Industry paper CTW lead this week with a story that they're to launch some new industry awards. The CTW People Awards are designed to recognise the achievements of individuals within the industry, rather than games. Which is nice. Readers of CTW and the CTW News Digest (a weekly email magazine along the lines of Future Gamer) will be able to vote, so, of course, our Mr Smith will be expecting your full support. He's even threatening to bring Game Kid back if you vote for anyone else...

On a less self-congratulatory note, CTW give front page space to the LucasArts/Sega deal whereby LucasArts will be bringing some of their big-name games to Dreamcast, kicking off with Star Wars: Episode One, Racer. A worrying story buried within CTW's pages also caught our eye this week. According to some research commissioned by Microsoft, UK PC owners are the least sexy in Europe, with some 27 per cent of them preferring to be on their beloved PCs than, er, on their beloveds. If you see what we mean. Actually, we've seen some of those beloveds and you'd rather play Half-Life as well, to be honest.

MCV lead with the story that Activision and THQ have been in talks and that a merger between the two companies is definitely off, but Activision are now talking to other companies along the same lines. Also on MCV's front page, and neatly tying in with our main feature this week, is the story that the main PlayStation magazines have been experiencing a drop in circulation of late as more casual gamers get into playing games. The 'casuals' are apparently still buying games but they don't bother to buy magazines first to find out which ones are good and which aren't. It'll only take a couple of naff purchases for them to see the error of their ways, surely?