Archived News:
A new preview of The Settlers
IV is online at PC.IGN this evening. The preview contains a generous helping
of gameplay details, complete with info on the three different civilizations
and how the game improves on the last installment in the series. They have also
posted 10 new screenshots that show off the game's new engine, which boasts
improved detail and much higher resolutions (up to 1280x1024) over its predecessor.
Lead artist Brandon Gillam and marketing VP Steve Escalante of Maximum Charisma
are
interviewed on Daily Radar this evening, talking about Fighting Legends,
their upcoming online strategy game. The duo explain how they mix RTS and RPG
elements together, what influenced the cartoony look of the game, and more.
- Morrowind
There are seven new Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind screenshots on Destination: Morrowind, illustrating the upcoming 3D role-playing game by Bethesda in images they're reposting with permission from the current issue of CGW magazine.
- Echelon
Gamecenter has posted ten new Echelon screenshots, captured from a recent build of the futuristic combat flyer by Buka that we haven't heard from in a while.
- Heart of Winter
A brief but hands-on preview of Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter on RPGVault looks ahead to this isometric RPG expansion pack, complete with a handful of new screenshots.
- The Ward
A new The Ward gallery on ActionTrip offers 15 new screenshots of the 3D point-n-click adventure by Fragile Bits that will appear on store shelves in about two weeks.
Russian site GameOver has posted a dozen new screenshots of Shogun: the Mongol Invasion, the upcoming 3D RTS expansion pack that will be sold in the US as the Shogun: Warlord Edition (which includes the original game). Additionally, they offer four soundless movies for download, the first two sporting gameplay footage in a giant 720x488 resolution, while the second pair features cutscene footage in a slight smaller 640-wide format.
GameSpot has posted a
new preview of Magic & Mayhem: The Art of Magic, Charybdis' upcoming
sequel to the original Magic & Mayhem by Mythos Games. The preview examines
how this game differs from the original, complete with details about the new
3D engine, and there are 11 new screenshots up as well.
Hyperion Software has released an updated version of the Mac OS Shogo: Mobile
Armor Division demo, which is available
for download at Inside Mac Games. This new demo adds support for GameRanger,
as well as improving its overall performance. Also, those looking to purchase
the full game will be pleased by Hyperion's
announcement that they are now shipping the game worldwide.
3rd World Interview on the newly opened Action Vault corners XYZ Team lead programmer Vitomir Jevremovic to discuss their upcoming massively multiplayer space combat sim. The interview covers a lot of ground, from an introduction of company and game, the inspirations and influences for the game (which naturally include the venerable Elite), to details like the weapon types, character and ship customization, and what they feel makes their game stand out from other persistent online games.
There is a brief interview on Hidden & Dangerous 2 at In The Trenches, quizzing Illusion Softworks lead designer Tomas Pluharik about their upcoming tactical shooter sequel. Tomas talks about the game's storyline, new gameplay features, the AI, multiplayer game types, and a few other topics.
A new version 1.1 of Q3Plug is now available, updating this web browser plugin that is an independent rewrite of the original QPlug. This release adds support for Quake II engine games, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament, as well as several other improvements, and works with Internet Explorer versions 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, Netscape Navigator version 4.x and Opera version 4.0 and 5.01 on Microsoft Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Professional.
As was suspected earlier from the announcement about Myth III: The Wolf Age
( story), Ritual
Entertainment has announced that they are splitting the company in two,
with half of it becoming Mumbo Jumbo, which will produce Myth III for Gathering
of Developers, and will also work on the Mac OS ports of Baldur's Gate II, Icewind
Dale, Sacrifice and Giants: Citizen Kabuto for MacPlay. No real reason is given
for the separation, and Ritual will still continue to work on a Quake III Arena
engine first person shooter for Electronic Arts ( story).
GameSpot has posted five new movies of Oni, showing off Bungie's third-person action game of anime art and martial arts. The movies are each a minute or more in running time, and feature footage from the third level in the full game, which is due in stores near the end of this month.
Version 101 of the UTJB mod for Unreal Tournament
has been released. UTJB is a JailBreak style mod, and this latest release contains
mostly bug fixes, including a fix for the server browser, which improves on
the previous version by actually allowing you to find (and presumably connect
to) games running the mod.
Now that the game has been formally announced ( story) Inside
Mac Games has conducted an
interview with members of the Myth III: The Wolf Age team. As there hasn't
been much, if any information released about the game, this interview is just
overflowing with new stuff, including word that Myth III will use a modified
version of the Myth II engine (the biggest change being the elimination of sprites
in favor of 100% 3D), that there will be a public beta test (as there was with
the other games) and lots more. They also have a
shot up of what would seem to be one of the character models from the game
(although they haven't completely verified this yet). A second shot can be found
at bs.bungie.org.
A new preview
of Jumpgate is up at GA-Sim today. The preview is based on their experience
with the current beta of the game, and contains their impressions, a plethora
of gameplay details and some screenshots from the next beta that were provided
by Netdevil. In addition to the preview itself, they have also conducted a
brief interview with some of the developers.
As noted in this
story at ZDNet, in his keynote address at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco,
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled their next batch of computers, and for the first
time in recent memory, some of them will contain a non-ATI video chip. The higher-end
systems will have processor speeds up to 733 MHz, a DVD-RAM drive, and video
powered by NVIDIA's GeForce 2 MX chipset. Thanks Bob James for the tip. Update: GameSpot's Sam Parker sends along a clarification that the new Macs contain DVD-R drives, meaning they can record DVD movie discs. More info on this can be found in this article at GameSpot.
Sci-Fi gaming has conducted a
brief interview with Ion Hardie, the lead level designer at Reflexive Entertainment
on their upcoming tactical shooter Star Trek: Away Team. Ion explains how the
game fits into the Star Trek universe, and also provides some technical details
on their 2D engine, the importance of stealth in the game and more.
We missed this when it appeared late last month, but UGO has posted an unfortunately
titled feature called Going
Down on American McGee, that contains excerpts in both audio and video format
from an interview with the designer. The audio clips are in MP3 format, while
the video is in Windows Media Player WMV format. Thanks Stomped,
who apparently noticed this through our own ad banners.
A new Q&A
with Dean Sekulic of Croteam is up at Reverend's 3D Pulpit today, asking
the programmer on Serious Sam a few questions about the game's hardware support.
Dean explains why they chose OpenGL over Direct3D as their API of choice, and
he also says what their minimum system requirements will likely be, and what
whizbang features their Serious engine supports. Thanks to The
Shugashack for the tip.
MacWorld is getting under way today (complete with an
announcement that OS X will be out on March 24th) and so Inside Mac Games
has conducted an interview with Mike Donges, an executive producer at MacPlay.
Many of the questions talk in general terms about the Mac OS as a gaming platform,
but there are also some details on the titles they will be publishing in 2001,
and Mike's thoughts about OS X.
Stomped has posted a
Q&A with Malvern Blackwell, the new level designer at id Software. The
Q&A deals mostly with Malvern's background in the industry, and he talks
about how he worked briefly on Unreal with Epic Games and his days at Xatrix,
where he worked on Return to Castle Wolfenstein for over a year.
Version 1.01 of Half-Life Menu is now available, bringing this console control script from the author of Quake III Menu to Valve's first-person shooter. Half-Life Menu allows you "to set virtually any cvar and
command known to man from the console," and naturally it works with Counter-Strike as well.
Italian gaming site Multiplayer.it has conducted a
ten question Q&A with the Levelord. The questions are all non game-specific,
and the 'lord talks about the future of the gaming industry (which he believes
will be on consoles) and other general topics. The interview is available in
your choice of English
or Italian.
A Mac OS version of the recently released Diablo II demo is
now available at MacGameFiles.com. The demo clocks in at 123.5 MB, and is
identical to its PC counterpart.
Although we actually discovered this game last week ( story)
Gathering of Developers has formally
announced Myth III: The Wolf Age this morning. While the press release doesn't
contain much more than what we reported last week, it does have details about
Mumbo Jumbo, a new studio formed by Ritual's Ron Dimant and
Mark Dochtermann. The Myth III team at Mumbo Jumbo consists of Scott Campbell, who was
lead designer on the original Fallout, lead programmer Andrew Meggs, and Ritual
level designer Patrick Hook. Also, the press release states that the game will
continue the series' commitment to cross-platform development, and it will appear
on the PC as well as both Mac OS 9 and OS X.
Developers Brat Designs have released a whopping eleven movie clips of Breed (pop-up alert), showing off their upcoming 3D action/strategy game in motion. The clips are quite short, with a running time between 2 and 9 seconds, but amply demonstrate the mix of surface- and space-based combat that this game intends to bring to PC and Xbox platforms towards the end of the year. Update: GameSpot has taken the trouble of compiling all clips into one convenient 59 second movie.
Despite its name, GameSpot
UK's Steel Soldiers Designer Diary is actually an interview with several
members of the Steel Soldiers development team at Bitmap Brothers. With only
six weeks left in the game's development, the designers talk about what's left
to be done, what challenges lie ahead as the game winds down, and how it will
feel to be finally finished after four years of development. There are also a handful of new screenshots.
Vitaly
Shutov of MiST land is interviewed on GA-Strategy today, talking about their
upcoming title Paradise Cracked. Vitaly explains how it differs from other strategy
games out there, how RPG elements mix into the gameplay, how the game is similar
to the original X-COM and more.
GameSpy.com continues their series of interviews
with industry art directors this morning with an interview with Chris Perna of ION Storm. Like the other interviews in this
series they talk in general terms about art in games, and Chris explains how
he got into the industry, what tools he uses and more.
A new preview of
Jumpgate, the massively multiplayer space sim from Netdevil, is up at IanStorm
this morning. The preview is based on the author's hands-on experience with
the current beta test, and contains his overall impressions, lots of gameplay
details and quite a few screenshots.
A new edition of RPGVault's
Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter Designer Diary is online, offering chapter six
of their series penned by designer J.E. Sawyer of Black Isle Studios that
details progress on the upcoming Icewind Dale follow-up.
The Star Wars Galaxies Official Site
now features a second set of comments from the team currently at work on
the upcoming MMORPG set in the Star Wars universe. The new installment features
Raph "Holocron" Koster, creative director on the project, describing
his introduction to online role-playing, and the team's efforts to reproduce
that magic in Galaxies.
3D Spotlight's Giants Citizen Kabuto Tweak guide
is online offering troubleshooting and configuration tips for Planet Moon's
newly-released game of living large. Also, GameSpot's
Mechwarrior 4 Game Guide is online showing how to make the most of your
mech. Meanwhile, PC.IGN.com's Alice Guide
offers help "controlling a psychotic teenage girl," so it might be of
use to some of you parents out there, in addition to those playing American
McGee's Alice.
X-Box Fr's
Steven Polge interview is the English version of their French conversation
about the Xbox with the Epic Games programmer that says: "The XBox version
of UT will be a new game with all new content, taking full advantage of the new
technology we are developing," while a
follow-up Q&A with Mark Rein on Stomped throws a little PR water on that
fire, saying "Steve's answer to the question jumped the gun a bit. No final
decision has been made on what game we will make for the Xbox. Like every other
developer on the planet we would love to make a game for the Xbox."
Meanwhile, MSXbox
interviews Derek Perez and ActiveWin.com
interviews Derek Perez both talk with the PR maven at NVIDIA about the
company's involvement in the development of Microsoft's upcoming console system.
Finally, big in Japan can be good if you are Cheap Trick, but if you are a
console it could be a problem, as an article titled Japanese
Xbox Response: "It's Huge" on Gamers.com suggests.
Starfleet Command Volume II Empires at War
downloads page has some SFC II scripting API sample code "for would-be
mission scripters who are learning the SFC II Mission Scripting API." Also,
the Buzzsaw website now has Evil HFX's texture sets 3 and 6 converted for use in Quake II levels.
More and more messages are trickling in about a problem with the new version of
the new design and Netscape 6.0 where the text of the news stories overlap the
menus on the left, a problem that only seems to impact some NS6 users. We'll
continue working on the problem rather than assume Netscape version 6.01 or some
such will fix it, since we have learned along the way that there is at least one
user out there using every single version of every single browser ever created.
Happy birthday Gilligan, as Bob Denver turns 66 today (exactly one day
younger than the King!), and were former US President Richard Nixon still alive
he would turn 88, as today is/was Tricky Dickie's birthday as well. Thanks, as
always to Chris Morris.
Link of the Day: Ghetto Scooter.
Thanks Rich LaPorte. Count me in, it looks
just like the scooters when I was a kid (though we didn't have the cool safety
equipment).
Story of the Day: Man's Family Doesn't Even Want to Rescue Him From Fire
(fox). Thanks theAntiELVIS. Now that's mean.
SoD Follow-up: Woman jailed for testicle bite
(BBC). Thanks RVF400RR. Justice (and hopefully vegetarian dinners) served in the
case mentioned in this story.
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