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According to Robert Atkins of Ritual, "our AI system is one of the most advanced parts of the technology" in their new third person action game, "Heavy Metal FAKK2".

has announced that it will now be holding two more events this year in Dallas, both at the excellent Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Dallas, which hosted their recent Razer-CPL event.

The third person 3D adventure genre is well and truly thriving. Games such as Nocturne, Fear Effect and Martian Gothic : Unification have all helped to feed our addiction. With titles such as "Alone In The Dark 4", "Myst 3 : Exile" and "Escape From Monkey Island" on the horizon, the adventurer has never had it so good.

Our UK release date list has been updated again, this time with all the latest release information from UbiSoft and Virgin. Notable changes include MDK2, which has slipped another week to June 16th; Icewind Dale, which has been pushed back a week to June 30th; and Arcatera, which is now set for release on June 9th.

Ageing rockers Motley Crue have spoken about their involvement in Tribes 2, the sequel to the popular multiplayer team action game, Starsiege Tribes. As well as writing music for the game (eugh) they will apparently be appearing in it as well...

Having now played the game to excess, it is my sad duty to report that Lucasarts have fired another blank into the midst of the console gaming scene. Jedi Power Battles is no less of a mistake than the Phantom Menace games of last summer, despite some genuinely innovative ideas. There's just no clear intent on the part of Lucasarts any more to really achieve. Star Wars is now just a money-spinning device for the big-wigs in America. Jedi Power Battles places you in the shoes of one of five Jedi masters seen in The Phantom Menace last year. You can take on the role of Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu, Plo Koon, or Adi Gallia. Having been cast in one of these roles, you pick up your lightsaber and fight through different stages based on locations in the movie. There's little adventuring to be had in Jedi Power Battles. Fundamentally it has more in common with Final Fight than, say, Final Fantasy. The action really only consists of battling druids and such. There's a lot of platform-jumping, too, for you and one possible companion, as you fight off the threat of the greedy Trade Federation. It seems a little silly for such an action-packed and previously popular concept to flounder and fall flat on itself. The controls have a large part to play in this failure. For example, there's the "Lock on" feature, activated by R1. By activating this, you literally lock onto one of the enemies and duel them in a free-roaming 3D environment. The problem is, this only works sporadically, with the player sometimes locking onto the thin air next to your enemy, allowing a free shot. If you're trying to fight off a group of Droids, this can be most depressing. The controls aren't the only thing that screws up Jedi Power Battles for the player. There's also the somewhat irksome animations, which do little for the overall experience. The fast action of lightsaber battling requires precision and accuracy, not only in the control system, but also in the animation of the main characters. While good-looking on their own, the animation sequences really show themselves up in battle, because they're long and drawn out, and can't be interrupted. Jumping is another important portion of the gameplay in Jedi Power Battles, but thanks to the depressingly imprecise collision detection at work, you rarely learn the distances that your character is able to safely leap. Throughout the 10 large levels that make up Jedi Power Battles, there are an awful lot of jumps to make, and despite this, it's hard to guess whether the jump is actually safe distance. Yet even if it is, the collision detection is so off that you end up dying for the most part anyway. Each Jedi is endowed with his own combination moves, but these moves are too hard to pull off to make them viable options in combat. If you don't use them, you'll get by, but unless you do, you'll probably find the game to be rather too repetitive. Still, should you manage it, it'll rip apart your enemies nicely! There are some pretty cool power-ups in the mix as well, including the one that doubles the length of your lightsaber for a limited period. The background is moderately interactive, but not overly so. Some areas can be smacked about a bit to give you points, whilst others just encourage mindless mayhem with a big glowing laser sword…

Here's something you don't see every day... British TV company the BBC are looking for Unreal Tournament mod developers, mappers, coders and artists, preferably based here in the UK, to design a "celebrity based version of UT with enhancements to convey the excitement of a UT game over to a TV audience". The end result will be used in a forthcoming prime-time show on the company's BBC2 channel.

New today on EuroGamer is our review of Soldier of Fortune, the "realistic" first person shooter from the folks at Raven and Activision. Taking the role of John Mullins, a real life American government "consultant" (that's a mercenary to you and me), it is up to you to save the world by tracking down terrorists who have stolen four nuclear weapons.

Deathmatch oriented games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament are all well and good, but I am a sucker for a good single player romp. So it is with wide-eyed glee that I received Soldier of Fortune into my grubby mitts!

The troopers in the Unreal-engined squad based shooter "X-Com Alliance" have been getting chatty since we saw the game at ECTS last year. "Each trooper has over 200 lines of autonomous speech that cover everything from running out of ammo in a firefight to mourning over the loss of a fellow trooper", according to Christopher David Clark, the game's lead designer.

Darrin Hart, lead animator at Ritual Entertainment, has confirmed what many of us already suspected - the reason why so many third person action games (including their own "Heavy Metal : FAKK2") have a female lead character is because "a female's shape is much more attractive in motion than a male's figure" to the mostly male developers of the games, adding that he "would rather watch a nice female backside than male backside".

According to Angel Munoz, founder of The CPL, the organisation is aiming "to have our events reviewed in every sports section of every paper in the world. We want sports reporters and television crews to cover our events. We want to be a mainstream sport. These players are athletes, just as football or basketball players are athletes."

New today on EuroGamer is our look at overclocking the new Celeron II 566Mhz processor from Intel. The old Celeron 300a became the processor of choice for hardware fanatics thanks to its budget price and the ability to make it run comfortably at 450Mhz or higher.

After a strict regimen of "daily purification rituals and prayers in the direction of Relic's offices", the guys from Barking Dog Studios have decided that they should add a whole range of new features to "Homeworld : Cataclysm", their semi-sequel to last year's critically acclaimed space-bound real time strategy game, "Homeworld".

Intel originally released the Celeron as a cheap and cheerful processor for users on a budget, designed to compete with the K6-2 family from AMD. The first Celerons had no Level 2 cache though, and were very slow as a result.

Proving that online gaming is more addictive than crack, a player by the name of "Onveric" recently organised a marathon session on Microsoft's online space combat / strategy game, Allegiance.

Martin Snyder of Ethermoon has talked about the process of designing units for their real time strategy game, Strifeshadow -

New today on EuroGamer is our preview of Neverwinter Nights, an ambitious multiplayer RPG from Bioware (the folks behind Baldur's Gate) which allows you to be the Dungeon Master as well as being able to play the game normally. Add to that the ability to create your own "modules" for the game and link multiple servers to create a whole online world, and you have a very exciting game. Read our preview to find out more, and check out the latest screenshots of the game in action.

In the gaming industry, ideas seldom come along that are truly groundbreaking. Sim City may be hailed as the first god sim, but in fact the lowly Intellivision produced the first such game, called Utopia - an early Civilization-Sim City hybrid that was years ahead of its time.

Our UK release date list has been updated with the latest information from Virgin Interactive, who also distribute Interplay's games in the UK. MDK2 (which has just gone gold in America) has slipped to June 2nd, and both Icewind Dale and Dino Crisis have slipped to June 23rd. Bizarrely though, WarTorn's release date has actually come forwards by two weeks, to June 16th. Now there's something you don't see very often...

Our sister site ConsoleGamer is running a competition to give away some Dukes of Hazzard models, all of them signed by Ben Jones, the actor who played Cooter in the cult TV series!

In an interview for "Vampire : The Masquerade" fan site PlanetVampire, Kevin Manthei talks about the music for the game which he has been composing. He says that the developers "wanted the music to be cinematic and gripping .. a full on film score sound", and adds that the various characters will all have their own themes throughout the game as well.

Set your phasers to stun, EuroGamer has discovered a spatial anomaly off the starboard bow! [Cut that out right now! - Ed] Yes, it's our review of "Star Trek : Armada", the latest PC game based on the long-running science fiction movie and TV series franchise.

Star Trek has proven itself to be a winning formula when it comes to television and movies, with a legacy stretching thirty plus years proving testament to this fact. Why is it then, that despite the existence of the Star Trek 'universe' and its extensive 'history', we still have no really good Star Trek games?

According to Angel Munoz of The CPL, "almost 7,000,000 people worldwide were potentially exposed to the CPL" thanks to a combination of "TV reports, documentaries, radio interviews, newspaper articles, magazine articles, web coverage" of their recent $100,000 Razer-CPL event in Dallas, Texas. Pro-gaming is finally reaching the mainstream in a big way...

, the chain of British LAN gaming venues, are looking for both full time site managers and part-time staff as part of their expansion plans which we exclusively reported on last week.

There's a new mod watch over on Telefragged, including a review of FireArms for Half-Life, and some new screenshots of Tribal CTF for Quake 3.

Our EuroCup photo gallery is now online, featuring a dozen photographs taken during the EuroCup Quake 3 clan tournament that took place in Holland last weekend. This now completes our massive coverage of the event, which includes full reports on every game played during the weekend, plus interviews with three of the four clans involved and the organisers of the event.

John Carmack of id Software has passed judgement on the latest crop of graphics card, and it looks like he agrees with our own graphics card round-up, which we posted here on EuroGamer on Monday.

Good news for music fans and Quake 3 players alike - Mean Arena have developed an "official Pitchshifter Quake 3 CTF map", with one of the songs from Pitchshifter's new album "Deviant" as its soundtrack. Grab it here, turn the stereo up high, and rejoice in the sound of Pitchshifter mingling with your enemies' screams...