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According to this news story at ZDNet, Intel (makers of course of the Pentium processor and its successors) have taken a liking to the Napster model of file distribution (unlike the RIAA, who are rather exasperated by it) and want to create a similar program of their own. While no information on the name is forthcoming (and all our MGS name generator could come up with was "Makeshift Hedgehog"), there's speculation as to whether it'll actually get out into the open anyway, since peer-to-peer file transfer programs have taken such a battering lately. The purpose of the program is apparently to share things like home movies and other family multi media, but of course it will probably just degenerate into MP3s, warez and other illegal activities. Still, Intel never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Earlier this week we reported on rumours that Warren Spector and his team at Ion Storm Austin had been entrusted with the future of the Thief franchise by Eidos, and today confirmation has come with an official press release from publisher Eidos. According to the press release, "several members of the original Thief team have already signed on with Ion Storm to continue working on the series and more announcements are expected soon". Warren himself worked on "Thief : The Dark Project" early in its development, and many members of Ion Storm Austin are veterans of the new defunct Thief developer Looking Glass as well.

The background to the game is that the year is 200X (yes, that confused me too), and the various PGAs of the world have banded together to form a World Golf Association, with three main competitive blocks, America, EurAfrica and OceAsia. Each of the players in the WGA can compete in all three blocks, and fight it out for the Triple Crown. You can control one of six golfers, each with a different level of ability in each of the key areas. For instance, the British lad Thomas Stewart has superb technique and control, but the power of his shots lets him down, meaning he's good for intermediate players, while the resident yank George Spinner is average in each category, making him perfect for beginners. The Brallian, Fernando Almeida, lacks any sort of skill or technique, but can smash a ball like nothing you can imagine. Naturally only experts should apply. The other three players all vary slightly from one another - your choice of player is very important, and as you progress, you may choose a new talent to wield your clubs. The game is split into three courses, one from each block. That's America, Japan and Germany. All three courses are quite tricky, but America has the most easy holes. As a single player you can choose to play these holes in one of several ways. Either you can have a simple game of Stroke Play, basically a practice mode, try and improve your Handicap in a critical environment, or take part in the Triple Crown tournament and attempt to win the grand trophy. Should you choose the latter, you'll need to beat three separate tournaments, placing quite high in the preliminaries before winning each final. It's a tough draw and not recommended without a lot of Stroke Play and Handicap work to get you used to it. The courses themselves are often fiendish in design, with doglegs, bunkers, water hazards and tight spaces between Out of Bound areas. The hole length and style is often varied from game to game, making the tournaments exciting, as a very powerful player like Fernando may dominate the long 500 yarders, while Stewart can quite easily Birdie on a short 150 yard water-hop. My only concern with the design of the courses is that they aren't contoured; there's no sloping at all, they're all dead flat. To anyone who plays golf, this will seem ridiculous - a lot of the sport's trials and tribulations come in defeating inclines and staving off the challenge of gravity. To play golf in a field is somewhat depressing. To add insult to injury, the greens slope and curve just as you would hope, so we know the game is capable of doing it, but the designers decided not to include slopes in the main. The graphics are perfectly suited to the format, it must be said. Cutesy super-deformed characters waddle around in an anime-style, and it feels like a very Japanese game. The colours are vivid and the animation is smooth, with the ball growing and shrinking depending on its height, perfectly discernable against any background. In a game like golf, making sure your ball is clearly visible is of the utmost importance. On the whole, the game's graphics are very consistent. It reminds me in essence of Nintendo World Cup on the NES in the mid-80s; a lovely, cartoony game with perfect definition..

Today's preview on EuroGamer takes a look at "The Conquerors", the soon-to-be-released add-on pack for real time strategy game "Age of Empires II". Adding new civilizations, new maps, new settings, new units, new technologies, new campaigns and new leaders to the game, including the ability to re-fight the classic England vs France match at Hastings in 1066, Conquerors is certainly shaping up to be an expansive expansion pack. To find out more, read our preview.

One of the biggest strategy hits of last year was Microsoft's "Age Of Empires II", a real time strategy game that landed somewhere between Warcraft and Civilization, putting players in control of a medieval empire and letting them take on the role of famous leaders of the period such as Jean D'Arc.

The CPL have issued a press release explaining about how they intend to run a Doom 2 tournament at their Frag 4 event in Dallas, Texas, later this year. Anyone over the age of 15 can enter it (thankfully the ratings system is more lenient Stateside) and the tournament will be played on a network of Compaq Presario computers, although quite why they don't just save some money and get some decent 486 DX4/100s is beyond us. Catch the whole press release here. Update: The CPL has just announced that there will be a Counter-Strike tournament at Frag 4 along with the Doom 2 one. People can register to take part if they can make it out there.

That's right, you can't escape from the nasty man with the loud music. According to John Carmack, speaking at QuakeCon 2000, the man is interested in doing some ambient backing music for the Doom 3 action, presumably somewhat like the midi-style backing present in the original Dooms! Here's a snippet from AMD Zone's article on the very subject..

Tribes 2 is due out pretty soon - according to our sources it will go into closed beta within weeks. Even more evidence comes in the form of a forum post from Dave Georgeson at Dynamix in which he addresses the requirements in terms of hardware for fans wishing to run dedicated Tribes 2 servers during the beta test. Obviously in a game with such a heavy multiplayer impetus the server code needs to be rock solid, and as such it pays to think ahead like this. Unreal Tournament did very well when it first came out simply because it had strong dedicated server support. Epic sent CDs with the dedicated server software directly to server admins prior to release. While there's been no call for that just yet, Dynamix know the genre and will no doubt be offering even more support to server operators than has ever been seen before. Here's a snippet from Georgeson's forum post..

Currently under development by Russian company Snowball Interactive, "Fatherdale: The Guardians of Asgard" is a role-playing game set in Europe at the end of the Viking era, "a familiar setting laden with legends of bravery and courage", as Snowball's Sergei Klimov explained in an interview with RPG Planet. "We like to immerse, to lure, and we do it by presenting a very realistic, very believable atmosphere, in which we then plant the seeds of our fantastic adventure."

Today's review on EuroGamer takes a look at "Suzuki Alstare Racing", an arcade-style motorbike racing game from UbiSoft and Criterion Studios. Can the gameplay match the relatively impressive graphics? Can the AI opposition stand up to the reputation of the real Suzuki Alstare racing team? Read our review to find out!

Arcade racers - love them or leave them, they are here to stay. Suzuki Alstare Racing is the latest in a long line of fast paced and easy on the realism racers, complete with it's very own lens flare rendition.

ECTS is the biggest computer games trade show in Europe, with dozens of exhibitors and thousands of journalists, buyers and marketing bods descending on central London for three days of sore feet, ringing ears, sweaty palms and free booze. For the second year running, Italian satellite TV channel Game Network will be covering ECTS with daily updates from the show, claiming a potential audience of 70 million households across Europe. No, we've never heard of them either, but apparently the channel broadcasts all day every day on Eutelsat. To find out more, read the press release.

Q3Center has posted a new tutorial, this time showing you how to modify the firing rate of a weapon in Quake 3

Complex open-ended space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD has had a torrid history. It was originally released incomplete and bug-ridden by Take 2 back in 1996, leading to a lengthy legal battle that saw designer Derek Smart taking back the rights to the game, giving it away for free over the internet and then going on to release two fixed versions of the game through various publishers. A new game, Battlecruiser Millenium, is currently in development, as well as a multiplayer version called Galactic Command Online, but it now looks like that will be the end of the road for the ageing warship.

Microsoft's Direct3D API has come a long way since the early days of DirectX, with all the leading graphics cards now supporting the latest version, and the majority of new 3D accelerated games running on it.

The long-awaited patch for Computer Artwork's impressive third person sci-fi squad action game Evolva has been released, adding full support for NVIDIA's latest GeForce 2 graphics cards to the game. As well as greatly improving the game's frame rate and particularly its support for the hardware "Transform & Lighting" acceleration capabilities of the GeForce series, it also adds support for the GeForce 2's "NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer", which provides some impressive looking bump mapping features for the game. Full details on the Evolva website.

Recently there has been a lot of debate about the state of the PC gaming industry, with several big developers (including Britain's own Lionhead, fronted by Peter Molyneux of Populous and Dungeon Keeper fame) saying that they were intending to concentrate more on console game development in future. Amongst the possible defectors is Ritual, which has recently completed the Quake 3 engined third person shooter "Heavy Metal : FAKK2", and in an interview with Voodoo Extreme, artist Rob Atkins has spoken about the problems of developing games for the PC.

An interesting rumour surfaced this weekend, with a former Looking Glass employee claiming that British publisher Eidos has plans to keep the Thief series alive. Both "Thief : The Dark Project" and "Thief 2 : The Metal Age" were developed at the legendary Looking Glass Studios in Boston, which was forced to shut down due to financial difficulties earlier this summer. Now Eidos has inherited the franchise, as well as early work which had been done on a third game in the series.

QTec are holding a twelve hour Counter-Strike LAN party in London, with prizes from AMD and Labtec amongst others

The modification that a lot of people want to label "Counter-Strike for Quake" is due to go on general release tonight in the form of "Beta 1". Urban Terror should weigh in at a healthy 21.7mb and there's a release party tonight at 9pm GMT (that's right, proper hours for once) in #urbanterror on irc.enterthegame.com. Take a look at some screenshots of the mod if you're not convinced, or download the trailer to occupy some time between now and then.

QuakeCon, the uh, Quake Convention, has continued its mildly irreverent festivities with a Toga contest on the third day. I don't understand either. Those wily tricksters at PlanetQuake have been keeping us up to date with regular supplementary information about the various fashions Quakers are sporting this year. They've also prepared write-ups of Paul Jacquay's level design workshop and have pictures of the cool case contest winners. These are definitely worth peering at for a little entertainment value. Later in the day they should have an article about John Carmack's speech. Hopefully it won't just be a transcription; I have a pain threshold.

Despite Diablo II's brilliance, it seems as though certain areas required extra-curricular activity! Blizzard have released two versions of the 1.03 patch, one for Windows systems and the other for those finicky Mac types. Neither will break your modem with their size, and there seem to be a great deal of issues sorted out, in particular benefit to 3dfx card owners, who will no longer be left at the mercy of washed out graphics and dodgy cutscene playback.

With Grand Theft Auto now available in the UK on the "Sold Out" label for just £9.99, EuroGamer took this an excuse to review the game, which was first released way back in 1998, long before EuroGamer was even a twinkle in our eyes. To find out if it's still as much fun today as it was back then, and whether the archaic graphics are enough to hurt the classic hit and run gameplay, read our review!

Since the release of their multi-million selling first person shooter "Doom", id Software has been known as much for its ground-breaking graphics engines as for the games themselves. But whereas their graphics have always been amongst the best in the industry at the time, other aspects of the games have fallen short. Sound is a classic example - id actually licensed the sound code for Doom from another company, and things haven't got much better since then.

The release of dungeon crawling RPG "Icewind Dale" might have been over-shadowed by the arrival of million-selling "Diablo II", but whilst Blizzard's latest hit took years to produce, Icewind Dale was amazingly developed in just a year, based on the Infinity Engine which powered "Baldur's Gate". According to designer J.E. Sawyer, speaking in an interview with RPG Vault, "the objective was to make a fast-paced, linear, AD&D dungeon romp that focused on rapid character advancement and combat".

This week's interview here on EuroGamer is with Nigel Papworth of Swedish developer Daydream Software. We talked to Nigel about the company's latest release, an online game called Clusterball which is a kind of cross between an all-action future sports game and an arcade-style flight sim, all played over the internet with a persistent rankings system and big prize competitions and leagues. To find out more, read our interview.

There must be something in the water up north these days. Massive recently brought us Ground Control, Southend Interactive are hard at work on Blitz, while Starbreeze are now producing Enclave. The link? Well, apart from the fact that all of the games are based around state of the art homegrown 3D graphics engines, all three companies are from Sweden.

Today's review here on EuroGamer takes a look at "All Star Tennis 2000", a truly dire tennis game from UbiSoft and Aqua Pacific which falls far short of its aim to be "today's most realistic 3D tennis simulation". For a full run-down on the catalogue of disasters and endless misery caused by this lacklustre title, read our review.

No sooner had I enjoyed the pleasure of Cryo's Open Tennis 2000, than I received UbiSoft's latest foray into the tennis courts, "All Star Tennis". Proclaiming itself to be "today's most realistic 3D tennis simulation", I couldn't help but get enthused.

A disturbing report on German hardware site RivaStation suggests that, despite an outcry from the online gaming community and open letters from both The Online Gamer's Assocation and America's Online Gaming League, Taiwanese hardware manufacturer ASUS may be planning to officially release their "3D SeeThrough Technologies" in the next driver release for their GeForce 2 based graphics cards.