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Sega's Dreamcast is to most people the most popular console currently available in this country, but with market insertion coming from Sony's colossal PlayStation 2, not to mention Microsoft's Xbox late next year, the company realises its console-making franchise is living on borrowed time. In an effort to turn itself around after some abysmal financial results earlier this year, Sega intends to move away from the console-development market and instead focus on software, with aims to increase its market share to 25%, which would put it ahead of Nintendo, who currently dominate. And obviously by software market we're not just talking about Dreamcast and PC here. The former will eventually die out and the latter sells nowhere near as many units as the console markets do. From a practical standpoint, the PS2 would seem a good target; the possibility of souped-up versions of Virtua Fighter, MSR and Virtua Tennis, some of its most popular brands might be a good idea. As for the rest, previous arch-rival Nintendo has already been caught fraternizing with Sega this week over undisclosed issues, so it would seem that a realistic interpretation of that meeting is that Sega want to work with Nintendo on the GameCube. For Nintendo this would represent a fantastic opportunity; the GameCube could do with some serious games rather than the usual cutesy catalogue. "We plan to expand our profit by utilizing our attractive and affluent software assets to appropriate devices," said Sega's Strategic Counsel, Tetsu Kayama, yesterday in Japan.

BT came out earlier this week and claimed that nearly 75% of users had the wrong drivers for their USB ADSL modems, a figure which has since been downsized to close to 25%. The mix-up in drivers seems to have occurred at Alcatel, the modem manufacturer) rather than at BT Openworld, the provider of the service, but users care not for these pathetic excuses, they want results. The company's service line was running a message last night claiming that faulty drivers were responsible for the lack of service, and since then the company has produced the correct drivers, although quite how users with no Internet service are expected to download these is beyond us. The drivers can be downloaded from here, despite the telco actually posting the wrong link earlier. The official line is that this problem was due to a "logistical issue within Alcatel", not just a competance issue at BT Openworld.

One of the more unusual and innovative looking games lurking amongst British publisher Virgin Interactive's impressive line-up is "Giants", the debut game from Planet Moon. As the company was formed by the brains behind Shiny's hit third person action game MDK, it came as no great surprise to discover that Giants features gorgeous graphics, a bizarre science-fiction plot, a quirky sense of humour, and of course a sniper rifle.

If nothing else, Alien Versus Predator on the PC a couple of years ago scared the life out of me. I reject the terms "made me soil my pants" because frankly even if it did make me do that, I wouldn't class it as a term of endearment. But still, the game was a moment of clarity for developer Rebellion, who beforehand frankly nobody had ever heard of. Presumably because Rebellion are now busy milking their own headline grabber, 2000AD, Fox have chosen instead to farm the production of the PlayStation's own scarefest off to UK lovelies Argonaut. Obviously a game based on the Alien franchise needs to thrive on tension; it's all that fans of the series know and expect. If, for instance, the guys and gals at Argonaut had come up with a resource management game about colonizing a planet, that would have gone down rather like a big lump of lead in a pile of particularly soft feathers. In order to replicate Rebellion's success, Argonaut should have sat down with the Alien movies, a pen and paper and gone through them considering just how best to fuse tension, excitement and the rather limited PlayStation format. However they clearly hadn't considered the possibility that one can go too far with frightening the player, and have done just that. Alien : Resurrection, even if played with the lights on and Teletubbies music in the background, is capable of frightening the life out of you. If you sit down in the pitch black with headphones on and a widescreen TV, the best you can hope for is to walk away sweating with adrenaline pumping wildly through your veins. At worst, well, some sort of cardiac arrest seems on the cards..

IGN have revisited the Xbox handheld topic with some more hearsay and rumour courtesy of Microsoft's own Paul Goss, a senior VP in their mobility section. It was exactly a year ago that the company first mooted the possibility of a handheld, even before the subject of the Xbox was first brought up. I think over time, as we establish Xbox as a successful gaming device, the concept of a companion gaming device is a very interesting thing. We could potentially leverage a lot of what we've done in the richness of a Pocket PC, with an integrated radio, and a form factor dedicated to gaming." Goss then goes on to talk about the possibilities of connecting the unit directly to the Xbox, much like the successful N64 / GameBoy Color linkup options available in some recent games.

While telecoms giant BT continues to plod on with its glacial roll-out of ADSL in the UK, a company from Luxembourg of all places is looking to head them off at the pass .. using radio masts. Tele 2 are offering their "Wireless DSL@Home" service, which involves installing a "compact radio receiver" on your roof and then attaching it to a "Speedbox" inside your house. This plugs into your network hub, or an ethernet card if you don't already have a LAN in your home. The whole job should only take two or three hours.

For all the bad news surrounding Intel this week (leaked roadmaps, dodgy P4 performance reports), it does look as though AMD are also going to come under a bit of fire. German news-ticker Heise is reporting that the 760MP (the multi-processing 760 chipset) will not be with us until the middle of 2001. My German's a little rusty, but as far as I can tell, what the article is saying is that David Somo, Vice President of AMD marketing has told journalists in Paris that the world may have to wait until the middle of 2001 for the 760MP because, to paraphrase Mr. Somo, the chipset isn't terribly useful without a complete platform solution. Heise then goes on to hypothesize on AMD's reasoning, settling on the fact that in the heady workstation and server market, there's no space for unreliability. If a chip isn't 100% reliable, it will be replaced. In order to make absolutely sure of themselves, Heise say, the company is holding back. A demo board showing off the 760MP's power has already been exhibited to the press at the Microprocessor Forum, but it may be some time before we see the final product.

Intel's contract to help promote Rambus has come under fire lately, even from sources inside Intel as we reported the other day. One of Intel's chief executives has now described it as a gamble that didn't pay off. To compound this, according to Electronic Buyers' News, an industry journal with no qualms about disclosing secret Intel documentation, the company's roadmap for 2001 includes details on exactly how they intend to go about freeing themselves of the troublesome RDRAM jinx. The Pentium III supportive i820 "Caminogate" motherboards will be the first to go, as early as the first quarter, with even the P4's i850 "Tahama" motherboard (which won't launch itself until next month) due to go under the hammer in the third quarter of next year. After that, the only products left using RDRAM will be the ultra-powerful workstation and server chipset Tehama-E, which most end-users have absolutely no reason to buy. This latest leak raises some interesting questions though. Obviously the first is, just what will Intel do to replace the Tehama P4 chipset? All clues point towards the company's own DDR RAM solution, the Brookdale chipset, which will support DDR RAM and SDRAM (albeit not running concurrently). The leaked roadmap indicates Brookdale will replace Tehama 850 sometime next year, and also indicates that the 0.13 micron die-shrink intended for the very latest PIIIs will be supported by the Almador DDR RAM chipset. It's known that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers Acer, Micron and Via have all been in talks with Intel about developing DDR RAM solutions for its products, and all three are definitely producing AMD 760 motherboards at the moment. One feels now might be a good time to buy some stock in Crucial, Infineon or Micron who are currently some of the only companies offering DDR RAM to the market.

With this coming festive period already set to case one of the biggest CPU showdowns the industry has ever seen, it looks as though another spanner has been thrown into the works by UK industry gossip website The Register and an unnamed source inside a European OEM. According to the source, "if [Intel] think this compares to Athlon they are joking. At 1.5GHz the P4 is outperformed by a PIII 933, never mind an Athlon 1GHz which urinates in rather copious quantities over the oversized, overcomplicated piece of silicon". There are no details as to just which OEM the fellow hails from, and it's unlikely there will be, but The Reg' describe it as a leading one, and who are we to discredit them. With AMD's 760 chipset and 1.2GHz Athlons now available or in the process of getting there, the question of the P4's relative performance is once again an issue, and although the marketing machine isn't in full swing yet, it looks as though it could be another disappointing season for the chip giant.

At the end of the Second World War, America's General Patton wanted to keep rolling right on into Russia to crush the communist threat. His bosses back in Washington decided this wasn't a great idea though, and instead of facing another devestating war across central Europe we had half a century of "cold war". SSI aren't about to let a little thing like history get in the way of a great game though, and so the new patch for their 3D wargame "Panzer General III : Scorched Earth" includes five hypothetical missions which see Patton's 3rd Army trying to liberate eastern Europe from the Soviets.

The developers of last year's tank action game Recoil have now taken to the air with Crimson Skies, a game that promises to bring the thrills of aerial dogfights to your PC. To this end, the game is set not in the present day, where jet fighters battle with missiles over huge distances, but instead FASA's "Crimson Skies" universe, where propeller aircraft rule the skies and combat is up close and personal.

For the last few weeks veteran Britsoft developers the Bitmap Brothers have been racking their brains, trying to come up with a new title for their 3D real-time strategy sequel "Z2". And now all that pondering is over, with the new title confirmed as "Z : Steel Soldiers". Due for release through new British publisher Eon Digital in the spring of 2001, the sequel moves the action 500 years further into the future and features a brand new 3D engine to replace the 2D sprites of the original. The Bitmap Brothers are describing the game as "arcade strategy", with the focus on fast-paced action and capturing terrain for strategic and resource gathering purposes. Hopefully we should have a clearer idea of exactly what they're up to soon... In the meantime, read the press release to find out more.

British publisher Midas have announced that, having scooped the European development and distribution rights to Japanese PlayStation 2 hit "Dynasty Warriors 2", they will also now be publishing "Robot Warlords" on this side of the pond. Developed by another Japanese company, DAZZ, Robot Warlords is a strategic mecha combat game which sees you controlling a force of giant robots trying to prevent a coup d'etat in modern Tokyo. With customisable mechas, a fully spinny-rotatey™ 3D graphics engine and a colourful rendition of Tokyo city for you to stomp around in causing mayhem, it looks like it could be another interesting PS2 game from Midas to give us a welcome breather from the endless succession of beat 'em ups, motor racing games and sports sims... For the full scoop, read the press release.

Earlier today we reported that Raven's Brian Pelletier had revealed that one of the main reasons why the company's first person shooter "Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force" was a little on the short side was because of limitations of the Quake III engine. At the time we said that "we will have to wait to see whether the other games due for release over the next year which use the engine will suffer the same fate", but now it looks as though oddball third person action game "American McGee's Alice" is having the same problems.

The relationship between the movie and gaming industries has got closer and closer recently, with most hit movies (and a fair few flops as well) spawning tie-in computer games, and several computer games being turned into movies. Generally the result has been disappointing though. The only good movie tie-in games we can think of that have been released recently are "Goldeneye" and "Heavy Metal : FAKK2", while movies of computer games include such forgettable tripe as "Street Fighter", "Mortal Kombat" and "Super Mario Brothers". Other projects have simply vanished without a trace - the "Titan AE" computer game was cancelled after the movie flopped in America, and plans to turn "Doom" and "Duke Nukem" into movies have apparently long since fallen by the wayside.

One of the few widespread criticisms of Raven's recently released first person shooter "Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force" was that the single player game was a little on the short side. Now project leader Brian Pelletier has revealed one of the reasons why the game was shorter than they had originally expected...

Details on id Software's new Doom game are still scant, and we've heard almost nothing about the game since its sensational announcement in frankly bizarre circumstances on June 1st. In fact, John Carmack hasn't updated his .plan (a mixture of diary and work log) since that day. But thanks to a message board post from Jim Dosé, one of the company's new programmers, we now have some idea of what's going on in the early stages of the game's development.

Human Head's third person viking action game "Rune" hasn't even been released in Europe yet, but already the first patch (4Mb) for the full version of the game has been released. Amongst the changes are updated Glide drivers as well as fixes to problems with the inventory, "infinite edge grabbing" in multiplayer, and getting eaten by danglers turning you into the invisible man. One of the mission scripting bugs has also been solved, but at least one more is still at large, and can apparently prevent you from completing the game in easy mode. Still, this patch appears to kill nine out of ten bugs dead and will only take a minute to download, so make sure to grab it as soon as you buy the game.

Despite the PlayStation 2 now being firmly engraved in the minds of the media thanks to all the buzz surrounding its launch, shortages, and the recent eBay bidding for up to several thousand dollars per unit, reaction from gamers seems to be surprisingly hard to find. The best we've found around the web seems to be GameCenter's selective developer soundbites from the likes of Trip Hawkins and Todd Vaughn, all anxious to tow the company line no doubt. So the question is, just what do people actually think of the PlayStation 2 in America? In an effort to find out, I contacted all of my various friends in different corners of the US and discovered that six of them had managed to get hold of a PS2. When asked what games they all bought with the console some of them were a little reluctant to admit atrocities like Madden NFL, but SSX, Unreal Tournament and (a staff favourite here) Smuggler's Run all proved hits. Another popular title is Ready 2 Rumble Boxing 2, which seems to have impressed universally. Todd Graham, from California, commented that he felt the console was "rather too chic for a kiddie's toy" and that the vertical stand position was "perfect for my bookshelf next to the TV". When asked about the more practical aspects of the console, its DVD playback, the controller and other issues, he claimed that "I would never watch a DVD using that console, I have a full A/V media system for that". Each to their own I suppose, but his pal Jason Bradley also from California pointed out that "the DVD playback is rather upsettingly jumpy at times, particularly with films like The Matrix. Moreover," he said, "my old third party PlayStation joypad has been giving me a bit of trouble, with unresponsive buttons and such, whereas the official PSX pads are fine". That, of course, is another thing; what do people think of the console's backwards compatibility with the PSX? Brad Hernshaw from Texas was next. "I've got in the region of 50 PlayStation games; although some are obviously gathering dust by now, so the backwards compatibility was very important to me. I sold my PSX without even questioning the possibility that there would be limitations and now I'm paying the price." According to Brad, several of his oldest purchases are giving him trouble. This doesn't come as a complete surprise though; as early as February of this year prior to the Japanese launch Sony were admitting that there were inherant problems with games "not written to Sony standards" (quote from Kenichi Fukunaga, SCE's director), or to give a more detailed explanation, games that bypassed the PlayStation's APIs and wrote direct to the hardware, a technique which will produce problems for users of the PS2 as the games simply won't know what to do with its graphics engine. That wasn't Brad's only problem. According to his wife, Mary, Brad has spent more time playing Zelda : Majora's Mask on his N64 and MSR on the Dreamcast since he bought the PS2 than before! When quizzed about this, Brad commented that "the first batch of games [for the PlayStation 2] have been varied, but not necessarily brilliant. I'm waiting for some of the truly exceptional titles before I drag myself away from classics like these." One gamer who thought the backwards compatibility was useful was John Banks from Minnesota. John's long been a fan of Gran Turismo and its sequel, and thought he'd give them a go on his new unit. "After fiddling around for a few minutes with the system's options menus I discovered stuff relating to the original PlayStation, and was delighted to find that you can adjust Disc Speed and turn Texture Smoothing on. The former is supposed to affect load times, and does, although GT2 still takes an age, whereas the latter smooths off the graphics and gives everything a slightly nicer tinge. All my PlayStation games look like I imagine them when I close my eyes again - why couldn't the PlayStation do this in the first place?" Well quite. So what's the general reaction? Well the concensus is that the games are varied but not quite as good as we'd hoped, whereas the DVD playback is functional rather than impressive. As for the backwards compatibility, assuming you don't have too many games which fall into the grey spot of incompatibility, you should be fine and more than impressed with the results. Roll on November 24th when we'll actually get to sample this for ourselves!

Eidos are celebrating today after winning two BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards. Popular first person role-playing game "Deus Ex" walked away with the "PC Game Of The Year" trophy. Although the game has had limited success in the USA despite rave reviews, here in Europe the game topped the charts and gave troubled developer Ion Storm its first real hit after triple-A duds "Dominion" and "Daikatana". Meanwhile the official Olympics sim "Sydney 2000" won the "Sports Game Of The Year" award.

Pro Pool is a very good pool game. It's about as complete and satisfying an interpretation as the GameBoy Color could hope to offer. Viewed from overhead, the idea is obviously to pot the balls in a specific order. The first disappointment here is that unless you actually know how to play pool in real life, the first few minutes will be spent guessing which ball is next in the sequence. There are no numerals on the balls to illustrate the order, and there are no actual indicators anywhere onscreen. Thankfully playing a shot is a lot simpler. You position your cue, and then you draw a dotted line from the position of your cue toward the ball you wish to hit. The length of the line is what determines the speed at which the cue ball moves. Although simplistic, thanks to the precise physics, this approach is just as useful as anything high-end PC simulations can offer. The physics are a true achievement; they mimic real life so thoroughly. If you play a ball against a cushion, it rebounds exactly as you'd expect, and it's clear a lot of tweaking has gone in to finely tuning this. Similarly, if you add any sort of spin to the ball, the results are as you would expect.

3dfx have today announced a bizarre tie-in with UCI cinemas, which will see anybody buying a Voodoo 4 or Voodoo 5 graphics card from certain stores before November 20th receiving at least six "two for one" vouchers. These will allow them to get in free to see any movie at 38 UCI cinemas across the UK, as long as they are accompanied by a paying adult.

ADSL in this country has hardly been a rollercoaster, and if it has it's been a really badly designed rollercoaster with stupidly long, flat sections and near vertical slopes to overcome. BT have screwed it up, claiming first that the network infrastructure was insufficient to support the technology, before giving up on that one and deciding to propose that actually it was a lack of eager triallists that was to blame for the delays. With all this out of the way and BT reprimanded by the frequently offbeat industry watchdog Oftel, the only thing that stands between the average punter and ADSL is the conversion of the local BT exchange, a process that is taking place up and down the land.

We all recognize "DDR" as "Double Data Rate". It's an abbrieviation that was batted around with gay abandon quite a lot in the months preceeding the release of NVIDIA's GeForce DDR last year, and now it's the sort of phrase that even Joe Public picks up on. At least, that's what AMD are hoping, as with their new 760 motherboard chipset, they're taking the emphasis away from the processing and steadying its targets on memory performance, by introducing support for DDR RAM, in other words, memory capable of bus speeds of up to 266MHz. The two types of memory supported are PC1600 and PC2100, although obviously this value refers to peak bandwidth rather than clock speed. Essentially it's 100MHz and 133MHz memory, the first capable of 1600Mb/s and the second 2100Mb/s. Because AMD's chipset is capable of sending data on the rising and falling edge of the clock signal, it runs at 200MHz and 266MHz. Be aware though that only the very, very latest Athlons (AMD will be releasing newer versions of its TBird processors to support the change) support the 266MHz bus. Thankfully the 760 chipset also supports 200MHz for older TBirds. Other features that the 760 chipset boasts include capacity for up to 4Gb of memory. While absurd for most desktops, when the SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing, in other words multiple CPUs) becomes available on the 760 chipset with later boards, it will become viable for server systems and this 4Gb capacity will become very important. Elsewhere, there's native support for 4x AGP, which affords ludicrous bandwidth to the graphics card sitting in the AGP slot, as well as ATA-100 hard-disk support, which bring it into line with the latest from rival chipset makers Intel and VIA. So where does that leave the 760? As the most advanced home PC platform currently available, we'd say. But just how much of a performance benefit does this DDR memory support offer? Looking at the results The Tech Report are pulling, it can safely be said quite a bit. Even games like Quake 3 are benefiting from the extra data throughput. Their conclusion? The 760 when coupled with PC2100 DDR RAM and a 1.2GHz Athlon will be a definite challenger to Intel's P4 1.5GHz. With a 1.33GHz chip in the offing and other increases proposed, Intel will have a difficult time of it this Christmas. We'll attempt to bring you a 760 board analysis of our own as soon as they become widely available. You can read AMD's official press release on the topic here.

Funcom, who are best known for their stunning adventure game "The Longest Journey" and the forthcoming massively multiplayer sci-fi role-playing game "Anarchy Online", have just launched the website for their latest project - "No Escape". Due by the end of the year (in Scandinavia and the USA at least), it's an off-the-wall online action game in which up to eight players battle it out across a series of 18 planets for the no-holds-barred TV show "No Escape". Contestants include an Italian secret agent, a psychopathic robot called Barry, a Western gun-slinger, and a militant rock singer called .. wait for it .. Bratney.

Quake 3 - popular Team Fortress clone Q3Fortress has reached beta 1F

Until recently the CPL was best known for its big Quake tournaments, including the $100,000 Razer-CPL event held in Dallas six months ago. Now they are branching out though, with the popular Half-Life mod "Counter-Strike" becoming a staple of CPL events, and a recently announced "Midtown Madness 2" tournament in the USA marking the CPL's first real break-out from the first person shooter genre. According to CPL founder Angel Munoz, this is an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, and to extend the idea of professional gaming to include amateur players as well.

While many publishers and developers have discussed the idea of episodic gaming, selling games one episode at a time over a period of weeks or months rather than producing a single large game, very few have put their money where their mouths are so far. One of the exceptions is Digital Tome, whose role-playing game "Siege of Avalon" was one of the first episodic games to be released entirely over the internet. This process wasn't without its worries though...

Mixing elements from action games, future sports and flight sims, Daydream Software's "Clusterball" is certainly rather different from your run of the mill online role-playing games and first person shooters. Intended to be resistent to the effects of lag while still offering fast-paced gameplay, the basic version of the game can be downloaded and played for free, with several additional maps (known as venues) available for purchase.

In "2001 : A Space Odyssey", Arthur C Clarke described a vision of a glorious future for mankind in which space travel was commonplace and we had permanent bases on the moon, could send men to Jupiter, and had developed an artificial intelligence all but indistinguishable from the real thing.