Archived News:
Sierra's Team Fortress 2 site
has posted two all-new screenshots in their Media section to
"start your week out right by checking out the latest in Team Fortress 2
splendor." Thanks Tymetodie.
Future Games Network's Giants
preview is up (we were sent word of this earlier today, but had trouble accessing the
site before now) looking ahead at this upcoming game of living large talking with Bob
Stevenson, "Co-Art/Design Director, Vice President, and Wine Taster at Planet Moon
Studios." The preview offers several exclusive new screenshots.
I see on Voodoo Extreme that The
Adrenaline Vault Downloads Demo has a playable demo of Force 21, a turn-based strategy
dealie from Red Storm Entertainment. Also, FalconŽ 4.0 update page has a
Version 1.07 US and UK update for Falcon 4.0. Thanks VeeSPIKE.
Inside
Mac Games has posted their MacWorld Expo wrapup, featuring the author's
opinions of the various games and game hardware shown on the show floor, including
the iBook, Halo, and some new Mac-only games.
Just because we care so much about you, we've gone and posted two new shots
from Accolade's big angry robots game Slave Zero. Cool, huh?
Bungie.org has posted
a 10 minute
interview with Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, in what they describe as "20MB
of NOT high quality video." Halo is the topic of the hour, as the interview
was conducted at last week's MacWorld Expo, and amongst the questions are, "will
Halo have body count?" and the ever important, "how cool is Steve
Jobs?"
PC Gamer Online's FreeSpace 2 preview
is up looking ahead at the sequel to Descent FreeSpace: The Great War in a preview that
features exclusive screenshots and an interview with Jim Boone, the game's producer.
U-Games interviews Chris Norden
talking with the lead programmer on ION Storm's upcoming action/RPG, Deus Ex talking about
the enhancements they've made to the Unreal engine that cause him to say "you won't
even recognize it as the Unreal engine when you play the game."
Halflife.org has posted a new edition of Yappin'
With Yahn, their regular column by Yahn Bernier, the author of BSP and the networking
geek over at Valve Software. Contained in this edition are Yahn's favorite games,
how to reproduce that Daikatana rain effect in Half-Life, and porting HL mods
to Team Fortress 2.
GameSpot UK has updated their Unreal
Tournament Screenshot Gallery, but there's definitely something freaky-deeky with that
first image, now isn't there? I'm thinking that's concept art (actually, I'm thinking it's
Alicia Silverstone). They've also delivered the Unreal
Tournament Hands On they promised last week, giving their impressions of the game
after some time with the latest build in their grubby little hands.
Also up on GameSpot UK is an article titled Developers At Play
asks the top names in game design their winning game strategies, tapping the minds of
Levelord, Firaxis' Brian Reynolds, Brad Wardell, Gabe Newell, LucasArts' Tim Schafer,
PopTop's Phil Steinmeyer, Blizzard's Bill Roper, and SimCity designer Will Wright.
MDK 2 Preview on
GameLinks.Net declares "wackiness ahead" as the look forward to the upcoming
sequel to MDK, which of course, stands for Mom Doesn't Know.
A New Venom
Screenshots and Demo Update on GA-Source has word on the planned release later this
week of the Venom: hardware test, the first demo of GSC Game World's Vital Engine ZL. The
update clarifies that as the hardware test name suggests, this release is not actually a
game demo, but is intended for testing compatibility with your hardware. The update goes
on to say: "The next demo will include two levels and a full set of special effects.
It will be released in late August." The update also includes four new screenshots of
Venom. Thanks Matthew Rorie for pointing out a couple of areas in this story that needed
clarification after it was first posted.
3dfx Interactive Targets
Business Users with New Velocity Brand is a 3dfx press release announcing a new
business brand called the Velocity, which I think it's safe to say should be avoided by
hardcore gamers. Thanks kabloie. The release describes the debut of the Velocity 100 and
Velocity 200, 2X AGP cards with 8 MB and 16 MB of RAM respectively. The Velocity 100's
MSRP is US$69.
TalonSoft to Ship Hidden & Dangerous is a company press release that has word of the completion of the US version of the game that the release calls the "No. 2 on UK PC Sales Charts According to
ChartTrack." Thanks GA-Source. Here's the
lowdown:
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO - news), and its subsidiary, TalonSoft Inc.,
announced today that "Hidden & Dangerous" will be shipping to stores
nationwide beginning today, Monday, July 26. The game was developed by up and coming
international game developer, Illusion Softworks.
Hidden & Dangerous was released to the UK market in early July, where it was met with
immediate success. The game is currently at number 2 on the PC sales charts according to
ChartTrack. A resurgence of interest in World War II and strong word-of-mouth is expected
to help fuel strong sales in the US.
Hidden & Dangerous sets a new level of excellence for the squad-based combat genre.
Players will find the game to be an extraordinary combination of tactical combat,
strategic planning, and exciting action. Gamers will be responsible for leading a four-man
squad of elite paratroopers on daring commando raids behind enemy lines.
Using a revolutionary new graphics engine called the Insanity engine, players will
experience World War II combat action like never before. Hidden & Dangerous is set in
a truly 3D universe that incorporates beautifully rendered backgrounds, objects, and
vehicles, as well as realistic terrain. Players can easily toggle between 1st and 3rd
person views during gameplay, including combat sequences. The game offers support for a
wide variety of 3D accelerator cards, such as the VooDoo product line from 3Dfx.
Players will have 23 unique, immersive campaigns to choose from in Hidden & Dangerous.
The game includes a roster of 40 international commandos, from which players must build
their squad of soldiers to complete a series of missions. The advanced overhead mapping
system allows for precision planning of squad movement and attacks. The game's powerful AI
will put players' skills to the test as enemy soldiers can see, hear, and react to
player's movements and sounds. In addition, sophisticated environmental effects like rain,
snow, fog, and sleet will affect mission difficulty.
The Rocket Crowbar Home has a
new version 11 of this Half-Life modification. The new release fixes a single bug and also
adds "old school style" CTF play. Also, Prax Entertainment's Immediate Half-Life
version 2.0 is now available, a tool that allows you to launch Half-Life maps with
individualized custom configurations.
An HTML version of the BattleCruiser
3020 Development Update that I attempted to summarize earlier ( story) is now available online with more detail about planned BC3020,
BC Online, and even BC 3030 news,
which is the new name for the planned BC Strike Pack.
The Kingpin Beta Testing page mentioned
earlier ( story) already has a newer beta patch for Kingpin that brings Xatrix'
Quake II-engine game where you live a life of crime, up to version 1.13c. It looks likely
that this binary will be updated fairly frequently. Thanks Cliff Yaun.
Results are rolling in from Rapture '99. There are several sites with extensive coverage of this international tourney, I'm cleverly excerpting (and heavily editing) some stuff from Challenge.AU because it gives links to so many other site's coverage along with an idea of some results. Thanks Aardappel. Checking out some of the fine coverage in the links is recommended for the full story:
It's all over and the big news is not so much the EU win over North America (US
team) - although that is certainly huge news, it's the Irish team beating England to take
out the 4 Nations finals. In the third game (out of the best-of-three) they came back from
30-down to win by a single frag...In other results, Kane beat his SK teammate Timber in
the "Elite 1-on-1 Tourney" to cement his rep as the best Quake player still
playing the game today. The other two contenders would be LakermaN and Thresh. LakermaN
has "retired" and may be back for Q3, and Thresh, well, he seems to have other
things to do these days (does he spend hours practicing Q3A? We'll have to wait and see).
Is this the last we'll see of serious 1-on-1 in Quake? I hope not, considering that the
1-on-1 Q3A demos I've watched so far are very slow and tedious by comparison.
The "US vs EU Clash of the Continents" was a victory for Europe by five games to
four, after a grueling nine games of DM3. All the games EU won were close, in the case of
the third game only 7 frags separated the two teams. NA (North America) apparently got a
40 frag lead in the 9th game, but the EU guys came back to win another very narrow
victory...There's some good coverage on FPSGamers, some
match-by-match commentary on Methos
Quake, and there is lots of useful stuff on Quake Nation. Over on Spores
Den, Bert (who watched the games by proxy) offers his thoughts on the match,
suggesting that one of the problems the NA guys had was "poor pent
control"...I'm still waiting to d/l and check out more demos (watched Cable's POV in
EU-vs-US game 2 last night). Some of them (including Kane in the EU vs US games) are up at
Quake Nation and some more
(including duel demos) are at FPSGamers. All in all Rapture'99 appears to have been a huge amount of
fun, and it certainly produced some of the biggest and best games of Quake ever. Now if
only we can all do it again with Q3A, and actually have the US and EU teams both playing
"current" games with the same level of excitement. I guess that's all up to JC
and his sixth sense for what makes good gameplay.
Chris sends word that he's posted a new version 1.02 of WinGlide on Chris' WinGlide Page.
WinGlide allows 3D accelerated output in a window using Voodoo-based accelerators, and the
new version fixes a thread synchronization bug that could cause problems when
multiprocessor optimizations are enabled (this problem only occurs in version 1.01's SMP
support).
News from a couple of noted Half-Life mods under construction. The Sherman Project site has been updated with 30 new screenshots of this "realistic military mod that focuses on teamplay multiplayer aspects." Meanwhile, word over on the Action Half-Life site is that they probably won't post any more screenshots, but that's because they give word (as of last week) that they plan on releasing the first Half-Life version of their popular Quake II mod on Thursday of this week to coincide with an on-location event in San Francisco's Club-i (thanks Mang).
There is a new version 1.12b beta patch for Kingpin on the Kingpin Beta Testing page. Xatrix
Programmer Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin updated his .plan mentioning the Kingpin Linux forum
mentioned below ( story),
as well as word on a problems ( story) with the just-released version 1.1 patch ( story), that have caused him to open up Kingpin Beta Testing to the public (thanks
Planet Kingpin). Here's the scoop on that:
It appears there was a major crash in the Kingpin patch client, which only seems
to occur with the particular binaries that were released. I believe this may be the
unfortunate occurance of a MSVC 6.0 bug, which causes some builds to screw up. At any
rate, the onus falls on me, for not having that particular build tested before release.
As a result of this, I have decided to open up the Kingpin beta testing to the public.
With most of us on holidays (yes, that includes me) at the moment, I'm thinking the best
thing to do, is to make what would usually be internal builds, available to anyone willing
to help the testing process. Then, once these builds reach a state where things are
running smoothly, I'll release that build as the official patch.
This way those that are experiencing major problems with the commercial release, can get
access to builds that may fix their problems, or at least they can help me get their
problem fixed sooner, rather than later.
The beta page can be found here
Before It's Done interviews Kenn
Hoekstra in another Q&A with Raven's project administrator about Soldier of
Fortune, currently under construction over at Raven.
No bullets, but you can take it: GA-Source's
Exclusive Slave Zero Screenshots are up with two more looks at Accolade's upcoming
rock-em sock-em robots game. There's also a GA-Source
TreadMarks Screenshots and Development Update with five shots and a blurb from Seumas
McNally. Also, GA-Source's
BlockWar screenshots showing off this 3D Real-Time Urban Warfare game in-progress at
KaosKontrol Productions. There are a bunch of new Star Trek New Worlds screenshots
on Interplay's site. These new Homeworld
shots add some action shots from the latest build. Also 3DFiles.Com's Ultima IX
Ascension Movie is a mirror of this walkthrough of Ultima IX: Ascension "by Lord
British Himself." Thanks Ian Kell.
LinuxGames
Forums offers help for those trying to run the Kingpin Linux ports.
BattleCruiser Online's Galcom News Network has
word of some new BC3020AD Shots
(the six at the bottom) as well as shots of new units and some in-ship shots with some prelim
place-holders (the game will feature the entire four deck interior of a ship). Word
from BC high command is that plans are on the boards for BC3K Online, an online version of
the game, which will feature a free beta test period, as well as BC 3030, the planned sequel.
NPR
Online's Weekend Edition Sunday has a RealPlayer
format version of a show
on LAN Parties, something they call a new trend in Southern California (it's hard not
to believe that voice-over guy isn't goofing, a la Brian Unger, the ex-Daily Show
correspondent). The show hypes the Beat
Down (you never new how desperately you wanted to be invited to that, did you?), and
offers commentary from Bastard about violence in gaming. Thanks Camp Trexler.
Goldbug's code-mods page has a
Railgun for Quake 1 mod. While you're cool-ifying your classic Quake weapons, you might
want to check out The NecroHunter's Lair
which has a new mod that replaces the oh-so-suckful axe with a much cooler (but likely
equally suckful) lightsaber.
The GSLogMod site has the the latest
version of the standard logging DM mod (sl-dm) for Linux (other platforms will be
supported soon). This Quake II mod logs games using the Logging Standard. Logs
can be sent to a file and/or remote machine (using UDP and/or TCP), and game statistics
can be generated and displayed on the remote in real time.
AMD's Know the Code! Contest
offers a trip to ECTS as grand prize, and a loaded Athlon system as first prize in a
competition looking for the best piece of 3DNow! optimized code. Thanks AMD Zone. Also up for grabs are copies of CodeWarriorŽ
Pro 5, and TNT2-Ultra cards, and each complete entry will net the entrant a free AMD
Athlon t-shirt.
- The Wanted page has word that this Quake II
conversion devoted to the old west is being ported to Half-Life, with the ultimate goal of
a commercial release...
- The ILL Clan (makers of Apartment Huntin') together with StarFury (of the Devil's Covenant movie) will present a
QMovie workshop on Friday Aug, 6 from 7:30-9:00 PM at QuakeCon99.
The workshop will discuss production techniques for creating movies with the Quake or
Quake II engine...
- Tzar Heaven's Beta signup
offers a chance to test this game, described as "fantasy-medieval realtime strategy
game with a touch of RPG"...
- The Quake Sanitation Authority has info
of a new private beta of LFire CTF 2.0 B125 with enhanced bot protection...
Wow, sometimes things just refuse to go smoothly. While loony was tending the fort, the
database ran out of space in spite of a week-old 10 GB drive that was just added (it
apparently is currently serving some sort of decorative capacity). Things are under
control now, but I find that a stretch of the thousands of emails (a down server generates
a lot of mail) that arrived over the weekend are munged together (perhaps due to the same disk
space problem), making catching up all that much more difficult. Oh yeah, and the airline
lost our luggage (no kidding). Like I said...sometimes things just refuse to go smoothly.
Neat thing of the weekend was definitely seeing American Pie with my in-laws,
just to see how impossible to embarrass they truly are...we all laughed until our ribs
hurt.
Link of the Day: TV's
Springer Says He Will Weigh U.S. Senate Bid. Thanks Apache. Why do I fear the voters
will cry Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!
I received an e-mail from Red Storm's
webmistress, Mur Lafferty, that despite earlier reports of a Rogue Spear demo
being released sometime in the next three weeks ( story)
they're working on finishing the game, and therefore haven't set a date for
the demo as of yet. There will definitely be a demo released, just not quite
as soon as many of us had hoped.
A new version of the Tread level editor
(1.11) has been released (thanks Redwood).
This version adds support for Kingpin, as well as some other new features. A downloadable,
10 day trial version of the editor is available, but at the end of the trial you
are required to pay for it. An earlier version (1.02) is available for free, however you won't get any of the new features.
Leinen Software
(the people who brought you the Unreal Launcher and the Battlezone Configuration
Utility) have produced an Aliens vs. Predator Launcher, which allows you to
easily turn on a whole slew of options. Here's a quick list:
- Display frames/sec. and number of polygons.
- Adjust volume and speed of the motiontracker.
- Adjust time- and leanscale.
- Adjust RGB-coloring of the sky.
- Access cheat codes like GOD and ALLWEAPONS.
- Pre-load additional bots.
Canopus has posted step
by step directions for getting Pure3D cards (those being the Pure3D, Pure3D
II and II LX cards) working with Q3Test (thanks Vornskr). It contains both directions
for installing, as well as uninstalling the new drivers.
Bot Epidemic has posted a Q&A
with Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin, talking about the AI and bots (or lack
thereof) in Kingpin. There's also this bit that's of note for would-be Kingpin
mod authors: Cube: Is the Kingpin source code going to be appearing
soon, or is the intention to have the game patched a couple of times to remove
any lingering bugs before a release?
Ridah: That's the intention. I expect to have the code out within a week, but
that depends on how things go with the patches.
BE has also posted a new
version of Ridah's Eraser Bot (version 1.10). This is the version that appeared
in the Quake II add-on Extremities, and features "heavily re-worked CTF
and combat AI," as well as a new route-file for Q2CTF2. This is a patch
for the Win32 version of the Eraser bot only.
Federation
HQ, a Star Trek gaming site has posted an interview with three members of
Raven's Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force team: Chris Foster (the lead designer),
James Monroe (the lead programmer), and Michael Gummelt (the AI and scripting
programmer). It's a nice sized interview, containing lots of little bits of
information about Raven's Quake III: Arena engine title. In an oddly related
story, The Boomstick Joint
has posted a review of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D, a really cool map that
recreates the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Version 1.11 of the ReDeMpTiOn
bot for Sin has been released. This version tweaks the bot's combat abilities,
making him utilize the Rocket Launcher and Quantum Destabilizer more effectively,
as well as making them generally tougher opponents.
A non-beta release of Ping Tool 2.5
is out, now adding Q3Test "fun name" support, as well as fixing the
game launching errors NT and Roger Wilco users were reporting.
eXplosive
3D has posted a tutorial for all of you would-be programmers, appropriately
titled the 3D Programming Guide (A-Z). The topics covered include finding the
right compiler, writing your own Keyboard manager, and even drawing polygons
on the screen.
PCParadox
has posted nine new screenshots from Volition's space sequel, Freespace 2, showing
off a variety of different models and ships.
The angelic Billy Wilson spotted this
post on the Requiem message boards from 3DO's webmaster, confirming that
the Requiem: Avenging Angel editor will not be publicly released. It's short
and sweet: I'm sorry to say that the level editor will not be released.
Guthwulf
Webmaster 3DO
UGN3D
has posted some screenshots from the Homeworld intro movie, taken from a beta
version of the game that actually contains a single player game (as opposed
to most of the betas that are multiplayer only).
GA-RPG has updated their RPG Mythology
column, with this week's installment featuring Bio Ware's Greg Zeschuk talking
about more of his favorite RPGs, including some forgotten classics: Sierra's
The Shadow of Yserbius (part of the failed Sierra Network), and of course, Wasteland
(the game Fallout was a pseudo sequel to).
Well, I had quite a day yesterday, that's for sure. First things first: I woke
up, and discovered, much to my horror, that I was in excruciating pain (I have
a lousy back, and yesterday was just one of those days). Then I find out that
my ISDN line hadn't been turned on yet, and wouldn't be until Monday morning
(aargh). I can live with that, I suppose. Yesterday was a freaky-hot day here
in Brooklyn, and my air conditioning just didn't seem to cut it, which wasn't
exactly helping. But the topper of course, was when around 8:00 PM the server
started going wonky on me, and as I write this (the next morning), it still
hasn't been fixed. Aaargh. Sorry for the downtime folks, but if you can read
this, I'll assume it's been fixed. :)
Link of the Day: Storytime
- Curious George and the High-Tension Power Line. Because on some days,
this is the funniest thing in the world.
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