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"We will be withdrawing from the ordinary gaming business that consider game console as a main," says this morning's latest statement from Sega. The company has admitted to be developing three games for the GameBoy Advance, "Chu Chu Rocket!", "Puyo Puyo Summer 2001," and "Sonic the Hedgehog Advance," expected in March, Summer and Autumn respectively. On the PlayStation 2 it has announced five new titles; "Virtua Fighter 4," two sports simulations of unconfirmed titles (Sega Worldwide Soccer is a possibility), and "Sakura War Series," a huge hit already. Elsewhere, "Space Channel 5" will return, as we said yesterday. Related Feature - Sega to become platform-neutral

Although they are called real time strategy games, all too often combat in these games devolves into "tank rushes", with both players hurling huge numbers of cheap units at the enemy until they keel over and die. TimeGate Studios are hoping to avoid this pitfall with their new fantasy strategy game "Kohan : Immortal Sovereigns", which will feature a "more complex" combat system than most other games in the genre, with units organised into companies for battle.

When a title is released which is multiplayer-driven, it's normally released on the back of a tried and tested pedigree. This is demonstrated by the likes of "Quake 3 Arena" which, as everyone knows by now, was the last title in a succession of games which led the pack into the era of online multiplayer gaming. Rarely has any genre other than the first-person shooter or role-playing game been known to forage into the online gaming arena, and driving games in particular aren't exactly known for their towering presence in this area. With 1nsane (or Insane as I'll name it, for the sake of my sanity .. no pun intended), Codemasters have set out to change this.

Sega have thrown a slew of announcements into the mix as of midnight tonight. We did try to report the news earlier as a rumour based on news we had received through unofficial channels, but the response was for us to remove the story nonetheless. The three announcements concern Sega's movement into the third party videogame development business, their Sonic Café deal with I'Apli and a crucial strategic alliance with Palm regarding wireless videogaming. Of the three releases, the strategic relationship with Palm is of most immediate interest, since they kept this one very quiet. "Both online and offline videogames will be released for the Palm V and Palm VII sometime this year," it says, and "further details regarding this relationship will be forthcoming." After the relative failure of Sega's Game Gear device and the catastrophe that was the Nomad, this deal will finally give Sega a solid development platform for its mobile games. Speaking on behalf of the company, COO Kazutoshi Miyake commented that the deal "breaks new ground" and that "people want to play more games on the move." The main announcement, that Sega intend to break into the third party videogame development business, was summed up quite succinctly in our restrained item earlier, which was as follows:- "A source close to Sega has revealed to EuroGamer that the company intends to make a big announcement tomorrow (Wednesday, 31st January) about its future in the videogame market. Definite confirmation is expected tomorrow, but in the meantime, we know that Sega intends to redevelop "Space Channel 5" for PlayStation 2 and "Sonic The Hedgehog Advance" for the GameBoy Advance. The information was obtained from someone who works for one of Sega's competitors - apparently it's common practice to share this information around a bit prior to it becoming public. Apart from the 100 games for Dreamcast Sega pledged to ship by March 2002 earlier this week, the company is apparently working on 30 for other videogame consoles and a number of Internet devices. Many will be sequels to well-known brands like "Crazy Taxi" and "Shenmue"." Specific details can be found in the press release. Related Feature - Sega Confirms New Business Strategy

With the recent news that Sony had purchased "Crash Bandicoot" developer Naughty Dog came rumours that the Japanese behemoth would be publishing future Crash games themselves, and that they would be exclusive PlayStation 2 titles. Today publisher Konami has declared both rumours to be false, with Konami Europe's president Kunio "My Name Is" Neo saying that "we are especially looking forward to Crash Bandicoot, which will be released by us on PlayStation 2 and Xbox".

Earlier today we posted a story based on information revealed to us by an insider at one of Sega's competitors. Shortly after, we received word from Sega's official channels that our report broke a press embargo regarding the news, and in compliance with their wishes we have decided to pull the story until midnight tonight. At the time of posting the news, we had not received any news of the embargo, in fact it was before any information on the topic was released to the press. Check back at midnight GMT for Sega's latest news.

Respected Id Software co-founder John Carmack is to be inducted into The Academy of Interactive Arts and Science' Hall of Fame on March 22nd, joining such industry legends as Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario), Sid Meier (Civilisation) and Hironobu Sakaguchi (Squaresoft). The prestigious honour is to be bestowed upon young Carmack at the Fourth Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. Well played that man. Carmack's works include the various Quake engines, Doom, Doom II and other Id titles. His forthcoming work on Doom 3 is unlikely to be demonstrated any time in the immediate future, but many suspect it will be the most impressive yet, and on a sadder note, possibly the last true first person shooter to come out of Id's doors. Related Feature - John Carmack Workshop at the Razer CPL

Although it was groundbreaking gameplay that made titles like "Red Alert" massive hits for Westwood, part of the appeal of the "Command & Conquer" series has always been the stunning cinematics, often including big name hollywood actors. Now Westwood's latest real-time strategy game looks set to follow suit, with "Emperor : Battle for Dune" (based on the classic "Dune" novels by Frank Herbert) starring the likes of Michael Dorn (Worf from "Star Trek"), Vincent Schiavelli (Dr Kaufman from "Tomorrow Never Dies") and Michael McShane (Friar Tuck in "Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves").

Originally we had been expecting "Black & White", quite possibly the most eagerly anticipated PC game in recent history, to be released just before Christmas last year. Unfortunately things didn't quite work out that way, and Peter and the gang at Lionhead were given an extra few months to polish the game up. Since then the new release date has been vaguely offered as "first quarter 2001" and "some time around Easter", but now we know that EA are expecting to release the game in the UK on March 30th. Expect queues around the block and stores opening at midnight to meet the demand from ravening hordes of bleary-eyed gamers, closely followed by the collapse of western civilization.

"Is my PC running too hot, or not?" A common query, especially in this age of power-guzzling Athlons and hair drier-class cooling units. As we said in the Sounds of Silence feature yesterday, you should never risk a trade off for volume that could put your CPU through some dangerous temperatures. The best way we have found of monitoring modern CPUs is with the aid of Motherboard Monitor (version 4 seems easiest); this little tool sits in your system tray giving a constant readout of your CPU's temperature based on the reading from its little thermal probe. If you CPU doesn't have a thermal probe, it's very easy to simply buy one from somewhere (e.g. Maplin) and install it to measure. You can even tell Motherboard Monitor how often it should check your temperature, and get it to play a sound (a Klaxxon is usually quite good) whenever your CPU reaches a certain temperature, above which you would prefer it not to venture. The trick is, of course, to find out where you should be drawing the line, and that, dear reader, is where The Heatsink Guide comes in. The Heatsink Guide, although also offering plenty of advice on which bits of metal to strap to your machine, includes a list of the highest operating temperatures you can reasonably use your processor at, based on documentation from the chip-makers themselves. Information it might take you hours to locate on vast websites like Intel.com. The guide covers everything, from modern day Athlons and Pentium IIIs, to old Pentium Pro chips and even the more recent Pentium 4 (or "Williamette") processors. If you're worried about your processor burning up under the stress of a late night Counter-Strike session, this is the place to turn. Related Feature - The Sounds of Silence

Just six months ago Eidos seemed to be on its last legs, with their share price plummeting as they issued a series of profit warnings, and rumours emerging that Infogrames and other competitors were trying to buy them out. And while sales in the US have remained disappointing, here in their native Britain the company is thriving. "Deus Ex" shot to the top of the charts when it was finally released on this side of the pond, and the latest release in the "Championship Manager" franchise sold rather a lot of copies as well, needless to say. In fact, when Eidos announce their financial results for the last three months of 2000 on February 28th they will reveal that they leapt into second place in the UK computer games industry, with 12% of the games sold in the UK during that period published by Eidos.

Publishing giant Infogrames yesterday announced that their acquisition of Hasbro Interactive from its parent company Hasbro Incorporated has now been completed. Commenting on the deal, Bruno Bonnell, chairman and CEO of Infogrames said that "the completion of the acquisition is extremely exciting for us, as it fits perfectly with our corporate strategy of building the premier publisher of digital interactive entertainment for the whole family". Thanks to its library of over 250 games, he said in the company's prepared statement, Infogrames "felt that Hasbro Interactive was an ideal partner". The deal was first announced in December, and sees Infogrames swallowing all of Hasbro Interactive's assets, including the Atari and Microprose brands, Games.com and a long-term licensing agreement with Hasbro Incorporated to develop games based on Hasbro's future properties. Atari are of course the company behind many classic arcade games stretching back to Asteroids and Frogger, while the seminal Grand Prix series was released under the Microprose label.

Sega have today announced the radical shift in business plans they have been hinting at since October last year. Sega will team up with British-based PACE Micro Technology, PLC, the leading company in the set-top-box industry, to develop a home gateway product using Dreamcast technology. The product will be introduced to the public by PACE at roadshows, scheduled to take place in Britain and the USA at the end of this month. The set-top-box will incorporate network connectivity as the main feature of the Dreamcast, enabling access to what it describes as "diverse markets outside the gaming industry." Users with a broadband connection (xDSL, CATV, satellite and so on) will be able to watch television and other subscription-based channels, play games, use the Internet and more using a single box. The product moves Sega away from console-dependant business for the first time. The press release stresses the three major technological points quite implicitly. The product will...

Picture the scene. You're hiding behind a crate on de_dust, having just planted the bomb, and you can hear the sole remaining Counter Terrorist padding up to the bomb site to defuse. You crane your neck as if to hear round the crate, when whoosh! You're startled by the increased volume of your PC's many fans from this angle, and you lose your concentration, during which time your nemesis has clambered up onto the very crate you lurk behind, and emptied his M4A1 into your lap. He defuses the bomb, round over.

Buried amongst the flurry of gorgeous 3D accelerated first person shooters and real-time strategy games released in the second half of 1999, one of my favourite games of the year was surprisingly "Age of Wonders", an addictive turn-based game featuring a mixture of role-playing and strategy gameplay which won it a string of rave reviews from many gaming websites and magazines. Although it drew heavily on the "Heroes of Might & Magic" series for inspiration, Age of Wonders stood on its own merits as one of the most addictive games of the year.

Not satisfied with knocking up to 80% off prices for their January sales, Gameplay are now launching a special "privilege card" for its customers, which will give them discounts off Take 2 games. The first title to be included in the deal will be third person action game "Oni", due on PC at the end of February and PS2 in early March. Other games to be included in the promotion later in the year include the amusing Caribbean dictator sim "Tropico" and the impressive looking gangster game "Mafia : City Of Lost Heaven".

Squaresoft has revealed the budget it expects to spend getting Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the company's first FF movie, onto the big screen by July 13th. The CGI-only film will apparently cost in the region of $137m, a figure Square has no doubts it will recoup at the box office. We'll have to wait until then to find out just whether or not they have hit the big time in the movie industry as well with this one. FF Movie media can be found at The GIA, including the full length trailer.

America ground to a halt over the weekend so that half of its citizens could sit on a couch drinking beer, munching tacos and watching the SuperBowl. With so many people watching the event live on TV, advertising slots on that day change hands for sums approaching the GDP of a small third world country, and SuperBowl day often sees a spate of new ads being released. Amongst the usual suspects this year was a pair of new teasers for the "Tomb Raider" movie, starring Angelina Jolie as the amply imbued Ms Croft.

After a week of unpleasant announcements regarding various tech-stock companies and the liquidation of BarrysWorld, it's nice to see that someone in the industry is actually making some money. Guillemot's Thrustmaster steering wheel brand, which took advantage of a Ferrari license now controls 43.4% of the market in units for the Dreamcast, and 21.5% of the steering wheels market full stop. Another of Guillemot's brands, Hercules, also enjoyed success, with its "3D Prophet II MX" budget graphics card the highest performer. The newer dual display version is also enjoying strong sales. The company's other retail cards have sold well and helped to reaffirm its position in the retail sector. Guillemot has also decided to use the Hercules brand for its new sound card range, including the "Maxi Sound Muse," an entry level PCI sound card priced at £24.99, and its enthusiasts' options, the "Game Theatre XP," similar to Creative's "Soundblaster Platinum," it includes a highly powerful PCI sound card and an external setup of some sort. The company also plans to release "CUBE" branded portable MP3 players starting in February. Related Feature - Hercules 3D Prophet II MX Review

Immersion, the developer of the force feedback software used in DirectX and whose chips power most of the force feedback paraphernalia on the market, wants you to get more sensation out of today's games than merely sore wrists. In a joint venture with Logitech they have released a new series of mice called iFeel, which can vibrate to simulate different textures using Immersion's TouchSense technology.

Anyway, pirates. Interstellar ones. Nasty fellows by anyone's reckoning, and causing no end of trouble for a young marsupial called Denis. A Kangaroo by trade, young Denis has been thrust in at the deep end of Titus' latest 3D action adventure title for kids, and it's his job to rid the world of these heartless hinds once and for all. The problem is, they're all over the place! Denis' adventures will take him all over Australia, through the plains, the Tasmanian wilderness, past the Great Barrier Reef and even into space. It looks like his will be quite an adventure too, with plenty of variety to keep the little tykes busy in front of the Dreamcast. Denis skips, swims, snowboards, hang-glides and even pilots jet boats and Martian rocket ships. The style of play mimics that of Crash Bandicoot and occasionally the PlayStation's Pandemonium as well with its quasi-3D platform sections. The graphical engine is superb, with some really impressive visuals. The cartoon element is strong with some rich, glossy textures and cutesy pirates running around all over the shop. The other enemies, some feral, some human, also live up to the billing, and on the whole it's a remarkably enlivening experience to play around with Kao. Denis himself is the bastion of cuddliness.

For twenty years FASA Corporation has been at the forefront of role-playing and table top gaming, producing a string of hit gaming systems including my own personal favourite, the cyberpunk RPG "Shadowrun", something which swallowed more hours of my teenage years than I care to remember. Over the last decade some of their better known games have come to the PC, including the "Mechwarrior" and "Mechcommander" games (based on FASA's "Battletech" system) and the fanciful flight combat sim "Crimson Skies".

It's been a very hectic few hours. Early this morning our time, Gamers.com ran a story reporting the unconfirmed news that Bill Gates and Microsoft will soon be announcing Dreamcast game support as the Xbox's latest feature. From the podium of this spring's Tokyo Game Show, no less.

Take 2 have announced that they will be publishing Ratbag's "Leadfoot" in Q2 2001 (in English, that's some time between April and June), and to celebrate they sent us a batch of brand new screenshots of the game in action. And very nice they are as well. Featuring a championship mode which includes a massive 180 events across 15 series races, three different classes of upgradeable vehicles to trash, and support for up to ten people to duke it out over the net, Leadfoot is already looking rather special. It's also one of the few games to cover the arcane art of "stadium off-road racing", which sees cars tearing around custom-built dirt track courses in both indoor and outdoor stadia. Look out for this fender bending all-action racing game coming to a store near you in the not-so-distant future.

E-commerce is your friend, if you believe the people who live by it, and Play 24/7 has for quite some time been one of the best friends of UK DVD urchins who needed to get their grubby mits on the latest US releases. The prices were quite reasonable, and the delivery time much speedier than ordering from the US directly. And in order to capitalize on that reputation, Play 24/7 have just launched a new games division. At the time of writing, the games area features only PSOne and PS2 games, but we expect that will change, and so does the company's business development manager, Ben Simpson, who says they "have plans to start selling Dreamcast and possibly Gameboy Advanced (sic) titles as well."

Japanese Mech games really do rock. Take "Virtua On" on the Dreamcast for example; whoever the heck came up with that should be congratulated at length. "MechWarrior 4" offers a slightly Westernized interpretation of the Mech, but nonetheless it boasts an in-depth storyline and a bizarre intergalactic war setting to boot. The 3D graphics engine has been entirely redone for the latest installment, so your 40 foot, 80 ton, 90 mile-an-hour war machine won't look too shabby.

SCi is today's walking wounded in the world of tech stocks, as they post losses of some £1.7m from the fifteen month period to September 30th last year. In order to try and recoup this loss, they have to rely on their new US distribution deal with SVG, a three year deal which could make them approximately $4.3m through PR and marketing in the new US office. The CEO of SCi, Jane Cavanagh, was commenting on the deal, saying that "By establishing a North American publishing operation, we will significantly improve margins and increase control over launch dates and marketing." By no means a bad thing. She went on, "By working exclusively with SVG we will minimise overheads and benefit from the strength of SVG's extensive distribution channels." We'll see you next quarter.

In the face of an even greater invasion, from the Burning Legion, the reunited Orcish Horde and the Human Armies of Azeroth have been forced to shift their attentions from in-fighting and general bickering to basic survival. The chaos to come looks insane, and finally, we have some downloadable footage to show for it. The movie, which is about 14Mb in size, shows quite a long portion of the game, unfortunately with next to no sound to show for it. Visually, WarCraft III looks like a highly advanced blend of StarCraft and WarCraft II, with some fabulous spell animations for the magical characters, some that take up the whole screen with their fury. The hud is similar to the StarCraft offering, with animated faces for each of the units and such, and watching the game in action, it looks remarkably similar in style to those classic RTSes of old. Old-hands from WCII days will be thrilled by the new building construction animations too - I know I was.

"House of the Dead 2" has been given a makeover, and this time you're gunning for the evil zombies and other creatures of hellspawn by typing various words as quick as possible. "The Typing of the Dead" is an amusing spin-off the classic lightgun shooter, and it's just your luck that there is now a demo available. Weighing in at a rather large 112Mb, it includes a fair chunk of the first section so you can get used to the action. Even if you can touch-type in the fastlane, you may find it quite entertaining, thanks to the variable difficulty levels. Our full review of the game will be coming soon. Until then, check out the demo:-

Anarchy Enterprises and Unique Entertainment are currently hard at work bringing the ever popular "SimCity" style of game to the final frontier with "Luna : Moon Colony Simulator". Luna does exactly what it says on the tin, putting you in charge of developing and maintaining a sprawling colony on the moon.