since "FIFA 2000"... Meanwhile for those of you who prefer your sports to be of the extreme variety, THQ "MTV Sports Skateboarding" is out. If you want something a little more sedate, then Microsoft's "Links 2001" golf sim might be more up your street. Finally, escaping from the glut of new sports games, Cryo's adventure game "Egypt II" is now available, bundled with one of their older titles, "Aztec".

Over the past few years the computer games industry in what used to be the Soviet Bloc has seen something of a renaissance, with fresh new developers springing up across eastern Europe, from Poland to Yugoslavia.

Television series about computer games have traditionally been rather hit or miss, and even the relatively successful ones have tended to enjoy a love / hate relationship with their target audience - witness "Bits". Sadly it looks like the BBC's innovative new series "Bleeding Thumbs" isn't even going to be given the opportunity to tank gracefully, with a researcher who had worked on the show revealing that "Bleeding Thumbs has been postponed indefinitely with the series being put on hold".

It has recently occurred to me that I've been playing video games for a very long time. In fact, for as long as I can remember I have had some sort of video gaming entertainment to hand, from my earliest recollections of the ColecoVision owned by my parents to my very own first computer, the Acorn Electron.

UbiSoft's latest release schedule just arrived, with several major changes. Oddball adventure game "Stupid Invaders" is the highest profile casualty, slipping from a planned November 10th release to December 8th. With off-the-wall humour and vocal talent from actors who have graced cult cartoon series like "Futurama", "The Simpsons" and "Ren & Stimpy", this is one of UbiSoft's most promising games, and we're sorry to see its release delayed again. Another title on the movie is "Pro Rally 2001", which slips a week to December 8th.

The international launch of the PlayStation 2 has proven to be something of a disaster for Sony, and almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. In the USA the initial allocation of consoles was slashed from a million to just 500,000, resulting in fights breaking out at some stores as the new system sold out within hours of its release, and the console changing hands on auction sites like eBay for five or ten times the usual retail price. Now things are starting to look grim for the European launch, with the UK's allocation of 200,000 consoles which were due between November 24th and Christmas now cut to 165,000. It's possible that the units are merely being shifted around within Europe, but it seems rather more likely that this is due to further supply shortages, and that as a result the allocation for the rest of Europe may drop as well.

The continued labelling of each new version of the insanely popular Half-Life mod "Counter-Strike" as a beta (it eventually reached beta 7.1) has been something of a running joke over the last year, but in what must surely be a sign of an impending apocalypse of truly Biblical proportions, the team behind the mod has finally released the long-awaited Counter-Strike v1.0. This latest version adds three more weapons (including the lovely looking "H&K UMP .45"), along with new improved player models taking advantage of the model blending technology introduced by Half-Life developers Valve.

While Blizzard were blustering at ECTS 1999 about how their newly announced "Warcraft III" was going to reinvent the real-time strategy genre by adding elements more commonly found in role-playing and adventure games to the usual Warcraft formula, another company had already beaten them to it. The game was "Magic & Mayhem", and the developers behind this innovative title were the legendary Gollop brothers of "X-Com" fame.

Blue Byte have announced that their new 3D strategy game "Battle Isle : The Andosia War" has gone gold, and is due on shelves across Europe on November 24th. The game is the latest installment in the long-running Battle Isle series which kicked off way back in 1991, and has also spawned a tactical combat game called "Incubation", released in 1997. Developed by Slovakian company Cauldron, the new game features a mixture of both turn-based and real-time strategy, a wide range of units to command, and an impressive looking 3D accelerated environment to fight over, complete with weather effects, day and night cycles, and even tides apparently.

Microsoft have promised to "embrace the worldwide independent video game development community" with two newly announced programs for its Xbox console - the Xbox Incubator and Xbox Independent Developer Programs. The idea is to encourage independent developers to prototype game ideas on the Xbox without hitting them for a huge license fee like many console manufacturers.

With the destruction of the threads that hold together human society, and the consequent collapse of watching television and computer gaming as two of the world's most popular leisure activities, the survivors of a nuclear holocaust would no doubt envy the dead. Unless of course they came up with a new way to entertain themselves, involving two bloody big tanks blasting each other to smithereens in a no-holds-barred battle to the death.

Is it really a year ago now that I wrote my "Championship Manager : 99/00" review, also my first review for EuroGamer? Time sure does fly when you are having fun!

Swedish developers Massive Entertainment added another trophy to their cabinet this week, winning in the "best strategy game" category at the recent EMMA Awards in Holland. The EMMAs are intended to "recognise excellence in digital media content creation", and Massive's stunning 3D real-time strategy game "Ground Control" was perhaps the obvious choice, with the jury apparently picking out the game for its "great interface, impressive 3D graphics and good lighting effects, as well as for its fantastic ability to zoom in and out of the action". There's also a rather good game under all that eye candy, but it seems they weren't too interested in that. If you want to read some more of Sierra's back-patting, as well as a not-so-cunningly disguised advert for the soon-to-be-released add-on "Dark Conspiracy", read the official press release!

London gaming venue The Playing Fields have announced what they claim is the world's first true professional gaming event, sponsored by AMD and PC Zone and taking place on Sunday December 3rd. How is it different from all the other pro-gaming events that have taken place over the last few years? Well, everyone who takes part in this competition is guaranteed to win a cash prize, making the event more like other professional sports tournaments, while normally you need to get through at least a couple of rounds at a pro-gaming event to get any money.

Rebellion are probably best known for their scary first person shooter "Aliens vs Predator", but all that could change with the release of stealthy 3D action game "Gunlok", published in the UK by Virgin Interactive. The game was certainly looking very impressive at the ECTS 2000 trade show in London just a couple of months ago, and now we have good news for all of you who were looking forward to the game - Virgin's PR agency Bastion has just informed us that Gunlok has "gone gold". This means that the game is complete and has been sent off for duplication, with the UK release planned for November 17th. No US publisher or release date has been announced yet, but it should apparently "follow shortly after" the game's UK release. In the meantime, we have no less than 18 new screenshots of the game for you, courtesy of Simon and the folks at Bastion.

Red Alert 2 is, unsurprisingly, the sequel to Westwood's highly successful real-time strategy game Red Alert, and the Tiberian Sun engine which powers the sequel gives it vastly improved graphics and network code, as well as a slicker interface to work with.

One of the most eagerly anticipated Dreamcast titles in the pipeline at the moment is the console port of "Half-Life", which proved to be a massive hit on the PC when it was first released a couple of years ago. The Dreamcast port, which boasts more detailed character models, enhanced weapons, and a whole new bonus single player mission called "Blue Shift", was shaping up to be one of the big console hits of the festive season...

Yesterday we reported that much to our own confusion, Seagate had been appointed official provider of hard disks for the Xbox console. Confusing, we said, because Western Digital had been granted the same gig barely a month earlier! But apparently not, according to a nameless Microsoft-based reader who dropped us a line last night, "Seagate will be the primary source, but in case their supply runs out at any point during production, Western Digital are on board as a secondary source.." It all seems so clear now. All thanks to our man at MS, and to humour him, we shall include his little anti-PS2 comment.. "..obviously this sort of contingency will help us to avoid blunders like the PlayStation 2's.. well, just the PlayStation 2." Quite. Related Feature - Seagate to supply HDDs for Xbox