Due to an overwhelming embarrassment and a fear of being lynched, poetry will not be making a return this week. It may well be the season of goodwill but that doesn't seem to apply to the Future Gamer Chat Forum

What started out as an unclear posting about Nintendo and Sony getting sued about something or other turned into a full-scale multinational brawl. Let's not go into detail but if we say that it involved the French then you'll probably get the idea! On a positive note (statistically anyway), this was the longest ever thread, with over 30 posts, and spawned many follow-ups such as "Bandwagon... sheep... cult followers", "Sieg Heil" and so on. Apart from this saga, the Future forum has been pretty quiet of late.

'Andy XL' said, "cheerio" until next year, so no more quiz games for 'Hiryu' to dominate. Rumours spread across the forum that International Superstar Soccer will make an appearance on the Dreamcast. Finally, 'Dodocream' announced the results of the "Most respected forum regular" - 'Mikfoz' emerged victorious. Yes, he's that popular! Other regulars who got votes were 'Kaneda', 'Wolfchild' and 'Jaffa'. And, bizarrely, even 'Felix' got 5% of the votes - guess someone liked his poetry from last week!

"A demo a day keeps the boredom away" or something. Ahem. We've got three spanking new demos for you this week. The War In Heaven, Interstate '82 , and Test Drive Off-Road 3 can all be downloaded right about now. Funk soul brother, an' all that.

Latest additions to the Hints and Tips database include Delta Force 2 on PC, Tomorrow Never Dies on the PlayStation, NBA Live 2000 on N64 and Trickstyle on the Dreamcast. We've also got patches and updates for all the latest games.