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It's always interesting to see how developers react spontaneously when probed by the public. Of course, email exchanges and press releases are one thing, but a sure-fire way of extracting information in this day and age is to collar someone on the development team and get them talking. John Howard and Matt Soell, Halo's Lead game designer and Bungie's Community Lead respectively joined fans for an IGN chat yesterday and Xbox Faction were good enough to log the event and post it to their website. Obvious questions about whether or not Halo will be ported to other platforms than Xbox, PC and Mac came up and were batted down again, but other, more interesting answers were also forthcoming. When asked whether or not Microsoft's "Gamestock" event would be repeated with Halo on show, Matt confirmed that there will be another Gamestock, but Bungie's role in it is uncertain at the moment, although it would make a great podium upon which to present new Halo materials to the public. Similarly, they can't confirm what presence they will have at events like the GDC, CES and E3, but that they hope to be there. One question that came up was why Bungie had chosen to redesign the Halo game engine so soon after E3 this year, and another how Halo would be controlled if the rumours about the Xbox having no keyboard and mouse were true. John fielded both, responding first to the query about the engine with confirmation that it was because of the need to redesign to fit in with the Xbox' hardware, and with regard to the control issue that it is one of the team's primary concerns. "This is our #1 design issue: Make FPS control RULE on the XBox. Without getting into details we're devoting a lot of time to this right now..." Moving away from Halo briefly, Matt teased the audience with news that the Xbox a possibility for the next Myth game, if it is indeed to be made. You can read the rest of it here.

Novalogic's third title in the successful Delta Force series has now been patched to include support for future online tournaments from Novaworld. The patch, a meagre 5.9Mb in size, is available from Fileplanet amongst other locations, and includes the aforementioned tournament update, as well as some bug fixes to the in-game sound packages and saving in user-created missions. Knife kills also now count in the Novaworld online rankings. Fileplanet also has a Links 2001 update avilable, which fixes a multitude of problems.

The PlayStation version of Spider-Man looks set to receive a conversion to the Dreamcast thanks to developers at Treyarch LLC. The action/adventure title from Neversoft met with critical acclaim earlier this year, and it's hardly surprising that publishers Activision are eager to seize upon its popularity by releasing it on alternative formats. Larry Goldberg, executive VP of Activision had this to say: "Spider-Man for the PlayStation game console wowed both gamers and critics alike by capturing the true essence of the comic book series. The swift action of the web-slinging super hero will translate well onto Dreamcast with its 128-bit graphics capability." It looks as though this will be a like-for-like conversion, with improved visuals and audio courtesy of the Dreamcast's updated hardware. Rumours of a second-generation Spider-Man title in development at Neversoft for the PS2 once again went unanswered. We will be surprised if there's nothing to them. Related Feature - Spider-Man Review

Like a lightning bolt from Zeus' fingers, so does Sierra bestow upon us the latest in Impressions' series of ancient civilisation management games, "Zeus : Masters of Olympus". But unlike the fiery wrath of a deity, this is something that the average Joe or Theo looks forward to. With a rich pedigree in the strategy-building field, Impressions' titles usually pick up much critical acclaim, and thankfully Zeus is no exception.

It has been a long time since "Pacific Air War" allowed us to chase Zeros and torpedo carriers. In the intervening years we have had numerous visits to European skies, escorting B-17s across a hostile Germany, or pounding tanks in the Ardennes. We have abandoned our old warbirds and conducted low-level strikes on Iraqi airfields during Desert Storm and strafed Egyptian Migs in the Six Day War. The Pacific Theatre even gained a jinx - it was supposedly commercial death.

Counter-Strike might have started out life as a simple mod for Half-Life, featuring teams of terrorists and counter-terrorists battling it out with realistic weaponry, but since then it has become the single most popular online first person shooter, boasting more followers than the likes of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. It came as no great surprise then when Sierra and Half-Life developers Valve announced that they were going to be releasing a stand-alone retail version of Counter-Strike.

If you ever dip into your PC's BIOS, you'll now doubt have spotted an obscure little variable tucked in there labelled "AGP Aperture". The default seems to be that it is set to 64Mb, half the main system memory in most cases. In fact, many hardware vendors and journalists have given long-winded arguments in favour of setting it to half your total system memory, or thereabouts. But in reality, does it really matter? "Many individuals have expressed concerns as to what Graphics Aperture Sizes should be implemented within the BIOS to achieve maximum performance," or so says this detailed forum posting over at AthlonMB.com. According to their data, "there is no perceivable difference when varying the Graphics Aperture Size". They even have a graph to prove this point. So what's the be all and end all on the subject? Well apparently, "Doubling your AGP memory size, adds 12MB for virtual addressing. The doubled amount is for write combining. If you specify too little, you will get paging to hard disk, and you may get errors if you specify too much." As the author says, there is very little definitive information available on the subject, leading to a lot of idle speculation (from whence the "half your total system memory" argument originated). Obviously this setting is very graphics card dependant, which in all honesty just adds difficulty to the equation. For the benefit of those of you who just want to do and be done, we recommend you leave it alone unless you have concrete information one way or the other. Adjusting the variable seems to give application-dependant improvements, so the way you change the setting is entirely dependant on which applications you use regularly and how they perform at each level. Research, I'm afraid, that really needs to be carried out invidually. As such, it's somewhat difficult to be conclusive.

One of the latest games to emerge from the rapidly growing gaming industry in Eastern Europe is "3rd World", a free-form massively multiplayer space sim that is aiming to be an Elite for the new millenium. Designer Vitomir Jevremovic chatted with us over lunch at the ECTS trade show in London back in September, and recently we caught up with him again to find out more about this ambitious title...

Lightsabres at dawn! Following on from the news posted yesterday that Saddam Hussein has allegedly bought 4,000 PlayStation 2s for use in the remote administration of UAVs and other pilotless missiles, Tesco today launched into a counter-offensive, announcing the procurement of some 2,000 or so units. Describing the deal as a "major coup", a company spokesperson left journalists and MI5 operatives standing awestruck by the power of capitalism. If you want one of the consoles, they will be available at stores in Watford, Peterborough, Cardiff, Newcastle and Inverness as of tomorrow! Related Feature - PlayStation 2 UK launch coverage

Marking the fifth outing in the Close Combat series, Invasion Normandy is a 2D real-time wargame representing one part of D-Day 1944 - the effort by the right flank of the American forces to secure a landing on Utah Beach and then secure the Cotentin Peninsula. It is a war simulation with a great deal of realism - soldiers can flee in fear, tanks can bog down in wet sand and heroism is born of the desperation of knowing that you have the English Channel at your back.

One of the most ridiculous stories we've come across recently are reports on World Net Daily that Saddam Hussein has been buying up as many as 4000 PlayStation 2 consoles. As well as serving as a great source of entertainment for his elite Republican guard soldiers now that they are unable to rape, murder, and torture Kurds and Kuwaitis, they are apparently going to be "bundled together into a sort of crude super-computer and used for a variety of military applications". Yes, we were rather skeptical too.

The gaming community was rocked last Friday when a press release from 3dfx euphemistically entitled "3DFX Announces Three Major Initiatives to Protect Creditors and Maximize Shareholder Value" turned out to be an announcement of the company's demise. Shareholders were less optimistic, and voted with their feet, sending the company's share price into freefall, reaching just 20 cents come Monday morning.

Since the Babbages CPL event ended in Dallas a couple of days ago there have been ominous rumbling noises emerging from the competitors and community. The big $100,000 Quake 3 tournament saw some surprising upsets and controversial results, most prominently the removal of Swedish number 2 seed Blue by number 73 seed Excaliber. Demos of the match seem to show that shots fired by Blue passed right through Excaliber without causing any damage on several occasions. Everything from a bug in the Q3Comp mod used by the event to accusations of cheating or inadvertant use of illegal console settings have been put forward as explanations, and the whole thing has got rather acrimonious at times.

It's been a long ride for Phantasy Star Online, the Dreamcast's first massively multiplayer online RPG, but the road is finally at an end, for the Japanese at least. The game, which will invite gamers around the globe to interact via a universal translation service (with support for English, Japanese, German, French, and Spanish) represents the first console-based game of its ilk. You can take a look at the Japanese TV commercial, which features a good amount of in-game footage to give you an idea of the level of presentation. We can't wait.

With the recent announcement that 3dfx was to break up and sell its patents and other assets to rivals NVIDIA, much of the attention so far has naturally been focused on what will happen to 3dfx's technologies and the famous Voodoo brand name. However, behind the headlines are real people who are facing an uncertain future this Christmas. We have confirmed with Andrew Humber, PR Manager for 3dfx's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) division, that he was made redundant along with the rest of the 3dfx EMEA staff last Friday.

Last week we talked about how to spruce up your PC to deal with high-end games like "No-One Lives Forever" and the like, and as promised, this week we are going to be addressing storage, sound systems and monitors, the other major elements of your setup. We might even have time to check out other disposables like mice, mats and keyboards too!

It feels quite strange for me to be reviewing something related to Star Trek, as while I do not dislike the television series, I am not its greatest fan either. As of late though it would appear a lot more care and attention is being paid to the games based around it.

The latest UK release information from Virgin Interactive has just arrived, with more movements in their rather fluid schedule. Off-road racer "Screamer 4x4" has slipped another week to this Friday, December 22nd, where it joins "Starfleet Command 2" and third person action-strategy game "Giants", which has bizarrely moved forwards two week. "Stunt GP", which we had been expecting last week, has been pushed back all the way to January 26th now, and Virgin's other two December releases - "European Super League" and "Pizza Connection 2" - have both slipped to January 19th 2001. Meanwhile "Heist" and "Worms World Party" have both been confirmed for January 12th. Finally we have our first sighting of "Fallout Tactics", which is listed for a March 2001 release.

I believe the expression starts "of all the stupid things they could do..." For some reason, the new revision of the PlayStation 2 that we reported on last week is incompatible with as many as five of the machine's titles. The new version shipped in Japan on the 8th of December, and although Konami and the other affected developers have pledged to reship any games that exhibit problems, anyone buying a console and one of the games in question in the run up to Christmas will likely be stung. Imagine opening your present on Christmas morning only to discover two or three incompatible games. We fear for the poor little Japanese mites. As for Sony, they are claiming it is the fault of the incompetent software developers. If we're honest, that's quite sickening. Yet another instance of Sony blaming its problems on the software. Didn't they do this before when they realised the PS2 didn't work completely with the PSX back catalogue, as they had claimed? European and American users are unlikely to be affected by this problem, unless they have imported their consoles in the very recent past. Meanwhile, DailyRadar reports that the N64 is outselling the PS2 in Japan week by week thanks to some "lacklustre software". Don't you start! Related Feature - Japan to receive PlayStation 2 MK.2

Interplay have announced a deal with New Line Cinema which sees the excellent "Baldur's Gate II : Shadows of Amn" becoming the official "game of the movie" for their lavish live-action "Dungeons & Dragons" film, which is due in cinemas in the UK on February 9th. To tie in with the movie's release, Interplay (through their European distributor Virgin Interactive) will be releasing an exclusive new Baldur's Gate II "Collector's Pack", which will only be available here in Europe! The pack will be "movie themed" and include "some wonderful gifts", although there are no exact details on its contents yet.

If you have been fortunate enough to acquire a copy of Team Arena yet, then there are a few things the boys at Id Software would like you to know. I suppose this is what they call post-release support, but 'omissions' is a much better word, we think. First up is the server batches; something many operators will require as a form of template to get them going, and with the game not having been supplied to operators prior to release, they will need them quickly, or else watch thousands of gamers running around like headless chickens with nowhere to go. If you run a server and need the batches, grab them here from Quake3World, apologies courtesy of Paul Jaquays. And this, falling into the category of an unconfirmed bug rather than an omission is Christian Antkow's latest .plan update. According to Christian, he's "received a few emails about people saying that the Offense and Defense voice chats don't appear to be working properly," but being a helpful fellow he's putting them right and explaining how the voice chat commands actually work in TA, also. Another Id'er who has updated recently is Robert Duffy, however his update will be no doubt provide lots of fun for people with slightly older machines. His update allows one to play Quake III without using MMX, something that owners of older machines like the Pentium Pro will appreciate. Related Feature - Quake 3 patch finally released

AVault and Bungie have pulled a fast one and sprung a demo of Oni upon the world. Weighing in at 67Mb the demo supports Direct3D, but scant little information is available other than that. The download sites have been up for a while, so UK-based gamers should have little trouble pulling it down. We've featured Oni quite a lot on EuroGamer overs the past year, including two previews, one shortly after ECTS when the game was decidedly unfinished, and one just recently in light of new information on the PS2 version. The game has shown a lot of promise throughout its development, despite some tumultuous goings-on with its developers. If you fancy a piece of the action, you can grab the demo from one of the following locations:-

Hercules (a division of Guillemot) have announced their latest soundcard for the hardcore gamer - the Hercules Game Theater XP. The soundcard includes a "powerful DSP for an unparalleled 3D sound gaming experience", with support for anything up to six speakers for those of you with a full Dolby 5.1 surround sound setup, hardware accelerated MP3 decoding, and Dolby Digital and DTS sound support for fellow DVD fanatics. As well as the soundcard itself you also get an external rack which includes a four port USB hub and a number of connectors for various audio devices, from gold-plated RCA outputs and S/PDIF through sockets to MIDI and optical connectors for musicians and those of us with MiniDisc players and the like.

Those lovely PR bods at Bastion sent us word that The Mavericks have released a brand new "Grand Prix 3" add-on pack from Instant Access. Called "Perfect Grand Prix", the pack includes three new tracks from the year 2000 to race on - Sepang, Indianapolis, and an updated version of Monza with the new chicane. There is a "race editor" to let you tinker with all kinds of race parameters, including the ability to add up-to-date statistics, cars and drivers for the 2000 season and make other changes to the game. For the full scoop, check the Perfect Grand Prix website.

One of the latest features to be added to the Ministry of Sound website is a daft little web game from online gaming provider Flipside called "The Club Blag", which sees you trying to blag your way into the Ministry without paying, get free drinks, take over the decks from the resident DJ, and finally pull and have it away with a luscious young lass in one of the toilet cubicles. Not the kind of activities you would expect one of the UK's most hyped dance clubs to be encouraging, but there you go...

- Martin Scorsese Producer - Barbara de Fina Starring -   Willem Dafoe   Harvey Keitel   Barbara Hershey   Harry Dean Stanton Filmed - America, 1988 DVD by - Criterion

The "Might & Magic" franchise lumbers on with yet another batch of releases, this time four "Heroes Chronicles", episodic turn-based games using the engine from last year's "Heroes of Might & Magic III". The basic premise is simple enough - instead of charging you upwards of £30 for a huge sprawling epic like previous Heroes games, you pay £15 a pop for four seperate stand-alone episodes.

For some time now we have been saying that graphics card manufacturer 3dfx were a ripe target for a take-over, but that didn't make the shock any less when a press release optimistically titled "3DFX Announces Three Major Initiatives to Protect Creditors and Maximize Shareholder Value" turned out to be an announcement of the company's demise.

Videologic's DigiTheatre speakers have already proven a hit with gamers and DVD fans alike, providing surround sound for the PC and DVD players, and earning an impressive 8/10 rating from our own reviewers in the process. Now they are being made available at just shy of £250 for the PlayStation 2, complete with Dolby Digital decoder and remote control. Meanwhile the even higher spec DigiTheatre DTS 5.1 speaker system is also being approved for use with Sony's new console, costing around £400 and coming with a powerful multi-channel amplifier and a full set of six speakers. For all the details, check the press release.

Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the release of the first shareware episode of "Commander Keen : Invasion of the Vorticons", the debut game from id Software, later to find fame and fortune as the developers of first person shooters such as "Doom" and "Quake". And today id CEO Todd Hollenshead gave a hint that the classic platform game series may not be dead, saying to "look for upcoming new Keen news in the not too distant future".