1C ECTS

We've said it before and we'll say it again - if you want novel games, look to Eastern Europe and Russia. The latest such publisher to break out into the west is 1C, owners of Maddox Games, the developers behind World War II flight sim IL-2 Sturmovik. 1C's stand at ECTS has been showcasing several new games from their stable of Russian developers, including some real eye-openers. For pure fun there's RC Cars, which (as the title suggests) involves racing radio control cars around tracks in a variety of environments, from seaside fortresses to military bases. Although your cars are miniature, everything else in the game is full size, and there's plenty of opportunity to interact with the environment by running into people's feet, knocking cans around and dodging full size cars. On a more cerebral level there's Perimeter, a real-time strategy game based around the idea of terraforming the land around you. The scenery is made up of literally millions of tiny polygons, producing some truly staggering graphics if you have the hardware to handle the highest detail levels, and the whole thing shifts and moves as your units mould new hills, trenches and other terrain features at your command. We also got brief looks at Borderzone (a first person role-playing game in the style of Morrowind, with a vast 3D world to explore) and Jazz & Faust (a good old fashioned point and click adventure game which is already out in the US and Russia and coming to the rest of the world soon hopefully). Look for more details and screenshots for all of these games later this weekend.