Archived News:
Gamecenter has posted fourteen new screenshots of Starsiege: TRIBES 2, the first such images in a long time of Dynamix' upcoming team-based multiplayer-only shooter. According to the accompanying info, the game is now scheduled for release late this year.
Bungie has given their official Oni site a make-over, and in the process released four new screenshots (the top row) of their anime-inspired third-person action game. In related Oni news, today's MacWorld coverage on Bungie TV featured part 1 of an Oni Special, which should be available from the bTV Archive later tonight, if you missed the live feed.
The initial version of The Glyphs, a multiplayer mod for Heretic II has been released, featuring two maps and modified player models. The Glyphs is a mod that "removes Heretic II's standard weapons and replaces them with a flying disk that the player throws at enemies. The disk can be given special abilities for a limited time by taking them to a 'glyph', which is a special statue. Examples of the different abilities include Multidisk, Homing, and Buzzsaw."
The latest Freak of the Week image is up on PsychoNews, depicting not one but a pair of UniPsychos from Third Law's upcoming action game KISS Psycho Circus: the Nightmare Child.
RPOV has posted an interview
with Vince Farquharson, producer on Evolva at Computer Artworks. Evolva
is a sort of oddball shooter, where you can "customize" your character
by mutating them to suit your needs. The interview focuses mainly on the gameplay,
delving into the game's use of fuzzy logic, the puzzles, and the insane number
of skills available.
Thought Guild, the publisher of New Media Generation's first-person shooter Hired Team, has released a set of new screenshots of Hired Team: Trial, the multiplayer-only version of the game, which is scheduled for a release this Spring.
The unofficial Quake III Arena gameplay FAQ received a big update to version 2.5, adding tips and hints for survival in levels Q3TOURNEY4, Q3DM13 and Q3DM14, expanding the weapons analysis section, and adding and updating bits of info throughout the document.
WONSwap, the utility that helps users
find new maps and custom models, now supports Quake III Arena. The program also
supports Half-Life, SWAT 3, TRIBES, Unreal Tournament, and even Soldier of Fortune
(despite the fact that the game hasn't gone gold yet) amongst other games.
3DGPU.com has posted an interview with Jake Simpson, programmer at Raven Software on Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (back and forth between the two of them). The talk mainly focuses on graphics technology and programming, but there's also a run-down of his typical workday, if you're curious about that sort of thing.
Gamasutra has posted an article that originally ran in the April 1999 issue
of Game Developer Magazine, which features Multitude
developer Art Min's postmortem on Fireteam. The piece is particularly interesting
in light of the fact that the game is no longer available for purchase. Fireteam
was an isometric squad based multiplayer-only title, which featured real-time
voice communication.
Steve Jobs has completed his keynote address at MacWorld San Francisco, and while
there weren't any earth shattering revelations of note, id Software's John Carmack,
who is indeed on his honeymoon, did in fact make an appearance on video (it
would appear Anna brought along some video equipment in addition to that workstation)
talking briefly about their new MacOS X platform (and its use of OpenGL, of
course). While there was a planned demonstration of Quake III Arena on OS X,
the computer froze as the level was loading. You can watch
the keynote in streaming QuickTime on ZDTV, and don't forget Bungie's
live BTV at 1:00 PST from the show floor as well.
There are four new screenshots of Project IGI on the Innerloop Studios website Projects page, offering a glimpse of their upcoming third-person action game that is scheduled to be released next Summer through Eidos Interactive. The page also shows off some screenshots of a hybrid sports game for the Dreamcast console.
PC.IGN.com has posted a hands-on preview of Hidden & Dangerous: Devil's Bridge, the upcoming expansion pack to Illusion Softworks' squad-based tactical shooter, which is already out in Europe under the subtitle of Fight for Freedom. The article goes into fair detail about all aspects of the nine new missions, and comes with a slew of new screenshots.
A few updates from the wonderful world of FAQs and walkthroughs: the unofficial Unreal Tournament FAQ has been updated with a few more bits about Epic's acclaimed action game. The Wheel of Time Walkthrough was expanded with more guidance into the world of Robert Jordan, as depicted in Legend's action/strategy game. And finally, the Nocturne FAQ/Walkthrough has more help on Terminal Reality's spooky adventure.
There are three new "official" mutators (game modifications) for
Unreal Tournament on the Digital Extremes
website. Here's word from GameFan
on what they do:
- Volatile Ammunition: This mutator makes any ammunition pick-up in the game
explode when shot. Punish the ammo-hog with a devastating Flak-ammo chain
reaction!
- Volatile Weapons: When you kill your enemies, their weapons explode! Think
twice before using the Impact Hammer on those rocket-launching newbies!
- Team Beacon: Places a yellow icon above teammates in team games. A
must-have for the CTF junkies!
The QuakeWorld Revitalization Project
has the first release of their client proxy and secure server for QuakeWorld
that are intended to put an end to the rampant cheating that has sprung up in
QuakeWorld matches since the recent public release of the full Quake source code
( story).
The story contains a warning that there are bound to be errors in this beta
release, and backing up your original installation is advised before checking
this out. Thanks Ryan Stotts.
Raven's Eric Biessman updated
his .plan with an update about progress on Soldier of Fortune, Raven's
upcoming Quake II-powered mercenary shooter: Soldier of Fortune:
Things are going very well for SoF and we are crunching to finalize all of the
levels and make sure that they are tested, balanced, and fun.
CTF, realistic, and the other mods are also coming along quite well and we are
just starting to sit down and really playtest the heck out of them. With the
huge amount of deathmatch characters that you can play in the game (thanks to
the wonderful world of GHOUL), it is always fun to change your player look.
Over the last week, when 90% of Raven had time off, Dan Kramer and Keith Fuller
sat down and got realistic up and running. I must admit that while I am not
usually a fan of this style of play, I actually had fun. A lot of fun. For those
of you who know me, this is not small feat. ;)
Other than that, another day, another level...
Voodoo Extreme
interviews Tim Sweeney hitting the Epic lead programmer with several
questions about Unreal and Unreal Tournament, as well as upcoming games and
technologies.
The second part of Computer Games Online's
RUNE preview is online with more of a look ahead at this upcoming
third-person Norse action game from Human Head Studios, declaring "A
healthy Viking is a happy Viking" in describing the new health system
devised for the game.
A post by Epic's Tim Sweeney on SourceForge
opens the possibility that Epic would be willing to cooperate with someone
willing to do a port of Unreal Tournament to the BeOS (thanks BeBits).
Here's the scoop: The parts of the engine you'd need access to for a full
port aren't open-source right now, but if an experienced team or individual came
to us wanting to do a BeOS port, we'd seriously consider giving them access to
the complete source for that purpose. Know anyone? :-)
I get several emails each week from Be users wanting a port...
QWare Software News has
a new version 0.85 of QBind Free Edition, the key binding program that supports
the Quake family of games. The new release fixes some bugs, and adds support for
the latest versions of Quake III Arena and the Q3A Demo.
Rungy's Metropolis is a new site
looking to introduce beginners to the art of making mods for Quake III Arena.
Also, the Official Shaded Website has
a new release of this utility to help make those tricky shaders for Quake III
Arena models that fixes a few bugs. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński for both of those.
The first release of the Renegades Elite Match MOD
for Starsiege TRIBES is now available, originally intended "as a bug free
version of the popular renegades mod," the project has grown and now offers
several new features, including "beefed up and toned down weapons"
(presumably not simultaneously).
More TRIBES: Described as "at a very rough stage at the moment" Star Wars Battlegrounds
is now available for Starsiege TRIBES. There is actually an updated version from
the very first version posted yesterday (before it was reported here), so if you managed to find an early
version, you should probably re-download the new one. Thanks Killjoys.
The first release of IRCQW, a
modified version of the GL QuakeWorld client that allows the user to IRC while
playing Quake, is now available. While described as "not really a serious
mod," it is still said to work pretty well, so the author is interested in
whether other Quake programmers have interest in incorporating it into other
Quake revival projects.
Player registration is now underway for the Arena Duel Liga
(ADL), a Quake III Arena league with low and high ping categories competing
using both the demo and the full versions of Q3A. Also, There's more information
on Wireplay about Fragfest
2000 ( story)
which has attracted a number of entrants from outside the UK. Applicants are
still welcome but registrations must be in by January 9. The "Best
Deathmatch Level/Map" portion of the $150,000 Make Something Unreal Contest
is underway, offering $7,000 in prizes for the best submissions in the category.
Finally, Quake III CTF is a Q3A league
for individuals, DM clans, and CTF clans, with over 200 players already signed
up.
- The Counter-Strike page has
word of an experimental server patch on the admin forum
if you want to help track down that nasty lag bug. Thanks [NWH]NemesiS...
- RIVA Station has
posted an endless timedemo loop for Quake III Arena to stress test your
system (or tie it up so you can regain control of your ship--no wait, that
was asking the computer to calculate pi on Star Trek)...
- 3D Gamer's Edge has a
review up of single-player Quake II map titled Small Pile of Gibs (by
SmallPileofGibs) that they call "simply the best spq2 (including those
maps within the Q2 game and it's related mission packs)" they have ever
played, receiving their highest ever rating...
- Stealth Systems,
devoted to Quake III Arena bot development and support, have posted a few
Q3A bots, custom models for bots, word of their Bot Development Server (Bots
are on 24/7 playing CTF), and a custom .pk3 file to make the bot .cfg more
flexible and easy to edit...
- The Diablo II
screenshot of the week mirrored on The Labyrinth is the 44th shot of the
week, presumably the 52nd will be shot of the year. There is also a new Cinematic
screenshot of the week...
Still looking into the site routing, feel free to continue to send traceroutes
if you are so inclined (thanks). In troubleshooting something in my dial-up
networking (it's always something--for some reason nothing I can do gets windows
to ask me to log-in on booting--I must log out first), I discovered a
performance tip that I was unaware of: In Win9x Dial-up networking there's a
checkbox in the properties called "Log onto network," which just seems
so obviously something you would want under these circumstances. It turns out
checking this box makes your machine look for a Windows network to log into, so
if your ISP is Unix-based, like so many, unchecking this box cuts a huge chunk
of time off of how long it takes your machine to log on to the net (since your
machine will time out looking for this other network to log onto). I'm sure
there are a lot of you who knew this already, but it was news to me, as well as
some others I pointed it out to, so I imagine it will help some of you as well.
Link of the Day: The Smoking Gun
lives! Issue four is online.
Image of the Day: Sin's
John Blade redone by former Ritual Artist John "Butcher" Mueller,
looking just a bit grittier than the original.
Tritin Films' Quad
God, a Quake III Arena movie that was made using the demo/test version of the
game, has been released, and is available
for download at its official site (as well as Damage Gaming). The movie is available in low and high bandwidth
versions, and is in the Windows Media
Player's ASF format.
New Reality Gaming has posted a
brief Q&A with Chris Taylor, the creator of Total Annihilation and the
madman behind the recently announced title Dungeon Siege. Since no information
about the game is being discussed at this time he doesn't reveal anything new,
but he does give some thoughts on working on a RPG instead of a RTS game.
GameSpot News has posted nine
new screenshots from Monolith's upcoming isometric action title Sanity,
which is powered by their LithTech 2.0 engine. The shots are fairly low-res,
but they show off a number of the game's many different characters and locales.
SquareSoft
has posted a free, downloadable version of "Chocobo World" the mini-game
that was originally developed for the PocketStation, and is included with the
PC version of Final Fantasy VIII. As the PocketStation was never released in
the US, PSX owners couldn't play it (although the functionality is there, should
it ever come out stateside), but now it's available for everyone to download
on the official
FF8 PC page (thanks Dre for the tip).
A Focus on Levels has posted an
interview with Iikka Keranen, a well-known community level designer before
making his way into the gaming industry (he's currently at Looking Glass Studios).
Ikka talks about a number of level editing issues, including some general tips
for designers.
Another preview of Final Fantasy VIII has popped up, this time at Game-Guru.net. While not as lavishly illustrated with screenshots as today's earlier preview (see below), the article is based on a beta of the game, and particularly highlights the various improvements made over the previous installment in SquareSoft's long running role-playing series.
Dynamix has posted a
new image showing off the BioDerm Light Carapace model and skin from TRIBES
2 at TRIBES
Players. The BioDerms are a completely new class of character for this sequel,
and the image should give you a good idea of what they'll look like in the game.
John Matthews sent word of his latest shell script released on LinuxGames, which will install the first Unreal game (which was released for Win9x only) on a Linux system with Unreal Tournament, and allow most of the Unreal single-player game to be played with the UT Linux client. Several maps, as well as save games, don't work yet, though.
3DO has posted their support FAQ for Crusaders of Might and Magic, sporting an array of tips and solutions for problems you might be experiencing with their recently released third-person action adventure.
GameSpot UK has posted a
preview of the PC port of Final Fantasy VIII. The text has a pretty good
introduction to the game for those who missed out on the Playstation version,
and they've posted a great deal of new images, including some conceptual artwork,
and plenty of shots of the game's guardian forces and CGI sequences (which really
have to be seen to be believed).
There is a new preview of Command & Conquer: Renegade up on CGO, looking at Westwood's upcoming third-person action game set in the Command & Conquer universe. While the article has no new screenshots, it does offer a fairly comprehensive overview of the game based on a recent build.
Asheron's Call Vault has posted a developer profile of Sean Huxter, lead artist on the massively multiplayer 3D role-playing game. The brief article mainly covers his work on the project, and his gaming and other interests.
Firaxis' official site for Sid Meier's Dinosaurs (working title) has been updated
with a new installment
in Sid's Dino Diaries (thanks GA-Strategy).
This installment has Sid debating whether or not to make the game real time
or turn based, and while no answer is given, pros and cons for both are explained
in detail. There's also some new concept art to gawk at as well.
Damage Gaming has posted ten
new screenshots from Shiny's Messiah, as well as six of project lead Stuart
Roch's favorite previously released images. Messiah is nearing completion, and
should (hopefully) be finished soon.
A post by id Software's Graeme Devine to the
Quake3World.com seems to indicate that Mac Quake III Arena CD key
authentication issues should be a thing of the past (thanks Matthew
Riddle). Here's the poop: Hey.
As of today there should be no more issues with the Mac authentication process.
You do not have to download a patch.
If anyone is still having a Macintosh CD key problem please email me at zaphod@idsoftware.com
and I'll do my best to get things resolved.
Graeme.
Computer Games Online
previews RUNE with the first part of their look ahead at this upcoming game
of melee combat set in the heyday of the Viking warrior. Here's a quote that
includes word from Human Head's Chris Rhinehart on their straightforward manner
for handling puzzles: "There are machines you're going to have to
shut down [in particular on the dwarven level], but you're not going to have to
do a bunch of tiny things to something that you don't know what it does in the
first place." Some of the dwarven machines, for example, will be powered by
goblins running on wheels, which means that you can slaughter the beast to shut
down the machine.
GA-Source interviews Craig Alexander
talking with the general manager of Codemasters’ US development studio, who
have restarted development of their Unreal-engine squad-based tactical simulation (after Sierra cancelled it) that's based on the
adventures of the Navy SEALs. The game is now expected to ship in early 2001.
The Allbots Site has an updated
version of the Allbots mod for Quake III Arena. Allbots will allow you to set up
a Q3A game with more than one user-made bots, which would otherwise cancel each
other out when run together. The new version has code to allow 23 user-made bots
to coexist with the 32 original Q3A bots for a total of 55.
Version 1.1.0 of the Servarena
Win32 front-end for Quake III Arena servers is now available on their newly
relocated website. Servarena offers support for server and console passwords,
FFA, Tournament, Team Play, and CTF modes, automatic generation of map-cycling
scripts, one-button selection of all CTF, DM, or Tournament maps, and more.
A new version 1.0.9 of Q3 Build
on Rust offers the first non-beta release of this program described as the
"first and best compiler front end for Quake3 level design." The new
version includes "all the compiling options and full .aas, bot navigation
file, support."
The Quake3 2k Bash Tourney is accepting
clan sign-ups for an upcoming Q3A teamplay tournament. Word is that this is
"a selective tourney that will host and view every match that takes place
on the ladder."
The Force Clan's
Dork Hunter Contest is another politically incorrect celebration of
dorkiness from "The clan that needs no legs or cerebellums," looking
to highlight the "dorkiest" clan pages on the Internet. Remember,
please, no wagering.
Any question that the holidays have ended should be answered by comparing the
length of this list to the several that preceded it:
I mentioned recently that the routing problem that had many complaining of slow
access to this site had cleared up, which clearly they have for some (me
included) if not all that were experiencing the problem (I believe most folks
never experienced the problem in the first place). Since then, however, I've
gotten a couple of odd "the site is still slow for me" emails, so I'd
like to request anyone having what they believe to be an unusual problem
accessing the site to send along a copy of a traceroute or something to help
make a quick determination if there is some problem of which we're not aware, or
(more likely) just a couple of folks having some of the problems typical of the
Internet (by the way, it's not an indication of a problem once your
traceroute hits a string of time outs at the end, that's just the firewall).
Like I said, the site has been lightning fast for me for a week or more, but
then again, I am in the same area of the country as the server (New York City)
for the first time since 1996 when it was hosted on my local ISP, not that
physical location always matters on the Internet.
Link of the Day: 2000 Uses for Peanut Butter,
following yesterday's theme. Actually they list no less than 2,574 uses. Thanks
gw.
Story of the Day: Sperm survey by mailshot
(BBC News). "A major fertility survey being carried out by researchers in
Edinburgh will see 1,000 Scots agreeing to send samples of their sperm
through the post." Thanks Braindead.
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