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Despite claims previously that there would be around 30 titles available at launch, the number has now been wittled down to a more realistic 16. So without further ado, here is the definitive list of games that you will be able to buy in stores as of Friday.

Those of you who were around in the days of the Voodoo 2 may well remember a company named Obsidian, who won some press attention by developing an enormously powerful quad Voodoo 2, which retailed at around £500 in the States. Of course nobody in the gaming sector bought it, but it was one of the first truly powerful 3D graphics cards available to industry. I personally sat there long and hard peering into my PC screen at the images of this beast, wondering whether power like that would ever be available to consumers like us. But like the Voodoo 2 itself, with the advent of the Voodoo 3 and the TNT2, it was quickly forgotten.. Forgotten, that is, until last week at Comdex, when we spied the latest creation from Obsidian, an eight-way SLI VSA-100 graphics card. The pictures are at HardOCP, here and here. Just to give you an idea of what this sort of card would be capable of, a Voodoo 5 5500 is a little way behind current technology in terms of performance, but it has two chips and 64Mb of VRAM. This board has eight chips, and god knows how much memory - to the Voodoo 5 5500 it's the equivalent of a Ferrari to a Fiesta. If only, eh?

With the announcement this year of Microsoft's entry into the games console business with the Xbox, the border between PC and console became ever more blurred. Here was a console which would use an Intel CPU, an NVIDIA graphics chip, and a Microsoft operating system. But the Xbox isn't the only PC-console hybrid in the works, there is also the catchily named L600 from Indrema, which is based around the user-unfriendly Linux operating system of all things. Don't expect to have to compile your own kernel before booting up the machine for the first time though...

Cryo have sent word that their decidely strange 3D platform game "Gift" has been delayed, but fear not - this Gift could still show up under a Christmas tree near you, as the new release date is December 1st. Featuring a series of themed levels inspired by computer games and movies from "Titanic" to "Tomb Raider", your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to recover seven garden gnomes, each modelled on one of the seven deadly sins. Having assembled your seven dwarves, you can rescue the buxom Lolita Globo, who is suffering from a Snow White complex. We told you it was a bit odd...

British publisher Empire Interactive, who are currently lambing it up with bizarre ovine puzzle game "Sheep", have announced that they have bought out Razorworks. Founded in 1996, Razorworks a pair of helicopter sims for Empire under the "Enemy Engaged" title, and are currently hard at work bringing promising motor racing sim "World Sports Cars" to the PlayStation 2 for the year 2001.

If there is one thing Shiny is good at, it is self-promotion. Gospel choirs, street preachers, buxom beauties and midgets in diapers all played their part in publicising the company's last game, the cherubic third person action-adventure "Messiah". Compared to that, "Sacrifice" has had a positively low key entry, although it has been hyped almost incessantly in the press, and if you placed every screenshot of the game which has been posted on the web end to end, they would easily reach to the moon and back. Obviously no game could live up to this level of hype, but is Sacrifice a total disaster or merely a mild disappointment?

When Intel launched its Pentium III, 450MHz was a lot of processing cycles. Nowadays it's not uncommon for gamers to be shuffling around the pretty locations of their favourite shooter whilst running at 900MHz, or even 1GHz. But would we be here now if it weren't for Advanced Micro Devices? In the last year or so their Athlon processor has changed the face of the CPU market. Far from being the unreliable, badly performing runners-up of times past, they are now the bane of chip-giant Intel's existance, and an incredibly close second in the processor race. Until today, their 1.2GHz Athlon was the fastest thing on the market. But now, numerically at least, things have changed. The reason for this change, as the more observant of you may have noticed, is that Intel have launched their next generation of microprocessor architecture in the form of the Pentium 4, and its bedfellow, the 850 "Tehema" chipset. Clocking in at 1.4 and 1.5GHz, the processor should represent the very pinnacle of performance, thanks to its new buzzword featureset which includes such eye-openers as Hyper Pipelined Technology, a Rapid Execution Engine, Execution Trace Cache and a 400MHz system bus. The new "NetBurst" architecture is a cut above the rest, and utilizes some radical new procedures to achieve the same effect as before - only better. Explanations of how the processor works have been springing up all over the net, including this technically lavish article at Anandtech as well as Tom's more visual approach. For those who are more interested in how it performs, people's favourite HardOCP have the lowdown, with an excess of common and uncommon benchmarks to try and show how the P4 1.5GHz performs in relation to a 1.1GHz Athlon. The news? For all its ALU Integer performance and its impressive new architecture, it doesn't actually score much more highly than an Athlon of 400MHz less, and as further benchmarks elsewhere show (including these, plucked from The Register's large collection of stories on the subject), in some tests, it was even beaten! Its superiority over the PIII is unquestioned, but judging by today's stories, performance wise, an equally specced Athlon would indeed pip it to the post.. So the only thing left really to consider is how the processor squares up in terms of price, and what you will actually need to upgrade your system to use it. The answer is a touch frightening. We recommend you sit down if not already seated, or at the very least grab hold of the armrest. Stateside, the Pentium 4 1.4GHz processor will cost you $644, and its big brother the 1.5GHz $819. That's not for a board plus CPU or anything cushy like that, that is the price for the processor alone. Over here it will be £849.95 for the 1.4GHz and £999.95 for the 1.5GHz parts. Couple that with a motherboard and you've already spent nearly £1200. But that's not all.. since Intel is still contractually bound to RAMBUS, its development of the 850 chipset has concentrated upon its use, and as such we shall not see a board using anything other than that company's memory perhaps until the second half of 2001. The RIMMs then, which you are forced to buy in multiples of two will set you back another £150 at least. And not content with that, thanks to some high-draw power consumption, Intel recommend you pick up a new power supply to boot, using the new ATX12V specification ( outlined here on HardOCP). The list of approved models is surprisingly short, but if you intend to buy a P4 you'd better take them into consideration. But upgrading your motherboard, processor, RAM and power supply (and possibly case) at the same time is going to require a very hefty outlay. As such this writer isn't convinced many DIY upgraders will bother with the Pentium 4. Especially considering the Athlon's relative performance, which in some cases is clearly superior. Whether or not the case will be the same when third party manufacturers start providing DDR/SDRAM P4 solutions is not clear, but at this point, the only P4s one would expect to see in this Christmas' PCs are those shipped direct from OEMs.

When 3dfx recently announced that they were selling their Mexican factory in Juarez, hoping to put an end to the two year nightmare that they have been living since taking over board manufacturer STB and starting to exclusively design, manufacture and sell their own boards, most people (ourselves included) took it as a sign that 3dfx were retreating from the graphics card market entirely. In future they would sell only the chips that power the boards, and third party manufacturers would build and sell the actual graphics cards themselves. The truth, it emerges, is not quite so clear cut...

- Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel, Benoit Poelvoorde Producer - Remy Belvaux Starring -   Remy Belvaux   Andre Bonzel   Benoit Poelvoorde Rating - 18 Filmed - Belgium, 1992 DVD - Tartan Video, 2000

If you're looking for a computer which is a little out of the ordinary, something to make a welcome change from the traditional rectangular beige box we have all come to know and loath, we might just have exactly what you're looking for. Not only does it sport some sexy curves and a custom paint job, it even comes with a carrying handle to make it easier to lug out to a LAN party, and a free digital camera to take photos with once you get there. And at just $700 plus shipping and handling, it won't punch a big ugly hole in your bank balance either.

After a turbulent history which saw three big events being announced and then cancelled one by one, and eventually the whole franchise being shut down and sold on to a new organiser, the all-new CPL Europe is hoping that this time things will go a little smoother. The full details of their debut event, taking place in the German city of Köln next month, have now been announced, including information on the settings and prizes for the Quake 3 tournament.

Sequels are either better or worse than their predecessors, and this is how they're judged. The concept of a sequel being its own game is completely alien to the average gamer, and it's for this reason that Driver 2 suffers so badly. In its own right it could be just about playable, but with the original still fresh in many people's minds it's going to take a lot of flack. This is because, if we're honest, Driver 2 isn't a very good game. Reflections have decided to focus on minor niggles in the Driver code instead of tightening up some of the big issues that plagued the previous game. As such these problems (including pop-up amongst other things) are accentuated, and because the engine is so over-stretched in places, the game even locks up at times, and the framerate is ghastly. But where did it all go wrong? Well it starts right at the beginning. The whole concept of you, Tanner, the undercover cop was clichéd to begin with, but by focusing so heavily on the driving angle the first game worked. It started out hard by making you learn advanced techniques in the underground garage and it then let you sit back whilst it eased you gradually into higher gear until you were fighting the steering wheel against the clock in later missions. Even so, the challenges were definitely proportionate to the feeling of satisfaction gained from victory.

According to the latest release schedule which just arrived from UbiSoft, the latest Everquest add-on "Scars of Velious" is now due for its European release on December 15th, just in time for elf-lovers everywhere to stuff it in a stocking and hang it from a Christmas tree. Probably. With some winter-themed new lands to explore and a more linear campaign to partake in rather than the usual free-form style of play, it should make the perfect festive gift for the tree-hugger in your life...

In the ever growing sport of professional gaming, Johnathan "Fatality" Wendel is the most successful competitor in the world right now. In the last twelve months he has won several tournaments, including the Razer-CPL event, the BattleTop Universal Challenge, and the World Cyber Games Challenge. He's only been beaten once this year in a major tournament, has taken home over $80,000 in prize money, and is likely to pick up even more at the Babbages CPL event in Dallas next month.

British developers Climax have been busy chaps recently, and their latest announcement has revealed a new PlayStation 2 game engine known as "Climax Motorsports". As the name suggests, it's been designed by Climax's Brighton office and is intended specifically for motor racing games, whether they be track based, off-road, urban or free range. Climax are claiming that the engine can handle twenty cars on screen at once without any slowdown, and an impressive polygon throughput of 320,000 triangles per frame. All of this comes with a range of special effects, including everything from motion blur and heat haze to motion captured spectators! Certainly what little we've seen of it so far looks quietly impressive, and hopefully we should know more soon. In the meantime, feast your eyes on these brand new screenshots of the engine in action.

Over the years BritSoft developers the Bitmap Brothers have built up an enviable back catalogue of classic games, including the likes of the Xenon and Speedball series, and of course the innovative real-time strategy game "Z". But since Z's release way back in 1996 they have been remarkably quiet, with only their recent PlayStation release "Speedball 2100" breaking the silence.

It doesn't matter who started it, and it doesn't matter who is the king of the hill at the moment, but what does matter is how astonishingly fast the tactical action genre has moved forward in the past couple of years. What began as a relatively niche market with the likes of Novalogic's Delta Force has now wrapped its camo-clad fingers around the gaming world, and it isn't going to let go for the foreseeable future.

Codemasters will be kicking up a cloud of gravel this Christmas with a pair of fast paced driving games. First off the marks is 4x4 off-road racer "Insane", due on November 24th. Although the game promises realistic handling for all of its vehicles, it's more of an arcade racer at heart, with the focus on adrenaline-pumping action rather than sim-like realism.

"Settlers IV" seemed to be in trouble when publisher Blue Byte recently announced that the planned public beta test of the game had been cancelled, and so it comes as little surprise to hear that the game's release has now been delayed until next year. Before fans of the popular strategy series start leaping off tall buildings, the good news is that the new release date is expected to be January 2001, so you won't have too long a wait if everything goes to plan. The delay will also "allow more time for the game's development and quality assurance", which has to be a good thing.

After Terminal Reality's extremely polished Rustin Parr offering only a couple of weeks ago, I had high hopes for the second in the series, The Legend of Coffin Rock, but after playing through the entire game in a solid afternoon I feel rather let down. Unlike its predecessor, Coffin Rock has been developed by Human Head Studios, a third party employed to help speed along production of the Blair Witch games. Unfortunately, the whole experience seems to suffer as a result, leaving a sour taste in your mouth. If you remember, Rustin Parr was lovingly termed an extension of Nocturne, the engine upon which the game was based. Like Nocturne, it used the mythical Spookhouse organisation, giving you control of a couple of central characters and asking you to investigate the original Blair Witch mystery. In Coffin Rock, the American Civil War has just ended, and you take on the role of a dazed and confused army veteran stumbling around the woods having lost your memory. A little girl named Robin Weaver finds you and takes you back to her Grandmother, who tends to your wounds and dubs you Lazarus. However instead of bidding a fond farewell to your newfound friends and starting a new life for yourself, you are pressed into helping locate young Robin, who has gone missing in the woods despite implicit instructions to stay away. Just before you set off to help find her, you suffer a flashback, which opens up a Pandora's box of spooky imagery from your life before. Picking up whatever weapons you can, you scurry off into the woods with the townspeople of Bukettsville.

Owners of the GameBoy Color haven't had all that much to shout about lately, no thanks to the GameBoy Advance, so it's quite pleasant to be in a position to report that Infogrames may be in the process of acquiring the rights to a Dragon Ball Z license for the system in the next few days. The famous cartoon series' last outing was on the PlayStation in the form of Bandai's abysmal Dragon Ball GT Final Bout, which flopped rather dramatically in 1997. However despite the series' gaming lineage being somewhat lacklustre, it is still one of the most popular cartoon series in the world, and regularly pops up as one of the ten most searched for phrases on major Internet search sites. Although Infogrames have not yet confirmed that they are developing anything relating to Dragon Ball, IGN managed to extract a standard but hopeful response from them on the topic, saying that they are "still in the planning process", and that they intend to "make an announcement on Dragon Ball Z soon". Promising stuff. It has been suggested that alongside a GBC title the company may also be working on PlayStation 1 and 2 incarnations in tandem, but as we've seen you would be hard-pressed to get anyone to confirm either way. All things considered this cannot be bad news for GameBoy owners. The Cartoon Network TV channel in the USA still broadcasts the show several times a day, 7 days a week to millions of adoring fans, so there is certainly a lot of money to be made should such a game be on the cards. Presumably this is why Infogrames are not rushing to announce anything, lest they increase the uncertainty. For those of you who aren't aware, the series itself focuses on a multitude of sagas pertaining to several good and bad characters. The one you have probably heard of or at least seen is Goku, a good guy renowned for his rather impressive Anime hairdo amongst other things. If as a GameBoy owner you're not sure why you should be excited about DBZ coming to your system, check out the flasy official website and try to track down a couple of videos. It's top stuff.

Massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game "Asheron's Call" celebrates its first anniversary this month with another new event, "Should The Stars Fall". A new chain of islands has been discovered, home to two previously unknown settlements, two new monsters, and lots of other dangerous creatures to fight. And as if all that isn't enough, a new threat is wandering the land of Dereth, "a very grave evil" which is "primordial to the world itself".

London Mayor Ken Livingstone had the surprise of his life on Tuesday night when he was accosted by a trio of sheep at a party in London to mark the lighting of the city's Christmas illuminations. They were there to advertise Empire Interactive's Lemmings-style puzzle game "Sheep", which is due for release in the UK on Friday 17th November. The game sees you guiding the hapless wool-coated animals through a series of fiendish obstacles and hazards on the way to Mount Mouflon, and is certainly one of the more bizarre games we've come across lately, as well as being strangely addictive.

Gunman has been a long time coming. Originally intended to be a freebie Quake add-on, it later switched to the Half-Life engine and caught the attention of developers Valve. Eventually publisher Sierra became interested in the former "total conversion", and agreed to release Gunman as a full stand-alone game.

Offroad racing games vary hugely in their stance and influences. Games like Monster Truck Madness look to the American monster truck passion for their inspiration, whilst 4x4 Evolution is more focused on how much damage you can do on uneven terrain with a Land Cruiser, yet both fall under the same generic umbrella. In deference to MTM, it has its fans, but on the whole, the best way to impress your clientele is to give them jaw-dropping graphics from every angle, and that means throwing them off cliffs, into the ocean and over precipices until their knuckles ache from wrenching the vehicle back and forth. And that's just what Terminal Reality have done with 4x4 Evolution. It's offroad action at its slickest, giving you one objective, to get through checkpoints, and telling you and your computer controlled opponents to do this in any way you see fit. Thanks to the vivacity that TRI have injected into the locations and the differing characteristics of the cars, finding the most efficient way to get to your objective can be quite difficult, but the rewards are great thanks to the World Rankings system, which allows you to put yourself up against the world's finest by uploading your lap times and high scores.

In a story based upon Nikkei Electronics Asia's recent write-up of the Nintendo GameCube's internal architecture, IGN have compiled an English-language version of the original article. The details focus upon the Flipper LSI and its ArtX graphics chipset, the 3.1Mb of embedded 1T-RAM cache, the DSP sound system (similar to the recent Imagination Technologies sound card chipset) and also information on the GameCube's main system memory. Of most interest is the news that the Flipper LSI will be a densely packed 51 million transistor beast, which indicates that it will be more complex in construction than the PS2's Emotion Engine, but not necessarily as Byzantine as its sister-component in Microsoft's Xbox.

A bit of a consumer-interest story, this one. If you have upgraded your PC recently, you will no doubt have noticed that memory prices are at an all time low. At a decent dealer such as Scan, a 128Mb stick of 133MHz SDRAM will set you back a paltry £47 plus VAT, whereas only a month or two ago it was literally twice that. If you were stung by the price fluctuations and had to buy some at full whack, you could certainly be forgiven for wondering just what was the determining factor here. You see, big OEMs like Dell, Evesham, Time etc, all buy memory direct from the manufacturers are a fairly set price. Whatever is left over is then sold on to the rest of the market, the domestic buyer in this case. Because of the Taiwanese Earthquake last Christmas there was a big shortage, and supply went down to a trickle. At this point, the price to OEMs rose about 10%, but as you will have seen, the price to the consumer leapt by as much as 50% or more, and continued to rise until recently. With only about 20% subject to supply-and-demand pricing, if the OEMs want more, they get it, and we suffer. However recently, the OEMs haven't wanted as much for whatever reason, presumably because of alternative solutions which require RAMBUS or other types of memory. As such, the amount of memory available to the average consumer has grown exponentially, and so the retailers are left with a big surplus that the OEMs won't touch, and frankly not too many consumers are interested in either. As such the prices are dropped to compensate, and the consumer gets a bit of revenge on the tight-fisted retailers, whilst the OEMs are still paying the higher prices. Power to the people!

Just two years ago 3dfx bought board manufacturer STB so that they could design, build and sell graphics cards based on their own Voodoo family of processors. At the time 3dfx were at the top of the PC graphics industry, their Voodoo 2 was the fastest 3D accelerator on the market, and you could buy graphics cards based on the chip from half a dozen different board manufacturers. But the STB buy-out proved to be an ill-fated decision, upsetting 3dfx's former partners and distracting the company from what they did best - designing graphics chips. Profits at 3dfx have slumped since the take-over, and a series of costly product delays has forced the company to slash prices so that their cards could compete at the lower end of the market. Meanwhile all the jilted board manufacturers dumped by 3dfx in 1998 have turned to NVIDIA, whose GeForce family of cards now dominates the market, and is available in literally dozens of different brands and variations.

If you want to get in some jaw-on-floor practice, we suggest you check out the latest Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within theatrical trailer. The trailer focuses on Aki Ross' dream, which may have originated from an alien force, but Grey is caught in the middle. If you've ever wondered what a completely life-like rendered movie would look like, check this out. If you'll excuse the editorial outburst, oh my God!