Archived News:
In response to the report about Microsoft's cancellation of Conquest: Frontier Wars and the subsequent assignment of the development team to other projects ( story), Digital Anvil has issued a press release stating that Digital Anvil is looking for a new publisher of the game, which is "a few weeks from completion." According to this story on GameSpot, they may even try to publish the game themselves, but it's not yet clear how the team's reassignment may affect this. Here is an excerpt from the full press release:
Microsoft and Digital Anvil have agreed to allow Digital Anvil to pursue
another publisher for its real-time strategy game Conquest: Frontier Wars.
This decision does not effect Microsoft's ongoing relationship with Digital
Anvil and their other games in development.
.....
Conquest will be made available to other publishers immediately. A demo will
be available shortly to demonstrate the high play value of this title.
DA looks forward to the success of Conquest: Frontier Wars, as it continues
to work on such exciting PC titles as Loose Cannon, Freelancer, and
Freelancer Online, that Microsoft will be publishing in 2001.
An update to the official Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel site brings a new progress report by lead designer Chris Taylor on this isometric turn-based strategy game, discussing the design of their heal system, while there have also been updates to the vehicles page and the official FAQ, which now lists a tentative first quarter 2001 release date among other changes. Thanks Vault13.net for the tip.
Later than intended due to circumstances beyond our control, Blue's News is now pleased to premiere, along with a number of other sites, the Battle Isle: The Andosia War demo, the 3D turn-based and real-time strategy game by Cauldron and Blue Byte. The demo clocks in at 66 MB and we have a local copy with a list of mirrors to grab it from. Here is a description of the demo scenario that is included along with three tutorials:
The demo scenario takes place on a very beautiful island called Lohoc, which is situated in the archipelago of Raldhan. Gamers will be introduced to the environment by Battle Isle/Incubation veteran, General Bratt. Players must set up base using old fortifications, before moving the bulk of their forces over to the Battle Isle to engage in combat with the enemy. This must be done by carving a path along a heavily guarded roadway, before the player's surviving forces can finally arrive at the enemy's encampment. From there they will need to knock out a radar installation, and then use stealth to mass their forces before destroying the main arsenal of the enemy.
A small bug fix for the Eternal
Arena mod for Quake III Arena has been released. The patch fixes a problem
that has popped up with the just-released version 3.1 where the "NoJump"
option was set to on by default (and therefore preventing anyone from jumping).
Stomped has conducted a
Q&A with Joe Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut, and Democratic
vice-presidential candidate. He answers questions regarding his oft-controversial
views on the violent content in videogames, and comments specifically on the
recent announcement that Kmart and other stores will be "carding"
people purchasing M-rated games, and not sell to those under 18 ( story).
Here's an excerpt with his answer to that particular question: For the
ESRB's rating system to be effective, it must be enforced. The recent FTC report
on the marketing of violence to children, however, showed most retailers outlets
are not meeting that responsibility. In fact, a sting operation found that underage
teens were successful in buying M-rated games 85 percent of the time. To correct
this problem, we are asking retail and rental outlets to simply abide by the
same common-sense standard that the nation's movie theater owners have followed
for years? If a game is not appropriate to children, it should not be sold to
children, at least not without their parents' supervision.
As noted in this
update at Blue Byte's official The Settlers IV page, the planned public
beta test of the game has been canceled (thanks BetaBites).
The update explains that they are doing this in order to make a pre-Christmas
shipping date, and that they will still do extensive internal testing.
Gamers.com contacted Westwood Studios
regarding this morning's story at Computer and Video Games that quoted an unnamed
source who claimed the company was working on Earth & Beyond, a massively
multiplayer RPG ( story). The Westwood official quoted at Gamers.com says that it's no
secret that they are working on a persistent world RPG (and that they have registered
Earth & Beyond domain names), but that the story is "wildly inaccurate"
and that the game will be unveiled before the end of the year - not at E3 2001
as CVG claimed.
Chaos UT: GOTY Edition has
been released. This is the version of the
Chaos UT mod that ships on the Game of the Year edition of Unreal Tournament
(which should be in stores nationwide) and is being released as the in-development
beta 4 is still "some weeks away" from completion.
Version 3.4 of the Mesa 3D graphics library has been released (thanks LinuxGames). Mesa 3D is an open source, OpenGL-esque, cross-platform graphics library, and this latest release adds several optimizations and slew of bug fixes.
Those who missed the fun of last night's AnachroChat ( story) can now catch up what went down as PlanetAnachronox has posted an unedited chat log, and they have also dug up a bit of sample code from the APE (Anachronix Programming Environment) that will be released to the community.
Computer and Video Games News has
learned via an unnamed source that Westwood Studios is currently working
on a massively multiplayer RPG called Earth & Beyond. The game supposedly
allows you to "explore space in starships or pursue an alternate life on
one of 200 planets" and their source also says that the game has been in
development for five years (the other games they have released, supposedly were
"just buffers to keep EA happy"). Whether or not any of this is true
remains to be seen, however it should be pointed out that Westwood registered
domains related to the name Earth & Beyond some time ago (draw what you
will from that). CVGN says the game will be formally announced at E3 2001.
Computer Games Online has written a
new hands-on preview of Battle Isle: The Andosia War, Blue Byte's combination
turn based and real-time strategy game. The preview contains some light impressions
(along with a disclaimer that they played a beta, and not a final version) along
with six new screenshots.
The eighth
and final movie from Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is now available
at German site ZOCKS. Like the others, it's a downloadable MPEG movie, and contains
creepy in-game footage from this upcoming first person RPG from Headfirst Productions.
There is a TRIBES
2 Interview on FiringSquad talking with Dave Georgeson, the game's producer. The following answer
gives some more details on how they are planning on handling "skiing"
in the sequel to Starsiege TRIBES, which has already been the subject of quite a
bit of discussion: Dave G: When we tested the idea of
limiting skiing in our "BasePlus" mod, it had a highly artificial cap
put on it that was arbitrary and wrong-feeling.
However, what it did for gameplay was pretty much in line with what we wanted.
Therefore, (and in response to fan suggestion), we implemented an "air
resistance" model that allows high speeds, but slows larger objects down
faster, thus putting a limit on ski speeds, but still letting you get that
incredible "flying" feeling that "Tribes" is famous for.
Crimson Rush
interviews TimeGate Studios talking about progress on Kohan, their upcoming
RTS game. The ten question Q&A covers basic stuff, learning what they are
doing to try to differentiate Kohan from the competition.
A new beta 1G of the Q3F mod is now available,
updating this Quake III Arena mod to resolve all known issues that were causing
users of the previous version to be accidentally banned from servers, as well as
addressing other bugs, including problems with the spectator mode. At the same
time, the Q3F Entity Documentation
has been updated for the use of potential Q3F map authors.
A new patch for the Infiltration
mod for Unreal Tournament is now available, bringing this teamplay mod up to
version 2.81 to address bugs in the previous version, and to also improve
performance. The new version is currently available as a patch only, so
Infiltration version 2.80 and UT 428 (or later) are both required.
The Strike Force website
now has a version 1.50 build of Strike Force for Linux for download. If you are
grabbing the Linux release, be sure to take note of the instructions on how to
chmod the files to install them.
There's a new Baldur's Gate II
walkthrough on Walkthrough-Online.com offering a complete step-by-step guide
to the game. Also, the first part of the Command & Conquer Alarmstufe Rot 2
walkthrough on gamesweb.com, a German-language walkthrough of Red Alert 2.
Finally, there's a new Red Faction
FAQ on Red Faction Watch going into detail even on questions that aren't
being asked all that frequently.
Gamers.com test drives a Dreamcast
broadband adapter. Also, the middle screenshot on Lara No longer ugly
on Daily Radar is a new one showing off how the Tomb Raider heroine will
appear in future Tomb Raider console efforts. MSXbox
interviews J. Allard about plans for the Xbox launch. Finally, Cube.ign.com's Yamauchi On the Record
quotes the head of Nintendo saying of Internet gaming "in the end, this is
a fad thing." Is he blind, or a visionary?
The news that greets me this morning is Baldwin Seeks Radioactivity Tests,
of course the kind of news that you read about your new neighborhood only after
you have moved in. Oh well, when my baby teeth start falling out, I guess I'll
send them in.
Link of the Day: Distortions.
Tweaked celebrity photos. Thanks Ant.
Bonus Link: Alex Rosen's Home Page.
Play along at home and Warp Bill Gates. Thanks again Ant.
Story of the Day: Kasparov Loses Chess Crown to Former Pupil
(ABC). A hat trick for Ant.
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