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Normally console manufacturers do everything they can to prevent other companies from developing "emulators" that allow games for their consoles to be played on PCs or even (in some cases) other console systems. But with Sega recently announcing that they are cutting their losses on their console business after the relatively lacklustre sales performance of the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast, and instead concentrating on developing games, all that could be about to change. Sega Vice President Hideki Sato has revealed that Sega are planning to introduce a PCI add-in card that will give PCs the ability to run Dreamcast games, and that it could be available as soon as the end of the year.

Quake 3 Arena - Q3F Beta 1G is now available, fixing some bugs from the last version of the Team Fortress clone

Expectations were high for Human Head's third person Viking action-adventure game, "Rune". After all, with a healthy mixture of gory dismemberment, silly horned helmets, big axes and plenty of tankards of mead, what's not to like? Add to that some gorgeous graphics courtesy of the Unreal engine, and a development team founded by former members of Raven, the company behind the Heretic and Hexen series, and things were certainly looking good. And although the final result is somewhat disappointing, we're happy to report that it's still well worth a look...

French publisher UbiSoft has announced that it has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Dargaud to make next-generation console games based on the "XIII" comic book series. We're not going to claim that we've heard of it before, but apparently "XIII" (which is made in France by Jean Van Hamme and William Vance) has sold 6.5 million books across nine countries (most of them French speaking) since its inception in 1984. Like the comic strip, the game will mix action and adventure as you play a mysterious man known only as XIII, a man who is suffering amnesia after a failed murder attempt.

December is starting to look busy for Virgin Interactive, with several titles relocating to the Christmas season in their latest UK release schedule. The promising looking stealthy action game "Gunlok" has been pushed back a week to December 1st, while off-road racer "Screamer 4x4" joins it after slipping from a planned November 10th release. "Heist" drops back a week to December 8th, while "Pizza Connection 2" is starting to look rather soggy after another two week delay - it's now due for delivery on December 15th, where it is joined by "Stunt GP" and "European Super League".

The last week has seen a whole slew of game demos being released, so without further ado... Fans of horned helmets and real ale everywhere will want to check out Human Head's third person Viking flavoured action-adventure game "Rune" (86Mb), while Codemasters and Spanish developers Rebel Act Studios have released a demo of their own third person fantasy action game "Severance : Blade of Darkness" (102Mb). Both demos are well worth a look, although the full version of Rune is on store shelves now, while you will have to wait until early next year for Severance.

Famous Israeli psychic Uri Geller has announced that he will be suing games company Nintendo over their use of a character called Yun Geller in their Pokemon games. Geller (the Pokemon) uses psychic attacks and carries a giant spoon, while Geller (the psychic) is an entertainer most famous for his habit of bending spoons through his alleged abilities. The character (listed as "Kadabra" on the official Pokemon website) can "send out waves of mental energy that cause headaches at close range", and evolves into a Pokemon called an Alakazam, which has a "brain as powerful as any supercomputer" and "incredible Psychic abilities" .. and two giant spoons. "Nintendo turned me into an evil, occult Pokémon character", claims Geller. "[They] stole my identity by using my name and my signature image."

When 3dfx first announced their latest range of graphics cards, many people were surprised to see how underperforming the VSA-100 chip which powered them was compared to other leading 3D graphics cards at the time. In fact, 3dfx's promise of gigapixel rendering was only achieved by stuffing four of the chips on a single card and running them in parallel. But although it sounded like a ridiculous solution at the time, 3dfx's long overdue but soon-to-be-released Voodoo 5 6000 is actually not much more expensive than NVIDIA's GeForce 2 Ultra, which will use a single super-fast chip and exotic memory to try to out-perform 3dfx's huge chunk of silicon. According to 3dfx chief technical officer Gary Tarolli though, multi-chip solutions can actually be cheaper than single chip cards.

The latest information from Eidos is that "Tomb Raider Chronicles", Lara Croft's latest third person adventure, has been confirmed for a November 17th release, giving us just a couple of weeks to wait for the .. um .. you know, we've actually lost count of how many Tomb Raider games this makes. Anyway, this one is based on yet another rehash of the age old Tomb Raider graphics engine, but comes with a level editor for the first time, giving you the chance to create your own missions for the game.

It's a bad week for would-be heroes everywhere, as 3DO's latest release schedule reveals a whole slew of games with the word "hero" in the title slipping. First up is "Heroes of Might & Magic Chronicles", with the first two installments of the episodic turn-based strategy game falling back two weeks to November 17th, and the third and fourth episodes now not due until January 12th 2001!

There's a bumper harvest of fresh new PC game releases this week, headed up third person Viking action game "Rune" from Take 2 and Human Head. Powered by the Unreal engine, it's one of the most beautiful third person games we've ever seen on the PC, and the gameplay isn't bad either. Also well worth a look is cartoonish strategy game "Cultures", which sees you guiding a tribe of .. um .. Vikings (I see a pattern emerging here!) as they colonise America.

Kuju's "Halcyon Sun" is rather different from most space combat sims. For a start, you won't find it sitting on the shelves of your local computer games store, it's only available from the Freeloader website. It won't cost you anything either, simply sign up at Freeloader and you can download it for free. And finally, you will have to wait another 24 weeks for the game to be completed.

Grand Theft Auto on the GameBoy was a big disappointment. It had lacklustre controls, a shoddy interface and was poorly executed in general. At the end of the day, it wasn't really fit to bear the name GTA, which beforehand had stood for originality and entertainment. The sequel has been upon us for some time now but it's only this week that GBC fans finally get their mits on it. Early impressions look quite favourable, so if you're looking for some hi-octane car action that one might make a good purchase. Nintendo 64 owners have a rare occasion to lift their chins up a bit too, with the release of what is sure to become known as the seminal Mario Tennis. Having sampled this gem of a game at ECTS, this writer can confirm just what a treat it is. If you thought Sega were the only ones who could do something decent with tennis, think again. Of course, this weekend wouldn't be anywhere near as enjoyable without some form of PlayStation release. With only three weeks now remaining until the release of its big brother the PS2, developers must be getting a little hot under the collar trying to get their last few PSX games out of the door. After the release of the PS2 things look a little uncertain for the format. The PSOne has been selling well according to Sony's own figures, but nonetheless, the emphasis seems to be on before, rather than after, and to this end several PSX games make their way onto the gaming stage this week. The unimaginatively titled Incredible Crisis from Virgin will be on store shelves, as will be the Codies' Prince Naseem Boxing, along with 3DO's WOL: Thunder Tanks. Joining them will also be the heavily advertised This is Football 2 from Sony. The original, which received cries of "No it isn't" from many quarters, didn't do so well, and Sony are pinning hopes on something of a reprieve in this sequel. And two weeks after its PlayStation counterpart went on release, Dreamcast owners finally get hold of Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. The PlayStation version was released to critical acclaim and the DC version looks like it good be even better. But of course, the big news this weekend is the release of M-SR, or Metropolis Street Racer. After a bit of a false start the other week, it looks as if the game is actually on store shelves this week. We've had a copy for about a week now, and we can confirm, unofficially pending review, that it is truly a killer app for Sega.

AMD are for one of the first times since the release of their Athlon over a year ago, finding themselves in an egg-on-face situation. The DDR RAM-based 760 chipset was announced publicly on Monday, and claims that it was "available now" on Gigabyte's GA-7DX were of course cheerfully received, that is, until people attempted to buy it. You see, the release pointed the finger at distributor NEC, whose European outfit is still claiming that the boards are nearly a month off. Eagle-eyed IT website The Register has been doing its usual utmost to uncover proceedings, contacting various strands of NEC all over the place, all of whom are none the wiser. Through telesales, the main office and even a section of the French operation there is no news. In fact, even the main Gigabyte website based in Taiwan carried no mention of the GA-7DX yesterday, nor today. In fact, there is nothing on the 760 chipset at Gigabyte, Jetway, MSI, ABit or ASUS' manufacturer websites. Nobody has details on this thing except AMD's press department. In fact, when grilled over the issue by The Register, AMD's European spokesman confirmed that "if that's the case, then the information we were given to write the press release must have been incorrect." Of course, this behavior is nothing new for the CPU and motherboard industries. It has been common practice for market-leader Intel to develop a chip in the comfortable confines of its testbases, then announcing it before it's prepared to cope with demand. The Pentium III CopperMine revision is a classic example; buyers read Intel's PR and hung on phrases like "available now", only to discover that it wasn't. Hardware suppliers have been carrying Intel pricelists for months, but many of them would deny that they have stock on more than a few. As for the psychological 1GHz barrier which Intel claim to have broken with their Pentium III 1GHz CopperMine; one doubts that you could round up more than a dozen of them in this country at the moment. The associated pricetag is more down to availability problems than manufacturing costs.. So as it stands, both Intel and AMD are major CPU manufacturers, and both are similarly important in the motherboard chipset market, yet neither can accurately report on the availability of its equipment. It seems that nowadays it's unwise to order anything without first scouring the web for some source of third party information on the subject. Although these press releases are there to sell you a product, the main emphasis is on stirring things up amongst the competition. At that, both companies are successful, at supplying the consumer, it would seem they are not.

The PlayStation 2 might be almost upon us, but with only a handful of the consoles available outside of Japan development on the original PlayStation is still going strong. Midas have already scooped the rights to bring Peter Molyneux's magnus opus "Black & White" to the PlayStation, which should be .. interesting, and now they have announced another PlayStation title - "California Water Sports". Set for release in January, when every surfer in the country with any sense will be huddled around their fire at home, the game promises a mixture of surfboards, bodyboards, windsurfers and jet watercraft to ride, while listening to the "popular surfin' tunes" of unfortunately named band "The Penetrators".

Part of the attraction of computer role-playing games has always been that they generally cast you as a hero, raising you out of the drudgery of your everyday life. Often you will find yourself saving the world, or at least a portion of it. Unfortunately this doesn't really apply in massively multiplayer role-playing games, because instead of being surrounded by non-player characters waiting to be saved you are in a world full of other humans, all trying to level their character and grab some loot. Or, if you're playing Ultima Online, the other players are all frantically making shoes and baking bread...

Although Capcom wouldn't like to admit it, one Street Fighter game is very much the same as another these days. However, for the most part I think it's fair to say that with each new chapter, the gaming giant has done enough to the series to justify its presence. With the release of Street Fighter Alpha 3, Dreamcast owners are about to be treated to a beat-em-up tour de force, perhaps the best arcade to console conversion Capcom have ever presented at our feet. It's taken ever so long to come into fruition, but it has been worth the wait, and Capcom have shown us once and for all what they are capable of. The reasons for Alpha 3's excellence are large and varied. The biggest has to be the fact that fighting in Alpha 3 brings the genre back to the heady days of the original Street Fighter II (and considering the amount of derivatives SFII played host to, I think it's earned that moniker). SFII's sublime emphasis on technique and execution rather than 500-hit super-combos is responsible for a lot of what we're seeing in Alpha 3. You have a cast of nearly thirty characters including classic battlers like Blanka and Guile, and through the game's ingenious use of "isms", their term not mine, you can shape just how you want to play the game, making it as complex or simplified as you like. Through the three "isms", you can shut off or turn on various features that have reinvigorated the genre in between now and initial SFII arcade release. Things like air-blocking, alpha counters and multiple combo levels are all within your grasp. By using X-ism, you discard all of the recent additions, giving the closest possible approximation to SFII yet. A-ism allows for super combos, air-blocking, alpha counters, you name it; anything that you've seen added to the series since SFII is probably in here, except for those final options to be unlocked by V-ism, which removes the super moves and instead uses Alpha 2's custom combo system. It's actually very hard to describe an average battle, because you can so easily change the way it unfolds at the touch of a button, by altering the speed of proceedings or blocking out a few of the moves.

We've said it before and we'll no doubt say it again - episodic gaming is the current buzz word in the gaming industry. And now British company Freeloader.com are jumping on the bandwagon by releasing their own "world's first episodic internet game", following on from such world's first episodic internet games as "Siege of Avalon" and "Arabian Nights". Developed by Britsoft developers Kuju (who are also responsible for the decidely odd-ball "Microsoft Train Simulator"), "Halcyon Sun" is a space combat sim which will be released as twelve episodes, available to download for free via Freeloader's website.

Not content with killing Lara off in Tomb Raider Chronicles, it seems that Eidos have decided to revamp her for yet another outing, this time on the PlayStation 2. The parent-pleasingly named Spank! has a single screenshot of our luscious heroine in action, flaunting her assets with a very large polycount. The background, as the writer points out, is simply a bitmap of some location presumably relevant to her new adventure, but if she is to make a Harold-in-Neighbours-style comeback from the dead, (ugh, they never found her body) perhaps we'll have a game more along the lines of 16-bit classic Flashback. On the other hand perhaps we'll have a dull 3D platform game where the emphasis is more on Lara's disproportionate breasts than the action.

Sega's Dreamcast is to most people the most popular console currently available in this country, but with market insertion coming from Sony's colossal PlayStation 2, not to mention Microsoft's Xbox late next year, the company realises its console-making franchise is living on borrowed time. In an effort to turn itself around after some abysmal financial results earlier this year, Sega intends to move away from the console-development market and instead focus on software, with aims to increase its market share to 25%, which would put it ahead of Nintendo, who currently dominate. And obviously by software market we're not just talking about Dreamcast and PC here. The former will eventually die out and the latter sells nowhere near as many units as the console markets do. From a practical standpoint, the PS2 would seem a good target; the possibility of souped-up versions of Virtua Fighter, MSR and Virtua Tennis, some of its most popular brands might be a good idea. As for the rest, previous arch-rival Nintendo has already been caught fraternizing with Sega this week over undisclosed issues, so it would seem that a realistic interpretation of that meeting is that Sega want to work with Nintendo on the GameCube. For Nintendo this would represent a fantastic opportunity; the GameCube could do with some serious games rather than the usual cutesy catalogue. "We plan to expand our profit by utilizing our attractive and affluent software assets to appropriate devices," said Sega's Strategic Counsel, Tetsu Kayama, yesterday in Japan.

BT came out earlier this week and claimed that nearly 75% of users had the wrong drivers for their USB ADSL modems, a figure which has since been downsized to close to 25%. The mix-up in drivers seems to have occurred at Alcatel, the modem manufacturer) rather than at BT Openworld, the provider of the service, but users care not for these pathetic excuses, they want results. The company's service line was running a message last night claiming that faulty drivers were responsible for the lack of service, and since then the company has produced the correct drivers, although quite how users with no Internet service are expected to download these is beyond us. The drivers can be downloaded from here, despite the telco actually posting the wrong link earlier. The official line is that this problem was due to a "logistical issue within Alcatel", not just a competance issue at BT Openworld.

One of the more unusual and innovative looking games lurking amongst British publisher Virgin Interactive's impressive line-up is "Giants", the debut game from Planet Moon. As the company was formed by the brains behind Shiny's hit third person action game MDK, it came as no great surprise to discover that Giants features gorgeous graphics, a bizarre science-fiction plot, a quirky sense of humour, and of course a sniper rifle.

If nothing else, Alien Versus Predator on the PC a couple of years ago scared the life out of me. I reject the terms "made me soil my pants" because frankly even if it did make me do that, I wouldn't class it as a term of endearment. But still, the game was a moment of clarity for developer Rebellion, who beforehand frankly nobody had ever heard of. Presumably because Rebellion are now busy milking their own headline grabber, 2000AD, Fox have chosen instead to farm the production of the PlayStation's own scarefest off to UK lovelies Argonaut. Obviously a game based on the Alien franchise needs to thrive on tension; it's all that fans of the series know and expect. If, for instance, the guys and gals at Argonaut had come up with a resource management game about colonizing a planet, that would have gone down rather like a big lump of lead in a pile of particularly soft feathers. In order to replicate Rebellion's success, Argonaut should have sat down with the Alien movies, a pen and paper and gone through them considering just how best to fuse tension, excitement and the rather limited PlayStation format. However they clearly hadn't considered the possibility that one can go too far with frightening the player, and have done just that. Alien : Resurrection, even if played with the lights on and Teletubbies music in the background, is capable of frightening the life out of you. If you sit down in the pitch black with headphones on and a widescreen TV, the best you can hope for is to walk away sweating with adrenaline pumping wildly through your veins. At worst, well, some sort of cardiac arrest seems on the cards..

IGN have revisited the Xbox handheld topic with some more hearsay and rumour courtesy of Microsoft's own Paul Goss, a senior VP in their mobility section. It was exactly a year ago that the company first mooted the possibility of a handheld, even before the subject of the Xbox was first brought up. I think over time, as we establish Xbox as a successful gaming device, the concept of a companion gaming device is a very interesting thing. We could potentially leverage a lot of what we've done in the richness of a Pocket PC, with an integrated radio, and a form factor dedicated to gaming." Goss then goes on to talk about the possibilities of connecting the unit directly to the Xbox, much like the successful N64 / GameBoy Color linkup options available in some recent games.

While telecoms giant BT continues to plod on with its glacial roll-out of ADSL in the UK, a company from Luxembourg of all places is looking to head them off at the pass .. using radio masts. Tele 2 are offering their "Wireless DSL@Home" service, which involves installing a "compact radio receiver" on your roof and then attaching it to a "Speedbox" inside your house. This plugs into your network hub, or an ethernet card if you don't already have a LAN in your home. The whole job should only take two or three hours.

For all the bad news surrounding Intel this week (leaked roadmaps, dodgy P4 performance reports), it does look as though AMD are also going to come under a bit of fire. German news-ticker Heise is reporting that the 760MP (the multi-processing 760 chipset) will not be with us until the middle of 2001. My German's a little rusty, but as far as I can tell, what the article is saying is that David Somo, Vice President of AMD marketing has told journalists in Paris that the world may have to wait until the middle of 2001 for the 760MP because, to paraphrase Mr. Somo, the chipset isn't terribly useful without a complete platform solution. Heise then goes on to hypothesize on AMD's reasoning, settling on the fact that in the heady workstation and server market, there's no space for unreliability. If a chip isn't 100% reliable, it will be replaced. In order to make absolutely sure of themselves, Heise say, the company is holding back. A demo board showing off the 760MP's power has already been exhibited to the press at the Microprocessor Forum, but it may be some time before we see the final product.

Intel's contract to help promote Rambus has come under fire lately, even from sources inside Intel as we reported the other day. One of Intel's chief executives has now described it as a gamble that didn't pay off. To compound this, according to Electronic Buyers' News, an industry journal with no qualms about disclosing secret Intel documentation, the company's roadmap for 2001 includes details on exactly how they intend to go about freeing themselves of the troublesome RDRAM jinx. The Pentium III supportive i820 "Caminogate" motherboards will be the first to go, as early as the first quarter, with even the P4's i850 "Tahama" motherboard (which won't launch itself until next month) due to go under the hammer in the third quarter of next year. After that, the only products left using RDRAM will be the ultra-powerful workstation and server chipset Tehama-E, which most end-users have absolutely no reason to buy. This latest leak raises some interesting questions though. Obviously the first is, just what will Intel do to replace the Tehama P4 chipset? All clues point towards the company's own DDR RAM solution, the Brookdale chipset, which will support DDR RAM and SDRAM (albeit not running concurrently). The leaked roadmap indicates Brookdale will replace Tehama 850 sometime next year, and also indicates that the 0.13 micron die-shrink intended for the very latest PIIIs will be supported by the Almador DDR RAM chipset. It's known that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers Acer, Micron and Via have all been in talks with Intel about developing DDR RAM solutions for its products, and all three are definitely producing AMD 760 motherboards at the moment. One feels now might be a good time to buy some stock in Crucial, Infineon or Micron who are currently some of the only companies offering DDR RAM to the market.

With this coming festive period already set to case one of the biggest CPU showdowns the industry has ever seen, it looks as though another spanner has been thrown into the works by UK industry gossip website The Register and an unnamed source inside a European OEM. According to the source, "if [Intel] think this compares to Athlon they are joking. At 1.5GHz the P4 is outperformed by a PIII 933, never mind an Athlon 1GHz which urinates in rather copious quantities over the oversized, overcomplicated piece of silicon". There are no details as to just which OEM the fellow hails from, and it's unlikely there will be, but The Reg' describe it as a leading one, and who are we to discredit them. With AMD's 760 chipset and 1.2GHz Athlons now available or in the process of getting there, the question of the P4's relative performance is once again an issue, and although the marketing machine isn't in full swing yet, it looks as though it could be another disappointing season for the chip giant.

At the end of the Second World War, America's General Patton wanted to keep rolling right on into Russia to crush the communist threat. His bosses back in Washington decided this wasn't a great idea though, and instead of facing another devestating war across central Europe we had half a century of "cold war". SSI aren't about to let a little thing like history get in the way of a great game though, and so the new patch for their 3D wargame "Panzer General III : Scorched Earth" includes five hypothetical missions which see Patton's 3rd Army trying to liberate eastern Europe from the Soviets.

The developers of last year's tank action game Recoil have now taken to the air with Crimson Skies, a game that promises to bring the thrills of aerial dogfights to your PC. To this end, the game is set not in the present day, where jet fighters battle with missiles over huge distances, but instead FASA's "Crimson Skies" universe, where propeller aircraft rule the skies and combat is up close and personal.