Last night Sega unveiled its much hyped Dreamcast console at a glitzy, star studded party in London quickly glossing over its three week delay in shipping date.

Sega is betting its family silver on the success of the Dreamcast, which will hit the shops on the 14 October priced at £199.

Originally, Dreamcast was due to ship on the 23 September, but issues relating to BT's role as ISP for the console have been blamed for the setback.

Shoichiro Irimajiri, president of Sega Enterprises who flew into the UK especially for the launch, confirmed that Sega will offer free Internet access on the Dreamcast, which comes with an internal modem.

Irimajiri said he accepted that the European market will be difficult for Sega because of the differing TV and telephone systems, but added that Europe is a very important element in the company's global strategy.

Dreamcast will be the first console to exploit handheld gaming through its Visual Memory unit(VM), which allows players to swap games with friends in the home, arcade or head to head using two VMs.

The Dreamcast was launched in November last year in Japan and has sold 1.5 million units. Sega has 300,000 advance orders in the US for the console and said it easily expects to sell another 1.5 million there by the end of this fiscal year.

Sega is hoping to sell one million units in Europe by the summer of 2000 and have at least 100 game titles in the market.

The company is splashing out 90 million euros on its marketing campaign for Dreamcast, which is equivalent to that spent on the recent Star Wars film. It is also signing up contracts with media partners and football clubs, including MTV, TF1, Arsenal and Saint Etienne to ensure that no one will escape knowing what Dreamcast is.

The gaming industry, which turned out in force for the launch, was suitably impressed by the new console. The celebs, including a variety of football players, actors from the East Enders television programme and the ever present Paula Yates, were kept literally caged in a VIP section.

Everyone there, however, agreed that to make it a blockbuster Sega will have to get titles to market fast.

Its promise of 40 titles by Christmas is an ambitious one.