Even though we didn’t see Richard Hammond a.k.a. the Hamster driving a Formula One racing car in the last series of Top Gear, here’s a classic video clip of the Stig driving the championship-winning Renault around the Top Gear test track.

The Stig* recorded an impressive lap time (under 60 seconds). No other car, not even a race-spec Aston Martin DBR9 can beat it.

Relive the moment with these two fantastic clips, shown below.

* The Stig driving the 2004 Renault F1 racing car turned out to be the then test driver, Heikki Kovalainen. The true identity of the ‘white suited’ Stig remains unknown, but I have a funny feeling its sports car racer Ben Collins…

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On-board with the Stig

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Former Malcolm In The Middle star Frankie Muniz has turned his back on acting to focus on a career as a professional racing driver.

The speed-obsessed actor will be taking part in the upcoming Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in California, aiming for a win in the Champ Car Atlantic Series.

Race spokeswoman Sherry Perez says, “He’s (Muniz) had such success as an actor at such a young age and now it’s almost like he’s starting over again… as a race car driver.”

Muniz will be racing for Jenson MotorSport in the event and he actually won the Toyota Pro/Celebrity race back in 2005. Good luck Malcolm, err… I mean Frankie!

This is your unique opportunity to sample the highly anticipated trailer to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, which will be launched simultaneously on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this October.

It certainly looks impressive, running at 720p resolution and in real-time. In addition, a new RAGE graphic engine is used, which made it debut in Rockstar’s arcade table tennis game.

As for the setting, the familiar landmarks from New York City makes it presence with sights of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

However the vast city seems to be based on a new, revamped version of Liberty City. In one scene from the trailer, a ship registered to Liberty City is shown docked at a wharf with the signage Liberty Ferry. In another, there is a skyscraper with a Liberteen logo. And finally, in a Times Square-like plaza, a Liberty Tree newspaper sign can be seen, including a small banner that appears to say: “Welcome to Liberty City.”

It is unclear if the in-game footage is taken from either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 version, but one thing can be certain, the GTA humour is still there. Re-creations of various landmarks had parody names, including the MetLife Building, which features a giant “GetaLife” logo. The Times Square replica contains a movie poster for the imaginary film “I Slept With Your Mom” and a billboard for “Top Hooker”, an apparent parody of reality TV show America’s Next Top Model. The trailer also shows that several faux brands from San Andreas including Sprunk, Cluckin’ Bell Chicken, and BurgerShot.

The trailer ends with a close-up image of a bearded man with short black hair looking around.

Grand Theft Auto IV ships in the US on October 16 and in Europe on October 19.

Download a High Resolution version of the trailer here or see a clip of the trailer from YouTube (shown below).

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It’s official. The special edition Xbox 360 is for real. For the past few months, there have been rumours that Microsoft were planning to launch a new model of the popular Xbox 360 console with HDMI support and a bigger capacity Hard Drive. Well, it seems that this particular advance model, named Elite, will be available in the US at the end of April. The price? Yours for only $479.99 or €479.99/£349.99.

The Xbox 360 Elite will feature a 120-gigabyte Hard Drive, an HDMI port, cables for HDMI, component and composite, an audio adapter for HDMI (offering crystal clear digital sound) and a new black finish. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use the smaller 65 nanometer chips, the built IPTV support (for watching videos via the Xbox Live Marketplace) or the built-in HD-DVD drive. Worse of all, the Elite does not include an integrate Wi-Fi, unlike the Nintendo Wii.

For those people worried about a limited run of available Elite machines, this model is here to stay, as are the Core and Premium versions of the Xbox 360.

As for when the Elite will be arriving in Europe, Tim Ellis, head of games at retailer HMV, says:

“All we understand is that it’s at some point perhaps around the late summer…I feel sure that there’ll be demand for this product, and Microsoft now enjoys the level of brand penetration and player loyalty for it to be successful… There should be quite a few core gamers out there that may want to upgrade or who will at least want the extra capacity now on offer.”

Even though Microsoft is positioning the Elite as a niche product designed for a small group of gamers interested in the increased storage demands of the Xbox Live Video Marketplace (and possibly the IPTV service) and the HDMI output. It will be fascinating how well receive this particular model compare to existing owners and its main rival Sony’s new HDMI and 60GB PlayStation 3.

In other related news, Microsoft has announced deals with distribution deals with five new video Marketplace partners.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment: They will be releasing its direct to video movies exclusively in high definition on Xbox LIVE simultaneous with their availability on DVD, starting with “Sublime” and later offering “Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.”

A&E Network: “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” “King of Cars,” “Gene Simmons Family Jewels,” “Driving Force” and “Criss Angel Mindfreak”

ADV Films: Top offerings from the #1 producer-distributor of Japanese animation (”anime”) outside of Japan

National Geographic: The television series “Is It Real?” and “Taboo” as well as programs such as “21 Days to Baghdad” and “Air Force One”

New Line Cinema: “Snakes on a Plane,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” and “Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny,” plus top titles including “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” and “Magnolia”

TotalVid: A broad action-sports offering including extreme skiing and snowboarding, skateboarding, motocross, surfing and mountain biking.

Will we see these outside the American market? It would be nice to download and watch these range of TV shows and films on offer from Microsoft, but just like the situation regarding videos on Apple’s iTunes Online Store, its all down to agreeing licenses from the distributors.

“freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again”

Yahoo! Mail vice president John Kremer

The battle for online email supremacy has now heated up, with Yahoo! announcing that it will upgrade its online storage for emails from 1GB to unlimited! While I’m an avid fan of GMail myself, this is in direct competition to Google who has so far offered 2.8GB of storage space to its registered members.

The move to unlimited storage space it seems was directed because of the rise of rich media content sharing amongst their users, however Yahoo are ensuring that this new announcement does not get abused by spammers. The service is for personal use only but no further news in terms of maximum file sizes allowed for attachments and the small print just yet. All of this however will take place within the next few months to ensure a smooth transition for Yahoo! so there is no strict ETA. With Yahoo! moving into the unlimited storage space this could filter though to Flickr too, a popular photo sharing service with a huge userbase.

“We are looking at those on a case-by-case basis,” said Yahoo! Mail vice president John Kremer which suggests other surprised could be on its way. Competition is good for the market and at the end of the day the consumer wins. Lets hope that more good news is on the way!

LG and Google has announced their partnership which will see many popular Google services being pre-loaded on LG Mobile phones in mid 2007. Services such as Google Maps, GMail and Blogger Mobile will be available as well as Google Search via an icon within the applications menu from the off.

While you can access these services on WAP enabled mobile phones already it is Google’s first step into actually having such services pre-installed, offering the user instant access. No news just yet as to which LG Mobile’s will get such treatment and no news either if new LG Shine mobile will also get the extra features built in.

Now if only mobile phone companies did the same with Opera Mini…

For the first time in video game history, Nintendo’s famed plumber and hero of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario, and Sega’s super fast blue hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog will team up to compete in video game simulated Olympic events this winter. The game is planned for release around Christmas of this year for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. Sega will be put in charge of the game’s release in North America and Europe, while Japan will receive their release from Nintendo.

“Mario and Sonic have been respectful rivals since the early days of video games. In fact, for a long time they have been discussing the possibility of one day competing against each other,” says Shigeru Miyamoto, the senior marketing director and general manager of Nintendo. “Now that they have been given the perfect opportunity to meet at the Olympic Games, we may finally learn who is actually faster, Mario or Sonic?”

Players will have the opportunity to choose among a myriad of characters from Sega and Nintendo games such as Luigi, Knuckles, Yoshi, Tails, and more to compete in events as seen in the Olympics, like track and field, swimming, and even table tennis.

This is both a historic and fascinating period in video game history for two video game company rivals: Sega and Nintendo. Just what kind of surprises will we see from these two? We’ll have to see in winter!

According to an article with video game trade magazine MCV, Sony’s next generation console has become the fastest-selling home console in the UK during its launch weekend.

A reported 165,000 PlayStation 3 units were sold beating the top selling Nintendo Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, with 105,000 and 70,000 units respectively.

Sony’s handheld system, the PSP, continues to sell well but it is unclear how it compares to the popular Nintendo DS.

Unlike the mass hysteria for the Nintendo Wii with every unit sold out, there is plenty of PlayStation 3 left in the 220,000 strong initial shipment. It will be interesting how many will be sold in the next coming weeks.

In addition the top 20 software chart reveals that seven titles for the PlayStation 3 has made a significant impact in what British gamers like to play.

1. Resistance: Fall of Man (Sony)
2. MotorStorm (Sony)
3. Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 (Codemasters)
4. Virtua Tennis 3 (Sega)
5. Call of Duty 3 (Activision)
6. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (Take 2)
7. Formula 1 Championship Edition (Sony)
8. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (THQ)
9. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 (Electronic Arts)
10. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (Ubisoft)
11. Ridge Racer 7 (Namco Bandai)
12. Def Jam: Icon (Electronic Arts)
13. Fight Night Round 3 (Electronic Arts)
14. Virtua Fighter 5 (Sega)
15. UEFA Champions League 2006 – 2007 (Electronic Arts)
16. Genji : Days of the Blade (Sony)
17. Need for Speed Carbon (Electronic Arts)
18. Final Fantasy XII (Square Enix)
19. TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Ubisoft)
20. Crackdown (Microsoft)

Unfortunately, there are no sale figures but it can be said that Resistance and MotorStorm proves to be the most popular choice for the new system.

How does a Japanese television company promote the new Formula One season? With this stylish and anime-style intro to the opening round of the FIA Formula One World Championship.

This amusing video clip was created by Fuji TV and features music by Queen. Seeing an anime version of Jenson Button and double world champion Fernando Alonso is… quite different!

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After months of delays, the next generation console from Sony is finally launched in Europe with both cheers and indifferences.

In the UK, the most successful launch took place in central London in the early hours of Friday morning with the news that the first one hundred people queuing up to buy the PlayStation 3 at Virgin Megastore received a brand-new 42-inch HD LCD television set for free.

Those lucky people – who have been waiting outside the shop for over 36 hours – were rewarded with a grand gift from Sony (valued around £2,000). That was a very nice gesture from the Japanese company to do this, you would think, but some believe it was a desperate marketing ploy to generate good publicity after weeks of negative press in the media…

The same can’t be said for the rest of Europe however. In France and Germany for example, many stores opened late into the night but there was a lack of interest from the crowd.

In fact, rival Microsoft ‘gate crashed’ the PlayStation event with publicity stunts including a boat decked out in Xbox 360 logos! And even more bizarre, free chairs were given out to those people waiting in line with a URL address printed onto it. That website pointed to a cheeky message that Sony are late into the next generation race…

Nevertheless, Sony is pleased to find out that early sales of the PlayStation 3 are selling faster than the predecessor model, the PlayStation 2.

Sony believes that the combination of a high-definition Blu-ray player, online capabilities and gaming powered by the Cell processor will convince gamers to spend £425 (€599) on the machine.

“High definition is very important to people,” said Ray Maguire, head of Sony Computer Entertainment in the UK.

“A lot of people have bought flat panel TVs and they want content to go on it and PlayStation 3 is one of the few places they can get that kind of experience.”

The battle between the three consoles (PS3, Wii and Xbox 360) has arrived in Europe. Let’s see who will come out strong.