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Archived News:
Game Factory Interactive
and Mist Land - South announce a
long-term partnership and Warfare, Mist Land's upcoming RTS game:
Warfare is a real-time global war simulator with
real material and it's devoted to a conflict in the Near East.
There are two campaigns, one for the USA, the other for Saudi Arabia. The
main goal of the first campaign is taking full control of the region; the
second one is coming to power in Saudi Arabia and achieving the withdrawal
of all American troops.
“The whole Arabic peninsula will be divided into maps. There are going to be
around 30 such maps. All these maps will be represented as regions on the
global map. Each region will be controlled by a different side (NATO,
Taliban, or the player). All “macromanagement” functions will be carried out
on the global map, including forming squads within the army, as well as
giving out movement orders for armies. In case a player’s army (or several
armies) has moved out into a region controlled by the enemy, or the enemy
has invaded a region controlled by the player – the game will switch to the
tactical phase.
When playing for the Americans player will get a more or less linear
campaign with a significantly simplified strategic part. In the beginning
the player is a lieutenant of the American army getting surrounded on a
patrol mission, his goal is breaking out; after achieving this, a plot
branch begins leading the player to become a colonel, as well as moving all
American bases out of Saudi Arabia and concentrating them in Iraq (capturing
it along the way). During plot development the Americans will receive
reinforcements from the States in predetermined plot locations.
When playing for the Arabs, the player will start off as a simple field
commander with a small squad increasing in size over time. According to the
plot, after a few missions his ties with the central command (the Taliban)
will break. This is where the game begins.”
Main features:
• Realistic lights, with dynamic sources,self-shading and advanced shaders.
• To storylines, you can choose two real different sides, with different economical and tactical models, American expedition corps, or Arabian rebel army.
• More when 30+ units with real prototypes, M1A2, “Crusader”, “Patriot”, T-72, C-75 and much more.
• 30 missions with non linear storyline.
• “Live” global map divided by sectors, where you can choose your advance.
• Realistic physics and combat model.
• Stunning effects.
• Advanced “resource” system, different for each opposing side.
DOOM 3 Invades
Macintosh on March 14, 2005 is the press release announcing that Mac owners
can now get their asses to Mars, as the Mac edition of DOOM 3 is shipping. The
body of the release contradicts the title, however, in stating the game should
be widely available on March 19. Aspyr is
still accepting pre-orders for the game.
- Dragonshard
A new Dragonshard movie shows off the upcoming D&D RTS game in the works at
Liquid Entertainment. The clip can be found on the
Dragonshard Media Index on GameSpot and mirrored on
3D Gamers,
Gamer's Hell, and
Worthplaying.
The conclusion of the clip teases plans for an open beta and playable demo
for the game in "April 2005."
- Act of War
A new Act of War: Direct Action movie is now available, with some cutscene
footage from Eugen System's upcoming modern warfare strategy game. The
download can be found on
3D Gamers and
Worthplaying.
- Stronghold 2
Another new Stronghold 2 trailer is now available, showing off more of
FireFly's upcoming besieged construction/strategy game. The movie can be
found in one or both of two different resolutions on
3D Gamers,
Gamer's Hell, and
Worthplaying.
- Psychonauts
Three new Psychonauts movies on the
Psychonauts Website
show off Double Fine's upcoming third-person action game. The site requires
registration to download the clips, but they are also available on
3D Gamers,
Gamer's Hell, and
Worthplaying.
- Unreal Engine 3
The
Quest for More Processing Power, Part Two Multi-core and multi-threaded
gaming on AnandTech (thanks Stoo) is a Q&A with Tim Sweeney of Epic
Games about the next iteration in their Unreal Engine: "Unreal Engine games
have always been more CPU-intensive than the norm, for two reasons. First,
we're always trying to push the leading edge with physics and other
CPU-based features. Second, the Unreal Engine has a much more extensive
gameplay scripting interface aimed at empowering mod authors and improving
developer productivity by enabling safer and higher-level gameplay
development. So we're not going to have any trouble keeping up with
increases in CPU power."
- Close Combat
The Close Combat:
First to Fight Q&A on Computer Games Magazine talks with Peter Tamte of
Destineer about their upcoming squad-based Marine Corps first-person
shooter: "There are some similarities between the Marine and enemy AI, in
that they're both affected by the psychology model and they can both take
cover, toss grenades, etc. But, one huge difference between the Marine and
enemy AI is that the Marine AI is written very much for teamwork and modeled
after actual Marine Corps fire team tactics. For example: crossing
intersections, moving up staircases, even when walking down the street the
Marines will provide 360 degrees of security and communicate their status to
you."
- Battlestations: Midway
Computer Games
Magazine's Battlestations: Midway Q&A chats with THQ's Klaude Thomas
about their upcoming naval combat game: "Well, Midway is foremost an action
game, but deeper down there’s a lot of strategy (repairs systems, command
maps, standing orders, all of that.) In Midway you usually have multiple
ships and planes under your command. You’ll generally take direct control of
your most important unit, and give orders to the rest. Even if you don’t
give them orders they will do something useful on their own – on defence –
but it’s up to you to direct the attacks. I like submarines (a lot), so when
I’m in command I tend to sneak around in my sub and just organise everything
else on the command map, but I know other people like planes (Midway’s Lead
Designer is very, very dangerous in a Zero.) It’s up to you how you play."
- Area 51
RPG Vault's
Area 51 Q&A, Part 1 chats with a few of the folks from Midway Austin
about their upcoming conspiracy-laden first-person shooter: "As Area 51 came
into focus on the console front, excitement grew at Midway. It was decided
to take our efforts on the consoles and port them to the PC. Since all our
development tools including our editor are PC-based, it was an easy
decision. We took our editor, and wrote some custom shaders as a test. The
results blew management away! The game already looked amazing, but Midway
decided the extra graphical power of today's PC would allow to us to use
higher resolutions for all our textures. Memory is at a premium on the
consoles, but translating the game to PC enabled us to truly realize our
vision. Since this PC product came rather late in the development process,
we decided to concentrate on making it play great and look even better, so
other than some online community support, all SKUs are identical."
- Guild Wars
Jeux Online's
Guild Wars Q&A (thanks Guild
Wars Slovenija) interviews Jeff Strain of ArenaNet about Guild Wars,
their upcoming MMORPG: "Guild Wars was designed to be an online RPG that is
very different from a traditional MMO, or what you think is a MMO. Guild
Wars has the technology of an MMO with the 100 000’s simultaneous online
players, but in terms of the core design of the game, we chose not the
follow the recurring ultima online, everquest, wow model. Guild Wars was
design to be really different game than those, and the fundamental
difference that we wanted to achieve was to design a game that reward you
for your skill as a player rather that on the amount of free time that you
have, to play the game."
- Gorky Zero: Aurora Watching
The
Aurora Watching Q&A on FileFront chats with
Pawel Miechowski of Metropolis Software about the upcoming installment in
the Gorky Zero series: "The story is linear like in an action movie, but
there are many possibilities to accomplish the missions. The basic plot goes
like that: the main hero is set to go to Arctic. Then he enters the military
base when he finds out an entry to an underground lab. During his adventures
he meets enemy soldiers but non-human enemies as well. The main mission
target is to eliminate dangerous genius scientist, but some things go wrong
– let it be a surprise for gamers. The story contains many unexpected
events."
- RYL: Path to Emperor
PlanetWide’s Chip
Bumgardner discusses Risk Your Life: Path to Emperor on GameZone is a
Q&A with PlanetWide’s Chip Bumgardner about their upcoming MMORPG: "We have
put a lot of time into bug fixing as you can imagine. We thought we were
going to be ready for launch on March 1, but we decided to hold going live
until we fixed a few bugs that were hindering gameplay. As of one hour ago
(late Thursday afternoon), we were finally able to fix our biggest issue ...
The dreaded AOE exploit bug (I won't go into what this is, if you are
playing the game, you should be smiling right now)."
- America's Army
Game Matters America's Army -- Behind the Scenes (thanks
Voodoo Extreme)
offers an anonymous postmortem from one of the developers of the America's
Army video game: "Originally there were two game projects in the works (the
other was an FMV piece of tripe that died a sad and whimpering death before
ever seeing the light of day). The development of the game was a huge risk
for the Army, and if it failed heads were going to roll. Because of this,
the Army was much more hands off (although they were still pretty difficult
to work with even then), and pretty much just held their breath and hoped
we'd pull something out. We barely were able to make the July 4th deadline
they set for us. The team that was put together, although pretty green, put
in a phenomenal number of hours to get the job done. The game wasn't
perfect, but we felt like we pulled off a miracle under some pretty bad
conditions."
PlanetBattlefield
(thanks Ant) has a screenshot and
a follow-up that seem
to demonstrate that EA and DICE are in the process of testing a demo version of
Battlefield 2, as it shows a pair of BF2 demo test servers in a server browser
window.
- Stolen
The Stolen Q&A on
GamersInfo.net talks with Jaid Mindang of Blue52 about their upcoming
stealthy action game: "The importance of the character can't really be
underplayed, especially in a 3rd person view game where you spend much of
the experience looking at the character, as well as controlling their
actions. Provided that you're aware of your target market, and the marketing
effort concurs with that analysis, it shouldn't be too difficult to get it
right, in theory. In practice, we spent many many months and untold reams of
concept art in order to finally get to a character design we could all
believe in. It's far more committee driven than people imagine."
- Rainbow Six: Lockdown
The
Rainbow Six: Lockdown Q&A on Gamebiz chats up Deke Waters about the next
installment in the Tom Clancy shooter series: "Ding Chavez and Team Rainbow
are tasked with neutralizing a new terrorist threat, the Global Liberation
Front (GLF). The GLF have acquired a devastating bio-weapon, which they plan
to deploy somewhere in the world, but no one knows where or when the attack
will happen. The team dismantles the GLF one cell at a time, but the
terrorists aren't going down without a fight. They set up ambushes, force
the team's allies to turn on them, and even hire assassins to hunt and kill
members of the team. The tables are turned and Rainbow is put on the
defensive."
- Preyground
The Preyground Q&A on
Gameguru Mania talks with Joel Kinnunen of Frozenbyte about Preyground,
their upcoming action game: "Preyground is an adrenaline-pumping action
experience combining today's technology with addictive gameplay. Preyground
is set in the near future and pits the player against oncoming alien hordes
who are invading a colony base on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. To counter the
invading monsters, the player eventually acquires a devastating arsenal of
upgradeable weaponry. The player's best weapon might be his own flashlight -
the aliens react to light in numerous ways. Intensive sound environment
further adds to the atmosphere. Preyground invites gamers to a thrilling
ride of epic heights."
- The Punisher
The
Punisher Q&A on Xequted interrogates James Tsai of Volition about their
action game based on the comic book and movie vigilante: "The interrogation
mechanic feature came out of in the early stages of our level design
meetings, when we decided we wanted to have the player find out game details
during the mission by roughing up his badguys. One of our animators with a
really nasty imagination had worked up a few ways this could be done, and
soon we had implemented the pistol-to-the-head interrogation as a test case.
From there, the feature continued to grow and we found all kinds of ways to
do horrible things to enemies using the environment."
- F.E.A.R. on
Boomtown.
- Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse on
GamersInfo.
Based on the Xbox version.
A new version of the Operation
Peacekeepers modification for Battlefield Vietnam is now available. The
update includes a couple of gameplay tweaks as well as performance improvements.
Tram Design
has posted a couple of new screenshots showing off the upcoming version 1.0 of
the Degeneration multiplayer modification for Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Happy Π day,
as
Ant, whose name is (probably not coincidentally) actually Pi,
points out that 3/14 is
the big day for
rational fans of the irrational number. If you are looking to be extra precise,
you can begin whatever celebrations you have planned at 1:59 (the even more
precise probably already did so at 1:59 am), though it's probably not worth
trying to pin it down more precisely than that due to the very nature of the
number. Of course, for fans of less precision,
Pi Approximation Day will
be this summer.
Yakety Yak!
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