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One of the more .. unusual titles to be announced recently is Microsoft's "Train Simulator", a game which aims to bring all the joys of driving and travelling on trains to a PC near you. To be honest, it sounded like a pretty daft idea when we first heard about it.

Scott Dalton of Legend, currently working on highly anticipated first person shooter "Unreal 2", updated his .plan yesterday to sing the praises of DirectX 8, and in particular the new "DirectCrate" component. According to the announcement, "DirectCrate is the component of the DirectX application programming interface (API) that allows you to directly manipulate storage containers, the hardware crate acceleration, and extended ExplodoCrate support". Given how common crates are in most first person shooters, this is obviously a god-send for lazy developers.

Publisher Sierra sent word that the official website for mythological city building sim "Zeus : Master of Olympus" is now online, featuring information about Zeus, as well as some new screenshots and concept art. For those of you with an aversion to marble, Zeus is the follow-up to the Caesar series and Pharaoh, this time set in classical Greece and once again giving you the chance to build and manage your own great city.

Graphics card manufacturer 3dfx last night announced its financial results for the quarter ending July 31st 2000, which CEO Alex Leupp admitted he was "very disappointed" with. Revenue slumped to just $67m from $105m in the same period last year, mostly thanks to the late arrival of the Voodoo 5 5500, while the company's losses rose from $12m this time last year to over $100m, partly due to their perhaps over-ambitious $60m take-over of Gigapixel.

Ion Storm Austin talk to RPG Vault about the forthcoming Deus Ex SDK

Taking place last weekend, i5 was one of the biggest LAN parties ever held in the UK, featuring three days of fragging and hundreds of participants. Assistant Editor Tom "Mugwum" Bramwell ventured into the mouth of madness to cover the event for EuroGamer, and returned with strange tales of Quake, Counter-Strike, drinking contests, masked gunmen, comfy chairs and pizza. Today we've got his full report on i5, including photographic evidence where appropriate!

This bank holiday weekend in Newbury the latest in the I-series of LAN parties run by Multiplay UK took place, at Newbury Racecourse, a venue not known extensively for its gaming background (although I suppose that depends on your opinion of equestrian pursuits). Gamers from all over the country converged upon the setting looking to meet up with net buddies, play some games and get some skillz.

French publisher UbiSoft has confirmed long-running rumours that they are planning to buy out Red Storm, the American publisher / developer best known for the "Rainbow Six" series. Following the exploits of an elite international anti-terrorist organisation, Rainbow Six and its sequel "Rogue Spear" have gone on to sell three million copies on everything from the PC to the GameBoy.

Following on from yesterday's announcement that NVIDIA are taking 3dfx to court for allegedly infringing five of their patents, today 3dfx launched a counter-attack, saying that they considered the NVIDIA suit to be an attempt to deflect an earlier 3dfx patent infringement suit against NVIDIA. 3dfx claims that NVIDIA infringed their patent on multi-texturing, and took the company to court back in September 1998 over the issue.

Sporting moves that come straight out of Tom and Jerry and story's the likes of which only the Japanese could dream up, Tech Romancer is the latest beat em up with a twist from the Capcom stables. Anyone familiar with the genre will feel instantly at home. There is the disparate group of brawlers, the cute little girls, the buxom wenches and the muscle bound brutes. Each pilots their building sized mech, which in the case of one Polin & Bolon, really is made of several buildings, and a boat, and a bus amongst other things!

The free Internet Service Provider EzeSurf has entered Voluntary Liquidation due to losses, fraudulent staff and broken promises. The open letter discussing the situation and history of the company can be found here. EzeSurf's closure comes only days after AltaVista's disgraceful high publicity withdrawel from the freecall ISP market, and leaves only Red Hot Ant and Freeserve amongst a few others offering 24/7 free Internet. The former is well known for its terrible lack of service, but this writer has been using the latter without incident for several months now. Interestingly, Freeserve are also a Planet Online customer, just as EzeSurf were.

Microsoft has announced that it has bought an equity stake in Big Huge Games, and will be publishing their titles in future as part of the deal. Big Huge was founded by Brian Reynolds, the designer who worked with Sid Meier for many years, and was the real brains behind classic games such as Civilization II and Alpha Centauri. With the company's first release expected some time in 2002, details are scant at this point, although we are fairly sure that it will be a real time strategy game with a scope closer to that of the Civilization games than the likes of Command & Conquer.

Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA announced yesterday that they are launching a patent infringement suit against ailing rival 3dfx. NVIDIA claims that 3dfx's Voodoo 3 and VSA-100 based graphics cards infringe five patents that they hold, and are seeking an injunction barring 3dfx from manufacturing or selling the cards, as well as claiming damages. NVIDIA's president Jen-Hsun Huang is quoted as saying that the company's "innovation is achieved through the annual investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development", and that they "cannot allow the fruits of this investment to be misappropriated".

As any hardcore role-players out there are no doubt aware by now, the 3rd Edition of the ever-popular Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set was recently released to a clamour of dice rolling and pencil erasing across the world. Amongst the first computer games to use the new rules is Neverwinter Nights from Bioware, and according to lead designer Rob Bartel "the primary philosophical difference [between the 2nd and 3rd Edition rules] is one of choice".

Activision today announced that Raven's latest first person shooter, the Quake 3 engined "Voyager : Elite Force", has gone gold - in other words, the game is now complete and a gold master disk has been sent off for duplication. The game is expected to be on shelves in the US by September 20th, although as today is a bank holiday in the UK we haven't received any news on the European release dates for the game yet.

, the organisation behind several of the largest pro-gaming events in the last few years, has announced that from next year all of its tournaments will only be open to players whose ages match the ESRB ratings of the games involved. This means that only over 17s will be able to take part in Quake 3 events, for example, whereas previously 15 and 16 year olds could enter with parental permission.

Showing once again that anything that Europe and America can do, the Far East can manage just as well, the World Game Federation sent word that they recently held a big computer games tournament in Hong Kong, with HK$260,000 in cash prizes up for grabs - that's over £20,000 in real money. Taking in FIFA 2000, Starcraft, Age of Empires II and Quake 3 Arena, the event raged for eleven hours, with the winners and two runners-up from each of the four competitions getting to represent Hong Kong in the massive "World Cyber Game Challenge 2000" tournament being run by Battletop in South Korea later this year. You can find the full results on the WGF website...

This weekend's preview here on EuroGamer takes a look at "Deep Space Nine : The Fallen", a third person action-adventure game based on the long-running Star Trek TV series and using the Unreal engine. Can the gameplay match the graphics and, if so, could this be one of the few really good Star Trek games which have been made over the years? Read our preview to find out!

Star Trek has had something of a mixed history, particularly when it comes to computer games. All too often developers have simply slapped the Star Trek name on the box, secure in the knowledge that thousands of Trekkies would buy it. The result is an extensive back-catalogue of Trek games that mostly vary from disappointing to downright terrible.

What with Doom 3 and Gray Matter's re-make of Wolfenstein 3D on the cards, it's often easy to forget that the next release from id Software will be the Team Arena Quake 3 add-on pack. With luck Team Arena will bring the sparkle back into playing Quake 3 teamplay. The original Quake 3 suffered from a lacklustre Capture-the-Flag mode and precious little else for team players. Bobby Pavlock, of fellow developer Rogue Entertainment certainly believes it will be worth a play or thousand. He's updated his .plan with a highly excitable message of praise for Team Arena after an intense beta-test session at id HQ:

Standings at the end of Day 1 of the Barrysworld European Quake 3 Championships look like this:

ChicksHardware are running a competition to give away a "vapochill" supercooling system for your PC

The seventh beta version of the incredibly popular Half-Life mod, Counter-Strike has been released.

The finals of the Barrysworld European Quake3 Championship began bright and early this morning and the first results for Group A are now in. The event, taking place throughout the weekend at The Playing Fields in London features the eight surviving national teams from the on-line qualifiers which have been taking place over the past few months.

The popular Delta Force series continues early next year with a new installment in the tactical combat series due for release. "Delta Force : Land Warrior" marks a break from the past with the developers moving from the "love it or hate it" voxel graphics of yore to a new polygon based engine, but otherwise the classic gameplay is very much intact. To give you a taste of what is to come, Novalogic have released a playable demo (24Mb) of the game, which you can download from your favourite file outlet -

The official website for "3rd World" has been launched, giving a little information about this in-development massively multiplayer space sim, as well as some concept art and a couple of screenshots from the title. The developers are promising to "present you a world where anything would be possible .. [a] world with no limits and no rules, but the ones you create". Bounty hunting, smuggling, trading, piracy and conquest are all said to be on the cards in what looks like an online Elite for the 21st century. Hopefully we should know more soon...

Ion Storm Austin have released the source files for the JC Denton's player model from Deus Ex, for those of you wanting to use the model in Unreal Tournament or create new skins for Deus Ex

Today's review here on EuroGamer takes a look at Everglide's precision mousing surface, the "Large Attack Pad". Looking like it escaped from a Batman movie, is the attack pad as useful as it is stylish, and is it worth shelling out £15 for? Do you really need a precision mousing surface? Why pick an Everglide one? And is this the right design for you? Read our review to find out the answers to all these questions and more!

- EverglidePrice - £15

Friday is release day in the UK, and this week there is a bonanza of new games available. The official Olympics game "Sydney 2000" from Eidos is now available for all you athletics fans, while Virgin have had a bumper week with the release of three new games - "Ka'Roo", "Road War" and "Search & Rescue 2". Thanks as usual to Nemesis for confirming those releases. For all the latest UK release information, check EuroGamer's UK release date list, now tracking over a hundred games due for release in the UK over the next year.