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Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA announced yesterday that they are launching a patent infringement suit against ailing rival 3dfx. NVIDIA claims that 3dfx's Voodoo 3 and VSA-100 based graphics cards infringe five patents that they hold, and are seeking an injunction barring 3dfx from manufacturing or selling the cards, as well as claiming damages. NVIDIA's president Jen-Hsun Huang is quoted as saying that the company's "innovation is achieved through the annual investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development", and that they "cannot allow the fruits of this investment to be misappropriated".

As any hardcore role-players out there are no doubt aware by now, the 3rd Edition of the ever-popular Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set was recently released to a clamour of dice rolling and pencil erasing across the world. Amongst the first computer games to use the new rules is Neverwinter Nights from Bioware, and according to lead designer Rob Bartel "the primary philosophical difference [between the 2nd and 3rd Edition rules] is one of choice".

Activision today announced that Raven's latest first person shooter, the Quake 3 engined "Voyager : Elite Force", has gone gold - in other words, the game is now complete and a gold master disk has been sent off for duplication. The game is expected to be on shelves in the US by September 20th, although as today is a bank holiday in the UK we haven't received any news on the European release dates for the game yet.

, the organisation behind several of the largest pro-gaming events in the last few years, has announced that from next year all of its tournaments will only be open to players whose ages match the ESRB ratings of the games involved. This means that only over 17s will be able to take part in Quake 3 events, for example, whereas previously 15 and 16 year olds could enter with parental permission.

Showing once again that anything that Europe and America can do, the Far East can manage just as well, the World Game Federation sent word that they recently held a big computer games tournament in Hong Kong, with HK$260,000 in cash prizes up for grabs - that's over £20,000 in real money. Taking in FIFA 2000, Starcraft, Age of Empires II and Quake 3 Arena, the event raged for eleven hours, with the winners and two runners-up from each of the four competitions getting to represent Hong Kong in the massive "World Cyber Game Challenge 2000" tournament being run by Battletop in South Korea later this year. You can find the full results on the WGF website...

This weekend's preview here on EuroGamer takes a look at "Deep Space Nine : The Fallen", a third person action-adventure game based on the long-running Star Trek TV series and using the Unreal engine. Can the gameplay match the graphics and, if so, could this be one of the few really good Star Trek games which have been made over the years? Read our preview to find out!

Star Trek has had something of a mixed history, particularly when it comes to computer games. All too often developers have simply slapped the Star Trek name on the box, secure in the knowledge that thousands of Trekkies would buy it. The result is an extensive back-catalogue of Trek games that mostly vary from disappointing to downright terrible.

What with Doom 3 and Gray Matter's re-make of Wolfenstein 3D on the cards, it's often easy to forget that the next release from id Software will be the Team Arena Quake 3 add-on pack. With luck Team Arena will bring the sparkle back into playing Quake 3 teamplay. The original Quake 3 suffered from a lacklustre Capture-the-Flag mode and precious little else for team players. Bobby Pavlock, of fellow developer Rogue Entertainment certainly believes it will be worth a play or thousand. He's updated his .plan with a highly excitable message of praise for Team Arena after an intense beta-test session at id HQ:

Standings at the end of Day 1 of the Barrysworld European Quake 3 Championships look like this:

ChicksHardware are running a competition to give away a "vapochill" supercooling system for your PC

The seventh beta version of the incredibly popular Half-Life mod, Counter-Strike has been released.

The finals of the Barrysworld European Quake3 Championship began bright and early this morning and the first results for Group A are now in. The event, taking place throughout the weekend at The Playing Fields in London features the eight surviving national teams from the on-line qualifiers which have been taking place over the past few months.

The popular Delta Force series continues early next year with a new installment in the tactical combat series due for release. "Delta Force : Land Warrior" marks a break from the past with the developers moving from the "love it or hate it" voxel graphics of yore to a new polygon based engine, but otherwise the classic gameplay is very much intact. To give you a taste of what is to come, Novalogic have released a playable demo (24Mb) of the game, which you can download from your favourite file outlet -

The official website for "3rd World" has been launched, giving a little information about this in-development massively multiplayer space sim, as well as some concept art and a couple of screenshots from the title. The developers are promising to "present you a world where anything would be possible .. [a] world with no limits and no rules, but the ones you create". Bounty hunting, smuggling, trading, piracy and conquest are all said to be on the cards in what looks like an online Elite for the 21st century. Hopefully we should know more soon...

Ion Storm Austin have released the source files for the JC Denton's player model from Deus Ex, for those of you wanting to use the model in Unreal Tournament or create new skins for Deus Ex

Today's review here on EuroGamer takes a look at Everglide's precision mousing surface, the "Large Attack Pad". Looking like it escaped from a Batman movie, is the attack pad as useful as it is stylish, and is it worth shelling out £15 for? Do you really need a precision mousing surface? Why pick an Everglide one? And is this the right design for you? Read our review to find out the answers to all these questions and more!

- EverglidePrice - £15

Friday is release day in the UK, and this week there is a bonanza of new games available. The official Olympics game "Sydney 2000" from Eidos is now available for all you athletics fans, while Virgin have had a bumper week with the release of three new games - "Ka'Roo", "Road War" and "Search & Rescue 2". Thanks as usual to Nemesis for confirming those releases. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, now tracking over a hundred games due for release in the UK over the next year.

There's something of a split in the action genre at the moment between first person games (like Quake and Unreal) and third person games (like Tomb Raider and FAKK2). Tony Barnes is lead designer on "Deep Space Nine : The Fallen", an Unreal-engined third person action-adventure game based on the popular Star Trek DS9 series. In an interview with 3D Action Planet he explains why they went with a third person view, pointing out that "when you have access to strong characters such as the ones on Star Trek: DS9, it is best to utilize them".

Veteran game developers the Bitmap Brothers have announced that Eon Digital Entertainment will be publishing their real time strategy sequel "Z2" in the UK, after the company recovered the rights to the game from GT Interactive, now a part of Infogrames. Due for release early next year, the game will carry on the innovative gameplay of the original, while adding glorious 3D graphics, better AI, and plenty of new weapons and vehicles to construct.

Codemasters have announced that they will be publishing "Severance : Blade Of Darkness", the impressive looking action-adventure game formerly known as Blade which is currently under development at Rebel Act Studios in Spain. The game is expected to be rated 18 because of the gory hand-to-hand combat, which Codemasters seem to have fixated on. Even without the gore, the game's graphics are excellent and the physics system means that you can move objects around and use almost anything as a weapon, from a torch to a severed limb. Expect the game to appear in the UK this November.

3dfx indulged in a bit of self-congratulation today, announcing that their Voodoo 5 5500 AGP graphics card has been in the top five of Chart Track's graphics card chart since its release in June, with the company behind five of the top six graphics cards in terms of sales. According to 3dfx, their Voodoo 5 5500 is out-selling its "next generation rivals" by a ratio of 2 : 1, and the high price of the card makes it 3dfx's best-selling graphics card by revenue. Representatives from PC World, Electronics Boutique, Jungle.com and Simply Computers all lined up to congratulate 3dfx in the sycophantic press release. Perhaps more interestingly, 3dfx said that they will be launching more versions of the Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 this summer, which presumably means the long overdue arrival of the budget Voodoo 4 4500 and the monstrous four processor Voodoo 5 6000. We should know more soon...

Publisher Fox Interactive have announced that they will be releasing Sanity in the UK this autumn. An action-oriented role-playing game from Monolith, Sanity takes place in the near future and sees you taking on the role of a powerful psionic Cain, whose voice is provided by rapper Ice T of all people. To find out more, read the press release.

Ezesurf, one of the many unmetered ISPs that has sprung up in the UK recently, is currently down amid reports that their 0800 service has been cut off by telecoms provider Energis. The official line from Ezesurf is that the service is down due to technical problems and there will be an announcement within 48 hours, but there are rumours that Energis pulled the plug after Ezesurf failed to pay their bill. No doubt we will know more soon.

Today's review here on EuroGamer takes a look at "Vampire The Masquerade : Redemption", the blood-sucking role-playing action game from Activision and Nihilistic. Can the gameplay match the graphics? Can Redemption live up to the promise of the popular pencil-and-paper role-playing system it is based on? Is it more fun than dressing in black and sitting in a dark nightclub sipping cider and black? Read our review to find out!

Anne McCaffrey's world of Pern was first brought to life in her novel Dragonflight more than twenty years ago, and now UbiStudios UK are hard at work on Dragonriders, a computer game set in Pern. But as lead designer Oliver Sykes points out in a developer diary, because of the vast scope of the world "bringing Pern to life has been no easy task". One of the first problems was "when and where to set the game so as not to interfere with any of Anne's established 'Pernology'", maintaining the consistency of a world that already spans 17 epic fantasy novels.

Today's review here on EuroGamer takes a look at "Heroes of Might & Magic III : The Shadow of Death", which offers an appropriately massive amount of gameplay to match its rather lengthy title. The latest in a long-running series of epic turn-based strategy games with strong role-playing elements, Shadow of Death includes the original Heroes III as well as a whole new set of campaigns and stand-alone missions. Is it worth your 30 gold pieces? Read our review to find out!

Never let it be said that 3DO don't know how to milk a franchise... Might & Magic began life somewhere back in the mists of time as a role-playing game series, now in its eighth installment.

One of the big problems with massively multiplayer games is the issue of player killing, with some games simply preventing you from hurting other players, while some have seperate PK servers, or make it so that only consensual player killing is possible - you can only hurt another player if they are themselves a player killer. Atriarch is taking a rather different approach, as lead designer Serafina Pechan explained in an interview on Atriarch Vault.

Vampire Vault have posted part five of their story-telling guide