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The Might & Magic franchise is one of the most prolific computer game series we can think of, with a whole host of games now available covering almost every conceivable genre from turn-based strategy to role-playing. But apart from the unremarkable third person action-adventure game "Crusaders of Might & Magic", the franchise has stayed firmly entrenched in its old school 2D ways, from the sprites and tiles of the "Heroes" strategy games to the goofy looking bitmap monsters of the "Might & Magic" role-playing titles.

The EuroGamer crew is now down at The Playing Fields for the Babbages-CPL UK qualifier event. Thanks to the current disruption on the British rail network I arrived at just past noon after a three hour journey (it should have taken less than half that time), but there had been delays at the venue as well. The first free-for-all started more or less on time, but then it was noticed that one of the players was missing and the game would have to be restarted. Unfortunately the wrong server seems to have been restarted, as a result of which the second free-for-all seeding group (including top player Blokey, who was about twenty frags ahead by this point) was cut short twelve minutes into the game. Everything seems to be under control now though, and the first free-for-all games are underway, although the event is an hour behind schedule now.

- Roland Emmerich Producer - Dean Devlin Starring -  Mel Gibson  Jason Isaacs  Joely Richardson  Heath Ledger Rating - unknown Filmed - South Carolina, 1999 DVD by - Columbia

There are many arcade games from back in the day that can bring a tear to the eye of the veteran gamer. Grown men have been lost for days at a time, only to turn up huddled next to Pac-Man machines in the local chippy making rapturous noises, as if reunited with a long lost son, or slobbering clumsily on battered old Galaxian cabinets, long forgotten to make way for endless light-gun shooters and derivative sports games. Konami's sports title Track and Field is certainly a game known to induce this sort of fitting. Frenzied button bashing and expert timing was needed in the arcade, in fact the wrist-crunching button action was so hardcore the cabinet shipped without a joystick, adding a third button instead for events where timing needed to take place. Many youths spent their coveted ten pence pieces, in between cans of old style Shandy and packets of Tudor Crisps (Steady on -Ed), on developing RSI by guiding a little moustachioed man through a series of events, to be rewarded with a hearty "CONGRATULATION!" (sic). But would it hold up today? Would the kids, with their class-A drugs and WAP phones and the like, find a place in their hearts for this update of a classic sports game? Or would it be like a retired athlete, clinging to the limelight doing punditry for Eurosport or advertising a phone book, ignored by all? Konami, ever the glutton for punishment, decided to find out with its release of International Track and Field on the little Gameboy Color.

While the next massive LAN party from Multiplay is still several months away, the company have announced a smaller 250 player event called "NewbLAN". Taking place at Newbury Race Course over the weekend of January 27th and 28th, it's being described as a "warm-up LAN", and will help fill the long gap between now and i7. Speaking of which, you can also now sign up for i7 itself, although it won't be taking place until the end of March. There are also plans for an event in Manchester, probably in mid-February. For the full details or to sign up for one of the events, check the i-series or NewbLAN websites.

A playable demo is now available for "Alice", a bizarre third person shooter from former id designer American McGee and the team at Rogue Entertainment, which, as the title suggests, is based on Lewis Carroll's classic children's novels. Powered by the Quake 3 engine, it's certainly got the looks, but is the gameplay there to match? Grab the demo and find out for yourself! The demo weighs in at "just" 78Mb, and can be downloaded from any of the following mirrors .. or should that be looking glasses?

It's no great secret that the CPL, who have run several large professional gaming events in America in recent years, have been looking to have a game built specifically with the needs of tournament gaming in mind. In fact, if you were following our coverage of the Razer-CPL event back in April you will have read about it here first! But although there are still no definite plans in place for a CPL game, more details are beginning to slip out.

3dfx have announced that they have reduced the recommended price of their Voodoo 5 5500 AGP graphics card from £249 to £199 in time for Christmas, with the Macintosh variety of the card also cut by £50, to £229. The cards have been topping the retail sales charts for some time, although sceptics will no doubt point to the fact that leading rival NVIDIA sell their GeForce 2 graphics cards through several vendors, splitting their market share. Either way, the price cut certainly makes the cards a more viable option for gamers wanting to upgrade their graphics during the festive season, as at the old price point they were actually more expensive than many brands of the slightly faster GeForce 2.

- Ferraro DesignPrice - $59.99 AUS

If there's one thing we like here at EuroGamer, it's creative advertising campaigns, and the latest Dino Crisis 2 advertising is certainly that. Spread around London today are a bunch of cars that have been crushed, if you believe the PR firms, by dinosaurs. It's jolly good fun, but our question is, are these cars, shown below, the only cars to have been left in this bad nick? If you spot any more with the numberplate Dino 2 around London today, let us know and we'll print the details! Apparently the area around the Natural History Museum is where to look.. happy hunting!

Russian developers Nival met with a mixed response when they released "Rage of Mages", but their new title is looking somewhat more impressive. "Evil Island" is a fully 3D role-playing game apparently offering more than a hundred hours of playing time, with three islands to explore, 120 characters to meet there, and 80 quests to take part in.

German publisher CDV have announced that their Second World War real-time strategy game "Sudden Strike" will be spawning an add-on in February 2001, set to feature additional missions and units for the game, which proved to be a massive hit in Europe. "All of the firepower, troops and vehicles available in the original Sudden Strike will be present and correct in the add-on missions, and the Expansion Pack also includes some new units for you to master and deploy". There will also be a mission editor to allow players to roll their own, and you will apparently be able to upload your masterpieces to the Sudden Strike website to inflict them on other poor mugs. We should know more soon...

The first Flintstones movie wasn't particularly good, and by all accounts the sequel was even worse, but that hasn't stopped publisher Virgin Interactive from gobbling up the rights to publish a game based on "Viva Rock Vegas". This will see "TV's most modern stone age family" coming to a PlayStation 2 or Dreamcast near you in March 2001, in the form of a cartoon-style Flintstones flavoured motor racing game .. but without the motors.

Smuggling is a very naughty pursuit, but one that I can certainly empathise with considering the number of imported DVDs I get through. The average disc costs me anywhere from $15-30, but with import duty and other Customs taxes on top it costs a few pounds more than it would buying locally. Still, it is unlawful, and like all good things unlawful it has now inspired an original and startlingly playable computer game, in this case "Smuggler's Run", the debut PlayStation 2 game from publisher Take 2. Angel Studios are the creative geniuses responsible, and yes, they are the same group who did Midtown Madness. But unlike their other PS2 game "Midnight Club", Smuggler's Run shares little in common with their classic PC title, preferring instead to take a simple objective and shape some entertaining adversity to put in the way of it. Rather like "Grand Theft Auto", in fact. The basic premise is that you (and potentially your friend, thanks to the multiplayer) are a smuggler, a rather dastardly one at that, and your mission is to locate and redistribute contraband, avoiding wherever possible the reprisals of the local constabulary. When you get a new objective you are usually just tootling around in a buggy on country roads, but as soon as you get word of the contraband's location you know where to head, and this frequently involves diving offroad. But it's once you have picked up the delivery that the race really begins - you swipe the goods and almost immediately the police are onto you, and after a while the CIA, National Guard and just about everybody else will join them.

According to a report on The Register this lunchtime, 3dfx has admitted that its high-end Voodoo 5 5500, while compatible with the Pentium 4 itself, is incompatible with the motherboards upon which the chips are sold. The Voodoo 3 family is also incompatible, leaving only the ill-received Voodoo 4 able to deal with it. It's highly unlikely that anybody willing to pay the obscene fees for a Pentium 4 would even sup at the same table as someone owning a Voodoo 4 though, so this doesn't exactly help. The sad thing is, this isn't even 3dfx' fault. It's a problem with Intel's own use of the AGP standard on its 850 motherboards, which don't support 3.3V signalling, which as The Register was quick to point out, is part of Intel's own spec for AGP. As shown by 3dfx' new P4 FAQ, the Voodoo 4 has a universal AGP edge connector, whereas the Voodoos 3 and 5 both use 1.5V signalling exclusively. Universal ports on the motherboard would have solved this problem, but apparently Intel neglected to include them. Both companies deserve criticism, but the bottom line is, Voodoo 3 and 5 owners will now have to wait for non-Intel P4 motherboards. Anyone care to guess when we're likely to have those? Related Feature - Intel Pentium 4 Preview

that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer SOYO intends to launch two new motherboards, one for Intel FCPGA Socket-chipand one for AMD's Socket A processors that support DDR memory. The move will introduce the SY-7ALA-R and SY-K7ALA-R, which both support 200 and 266MHz FSBs. The Intel board uses the Acer Labs ALiMAGiK chipset and the AMD board Ali's Aladdin Pro5 chipset. They will be priced at $119 and $129 respectively. Both boards will also feature five PCI slots, an AGP 4x/2x/1x slot, two ATA100 channels and six USB 1.1 ports. This is good news for gamers in that it will introduce not only memory with more bandwidth, but lower latency, which in the end proves more important. As this wordy article on HardOCP makes clear, the reason Rambus has slipped up is not just that it costs too much and has an unproven fabrication technique behind it, but because it isn't terribly low latency, and that's where things need to improve, not necessarily in bandwidth. Memory is a bottleneck in modern computing, and especially for gamers. If you are one of an elite few who own a GeForce 2 Ultra at the moment (and with them retailing at close to £400 it's unlikely to be many of you) then moving to a DDR solution will likely improve your scores quite impressively. At the moment there isn't much literature available on the topic, but as soon as we get our hands on some DDR kit, we will certainly consider the relative merits of upgrading to DDR from several perspectives.

If SSX is the best game on the PlayStation 2 at launch, then TimeSplitters easily comes in a close second. The game, developed by ex-Goldeneye developers Free Radical, takes advantage of the PS2's increased RAM and ability to deal with floating point calculations and produces a 60fps-smooth single and multiplayer experience that encompasses tremendous fun. It's based on a simple idea, that blasting is fun and that we should all do lots of it. The fast action is sometimes rather repetitive and draining, but it's just... it's just so entertaining. At first, the single player mode didn't appeal to me at all. The multiplayer struck a chord almost immediately (although it does prove exceedingly boring to watch), but the single player experience lacked vitality. For starters, there's no intro movie, it just begins with a simple menu offering single or multiplayer, then Story or Arcade if you opt for the singleplayer option. The "Story" is about as simplistic as something out of a Doom clone from 1995; you travel all over the world over the period of about ten years and retrieve secret artefacts before the TimeSplitters (lots of nasty fellows with a time machine) come along and take over the world. Arcade just lets you pick and choose which level to blast through. We've found that it's best to treat the Story mode rather like that of a beat'em'up. Sure, things aren't terribly well structured and it's not exactly gripping, but as you improve your reactions and weapon skills and beat new levels, new characters, weapons and even other modes of play are revealed. The reward structure is nicely crafted, so you receive a boost and something new when you most need it.

The latest release information is in from Electronic Arts Europe, and there are a few movers. First up is "Alice", the twisted third person shooter from American McGee and the boys at Rogue, which is loosely based on Lewis Carroll's Alice books, "Alice In Wonderland" and "Through The Looking Glass". Although the game recently went gold, it is now not expected on shelves in the UK until December 22nd, just in time for last minute Christmas shoppers. Meanwhile Peter Molyneux's meisterwerk "Black & White" has changed to an ominous "To Be Announced" release date, although we are expecting it some time in the spring.

Sony has announced that it will be releasing a new version of the PS2 onto the Japanese market, version SCPH-18000. The only difference though between this new edition and the original is improved DVD playback (version 2.01). As you may recall, in Japan, users were expected to copy drivers for DVD playback from the utilities disc onto the memory card and boot with it. This was cumbersome and easily hacked to allow region-less play. Buyers are told to "expect better playback along with convenient features such as A-B repeat, slow motion, and increased track scanning ability". Also included will be a new wireless remote control, as well as the familiar Dual Shock controller. The price will remain quite high.

Last year The OGA's "UK Quake 2 Team" took on the French at the LAN Arena 3 tournament in Paris, with four of Britain's finest Quakers pummelling the French by a convincing 5 : 0 margin, before celebrating their victory with no less than three bottles of Champagne on the way home. Now it's all going to happen again, as The OGA puts together the definitive UK Quake 3 Team to face the French again at the next LAN Arena event, taking place in Paris in early January 2001. Five lucky players will get a trip to Paris and free entry to LAN Arena 5 to take part in a five match series against the French as part of the UK Team, and will also be free to enter any other tournaments taking place at the event.

It's no secret that SSX is the best game available on the PlayStation 2 at the moment, and as such the closest thing Sony have to a killer app. It's also the best snowboarding game ever, putting Cool Boarders, 1080, Pure Ride and everything else to shame with its fast pace, lightning moves and addictive qualities. 'Boarding games, be they skate or snow, tend to vary greatly depending on publisher. Games like Tony Hawk's are based almost solely around tricks, whereas Pure Ride is just that. There have been mixtures too, like 1080 and Cool Boarders, both of which were immensely popular, but none of them can touch SSX. The Canadian development team behind it have managed to blend the various elements of showmanship, skill and speed so surreptitiously that one might think this is the way all snowboarding takes place in real life. They have even taken onboard things like skillsets for the characters and actually made them important to how you play the game - character selection has made little or no difference everywhere else. The key to success in SSX is also the key to its success; the way that it is not only possible to do well by varying your approach but actually important. If you race downhill at 100mph and thunder into every turn you may very well cross the finishing line first, but that isn't always the point. By integrating clever tricks into your technique and discouraging your opponents with Road Rash-style jolts, you can not only improve your standing in terms of points but also your position, as a lot of cunning shortcuts are only available to the eagle-eyed, and those prepared to do the unthinkable.

If you have a spare $20,000, and this is something not a lot of people do have, then today is your lucky day. This eBay auction in the States includes hundreds of games and consoles throughout the ages, including the original grey Japanese Saturn, a Sega Master System 2, an American SNES with such classics as Final Fantasy 2 and 3, and although the reserve hasn't been met yet (current bid is $18,700 at the time of writing) it's definitely going to make at least two people happy. If only, eh?

Have you ever felt upset that your Dreamcast doesn't test your business acumen? Distressed that your superb stock trading abilities are not being put to good use, or disturbed by the machine's inability to display even the most basic sales data? You haven't? There's a surprise - right, well sir, you're in the majority, because although we haven't the faintest idea why they are doing it, Sega have just announced a new Dreamcast title, a game which puts you in control of two "Segagaga" employees, Taro Sega and Yayoi Haneda, whose job it is to take the company to the top in only three short years, staving off competition from the sinister DOGMA corporation. The things we know so far are that the game is being done in a beautiful hand-drawn anime style using both RPG and simulation elements. Sequences shown to IGN demonstrate parts of the game where Taro and Yayoi have to enter the Segagaga Central Supercomputer and interact with various people in the company. The Japanese do tend to go for gimmicks like this, so don't be surprised if it proves very popular over there, but the chances of the West ever seeing it are rather slim, and even if we do, the thought of it progressing beyond cult status is somewhat optimistic. Ah well, feast your eyes on IGN's impressive collection of screenshots and decide whether you want to pursue it.

Half-Life must be classed as the best game ever by now. With a still thriving mod community and as many boxed versions to its name as most games have sequels, it's difficult to accept that this is a game that was released at the end of 1998, nearly two years ago. But despite being rather antiquated by the technological standards of today, it has yet to grace a console system. The Dreamcast version, which looked spectacular when we saw it at ECTS, is still some way off, and aside from that nobody has managed to come up with anything, despite many eagerly anticipating announcements on a whole host of consoles. To round off the cliché; that is to say, until now. Because today, GameLoft have unearthed some information on an Xbox version of the game. According to them, after some prying they have uncovered news that the game will be radically overhauled in several key areas with improved graphics, enhanced AI and perhaps most intriguing, a new physics engine courtesy of Havok, which will mimic real-life. It will most certainly be interesting to see how this works in practice.

There are times in every woman's life when she needs to be on her own, none more so than when the integrity of the Christmas shopping is in jeopardy! It's with this in mind that the Lakeside Shopping Centre have opened a wired-up crèche service for the festive season called simply "The Crèche". The service, to be run by Flipside, a new online gaming service and according to the press release, some 40 titles will be available under the watchful eye of the usual babysitting staffers, including Wordox, which was nominated for an award at E3 earlier this year, . A refreshing move in the right direction, we thought, although if it were us, there would be less educational titles and a few more PCs running Quake 3 and Counter-Strike. Breed 'em young!

If you've ever stood in front of a stand in WH Smith and scratched your head over whether or not to buy a GameBoy game, you're not alone. Beyond magazine reviews, there is no way to check out a game before you buy it, other than downloading an emulator and 'warezing' the game's ROM image from a dodgy website. Not any longer, say Simon & Schuster, who are now proudly offering their latest title for download, or at least the first level of it, in ROM image form, alongside a GameBoy emulator. The question is, does this sort of move encourage piracy of GameBoy games, and what right does Simon & Schuster have to do this? The ROM works just great on their emulator, and we can confirm that so does just about every ROM we could track down via popular search engines MetaCrawler and Google. The emulator is called "Virtual Gameboy" and can clearly be used for running illegally obtained copies of Nintendo games, yet S&S have no qualms about offering a direct link to it and encouraging you to use it. Fair enough this is a legitimate use of the system, but how far away from this is offering someone a car with no tyres and hiding the keys to the local Kwik-Fit under the passenger seat? People will find out, and will take advantage. On the other hand though, this is an interesting experiment. Will the game's sales be noticeably larger because of the free one-level demo, or will they suffer because people download the ROM, enjoy it and download the full version from a slightly more nefarious outfit? It could open the doors for more interesting possibilities, like web-based demos of GameBoy games. Something along the lines of the WildTangent setup would work perfectly.

Of all the things we were expecting to hear about the PlayStation 2, discovering that some people's machines overheat and crash due to faulty fans was not one of them. The PlayStation 2 in Japan was notorious for overheating, crashing DVDs mid-showing and the like, and there is noticeably more ventilation on the UK unit, especially at the front. The fan is louder too, although in the words of a GameSpot reader, "it's knackered". Sony aren't saying anything. Related Feature - PlayStation 2 Launch Index

It's the Monday morning after the first weekend of PlayStation 2 gaming, and everyone who got one now has an opinion. Those who didn't manage to get one also have some interesting comments on the matter too, so I suppose that's where we shall begin.

Stunning photo-realistic skies are nothing new in computer games, and recent hits from Unreal Tournament to Sacrifice have all sported impressive skylines. Even day and night cycles are old hat, with online games like Asheron's Call sporting some spectacular sunsets, and even spawning an amateur astronomy website from a fan who took it all a little too seriously. But now Ultima Worlds Online is set to take this .. um .. important aspect of massively multiplayer role-playing games to a whole new level.

Pro-gaming tournament organisers The CPL have moved into a swanky new residence in Dallas, taking over part of the Ion Storm offices at the top of the impressive Chase Tower, which is the fourth tallest building in the Texas city. Well, renting out their office space to another company is certainly one way for Ion Storm to make back some of the money that they burnt on multi-million dollar flops Daikatana and Dominion.