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We reported a few months ago that Fox Interactive was in the process of licensing out the Futurama and Simpsons brands (amongst others) for new PC and console titles, and today we have word of the result in one of those categories. Unique Development Studios are the guys who have picked up on this "unique" opportunity, and will be producing a game based on the wacky TV series for the PC and undisclosed console platforms. A similarly licensed Simpsons game is already in development due out next Spring. Futurama is of course the most recent big thing from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. The action centres around Fry, a 25-year-old pizza delivery man who is transported into the future by some bizarre electric ray and eventually becomes entangled with a comical robot named Bender, a one-eyed flight officer called Leela and his own nephew, Professor Farnsworth, who is not 125 years his senior. There is no news on which genre the game will fall into nor what the plot will be like, but we here are EuroGamer are rather hoping for a Stupid Invaders-esque point-and-clicker. Some hope though, we feel.

One such character is our hero Obi-Wan, played by the ignoble Ewan McGregor in The Phantom Menace, and Obi-Wan's Adventures (due out from THQ in November on GameBoy Color) is a title that will allow players to take on the guise of our aspiring Jedi Master and play through various sections seen in the film. Obi-Wan's Adventures marks the first title in a worldwide publishing agreement between THQ and Lucasarts which will give THQ the opportunity to publish GameBoy (and latterly GameBoy Advance) titles based on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones properties. If you've been living under a rock and haven't seen last summer's film, then here's a brief summary of the plot. The Trade Federation (an alien race) has blockaded the world of Naboo (seems timely does it not?) and you, Obi-Wan Kenobi are being sent by the Jedi Council along with Qui-Gon Jinn to help officiate the dispute and negotiate a settlement with the leaders of the Federation. Senator Palpatine and the Imperial Senate are depending upon you, but the Federation aren't interested in negotiations. Instead they have allied with the Sith, Dark Jedis.

The finals of the Quake 3 duel competition has just ended at the "NYC Challenge", with Dy Syng and Zero 4 battling it out on stage, just before the fireworks, smoke generators and .. bizarre dancers took over the show. The first match was on DM13, with Dy Syng taking the early lead, but Zero 4 soon closing him down and battling frag for frag throughout the middle of the game. The end was all Zero4's though, with him racking up a 15 : 7 lead after ten minutes, and maintaining his lead to the end, finishing 21 : 14 up. The second game was much the same, with Dy Syng getting the first frags on Tourney4, but Zero4 equalising after about five minutes and then pulling out a lead. The two players again matched each other frag for frag during the last stages of the game, but the damage had already been done. Zero4 took the game 29 : 19, winning the match and walking home with the $10,000 first prize.

The Quake 3 clan competition at the "NYC Challenge" in Time Square just finished, with a three map match with an exciting climax. Stickmen won the first game on DM6 by just 144 : 139, only for cK to come back and take the second game 114 : 106 on DM7. The decider was a real nail-biter from start to finish on DM14, with cK pulling out a strong lead at the start, only for the Stickmen to close right up and equalise with just three minutes to go! The game stayed neck and neck until the final minute, when Fatality got the quad for cK and Stickmen's Larsen leaped into the red mist. By the end cK had managed to amass a ten frag lead. A thrilling end to a close match - cK take home $8000!

The finals of the Unreal Tournament competition at the Battletop "NYC Challenge" event is now over, with a very close match between Pain and Destrukt from clan DD. The first game (on Grinder) started with the two players matching each other almost frag for frag, with Pain pulling out a slim lead in the final minutes. The second match was even more tense, with Pain taking a seemingly secure lead in the first half of the game, only for Destrukt to catch right up again and equalise just two minutes from the end. Pain was literally shaking with nerves by this point, but managed to hold it together and secure his victory by a single frag! Pain took the first prize of $8,000.

Hot on the heels of our AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" review today comes the news that AMD are finally closing in on SMP support for both its Thunderbird and Duron processors! SMP of course translates as "Symmetric multiprocessing" or dual CPU support. According to American news reporter JC's Pages, the 760MP chipset will be sampled in December and motherboards could be available as soon as the first quarter of 2001! If true, the report could well be another nail in the Pentium III's coffin, just as Intel release their cC0 stepping models. Sources report that the cC0 platform is incapable of SMP, and as such they will be unable to compete on the same level. This said, sources are already stating that the Intel-published developer report stating that the cC0 stepping model will be incapable of SMP is a typo. An expensive one, too, if AMD manage to seize upon it. Meanwhile, AMD's new Lightning Data Transfer bus (or LDT for short) has received a total of 40 further sign-ups, from companies including Transmeta.

UK hi-fi company Wharfedale has had to modify its DVD750 player to incorporate a new DVD chipset, according to a report in DVD Times. According to representatives of the company, the shortage in LSI Logic chips (previously used in the Wharfedale player) has occurred due to the overwhelming demand for them from none other than Sony. The Register think they have it sussed out - the implication is that Sony wants to chips for the DVD playing side of the PlayStation 2, since the chipset will allow hardware DVD playback rather than software as was to be the case previously (and as it is in Japan). Criticisms were levelled at Sony for the quality (or lack of quality) of DVD playback on its Japanese unit. According to research the Japanese really don't mind that much as they upgrade much more frequently, but the Americans and Europeans will not put up with such inferiority, especially after reports published recently slated VHS in for a meeting with its maker in the next year or so as DVDs take control. Considering the price differential between the US and UK units (£299 versus $299 does not compute), it's a good thing we're getting a decent player for our money..

The grand final of the Starcraft competition at the "NYC Challenge" has just ended, with [usa]jolly taking the first game, only for Pillar to come back and beat him in the second, leading to a tense tie breaker that was hard fought. Pillar dug in heavily, and fought off attacks by Jolly while launching his own counter-offensives to keep him off balance. In the end it paid off, and a juggernaut of Pillar's Protoss troops paraded into Jolly's base, with running battles all the way to the heart of his base before the game came to an end. Pillar goes home $3500 richer, and both players will get to represent the USA at the World Cyber Games Challenge in Korea next month.

Having survived Battletop's "World Cyber Game Challenge" London Preliminary at the Millenium Dome with lives and sanity more or less intact, EuroGamer ventured across the pond to visit the Big Apple itself for the New York Preliminary. EuroGamer's tech team were on hand with their new TOAST software to manage several of the competitions for Battletop, while I watched the action to bring you full reports on all the key matches from the two day tournament...

Marvel Comics were having a hard time of it about 5 years ago - the price of paper had risen to ridiculous levels, many of their top artists had defected to independent studios, and the stories involving some of the best known and much loved characters in Comiciverse seemed to be going nowhere. To top it all off, any movies made featuring their heroes were low budget rubbish with bad actors in rubber suits - Generation X anyone? The whole situation got so bad that I actually dropped all the X-Men titles from my regular comic collecting - about 10 series, plus any specials! I felt really bad about it, but they were just not worth the money anymore...

The definition of the "Speed Freak" is changing. Thanks to the AMD Athlon Thunderbird processors (or Athlons with "Performance-enhancing L2 cache memory" as AMD would have it) comes yet another doubling of the CPU speed threshold within a year. Why have AMD made this move to a new core though? The answer can be seen when broadly comparing the specs of its own line of Athlons from the past year. Throughout the series, spanning 500 to 1000MHz, the L2 cache divider was set so that the cache speed never rose above 350MHz, its peak, seen only in the 700MHz variant with its 1/2 divider. With the later Athlons, the performance deficit between them and Intel's equivalent Pentium III chips (whose cache ran at full speed) was quite sizeable, and something needed to be done. With the advent of the Thunderbird core, AMD have tipped the balance back in their favour, introducing a chip capable of keeping up with even the hardiest PIII. The secret to the Thunderbird's success lies in its full-speed on-die L2 cache. Having the L2 cache on the die allows it to operate at the same frequency as the rest of the die, meaning that it runs at a ratio of 1 : 1 with the processor, ergo full-speed. The latency is greatly reduced, as the CPU is physically closer to it. The performance differential between the older K7 core Athlons and these newer Thunderbirds under certain conditions is staggering. The Thunderbird is being released at 750, 800, 850, 900, 950, 1000 and (most recently) 1100MHz frequencies, with more to come. The availability of the chips is paramount and although there were rumours of a shortage earlier this week, there's been no talk of it since, whilst Intel are left scrimping and scraping to get their 1GHz Pentium III off the ground. Currently it's in very short supply and at inexplicably steep prices, while the Thunderbird 1GHz (reviewed here) is priced reasonably and available readily.

Popular Half-Life teamplay modification Counter-Strike is refined further this weekend with the release of the Beta 7.1 update patch. Weighing in at 3.93Mb for current users of the Beta 7.0, the package is also available as a full executable for users who haven't yet tried it, 68.9Mb in size. Main developer "Gooseman" points out that users connecting to servers over the weekend may find that they receive a "client.dll differs" error. This merely indicates that the server has not been upgraded to the latest version. If you know the server operator, drop them a line and inform them of the update. Changes in this version includes fixes to maps added in the latest previous version, improved programming for the vehicles which are making their way into the fray, a few fixes relating to timelimits and maximum rounds settings and some weapon display problems. There are some lag-related issues that have been fixed now also, although the netcode from the most recent official Half-Life update which has met with cold disdain from some sections of the community is untouched. Of most interest to players is the addition of an APC to the popular "cs_siege" map. You can download Counter-Strike and other related files from the official site.

Battletop's "New York Challenge" event is now underway, one of several qualifiers taking place around the world for the massive $300,000 World Cyber Games Challenge in Korea. FIFA 2000, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament and Age of Empires II competitions are taking place today, with Quake 3 clan, duel and free-for-all competitions running tomorrow. EuroGamer is on site with their TOAST tournament management system, which is recording all the results from the various competitions taking place and posting them to the web. The first results are already coming in from the Age of Empires II competition, and you can check the competition brackets and keep up to date with all the latest results live on the NYC Challenge TOAST page.

Publisher Cryo Interactive just sent us a big batch of new screenshots from their bizarre looking action-adventure game "Gift", which is all about a short fat red guy with an attitude problem, sent into a computer game to rescue the amply imbued Lolita Globo by finding seven sinful garden gnomes. No, really. Give your eyes a treat - check the new screenshots!

One of the surprise hits of 1998 was the old school isometric role-playing game "Baldur's Gate", based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules and set in the ever-popular Forgotten Realms. Since the success of the original game, developers Bioware have been hard at work on a sequel - "Baldur's Gate II : Shadows Of Amn". Now that hard work is about to pay off, with news that the game has gone gold, meaning that it has been completed and a master disk has been sent off for duplication. According to the latest information we have from UK publisher Virgin Interactive, Baldur's Gate II should be on shelves in the UK on Friday September 29th.

Platform games have gone all funny. I'm not talking about your Lara Crofts and your Mario 64s, I'm instead referring to the proper two-dimensional side-scrolling platformers of yore, whose programmers were sadly only in possession of one-track minds. The most variation on the good old Super Mario franchise we ever saw back then was the idea of a world map in between levels, and pipes that actually transported you elsewhere on the same map. Sickeningly simplistic, yet appallingly addictive seemed to be the order of the day. Quite how we've managed to go from one extreme to the other in the space of a decade is up for debate. And so we come to Croc, for the GameBoy Color. Croc on the PlayStation and Saturn was one of the few early answers to the life-disrupting Mario 64. It was very entertaining and presented a character with charm and personality, far much more so than others games of the time like Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot, which simply attempted to mimic Mario, and failed unreservedly. Croc was a cuddly green crocodile, and there was no knocking him. Which is why it troubles me so that the most inexcusable desecration of his character has occurred! It's still Croc, but his charisma has gone AWOL! Not to mention the controls are.. shall we say less than eloquent, and for all its 30 environments, magic carpets and cable cars it's actually dreadfully dull! So what went wrong? Unfortunately Croc gets off on the wrong foot in his new side-scrolling world (new to him anyway) by having a disappointing control quirk; he jumps twice as fast as he moves forward. This is another example (to pull out my introduction again) of the platform genre shooting from one extreme to another - back in the NES and GameBoy monochrome days we used to have games where the character moved twice as fast as he jumped.

Unreal Tournament will be available for the PlayStation 2 from release both in the USA and Europe, despite claims to the contrary from publisher Infogrames towards the end of last month.

It's a rainy, moody Friday down here in the South-East of England, but it brings about the release of many interesting new gaming delights. Of particular interest are PC titles Age of Empires II : The Conquerors, Dino Crisis and the epicurean Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force, Raven's Star Trek licensed Quake III engined title which has been long in the coming. The consoles are rife with new titles, including the aforementioned GBC and N64 releases. The PSX gets a healthy smattering of titles with F1 Racing Champs from Ubi Soft, Spiderman from Activision and Wacky Races from Infogrames. The latter also hits the PC today, much to the delight no doubt of gamers looking for a bit of Mario Kart-style action on their PCs. It really appears to be Sega's week this time around however, with Virgin introducing Street Fighter 3 Double Impact and Street Fighter Alpha 3, Ubi Soft releasing Deep Fighter and Eidos releasing Powerstone 2, successor to the innovative and successful Powerstone. As if this were not enough, Take2 have chosen this week to bestow Hidden & Dangerous upon us, but Konami's International Track & Field for the Dreamcast has slipped a week. Disappointing, for it's a game that looks set to utterly destroy the lacklustre competition from Eidos and to a lesser extent Sega in time for the Olympics. However, the biggest release of the week is not a game, it's Microsoft's next generation of the Win9x kernel, Windows Millenium. The operating system is basically a friendly upgrade for Windows 98 users, which cuts down bootup times immeasurably, introduces Media Player 7 and Internet Explorer 5.5 at the heart of the system (much to the distaste of the DoJ in America I dare say), and vanquishes DOS away completely from view. It's still there somewhere, hidden under all the whirs and clicks, but it's no longer a core element of the system. Users who chose not to upgrade to Windows 2000 may find Windows Millenium much more friendly, and although it's still the same old Windows 98, it's closing in faster on the stability threshold and has been finely tuned in a lot of areas.

Nintendo's attempts to fight back the PlayStation 2 onslaught begins in earnest today with the release of Pokemon Snap and the Pokemon-themed N64. The latter includes a Pikachu moulded into the plastic that lights up, and will likely be retailed in bundles alongside Snap, which offers players the opportunity to photograph Pokemon in their natural habitat. Also arriving in the UK in the near future are Mario Party 2 and the highly anticipated Mario Tennis. The former is due out on October 23rd and will follow on from the original with its multiplayer orientation. Mario Tennis on the other hand is due out on November 3rd and will act as a strong aggressor against the PS2 and its early lineup, which will of course hit our shores on the 24th of the same month. As if this were not enough, the incredibly impressive Zelda : Majora's Mask will hit on the 17th, barely days before the PS2, and N64 feeling a bit depressed on the first morning of Sony's new console can pick up Rare's Mickey's Speedway to drown their sorrows. Nintendo representatives have called this the most impressive pre-Christmas N64 lineup yet. Meanwhile in related news, the GameBoy Color welcomes Heroes of Might and Magic, Activision's Spiderman and the timely Carl Lewis Athletics into its stable of games this week.

Fans of the Ultima series are today bandying together to try and get EA to develop Ultima 10, despite the fact that the bitter swansong to the series, Ultima Ascension flopped in a major way due to bugs and inconsistancies. The petition looks set to inflame yet more debates about Ultima IX, but the writers are eager to point out their issues with the game as well, far from acting like the "fanboys" some of us have come to associate with the series, pointing out that it "turned out to be a buggy, unfinished, barely playable game". Well spotted. "The purpose of this petition is for Origin to Realize what went wrong with Ultima 9 and to try their best to fix this. By this, I mean release Ultima 10. If Ultima 10 could be developed without EA's interference, and with Lord British in the mix, it could easily be the best game ever. If Ultima 1-7 is anything to go by, Ultima 10 could really be better than Diablo, Starcraft, or even Half-Life." Sadly we fear that not even Lord British can rescue this one.

Today marks the latest GLSetup release (Build 1.0.0.116) and new drivers for Matrox video cards. The latter comes in several versions for various incarnations of Windows, including the recent Windows Millenium, while GLSetup is unilaterally available in a single executable that suits each Win9x OS for various video cards. Matrox' graphics cards are of course most famed for their DualHead technology, which allows users to output graphics to two monitors simultaneously. We polled a few gamers on QuakeNet IRC about the new drivers; one commented that "the improvement is marginal but you might as well grab them" while another remarked "who cares, they haven't got any petrol". GLSetup first made its name when it was released alongside the Quake III Arena demo test. The premise is that it checks which graphics card you're in possession of then installs appropriate drivers to run OpenGL optimally. The latest release is still very much unfinished with lots of known issues, but for gamers who own one of the selected video cards it takes a lot of the confusion out of upgrading the drivers.

E-commerce outfit Gameplay will today announce a PlayStation 2 pre-order deal, which was unexpectedly announced on their PS2 mailing list early this morning. Lucky gamers who have managed to get in there early will have forms despatched to them today and once returned will be put on the list for Sony's next-generation console, with guaranteed delivery on the morning of November 26th, the day the console hits stores in this country. Delighted representatives of Gameplay happily informed readers that Sony have come through with the goods, and that there will be plenty of units available for the launch, hinting at the fact that many are already in place from the production lines and ready to ship. At the time of writing there is no mention of the deal on Gameplay's online store page, but with the PS2 mailing list announcement arriving at Inboxes the world over, the public web announcement can't be far behind.

Barely a month after big-hype "free" ISP Altavista admitted its incapability to provide an 0800 service, Cable & Wireless has pulled the plug on World CallNet, one of the first ISPs ever to offer the service (albeit to very limited numbers). According to the Telco they were "in serious financial difficulties" and unable to pay enormous bills to C&W. Unconfirmed reports state that Worldcom has also withdrawn its support for the ISP due to similar financial problems. Obviously no-one from CallNet was available as all their lines are now down. Only last week The Register voiced concerns that the company was clinging onto a slippery financial precipice with extreme danger of plummeting to the ground, but Gerard Farley, company president firmly denied rumours about cash problems and laying off staff. "The 0845 business is as strong as it has ever been and we're delighted with its performance," he reportedly said. In fact it was only last week that he used rumours of a destructive whispering campaign against his company to try and win sympathy from the press. He also went on record as saying that he was not running the company into the ground. After today's announcement, he ain't foolin' nobody.

Model airplanes, eh? The rattle of plastic kits and the pungent aroma of specialist paints. Sticking the whole lot together, only to discover that the bloody cat has swallowed a vital part of the landing gear of your pint-sized Spitfire. And then you either re-enact the Battle of Britain in your back garden with the acne infested kid from next door, or your plane just sits on a shelf in your bedroom and gathers dust.

The Olympic Games are perhaps the most celebrated of all the sporting events in the world. There is something about the entire procession that captures even those not usually interested in athletics.

In the run up to any major sporting event, we always see a rash of titles released on all formats clamouring to be the armchair enthusiasts favourite way of escaping into their chosen sports world. The ludicrous re-hashing of old ideas is synonymous with this tradition, especially with athletics games and Olympics tie-ins, with usually the only real change being the gaming hardware and the graphical capabilities available. So.. the year 2000 sees another Olympic games, with only one licensee (this year it went to Attention to Detail) and another parade of titles coincidentally being released at the same time, all clamouring for the ultimate recreation of this glorious sporting occasion. Sega are a bunch who have come to be known as game creators who set standards, and they certainly haven't shied away from this trend with their Sega Sports titles on Dreamcast. The most recently notable of these obviously being Virtua Tennis - an outstanding piece of work by anyone's standards, it even made EuroGamer editor Tom Bramwell want to get up and play tennis.. anyone who's met him will know that's no mean feat. (Fired -Ed) And so it is with great pleasure and anticipation I picked up Virtua Athlete 2K, looking forward to a repeat of the kind of quality and sheer gameplay on show in VT. Back in days of yore, a game by Konami called International Track & Field (the Dreamcast update will be upon us very soon) heralded a control method in which the players could physically exert themselves in a manner only superseded by the real-world competitors. This method involved bashing two buttons as fast as physically possible without breaking your fingers and/or the game cabinet. I was expecting more of the same frenetic fun from VA2K. But, to my immense surprise, it proved to be possibly the worst execution of this formula I've yet played.

In an interview with WarcraftIII.net, Blizzard's Bill Roper explains that "we want to do the story like we did in StarCraft, as opposed to how we did it in WarCraft II", with a central storyline common to all of the races in the game rather than entirely seperate campaigns for each. "As you go through the game it's one large storyline, but you pick it up in different places through the course of the storyline. Kind of like getting your side of the story depending on what race you're playing at that point in the storyline."

Those of you who have played Aliens Versus Predator on the PC will know what it's like to be scared by a PC game. The effect Alien-based games have on people is truly hilarious. The funniest thing I've seen this year was EuroGamer's Marketing Manager Mat Bettinson leaping out of his skin at the i5 LAN Party while playing the thing. He was literally reduced to a quivering wreck enduring fits of giggles on the floor. Not pretty. If you want to share his condition, you'll be pleased to hear that Fox Interactive are poised to release Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation in a month's time. The press release indicates that it will take the form of a Resident Evil-like survival horror title, and developer Argonaut is allegedly using the next month or so to adjust the game's difficulty in certain levels, which has been described by some as impenetrable. It is thought that the game will be available toward the end of October to fans everywhere. Very little preview information seems to be available on the title, but it's a safe assumption that dangerous levels of firepower will intersect with startling aliens and there will be lots of death and ruckus as a result.

Satoru Okada, co-developer of the original Game Boy and now a chief designer in the development of the GameBoy Advance recently voiced his thoughts on the new Nintendo handheld to Nintendo Online Magazine, and IGN have fully translated it for us. Okada's banter centres around the beginnings of the GBA and how it came about. It turns out that it really started out in earnest back in the days when Okada and Gunpei Yokoi were working on the internal workings of the GameBoy Color, which the two regarded as a stop-gap in between the original cost-limited GameBoy and something bigger and better. Okada justifies this by pointing out that the GBA was always going to have backwards compatibility, something he later describes as "one of the duties of developers". Another interesting morsel is that the Nintendo-released specifications for the unit (and those still available at GameBoy.com, Nintendo's official site) are actually innaccurate due to post publicity decisions that Okada made about the design. In order to increase the memory capacity, the amount of possible colours decreases from the originally touted 65,535 back to 32,000, the same as the GBC. Those of you who saw the GameBoy Advance are ECTS or Spaceworld will be aware of two indentations on the top surface. According to Okada these are for securing peripherals, something he's wanted in place since the original GameBoy. Obviously this is very revealing information, but at the end of the day Okada is keen to point out that it will be the software that makes and sells the system. Ease of development is paramount. That said, judging by the software on display at ECTS, developers are getting the idea quickly.

One of the things that has been causing a bit of a stir of late is the new UT technology. With demos showing off 3700 polygon models and rolling landscapes it's been whipping up interest all over the industry. Thanks to the incredible developer support Tim Sweeney and the guys at Epic provide to their customers we can expect to see this in UT engine games as early as Spring 2001. There's even the danger that it might run well on average computers, something that UT has gained something of a reputation for not being able to do. The main question from the perspective of console gamers is will Xbox developers (seemingly the most likely non-PC group to use it) using the UT engine be able to take advantage of it. Well according to this interview at VoodooExtreme, yes they will! One of the first things Tim Sweeney mentions is that the really exciting application of this tech will come when "DirectX8/X-Box hardware starts to make its way into developers' hands". Despite this revelation, Tim's remarkably tight-lipped throughout the short interview.