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"Zone of the Enders", or "Z.O.E", as it's known, is set in a post-terraforming era of the Earth's history, when colonists from the little green and blue planet, called "Enders" (good grief -Moral decency Ed), finally get round to spreading themselves over the farthest reaches of the solar system, and for the first time, experience slightly less than plain sailing in the shape of a Martian force in the moons of Jupiter. Of course, instead of giving the player control of an all-out interstellar war, Z.O.E. offers control of a prepubescent munchkin of a child called Leo Stenbuck, who just happens to stumble upon a giant "orbital frame" and who by some bizarre freak of nature is in possession of the precise knowledge required to operate it. It doesn't just stop there, either - the young lad discovers a young lady, occupant of another great robotic construct, and fears the worst, that she has no soul. So in spite of the rather more pressing matter of a cataclysmic, galaxy-threatening conflict which threatens to engulf life as just about everybody knows it in the fires of war, he has to try and remedy young what's-her-name's soul problem. You can tell that the Japanese are going to love this one already, can't you? The thing is, Z.O.E. is merely one half of producer Hideo Kojima's job at Konami too. Remember Metal Gear Solid 2? He's doing that one, as well. And if Z.O.E. wasn't already looking at sales in the hundreds of thousands in the Far East, it will also play host to the first playable demo of, you guessed it, MGS2. Anyway, the general point of this item is to inform you that Z.O.E. isn't simply a proving ground for the demo of said stealth-em-up. And you can finally discover just how and why for yourself, with the somewhat highly anticipated release of the game's opening movie, in Windows Media form. The file can be had from the GIA, and if you think that looks good, we also recommend you take a look at some of the in-game screenshots.

Originally intended to go on shelves this week to tie in with the cinematic release of the hilariously bad Dungeons & Dragons movie here in the UK, European publisher Virgin has announced that the "Baldur's Gate II Premium Pack" will now be out on March 16th instead, along with the long-awaited DVD version of the game and Icewind Dale add-on "Heart of Winter" (not to be mistaken for "Winter's Heart", the latest hefty tome in the Wheel of Time saga).

We don't often report on user-made add-ons here at EuroGamer, but one mod which has caught our eye recently is Tribal CTF for Quake 3. Featuring three unique teams (cyborgs, aliens and elementals) and some truly stunning maps which (in terms of pure eye candy at least) are a match for anything that id Software has released to date, it's certainly one of the best looking mods to grace our screens to date. Last night the Tribal team released the first public beta version of the game, weighing in at around 36Mb and featuring all three tribes and a single map to play on. You can grab it from any of the following outlets -

For the last few years California-based Rambus Inc. have been chasing down memory manufacturers across the world and accusing them of infringing patents that it holds. The patents cover technology used in SDRAM and DDR memory chips, which between them make up the vast majority of the memory used in modern PCs. Now the boot seems to be on the other foot though, with a series of documents and e-mails uncovered by Hyundai's legal team suggesting that Rambus used its place on the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council to secretly patent technologies which later became industry standards.

Telewest's cable modem service blueyonder has been in chaos this weekend, following a break-in at the company's south-eastern headquarters in Basildon early on Friday morning. According to a spokesman for the company, "23 servers were stolen and other important equipment was vandalised. This equipment ran our high speed Internet [service] and the interactive element of our digital television service in the south-east region."

There are motor racing games, there are pod racing games, there are monster truck games, there are even speedboat racing games, but "Ski-Doo X-Team Racing" from Swedish developer Daydream Software has to be the first ski-doo racing game that we've come across, allowing you to tear across the snow at up to 200 kilometers per hour. Now you can get a taste of the action yourself with the release of a free downloadable demo of the soon-to-be-release game. Weighing in at around 13Mb, it gives you a single course to race on and three AI riders to compete against, as well as all fifteen of the stunts available in the full game and of course eight player multiplayer support. Grab your woolies and head over to the X-Team Racing website to find out more!

Korean war (or should that be "police action"?) flight sims are few and far between, the excellent "Mig Alley" being the only recent example that we can think of, and Sickware's "Target Korea" is certainly the first online-only Korean flight sim that we have heard of. With a wide range of aircraft, historically accurate terrain to fly them over, and a mod toolkit that will allow players to "make anything from a Sopwith Camel to a flying saucer", it's certainly ambitious. But for CEO and lead programmer Sylvan Clebsch, the most important thing is authenticity.

In my humble opinion, the "Silent Scope" arcade game has been Konami's highest moment to date. Okay, with the possible exception of "Legend of the Mystical Ninja" on the SNES. Lets look at the reasons it was a success. Firstly, it actually included a sniper rifle complete with LCD zoom. Second, oh, it included a sniper rifle. Third, fourth, fifth… you get the picture. Only people like you or I who weren't simply gasping at its genius in the presence of four beer-soaked friends, actually cared about the game's pace, style and, at the risk of evoking a P45, scope. (Clear your desk -Ed) Bringing it home was always going to be tricky. For starters, much to everybody's disappointment, there's no sniper rifle. Such a peripheral would, despite impressing the wife and terrifying the kids, have cost upward of £100. After playing the PS2 version of Scope for a while though, I'm actually of the opinion that the game as it is plays better without the gun. Sure it takes a little getting used to, but after a while it's no harder to line up a sprinting terrorist in your sights with the analogue stick than it is with the big plastic sniper rifle. For those of you that haven't played Silent Scope, the idea is very simply to remove you from the height of the action, and equip you with the means to pick off enemies from miles away. As such you are rarely in any danger yourself, but you have to make sure no one on the ground is either, by centring your view on those rapscallion terrorists with the itchy trigger fingers and putting a bullet in them first.

Thinking man's shooter "Delta Force : Land Warrior" might only just have been released on this side of the pond, but the Americans have had a few months' head start on us and have been taking full advantage of this to hone their online skills. Nick "~EM~DADEATH'' Huynh, a 30 year old man from Indiana, has already notched up 400 hours of playing time on the NovaWorld 2 service, and publisher Novalogic last night declared him the game's "Commander-in-Chief" - the first player to reach 5-Star General status on the game's multiplayer ranking system.

Picking up where we left off last week, we continue our chat with Scott Miller of 3D Realms to find out more about the state of the gaming industry, and his own company's work on the eagerly anticipated Duke Nukem Forever...

The soon-to-be-released "Severance : Blade of Darkness" has apparently run into distribution problems in both Scandinavia and its native Spain, with several major retailers refusing to stock the game due to its "mature" rating and gruesome hand-to-hand combat. Juan Diaz-Bustamante, marketing chief at developer Rebel Act Studios, reports that "it seems that the larger chains of Sweden are refusing to stock the game due to its mature rating. We really don't like it, as we never intended to create a violent videogame."

Future Publishing today became the latest gaming-related company to feel the pinch, with the company laying off 350 staff and shutting down twenty loss-making magazines worldwide. Amongst the casualties are 90 staff and several tech-related magazines here in the UK, including the recently launched "Video Gamer" as well as "WAP" and "DC UK". Also on the chopping block are "Best Games Ever" and "PlayStation Tips", both of which have been suspended. The company's Future Network websites will also be restructured as part of the sweeping changes, with the existing UK-based websites being replaced by a single "FutureNet" portal covering computing, games, technology, music and other topics.

"While some believe there are no victims from piracy, they're wrong." The words of Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, a trade group representing the entertainment software industry, speaking yesterday to CNet. "A video game is increasingly expensive to develop and each title involves the hard work of numerous individuals." He's right, of course, and so on Monday 12 video game companies, plaintiffs including Activision, LucasArts, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Midway Amusement Games and Capcom Entertainment, filed charges in federal court against four men it claims offered pirated versions of games over the Internet. The software industry loses millions every year thanks to the efforts of a small minority, but this is one of the first major suits that we have heard about where the subjects of the action were dealing in "Warez" and "Roms". Warez is an oft-overused word that describes pirated software, which has usually been modified for use without the associated CD-Rom, and Roms are usually disk images of console games that can be played on emulators. The major problem with the Warez and Roms is the ineffectiveness of measures taken to prevent their distribution. The Internet itself - i.e. webpages - is a very small part of the problem; private mailing lists, newsgroups and other methods are also used rampantly. If you know where to look, you can still find pretty much anything. If the companies are successful with their case, the four young pirates could be fined up to $150,000 for each instance of copyrighted work they distributed. And that could be hefty. Hopefully the case will rattle the cages of software pirates that use the web as their catalyst for distribution - perhaps enough to push them back into the depths of Usenet and Internet Relay Chat again. The real threat though, in our opinion, is the use of the Internet in "real-life" software piracy. Private mailing lists and Usenet groups can make it very easy for people to exchange games while making apparently innocent use of the postal service and the like. We would like to see undercover e-operatives (the techno-flying squad, perhaps) trained by the Police to sit at computers and assume identities in underground Internet circles and rat out the wrong-doers. It wouldn't be terribly difficult, and with some government funding would doubtless do a lot more to stamp our piracy than throwing four young idiots in the brig for running websites.

One of the more interesting "Might & Magic" games currently under development at New World Computing is "Legends of Might & Magic", an online-focused action game featuring all your favourite monsters, characters and spells from the long-running series of role-playing and strategy games, all rendered in glorious real-time 3D for the very first time thanks to the Lithtech engine. Now publisher 3DO have given us an update on the game, which has moved from a vague "first quarter" release date to a slightly firmer April arrival.

Although AMD will always be best known in gaming circles for their processor business, they also research and develop other forms of synthesized silicon silliness, including motherboard chipsets. However, their latest non-Athlon bit of news actually centres around another area of everyone's motherboard, the PCI bus, and at a more fundamental level, the way data is transferred by the bus. The company's new technology is being dubbed "HyperTransport," and it differs to current methodology twofold: firstly it aims to provide a singular input and output stream for each device, rather than sharing one for all, as current technology does. Think of it like a restaurant. You can cook a set menu for every customer and most of them will be pleased with it, but by catering to everyone's individual needs there won't be a problem unless it originates with the customer. If a PCI card is the customer and AMD is the chef, that pretty much hammers it on the head. The other part of the idea is increased speed. AMD want not only to cater to each peripheral's needs, but also to give each of them more leeway. The technology will theoretically (a dirty word when it comes to this sort of technology) allow for 6.4Gb per second peak data rate. So under perfect conditions, data should sail through very quickly. Current PCI buses operate some 24 or so times slower according to Yahoo. AMD's plans for HyperTransport don't just stop with the replacement of the PCI bus though. That's their ultimate dream, of course, but they are also offering the technology (for free!) to companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and others, for use in completely different devices, like networking equipment, set-top boxes and the like. By being so open about the technology, the chances are AMD can improve its standing in the enterprise business sector too, something the company is very keen to pick up the pace on. Companies like ATI and NVIDIA, the two graphics card giants, have also been signed up. The first applied use of HyperTransport the average punter is likely to hear about is in AMD's "Hammer" line of 64-bit processors, which are due to face off against Intel's "Itanium" line sometime this year. If AMD really want the technology to become an industry standard though, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Console specialists Konami have announced record sales for 2000's Japanese business year (which will end in March). The company claims to have shipped a combined total of 10 million units, the third time in as many years the company has managed to break the psychological 10m barrier. The success is being attributed to sales in Japan of GameBoy sensation Yugio: Duel Monsters, Dance Dance Revolution 3rdMIX on the Dreamcast and PlayStation and the company's sports franchises. Although not thanked in the company's press release, sure-fire money-spinners like the PC port of Metal Gear Solid must also make up a sizable part of the figure. All in all, it's been a fairly good week for Konami, thanks to its victory in the Japanese Supreme Court last week and now this awe-inspiring sales figure. With Metal Gear Solid 2, Z.O.E. and other spectacular titles scheduled for the coming year, it shouldn't be too hard for them to plot another's year's success. Related Feature - Konami win Tokimeki Memorial case

Publisher Take 2 Interactive has confirmed today that it is developing an unspecified number of games for Microsoft's Xbox console, including eagerly anticipated sequels "Grand Theft Auto 3" and "4x4 Evolution 2". The other games aren't named, but the press release does say that "several titles" are under development already. With top franchises like Duke Nukem and Hidden & Dangerous finding a home at Take 2 and promising new titles such as Caribbean dictator sim "Tropico" and mob action-adventure game "Mafia" due for release through them over the next year, not to mention a recently announced PlayStation 2 version of "4x4 Evolution", it's perhaps no surprise that Take 2 Europe's Managing Director Kelly Sumner is declaring that 2001 "will be our best year yet".

The Japanese are never the type to let us down are they? Feeling a bit bored with first-person shooters? Growing tired of beardy RPG types jabbering on and on about elves and wizards and… stuff? Well, along come our far eastern chums with yet another oddball solution to our plain, dull little existences, this time in the form of a (Drrrrrrrrrrrrrr -Drumroll Ed) typing tutor! Hmm… that doesn't sound too promising does it? Perhaps simplifying it (admittedly for my own convenience) down to being a typing tutor isn't the correct thing to do, because it's not really such a thing. Don't fret, because this is no ordinary Mavis Beacon doldrums affair, this is a modified version of the arcade classic lightgun shooter The House of the Dead 2, but instead of wielding a zombie-pulping shotgun, you have to type your way through the rampaging hordes of the rabid undead. I know, it sounds absolutely crazy, but god damn, IT WORKS! Frankly, I don't quite know what got into Sega, but replacing characters guns with keyboards and Dreamcast's strapped to their backs and sending them into battle happens to be a master-stroke of innovation whilst even being a little self-improving. Play takes the form of the aforementioned shooter on rails whilst phrases and words appear on the screen over the appropriate bad guy. In the game's simplest form, you just have to type the words as quick as possible, with longer words for bigger enemies. All the while, a particularly hammy B-Movie plot is being played during short intermissions replete with dreadful voice acting and not an iota of depth.

3DO announced its latest financial results earlier this week, with the California-based publisher seeing revenues of $30m for the three months to December, a slump of 27% compared to the same period the previous year. The announcement comes amidst rumours that 3DO have laid off upwards of 20% of their staff this week. The shortfall in revenue was put down to "a reduction in Nintendo 64 and PC sales, which was partially offset by PlayStation and Game Boy Color sales" and "a general slowdown of software sales in the interactive entertainment industry", although computer game sales have actually risen in Europe over the last year, and figures released last week showed that sales in the US were only down by $80m compared to the previous year, to a little over $6bn.

Wanadoo are probably best known as a service provider and e-commerce company in their native France, but now they are seeking to branch out into computer games publishing, with a total of nine titles due for release during this year. As part of the move they recently announced a deal with Kalisto Entertainment, whose Bordeaux and Paris studios will be developing three games for them over the next year.

Black Isle Studios, Interplay's RPG arm and development outfit Snowblind Studios will be joining forces to develop and produce a new "Baldur's Gate" game for the PlayStation 2. The new title, "Baldur's Gate : Dark Alliance," will take place in the popular Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, The Forgotten Realms. The idea seems to be to make the franchise more console-friendly. Speaking to Yahoo, Feargus Urquhart, Division Director at Black Isle Studios (who sounds as if he himself belongs in one of his company's games), said that the company was "committed to making Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance a completely original experience that both console gamers and RPG fans will enjoy." Although the game will take advantage of the D&D ruleset and use time-honoured RPG tactics to win back its PC audience, the company is anxious to build a new userbase on the console systems, and to this end the plot while using assets from the original two games will be wholly original, with dramatic new spells and new abilities for players. Snowblind Studios are also pleased with the announcement. "We are developing the game from the ground up to take full advantage of the sophisticated PlayStation 2 technology," said their Director, Ryan Geithman. Baldur's Gate : Dark Alliance is due to ship in the latter stages of this year, with more information due to be available at BlackIsle.com. Related Feature - Baldur's Gate II : Shadows of Amn Review

The latest casualty in the gaming network meltdown is eUniverse, whose affiliate program includes a number of gaming fan sites such as Loose Cannon Zone, DungeonSiege.org, 3DGPU and The Croft Times. In an e-mail to affiliate sites, the company said that "it is with deep regret that I inform you that eUniverse.com will end its affiliation program on March 15, 2001", adding that "we feel it important to note that this decision should not imply any sort of dissatisfaction on our part with the excellent work and long hours many of you have put into your sites". Instead the decision was put down to the total collapse of the internet advertising market over the last couple of years.

While SCi have snapped up the rights to make a game based on the classic war movie "The Great Escape", Codemasters have gone one better by announcing that Wide Games are currently working on a game code-named "Prisoner of War", which will feature not only two different Stalag Luft camps, but also give you the opportunity to break out of Salonika and the mother-of-all World War II prison camps, Colditz Castle itself.

MCV reports, Capcom Eurosoft has selected Electronic Arts to be its European distribution partner for its PlayStation 2 product. The deal sets up EA to handle distribution of current Capcom titles outside of the UK, although current deals with Virgin Interactive and Eidos remain in place for the handling of other titles over here. Both Capcom and EA are pleased with the deal, and if anything it should help get more of Capcom's lesser titles into the limelight, something we feel is very important, especially with such titles as Gigawing 2 in development. Related Feature - Gigawing 2 Preview

Although the Japanese can actually buy the Dreamcast for a paltry £50 or thereabouts from now on, and in the US you can pick one up for $99, Sega's UK PR office had previously denied any changes, answering our queries with a tiresome "no comment". Today however, they have issued a press release which announces the change of the Dreamcast price tag to £99.99 forthwith. With production ceasing on the 31st of March, now would seem to be the time to buy a unit if indeed you have plans to. Speaking about the announcement, Kazotoshi Miyake, COO of Sega Europe comments, "The new £99 price point for Dreamcast is a great buy for the gaming public. Our software schedule for the next year also maintains Sega's position as the world's finest developer and confirms our status as the most consistent and innovative content providers in the gaming world." You can read the entire release here. Related Feature - Japanese DC price cuts

Videologic recently announced their DigiTheatre and DigiTheatre DTS speaker systems for the PlayStation 2, and apparently Creative now thinks that it's their time to bite back with the new PS2000 Dolby Digital surround system. Despite the overly complicated website and Star Wars-like design, they seem to be a well-endowed set of portables, and we're assured that they can reproduce sound to the same level of quality as their esteemed competitors in the PC range. Whether they match up to the DigiTheatre is debatable. It's no secret that we regard the DigiTheatre DTS as the pinnacle of speaker brilliance around here - DTS itself seems like a much richer standard too. The reason for this is largely that it's an elitist solution, so when DVD executives produce DTS soundtracks they have higher standards to maintain than with Dolby Digital. It'll be interesting to see how much of this the public picks up on. If you're very interested in the set, then Dabs.com do a reasonable deal on them for £150 here. The DigiTheatre DTS costs in the region of £399, but many would say that you get what you pay for, in both cases. Related Feature - DigiTheatre for the PS2

The Japanese Supreme Court has recently concluded a copyright case involving Konami and an unnamed company, who were violating the former's rights by selling modified memory cards to be used with "Tokimeki Memorial". The court ruled that by distributing memory cards that altered actual game data, thereby changing the story and character assets, the unnamed company was contradicting Konami's rights to control its image. "Tokimeki Memorial," which you will probably have never heard of, is a love simulation, and is tremendously popular in Japan, where the arcade version is equipped with apparatus to monitor your skin moisture and heartbeat so as to provide accurate data, which is then used to help correlate your score. The game gives you a colour print from a selection of 500 based on how you did, and, well, this is the sort of gimmick Japanese teenagers lose their month's allowance on in a matter of minutes. The company guilty of infringing on Konami's copyright took data from the game, altered it and saved the changes to a memory card, which they then sold. The data on the card changed some of the game's characters and altered the way it worked. The most obvious parallel one can find is that of an unofficial mission pack sold commercially here in the West. Developers often spend time and money outlawing these packs, or seeking injunctions to prevent their distribution. This is the first time we have seen such a ruling in Japan. What the ruling effectively means is that companies are under no pressure to tolerate unofficial modifications to their games in Japan, and they can go to the courts if needs be to make sure of themselves. This isn't that important a change for many, but it also paves the way for similar cases along the same lines, perhaps based on fan fiction using the game's characters, stylised artwork and similar. The boundaries of such a ruling are not clear, and it will be left to Konami and rival companies to decide whether more such matters need adjudicating - only then are we likely to see how far the courts will stretch.

Nintendo's UK distribution operation is to be taken over by Planet, after the Menzies subsidiary THE Games gave up the contract recently, report MCV in a newsflash this evening. The distribution deal will ensure that Nintendo's distribution to retail will remain constant and that the Eastleigh premises formerly occupied by THE Games will be retained. A number of the THE operational staff will join Planet as well. "With the logistics infrastructure of THE Games and the financial backing of Big Ben Interactive in France, we can now offer any retailer a complete all formats solution on a pan-European basis," a spokesman informed the press. Whether this means the online media in the UK will finally gain access to review materials is rather uncertain. When we last checked, the Internet was still a grey area for THE/Nintendo UK. Hopefully things are to change. Related Feature - GameCube : The Science Bit

The Register (who else?) is reporting on a young lady in Taiwan who has had to have a mobile phone surgically removed from her back passage after a kinky sex game went awry. Although this isn't exactly the sort of news we're used to reporting, the associated X-ray scan (which we somehow doubt is genuine) is hilarious. You can read more of the, er, "report" here. Not available via SMS. What's slightly more disturbing is that there are genuine reports flooding in that the ASUS 7100 graphics card (a 32Mb GeForce II MX if we know our product numbering) is being distributed with a supposed driver disc that actually contains a pornographic movie in .dat form, called "RAW". The one hour blockbuster (we were bound to use that one) is causing quite a stir in hardware circles, presumably as all the "unfortunate" customers quickly create a backup before returning the disgusting filth. Apparently the movie is appearing in ASUS motherboard boxes as well. While this sort of rampant customer baiting isn't normally heard of in hardware circles, it makes a refreshing change to juvenile tiffs between retailers, we think. Related Feature - Gamers are sad - official

Each of 4x4 Evolution's 15 courses will feature a unique design set and musical score, the idea being to keep the game innovative from stage to stage. Getting to the finish line first is obviously the general idea, but in the meantime you'll have to hit each of the many checkpoints in turn - how you do that though, is your business entirely. That's part of Evolution's attraction; it doesn't deny you the freedom you and your SUV or truck deserve. Big burly 4x4s deserve to write their own ticket, and that's precisely what you should do. If you see what looks like a shortcut, the chances are you could slice a few seconds off your lap time. There's always the map and a cursory pointer to give you a helping hand should you come a cropper. Ditches and cliffs litter the tracks to thwart your attempts, but perseverance will likely prove beneficial, just as it did in the PC version. The graphics engine is expected to be nigh on identical to the PC version's, meaning all the associated detail, lens flare, reflections and shadows will be emanating their way onto the PS2 as well. The intricately detailed car models will return, as will the variable polycount landscapes, which actually do increase in detail as you approach in order that more high quality visuals can be displayed at once without slowdown.