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Today really is a day for console and pocket gamers to be out shopping, with plenty of different titles across several formats let loose upon us. The biggest titles are clearly Konami's Dreamcast monster International Track & Field, which has been long in the coming, and of course Virgin's epicurean International Karate on the GameBoy Color, which we took a look at in the early months of this year.

John Carmack, lead programmer and co-founder of id Software, has long been known for his geekish tendencies, but during an interview with Voodoo Extreme he finally blew a gasket... "None of the Quake games have had what I would call a BSP based VSD algorithm", JC gibbered (that's pronounced with a soft g by the way!). "The visibility associated with Quake is a cluster to cluster potentially visible set (PVS) algorithm, masked by an area connectivity graph (in Q2 and Q3), followed by hierarchical frustum culling (which does use the BSP). The software renderers then performed an edge based scan-line rasterization algorithm, which resulted in zero-overdraw for the world."

Released as a forerunner to both the highly anticipated PSX version and of course the equally anticipated film, X-Men : Mutant Academy on the GameBoy Color was always going to be a cash-in. Activision must have sat there, realised the money to be had from such a venture and thrown it at the nearest development farm, which just so happened to be Crawfish. The thing is, this shouldn't have been such a big loss, since Crawfish are a fairly well respected GameBoy developer, capable of making decent beat-em-ups out of concepts like this. But sadly despite their credentials this game is tatty, unadventurous and bloody easy to finish. In fact you can get the whole way through by simply using the A button, something of a limitation I think it must be said. If you delve a little deeper, you discover that the charm and popularity of the X-Men series are totally alien to designers Crawfish, and the game is a real clanger. None of the charisma of the series' characters is carried over, and the sprites look fuzzy and blurred. What the heck happened here?

Today we have a double dose of eye candy for you here on EuroGamer, with sixteen brand spanking new screenshots of "Arthur's Knights" and a second batch of eight exclusive new screenshots of "Odyssey". Both are adventure games from French publisher Cryo Interactive, featuring a mixture of pre-rendered backdrops and highly detailed real-time 3D characters for the best of both worlds. Go on, give your eyes a treat!

In recent years the "Close Combat" series has had a near monopoly when it came to World War II real-time strategy, but now all that is about to change. Enter German publisher CDV, whose epic "Sudden Strike" shot straight to the top of the charts in their native country when it was released there a few weeks ago. The game is due to invade these shores at the end of October, so we headed deep behind enemy lines to find out more...

The latest release schedule from 3DO Europe has just arrived, with the expected wide selection of "Might & Magic" and "Army Men" titles on offer. The first two "Heroes of Might & Magic Chronicles" games are now due for release on November 3rd, with two more to follow on November 17th, and a further two now pencilled in for March 2001. These games mark 3DO's first attempt at episodic gaming, each offering a single story-based campaign using the Heroes III engine, aiming to bring the Heroes series' addictive blend of role-playing and turn-based strategy to a larger audience with a budget price and gentler learning curve. Meanwhile Might & Magic fans will be disappointed to hear that the Lithtech powered multiplayer title "Legends of Might & Magic" has been delayed. Originally due out this November, the game now looks set to be released some time early next spring. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, currently tracking over a hundred PC titles due for release over the next year.

While browsing some hardware pages this morning I spotted an advert advising me to sign up for NetGames UK's 0800 service. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth (obviously with the exception of those Punch the Monkey click-throughs), I clicked through to the NetGames UK website.. The company is entering the third phase of its 0800 beta-test. The service aims to provide a high-quality gaming performance Internet connection with plenty of associated services. The signups are only running until tomorrow, so you'll have to look sharp about it if you want to be in with a chance of getting this service for free, at least for a while. While the company will only be accepting 100 signups based on very specific criteria, you're in with a shot!

Electronic Arts have announced that their eagerly awaited real-time strategy sequel "Red Alert 2" has been pushed back two weeks to an end of October release. Meanwhile THQ have also updated their release schedule after a long period of dormancy, with the much delayed "X : Beyond The Frontier Gold Edition" now due for release tomorrow, and their Settlers style strategy game "Cultures" is due on October 20th. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, currently tracking over a hundred PC titles due for release over the next year.

French publisher Ubisoft have updated their UK release schedule, with several titles moving since we last heard from them. Underwater action-strategy game "Deep Fighter" is now due at the end of this month, along with a couple of Star Wars titles, including the intriguing sounding "Maths : Jabba's Game Galaxy". No, really. The promising looking stealth 'em up "In Cold Blood" has slipped to mid-October, while the hilarious adventure game "Stupid Invaders" is now set for release at the end of October. The last of the big titles is the Everquest add-on "Scars of Velious", which Ubisoft will be distributing in the UK just in time for Christmas. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, currently tracking over a hundred PC titles due for release over the next year.

Activision's UK release schedule has been updated, with the biggest mover being the PC version of "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2". We were expecting this to be released at the end of September, but it has now been pushed back until mid-November, where it joins "Escape From Monkey Island". Civilization sequel in all but name "Call To Power II" is also expected in November, and although there are still no firm release dates for "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" or "Quake 3 : Team Arena", we suspect that both will be available just in time for Christmas. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, currently tracking over a hundred PC titles due for release over the next year.

Clan Zone have interviewed the team behind the Navy Seals : Covert Ops mod for Quake 3, complete with a host of new screenshots of the mod

The demo for "Homeworld Cataclysm" is now available, giving you a taste of Barking Dog's semi-sequel to last year's hit space-bound real-time strategy game, "Homeworld". Published by Sierra, the game is due for release in the UK at the end of September, and will feature a new storyline, tweaked graphics engine, new ships and technology to research, and plenty of single player and multiplayer missions to keep you busy. While you're waiting, why not grab the 50Mb demo?

The ECTS computer games trade show in London was a fairly big showcase for new technology, but in some respects it was also used as a low key platform on which to showcase the latest and greatest in silicon engineering. The Intel stand certainly drew a crowd by showing off Shiny's new strategy game Sacrifice and Microsoft's sequel to the entertaining Midtown Madness, but the big I were also showing off some of their own 'new technology'. The Pentium 4 has to be one of the latest pieces of gossip in the hardware world, and anyone actually getting to see it 'in action' is something of a rarity. Yet with little or no promotion, Intel were quite happily demonstrating software running on their new behemoth CPU at ECTS.

British TV channel BBC2 is currently working on a series called "Bleeding Thumbs", which will feature a mix of gaming lifestyle type stuff and competitive multiplayer gaming, with the big event in each show a celebrity shoot-out in a modified version of Epic's eye candy laden first person shooter "Unreal Tournament". Apparently the company is now looking for female gamers to form a women-only team for the show, so if you're a woman, play games, and live in the UK, drop us a line at contact@eurogamer.net and we'll pass your details on to the show's producers.

Good news for fans of the dungeon crawling role-playing game "Icewind Dale" - Virgin's latest release schedule lists an add-on for the game, titled "Heart of Winter", due for release some time in .. um .. the heart of winter. December to be precise. And for those of you who are sick of disk swapping, look for a DVD edition of "Icewind Dale" appearing on shelves in the UK on September 29th - the same day "Baldur's Gate 2" is released on this side of the pond. Expect much beard scratching and dice rolling over the next few months! Related Feature - Icewind Dale review

The latest UK release schedule from Eidos just arrived, with some noteworthy changes - the recently announced "Tomb Raider Chronicles" is set for a November release (surprise, surprise), while "Hitman 47", "Project IGI" and "Chicken Run" are now all due for release on November 24th. Looks like it could be a busy month for the troubled British publisher.

Good news for the Mac loving minority, who continue to cling to their little blue tinted boxes but secretly yearn for better 3D graphics performance - 3dfx have announced that their Voodoo 5 5500 PCI graphics card is now available for the Macintosh, weighing in at £279 in the UK. Offering fast 3D graphics acceleration and full-scene anti-aliasing, this is probably the best graphics card currently available for the Mac, and comes fresh from winning the "Best Of Show" award at the Macworld Expo. "This product launch marks our official entry into a market that we knew was in desperate need of a superior graphics solution," said Bryan Speece, director of Macintosh business development at 3dfx Interactive. "No other graphics accelerator offers the kind of high visual fidelity and incredible 2D and 3D performance that Voodoo5 for Macintosh delivers."

Activision announced a launch title and a follow-up to its already popular PSX title Spider-Man on PS2 today. Sky Odyssey is a Sony-developed title that has been acquired by Activision for release. An action-adventure flying title somewhat similar to Pilot Wings, the game gives the player control of various flying apparatus (be it planes, parachutes, gliders or what have you) and asks you to perform certain tasks to suit the situation. The final game is said to include over 40 missions involving tasks like flying through hoops, under bridges, landing on aircraft carriers and similar derivatives and will be available for launch. Meanwhile Activision have also announced that it is developing Spider-Man for the platform, only days after its PlayStation Spidey title hit store shelves to critical acclaim and a strong place in the sales charts. The game will not be a conversion, but the company did not rise to speculation about its contents, simply confirming that it has 14 titles in development for the PS2 and that interest in the Spider-Man series is now at an all-time high because Sony is developing a movie scheduled for release in Spring 2002. Tobey Maguire will lead at Peter Parker and direction will come from Sam Raimi.

Sony's next console hit store shelves today in America, and no, I'm not talking about the PlayStation 2. We saw the PS One debuted at ECTS this year and thought it looked very impressive. A much smaller version of the original PlayStation console, the PS One's price tag ($79 in the States, around £79 over here) aims it at younger gamers whose parents aren't interested in the £300 PlayStation 2. There are plenty of new PSX games still coming out and with a catalogue of hundreds already available it's a solid Christmas purchase option for the erstwhile parent. Or so Sony would like you to think. Other interesting additions include possible compatibility with mobile cellphones (for what purpose we can only guess but presumably it involves score swapping and the like) and as of Spring next year a four-inch colour TFT display panel, to add supreme portability to the console's feature list. At the size it is already one of the smallest consoles we've encountered.

Cryo Interactive have today announced a license with Dark Horse to produce a 3D action PC title based on the comic firm's critically acclaimed paranormal investigator "Hellboy". This doesn't really come as too much of a surprise to us as we actually saw Hellboy in action at ECTS and were quite impressed by the early build, in which the Hellboy character already exhibited much charisma and style. Hellboy is a rather perculiar character. An orphan, he is the unfortunate product of an illegal scientific government experiment which went somewhat wrong, rendering him a Hellish demon with horns and glaring red appearance. After sawing off his horns to improve his appearance (I'm not making this up) he decided to set off on a lifelong quest to discover his identity, his past and what his purpose in life should be. Along his travels he was recruited by another secret government operation (being as there are quite a few of them these days), the BPRD, which is made up of paranormal beasts that investigate the paranormal. The press release suggests that you liken it to the X-Files, but personally I think it sounds more akin to the "Spookhouse" organisation found in fantastic PC adventure title Nocturne. While the build we saw was very early on in development (and buggy enough not be shown to the general public at ECTS, which takes some effort as far as we could see), the game is expected to be released as early as November of this year. A console version is also in production.

We last saw Human Head's Viking action game during the GOD press tour of Europe a few months ago, and were impressed by our first look at the title. With an enhanced version of the Unreal engine powering it and a healthy mix of blood letting, mead drinking and puzzle solving, the game looked to be a winner.

about the GameCube and in particular their acquisition of ArtX, the company that was working to create graphics components for Nintendo when its console was still known as the Dolphin. The interview is well worth reading, and while normally we frown on snippets here at EuroGamer, this one tickled my fancy enough to warrant a breach of protocol.

For those of you who thought you'd seen it all, here's a petition to get Apple's OS X released on Intel.

Valkyrie, best known until now for their anime-inspired role-playing game "Septerra Core", are currently working on the early stages of an Unreal-engined action game called "Seraphim", in which you take control of fallen angels and wreak destruction of truly biblical proportions. "In the movies and screenshots you may have seen buildings and bridges being destroyed", Valkyrie told 3D Action Planet in an interview with the site. "We want to take these innovations to the furthest extreme and put the player in a world that can be almost completely reduced to rubble. We want to see what it actually look like when you read ancient stories with passages like: "And they did fight for three days and three nights, and when they were done the entire village was lain waste...""

The latest world changing event in the massively multiplayer role-playing game "Asheron's Call" has seen the towns of Arwic and Tufa reduced to smouldering ashes, while Cragstone has also been damaged. The sky is lit up by flashes of lightning, the howls of wolves drift across the hills of Dereth, and all manner of new monsters have emerged to threaten the game's inhabitants. On the bright side, there is now a secure in-game trading system allowing players to exchange money and goods without fear of being ripped off or robbed while trading. In related news, one player is running a campaign to "buff the bunny". Apparently the designers of Asheron's Call included a tribute to the classic comedy film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in the game, in the form of a lethal white rabbit. Now the rabbit is finding its match as players reach ever higher levels and more powerful monsters are introduced into the game, and so one player has taken it upon himself to campaign for the rabbit to be returned to its rightful place as the most deadly, bad tempered rodent you ever laid eyes on. It's a funny old world... Related Feature - The Dereth Diary

Land Maker is the sort of puzzle game that should never have been released outside of Japan. It's a fair enough concept with nice visuals and execution, but the translation is dire at times, on and off the screen. It may sound silly, but the notion is that you are building houses from blocks, with the emphasis on being quicker than your opponent, or in single player Mode to build a city. The manual that accompanies the game is a minefield of involuntary patronization and confusion, in keeping with the direness of the translation. Here are a few choice excerpts - please bear in mind that these are direct quotes.. "What is a block? It is a coloured block which appears during the game." "How to change the colour of the blocks. If a block is placed near another one, this latter will change colour, assuming the one of the block shot against it. If the new colour is already present, buildings will increase in size." Of most amusement to the EuroGamer staff was the "What is a deadline?" section, during the course of which for some reason the incompetent translators mistakenly included the word "MISS" instead of "LOSE". There are plenty of options to the game, including Puzzle and Battle Modes, which are drawn in a 3D style, as well as a port of the original 2D Puzzle Bobble-style Arcade version. Rather like an upside down version of Tetris, you have to build houses by bashing blocks together.

According to Daily Radar UK, Japanese mech-based anime series Macross is coming to Dreamcast, currently under the working title of Macross M. While we shamefully know very little about the TV series here at EuroGamer, the word is that the game's story takes place between the Macross and Macross 7 time periods, and that gameplay will be of the 3-dimensional beat-em-up variety. More news as we get it. In other Dreamcast-related news, Sega's tendancy to favour the USA as an outlet for its new toys and offers continues as it gives owners the opportunity to win a Dodge Viper by simply filling in a SegaNet form. This is hardly shocking; American owners can already pick up interesting new toys like black DC cases (with which you receive loads of free stuff), and of course American Football thriller NFL 2K1 - a game we're never likely to see over here for some reason. Come on Sega, get your act together and share some of the loving!

Anyone who attended ECTS a fortnight ago will remember Ed Fries' heart-warming speech about Microsoft's current slew of Xbox developers, including the eponymous Lionhead Studios whose phenomenal Black & White is nearing completion at the moment. You may also have noticed that many if not all were Western development companies, and if sources within Microsoft are to be believed, the next group of developers from Japan will be announced this Wednesday. Possible contenders include Capcom, Konami, Namco, Tecmo, Koei and Grandia II authors Game Arts. The biggest possibility of course is Japanese RPG giant Squaresoft, who have long been rumoured to be in talks with Microsoft. If these developers were to bring their wares to the Xbox it could expect some of the best beat-em-ups, RPGs, puzzlers and platformers to comprise its ranks at launch late next year. Fans could expect a full complement of games from different genres - in other words plenty of variety, and when games make a games console, you have to consider that a major plus.

Never ones to miss out on Microsoft's off and on-record announcements, MSXbox.com are reporting on the possibility of Microsoft introducing an a handheld Xbox unit. With a direct quote from J. Allard on the Xbox team they report that "it would be foolish to say 'never' to something like a handheld opportunity, but right now the entire team is focused on delivering an amazing console launch in 2001 and fantastic games. In general, we'll take our cues from xbox gamers and developers when considering future opportunities like this.." It's a well known fact that Nintendo's GameBoy Color grossed more sales worldwide than all of the other consoles (N64, PlayStation and Dreamcast) put together. It's no surprise then that Microsoft are not ruling out the possibility of such a unit. Nintendo's GameBoy Advance will put up some incredibly stiff opposition to the move should Microsoft ever choose to make it. Especially bearing in mind the failure of the Neo Geo Pocket Color earlier this year. Microsoft are of course a much bigger adversary than the united colours of SNK, but Nintendo's brand name is so strong it may be hard to break down, and any such move from MS would have to come after the Xbox was released.

Apart from last week's news of Gameplay's pre-order deal, it seems that the fuel crisis in the UK has left retailers all across the country with plenty of pre-order forms still available. Areas like the Midlands, the North and Scotland still have plenty of forms, while retailers in the South-East are fresh out. The problem from the perspective of anyone attempting to pre-order Sony's next generation console is that it won't be available in large quantities until Spring of next year, and anyone desperate to get hold of one until then will have to reserve it in person by filling in a form. Meanwhile, the mainstream press in the Capital have been seizing upon the Dixons group's latest offers for PS2 consumers. The deals will include the console, two games and one movie on DVD for £399 and a similar deal with more games and DVDs for £499, the "PS2 Ultimate Pack". The press reports have chastised the group for these offers, but to be blunt, who cares? If Dixons can shift more PS2 units based on these deals then so be it and good for them. There's also a standalone £299 deal, but what's the point in that? At the end of the day, many retailers are preparing to make an awful lot of money out of the PlayStation 2 and its games, and if you want to be playing one come Christmas morn, make damned sure you get yourself a pre-order form.