Archived News:
Saying "BioWare and Infogrames will announce two new expansion packs to
Neverwinter Nights tomorrow, but we've got details on them today," the Neverwinter Nights: The
Shadows of Undrentide Q&A on GameSpot chats with Paul Neurath and Rick
Ernst of Floodgate and BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk to discuss one of
the add-ons, The Shadows of Undrentide, co-developed by Floodgate, said to be
composed of several former members of Looking Glass. They also have posted a
second Q&A with Dr. Greg and Dr. Ray about the second of these two
new expansions, currently only going under the mysterious working moniker of
XP2. Here's a bit about the Shadows of Undrentide
from Paul Neurath: Most everyone who's played Neverwinter Nights has a
favorite monster, spell, or weapon that they'd like to see added to the game. So
what we're doing with the Shadows of Undrentide expansion is adding a stack of
new material and then building a new campaign to show it all off. The biggest
additions would have to be the three new tilesets we've cooked up, a winter
version of the rural tileset, plus a new desert and ruins tileset.
This Firaxis Games
Page (thanks Civilization Fanatics' Center)
has a new version 1.14f patch for the Play the World expansion for Civilization
III. The 9.3 MB patch adds some new pedia entries and some conveniences for
multiplayer games. The file is also available from Apolyton Civilization
Site and Worthplaying.
Patch-mania continues, as this Strategy First
Downloads Page now offers a new version 1.01 patch for the North American
Hearts of Iron, the World War II Strategy game. Here's what they have to say
about the 555 KB patch: "Version 1.01 brings many improvements to the game,
including gameplay tweaks which address game balance and historical accuracy
issues; generic bug fixes such as certain CTD, text bugs, etc; AI fixes which
improve how the AI handles certain situations; scenario setup and event fixes.
For a more detailed listing please check the readme
file." Also, this The
Gladiators Downloads Page (thanks Voodoo
Extreme) has a new version 1.2.0 patch for The Gladiators which address some
minor bugs in Eugen Systems' RTS game of futuristic gladiatorial combat. The
patch also introduces 17 new multiplayer maps, as well as the ability to play
all of the game's solo missions over the internet in cooperative multiplayer
mode. In further patch news, Gamer's Hell has posted a Season Ticket Baseball 2003 v1.5 Patch
and a Trophy Hunter 2003 v1.1 Patch.
The much ballyhooed new version patch for America's Army is now available,
updating the Unreal-engine first-person shooter to version 1.4.0. There are
actually two patches, one to update version 1.2.1 and the other updates version
1.3.0. A full list of what's changed can
be found here, and a list of file mirrors can
be found here.
The promised multiplayer stress test version of Impossible Creatures is now
available exclusively on FilePlanet.
In a semi-related note, there is a brief editorial about their inability to
present this file on 3D Gamers.
Another demo version of Enigma: Rising Tide is now available to offer the chance
to test drive some of the ships in the single-player version of Tesseraction
Games' naval MMORPG. The 84 MB Enigma Recruiting Demo "B" is available
from 3D Gamers, Computer Games Online
and FilePlanet
(registration required).
Uncle Sam sends along an
update about the planned patch for America's Army ( story),
revealing that the plan is to release this sometime today. The update provides
more information about the included new map, a detailed rundown on the new
scoring system, descriptions of "report-in" and other new features, as
well as the included tweaks and bug fixes. Additionally, there is a
Q&A with Alex "Abraxas" Mayberry on MilitarySim.com talking
with the producer of the U.S. Army's first-person shooter about this patch as
well as other future plans for the project.
The pre-Thanksgiving demo season continues, as a
playable demo for NASCAR Racing 2003 (direct FTP link) is now available,
offering the chance to check out EA Sports' latest stock car racing game. The 83
MB file is mirrored on 3D Gamers,
and offers the chance to check out the high-speed restrictor plate racing at the
Talladega Superspeedway.
HomeLan Fed's UT 2003 Bonus Pack
Q&A catches up with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski about plans to release a
free bonus pack for owners of Unreal Tournament 2003. They discuss the reception
UT2003 and Unreal Championship have met with, a response to complaints of too
much similarity between UT2003 and the original UT, mods, whether previous bonus
packs have influenced sales, the idea behind this bonus pack, new levels, new
gameplay types, plans for demo recording in the next UT 2003 patch, and more.
The Chaser
Developers Diary volume 7 on Gameplex offers a brief continuation of the
series of journals recounting development of Chaser, Cauldron's upcoming
first-person shooter. As they are no longer adding new features, the focus of
this diary is their three remaining main tasks: "finishing of network code,
AI and optimization." Also, GameSpy.com's
Rise of Nations Developer Diary features Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds
discussing the several different victory conditions that will provide variety in
Rise of Nations, their upcoming RTS game. Finally, the RPG Vault Horizons Journal #7
is written by Artifact Entertainment effects artist Casey Robinson, who
discusses tradeskills and how their use offers the possibility of 675 million
different swords in their upcoming MMORPG, dryly pointing out: "That's a
lot of swords."
- Kreed
Nextgame.it's Kreed
Q&A chats with Vladimir Nikolaev about Burut's upcoming FPS. They
discuss game development in Eastern Europe, making it in the industry as a
relative newcomer, influences for the game's science fiction plot, AI,
multiplayer support, the X-Tend engine, and more.
- Will Rock
TotalVideoGames.com's
Will Rock Q&A talks with Derek de la Fuente in an article format
conversation about Saber Interactive's upcoming FPS. Only a few questions
are asked, but the replies provided are quite lengthy.
- Postal 2
Action Vault's
Postal 2 Art Q&A talks with animator Geoff Neale and texture artist/character
modeler Joshua Leichliter of Running with Scissors about Postal 2, their
upcoming first-person follow-up to Postal. They discuss their backgrounds,
goals for their work, challenges, characters, character creation, the
inclusion of a teensy Gary Coleman model, and more.
GameSpyDaily
has details on today's planned release of a stress test version of Impossible
Creatures, Relic's upcoming strategy game featuring custom mix-and-match
critters. Word on the 250 MB test is: "the Stress Test features three maps
geared towards Two, Four and Six player games online. The Test will run for
approximately three weeks and will be available exclusively through FilePlanet."
There's a Star Wars Galaxies Chat Log
on SWGalaxies.Net with an edited recap of yesterday's IRC session with
the developers of the upcoming Star Wars MMORPG. The log has been edited into an
orderly Q&A format, and they have even gone to the trouble to create a
hyper-linked list of questions to easily find topics of interest.
This Activision Downloads
Page now offers downloads of a 480 KB Starfleet Command III DirectX 9 Fix. The
accompanying update simply states: "This download allows Starfleet Command
III to properly detect later versions of DirectX and enables it to play on
systems with DirectX 9 installed."
Tomorrow is the cut-off for registrations for the
Arizona LAN Basher's League's fifth anniversary event. One of the events is
a CPL qualifier. Also, Top gamers battle for glory
is a BBC article on a big gaming tournament in the UK this December (thanks
David Johnston).
Well my experience as the tile-meister in the kitchen has met with mixed
results. The mix is mostly good, as the replaced grout and tiles look as good as new, but I also managed to raise a cloud of grout dust worthy of, well,
something really dusty (my gift for metaphor fails me at the moment). What's
worse, I failed to think of closing the doors to the kitchen as I worked, so
there is a thin layer of dust covering everything in the house. I had a
filter to breathe through, but I think I would have been better off with
SCUBA gear, because the whole procedure has left me feeling a bit sick... but
hey, did I mention how good the kitchen looks? Cough.
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