Reports trickled in during E3 that Microsoft wasn't showing the 2001 incarnations of its NFL Fever or NBA Inside Drive Franchises. Sadly it turns out there was a reason for that. There won't be a NFL Fever or NBA Inside Drive 2001 this year. Yes folks, you read it right, EA Sports is the only game in town. Fortunately that isn't a terrible thing, EA Sports games (aside from baseball) tend to be pretty good. But NFL Fever and Inside Drive were also very good. Good enough to make EA nervous and nervous giant game companies tend to over-compensate and therefore work harder to make better games. Without competition, we all lose this time out. Rumor has it that MS is focusing on bringing those two franchises to the new XBox console system. Maybe a new PC incarnation, sigh... port, in 2002?

Interplay's Klingon Academy, which hopefully won't suck quite as much as Starfleet Academy, is going to include Game Commander software. This software will allow players to issue voice commands to control the action in the game. We've gotta hand it to Interplay and 14 degrees East on this one, sounds great. The real question is... does it understand Conversational Klingon? The first person to email me with the correct translation of the above phrase gets a free game at my expense (note: I didn't say it would be a good game). Good luck. Email address is at the beginning and end of this column.