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Thief was one of the most innovative games of 1998, taking the first person shooter and turning it on its head by encouraging you to creep and sneak instead of run and gun. Thief II is essentially more of the same, but as the original was so good that isn't necessarily a bad thing...

As you may recall, Rayman appeared on 16-bit and 32-bit formats respectively a year or two back. It mildly impressed the gaming journalists who critically analysed it, but the public remained unconvinced; it sold fairly well, but its crude difficulty levels left it impenetrable and untouchable to the majority. Rayman 2 has been completely overhauled though - it's in true 3D for starters, and its previously hardcore puzzles are now taxing, but nothing frustrating. Thanks greatly to this; the game is very accessible, both to young and old. Instead of simply rehashing an old platform title in a different guise, Rayman 2 borrows the odd bit here and there, but the best sections have been put together by the creative geniuses at Ubisoft, and it all melds them all together into one seamless classic. Despite being developed in the West, Rayman 2 features the over-the-top madness approach of its Nipponese competitors in abundance. Each of the non-player-characters (NPCs) that you meet is Manga-like in appearance and full of quirky tales and one-liners. The way that you read the subtitles while the characters spiel unintelligible gibberish is one such Japanesey touch that adds to the experience. Larger than life characters like the hefty "Globox" and the colourful "Teensies" set the story alight and compel you to continue, in much the same way as Mario 64 did when Nintendo unveiled it. Again in true Japanese platform style, the artwork is exquisitely rendered, from shimmering waterfalls to rocky outcrops, it all looks beautiful and your jaw will definitely hit the ground on occasion. I had to pinch myself at times to remind myself that this was a console game, not a high-end PC title. In fact, the genre is basically there, right now. You view all this spectacular scenery from a camera positioned Tomb Raider-style just above and behind our hero. Unlike the aforementioned adventure title though, Rayman 2's camera moves and positions itself perfectly to view the action and rarely needs adjustment, although that thoughtful option is still easily accessible via the Dreamcast's X and Y buttons. Accessible is probably the best word to describe Rayman 2's control system on the whole. It's flawlessly executed for the most part, although Rayman's swimming mechanics are a bit irksome. On the whole though, controlling Rayman is simple and instantaneous; there's no half-second pause between cause and effect, which is present in other, lesser platform titles, and the game makes wonderful use of the whole Dreamcast controller. New abilities and options are presented to you via a cunning in-game tutorial interface. Whenever you see a "magical stone", you walk up to and jump on it and a little green flying chappy appears from nowhere, glimmering with magical dust and instructs you on a new technique or gives you a valuable clue on how to complete a particular puzzle. Even hours into the game, I found my useful companion revealing movements and techniques that I would never have figured upon! The puzzles are never conceptually challenging, thanks to clearly defined graphics. You can always either see what the solution is and it's the physical task of achieving it that requires thought, or you can ascertain how you're going to be tested in order to complete it. Usually your charming chum in the air will offer a hint for success too. Some puzzles trigger in-game cutscenes and pre-defined action sequences, such a bouncing down river rapids in a barrel or racing away from an approaching pirate ship, and thanks to the responsive control system, split second decisions are possible, and necessary in order to succeed. The soundtrack is another area that impressed me. From raging torrents of rock to accompany the action sequences to the soothing ambience of your more benign surroundings, everything fits in perfectly. Sound effects too, are precise and at time coquettish. I really enjoyed them and even turned down my customary Stereo-gaming-accompaniment in order to hear them better. In fact, there's very little of Rayman 2 that I found disagreeable. It's over fairly quickly, a quite insignificant 11 or 12 hours should suffice, which is nothing by today's standards, but you only notice it because you're so desperately scrabbling through the thing that time really does fly past you.

Shiny Entertainment have already released a patch (4.5 Mb) for their recently released game, Messiah which was released not too long ago. This patch is only for the US version, it will definitely not work for the UK version but a patch for the UK version will be out shortly. The patch fixes a lot of bugs in the game, I recommend that you take a look at the entire list over at 3D Files.

The latest Mod Watch is up over at Telefragged, featuring an interview with Team Reaction of Jailbreak fame, an interview with the DragonBall-Z mod team, a preview of Urban Terror, and some new shots of Q3Rally.

The Oxygen Tank have conducted an interview with Kim Lathrop, texture artist at Raven Software and he is currently working on Raven's upcoming Quake III engine powered game, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. They talk about some personal facts about Kim and there's a few blurbs about the Quake III engine in there as well.

Almost everything about this title oozes quality. From the flawless voice acting to the maddeningly addictive rolling block puzzles, Soul Reaver is a showcase to how great third person gaming can be. The intelligent storyline, chillingly dark plot and stunning visuals form an action adventure game that is currently without peer on any platform. Buy it, play it and savor every evil minute, this kind of game doesn't happen very often, make sure you don't miss out.

The UK Release Date List has been updated with all the latest information from Activision and UbiSoft, including release dates for "Star Wars Episode One : Obi Wan" (June) and "Star Trek : Conquest Online" (June 2nd). We've also had confirmation from Nemesis that Messiah was released today in the UK.

Last week we talked to Warren Spector about his long career in the gaming industry, taking in RPG companies Steve Jackson Games and TSR, and computer game developers Origin and Looking Glass.

Seems like everyone has taken a look at this upcoming video card from 3dfx. Redwood over at Stomped wrote up his quick Voodoo 5 impressions based on a visit to 3dfx earlier today, including a few comparison screenshots as well. And the hardware guru himself, Anand Lal Shimpi, has posted a lengthy article with his impressions of 3dfx's Voodoo 4 and 5, featuring all the juicy details.

Our partners at ModGamer have posted an interview with AnthonyJ, the man behind the Domination mod, which brings one of Unreal Tournament's excellent team play modes to Quake 3.

You begin the game in a classy looking hallway with two doors, your accompanied by some pleasant classical music and are free to browse though the past high scores proudly displayed on the walls. You can choose to navigate around the hall using the directional buttons, or choose your door using a menu system. It feels a bit odd walking round a non-violent game in the Quake style first person mode, but it does serve to make the rooms feel a little more tactile and realistic. The left door takes you to the pool room, a garishly American themed parlour complete with an authentic (and playable) Wurlitzer style jukebox, arcade machine, slot machine and of course a chrome edged pool table. The atmosphere is perfect with a bar along one wall and plenty of baseball memorabilia scattered around the pubs, and a basketball game viewable live on the telly. You can have a quick blast of the Dropzone arcade game, which is a rather crude defender clone from the 80's or chose to blow some virtual cash on the one armed bandit, and while these sub-games are fun for a while, and do offer a little variety from playing with the balls they don't really provide much lasting fun or enhancement to the main game. It's a shame the developers didn't link progress of these games into the main game, perhaps unlocking some new opponents for pool by getting a great Dropzone score, or new tunes on the jukebox by earning money on the slot machine. The real purpose of the room is the Pool table. Pool is great fun, not too stressful, easy rules and pockets like the channel tunnel. It's a perfect introduction to the game mechanics, and far easier than the trickier snooker table. The one player game lets you take on a series of opponents of increasing difficulty ending in a showdown with the super skilled Mr White himself. Whoever you are playing, the opponent is represented in the room as a ghostly pair of disembodied white gloves that constantly float around the table and while this is less obstructive than having a full sized player model filling your screen, it's a shame that all the opponents are depicted in the same fashion. The vitally important ball and table physics are convincing, and with the freely movable view down the cue it only takes a little while to get used to the way you place your shot. Controls using the Dreamcast controller do seem daunting at first, with some options quite a few presses away, soon you find however that your most used features such as shot strength and spin are easily accessible and easy to use. There's a number of different pool variants to choose from, with American and British rules and eight or nine ball configurations. The room and the table are visually impressive, the textures are extremely detailed and the ball models are nicely shaded and light-sourced giving them a nice solid look. It's unfortunate that the frame rates so poor though, a quick touch of the joystick in free look mode has the game engine struggling to keep up at a choppy and jerky low frame rate. It's not bad enough to interfere with play, but it's an irritation nonetheless. Moving along through the hallway to the snooker room, your presented with a more cultured environment, with a grandfather clock, a roaring log fire and soothing classical music. Diversions in this room include a very competent, playable draughts game and a great implementation of darts, both will take a fair amount of skill to master so offer more of a challenge than the pool room offerings. The large snooker table dominates the centre of the room, and its on this monster that you can take on another series of computer controlled players in the more complex game of snooker. The snooker is considerably more difficult than the pool, with the larger table and smaller pockets serving to make those long shots very tricky. The computer controlled opponents don't seem to suffer too much, with even the inept sounding Clumsy Colin making tasty breaks into the double figures. The pool hall is definitely the place to warm up and hone your skills before moving into the more challenging snooker room. Everything's been put together into an extremely likeable and authentic package, you can almost smell the chalk as you move your virtual player around the green felt of the tables, with the sounds of the balls connecting and sinking into pockets has been carefully crafted for full effect. There's plenty of neat touches too, like a book on the bar in the pool room containing pictures of the games development like a kind of virtual scrapbook, there's obviously a lot of love and attention that has been bestowed on this title. It's a great game for when you've got company too, my mates weren't eagerly flocking around my lair in the way they used to when I had a real table, but we all had a blast with the pool mode, although we found the Snooker a little too tricky for casual play.

I noticed over at VE that GameSpot UK have posted a huge (read: huge) feature covering Lionhead Studios' upcoming strategy/adventure game, Black & White. It is filled with information about the missions, the engine, the spells, the creatures and a bunch of other things. If you have any interest of all in this upcoming game then you can't afford to miss this feature.

"From Dusk Till Dawn" was a fantastic film, wasn't it? It was built up from the start as a simple cut-and-run kidnapping story, but after about an hour or so of calm it exploded into a vampire slaughter fest.

The latest version of server browser util GameSpy is now available to registered users, adding support for Urban Operations and Codename Eagle, as well as improving mod support for Quake 3 Arena and solving some problems with using GameSpy under Windows NT or 2000.

The Soldier of Fortune Center have posted another installment of their weekly designer's diary, written by Keith Fuller, programmer at Raven Software. In this lenghty installment Keith talks about about everyone's least favorite topic, bugs.

I spotted over on Voodoo Extreme that Legend Entertainment, the company behind the double Gaming Globe nominee "Wheel of Time", are looking for another level designer to work on their next project - Unreal 2. Send your resume and links to samples of your work to u2jobs@legendent.com if you're interested and willing to move out to Virginia...

I spotted a tasty tidbit over at the Shack, apparently Don "onethumb" MacAskill has gotten a new game company, Orcus Technologies off the ground. Their first project haven't been announced yet but they plan on doing an online game. They got a bunch of job openings for you really talented guys out there so check out their jobs page.

New today on EuroGamer is our hands-on preview of "Martian Gothic : Unification". More than just another Resident Evil clone, we put a beta version of the game through its paces to find out more. For the full scoop and several new shots of the game in action, read our preview now!

It's Wednesday, it must be interview day... This time it's 3D Action Planet getting in on the act, slapping up a quick interview with Dave Halstead of Human Head, talking about the company's viking action game "Rune", as well as those pesky Blair Witch games.

Back in 1996 NASA announced that it had found what looked like tiny fossil bacteria in a meteorite that had landed in Antarctica over ten thousand years ago. What made this so exciting at the time was that the meteorite was made up of rock which had been blasted off the surface of Mars millions of years ago...

The latest member of the EuroGamer Network, ConsoleGamer, is now live! The site will be covering all the major console platforms, including PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, N64 and X-Box.

After a week which has seen literally thousands of visitors casting their votes, the results for our first ever Gaming Globe awards are now online, including details of the winners in each of the fifteen categories as well as our own staff picks. We've also got "acceptance speeches" from some of the developers whose games won awards, so be sure and check it all out!

The movie industry has the Oscars, music has the GRAMMYs, journalism has the Pulitzers, and now the gaming industry has the Gaming Globes!

The Q3 Fortress website have been updated with a small "server side only" patch that fixes stability issues many servers have been seeing over the last few days. Please note that this is not a client update so don't download this unless you're running a server. Download the patch from their files section and if you haven't downloaded this mod yet then I strongly suggest that you do so, because it rocks.

, your source in humor for anything Team Fortress have conducted an interview with Robin Walker of Valve Software, the developers of Team Fortress II. They discuss vehicles, death factor, physics and a few other Team Fortress II related questions.

Christian "Disruptor" Antkow, level designer over at id Software made a short update to his .plan file today with his take on the recently released Quake III Fortress mod, which have received some great feedback. Be sure to check out our old news story about this mod for downloading location and other interesting stuff as well.

The lucky chaps over at Incite have gotten their hands on some spicy details on the upcoming Blair Witch: Episode 3 game, which is being developed by Ritual Entertainment. As an extra bonus they got a few screenshots of the game up, remember that the game is still in very early development so there's not a lot to see. To sort out any confusion here, there are three Blair Witch games in development and the other two are being developed by TRI (Nocturne) and Human Head Studios (Rune).

I noticed over at VE that the official website for Black Isle Studios' upcoming RPG, Icewind Dale have been updated. It's no major update, more like a development update on the game which is still on track for an early summer release. Be sure to check out the screenshots and the concept art over at the official website too, you can't afford to miss them.

: SAN JOSE, CA - March 10, 2000 - Bill Gates announced today at the annual Game Developers Conference that Microsoft Corp. is entering the video game world with the introduction of a future-generation dedicated video game console, currently code-named X-Box, designed to deliver intense, action-packed games. Building on the company's software expertise and advances in PC technology - such as 3-D graphics and Internet connectivity - Microsoft is developing a high-performance, easy-to-use platform that will enable developers to create better games, faster. Press releases, eh? A lot of hot air and technical wordplay, but in this case at least, the message is very clear; Microsoft is creating a computer gaming console entitled X-Box. That could mean anything though, the truth is very hard to fathom. As you can see, the teaser screenshots dotted around this article do little to help you, but Microsoft have already erected a small website at XBox.com to display the machine's specifications, along with these shots, so maybe those will help...

The recently opened Thief News has posted an interview with Steve Pearsall, Thief 2's project leader. The interview covers the game's completion, and where the series is likely to go in future. Can you say multiplayer?