Latest Articles (Page 3597)

French publisher UbiSoft have updated their UK release schedule, with several changes and additions. Stealthy action-adventure game "In Cold Blood", which we were expecting to be released today, has been pushed back two weeks to October 27th. It joins "Rainbow Six : Covert Ops", which is something of a mix of computer game, edutainment and gun fetishist's wet dream, featuring new missions, training scenarios, interviews "top experts in the field", and video footage of the real-life weapons and equipment seen in the game.

Last year it was all you could do to keep yourself to yourself about the Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament frenzy, and it looks like this Christmas will be no different in the USA.. Quake 3 on the Dreamcast should be with us in a matter of weeks, but DC owners will have to wait until March 2001 in this country to get hold of it. Fortunately the PlayStation 2 version of Unreal Tournament will be out for the console's release, but if the latest reports from Infogrames are true, potential owners of the PS2 and Dreamcast might be better off to wait until March for the DC incarnation. With the extra time Infogrames have given the development team it's expected that a lot more of the original game will be converted and included than had been previously suspected. We reported a few weeks ago that the PlayStation 2 version was to be dramatically cut down to simply Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. This latest announcement hints at the possibility of us seeing further game modes in the Dreamcast version, perhaps even some original ones.

Episodic is one of the big buzz words to hit the gaming industry recently, and Digital Tome claim to be the first to release an episodic game, in the form of medieval role-playing game "Siege of Avalon". The first episode is available for free from the game's website, and apparently provides up to twenty hours of gameplay to "set the stage for a much larger story and introduce a compelling scenario that unfolds over the subsequent episodes", according to Creative Director Van Collins. Now the first of those subsequent episodes is available to download for $9.95, which is just shy of £7.00 at current exchange rates.

One of the more ambitious first person shooters currently under development is "Battlefield 1942", a Second World War tactical combat game in which you can also drive a variety of vehicles and take part in large scale battles with dozens of players on each side. As you rise in rank during the game's single player campaign you will gain control of more of the soldiers fighting alongside you and get more complex tasks to carry out. At the end of the day battle objectives are handed down by your commanders but, as Ola Holmdahl explained in a recent interview with TacSim.com, you are still free to use your initiative in carrying out your tasks.

Death Stars, Tie Fighters and AT-ATs are all well and good, but in the Star Wars universe when it comes to one-on-one combat there are few things more dangerous than a well-trained Jedi knight with a light saber. Lucas Arts are currently hard at work on "Obi Wan", a new third person action game based on the recent "Phantom Menace" movie, in which you play the eponymous Jedi made famous by actors Alec Guinness and Ewan McGregor. Now, in an interview on Italian gaming site NextGame.it, Stephen Shaw has described how Obi Wan's trusty light saber is controlled in the new game...

The US Military has a long history of using computer games as training tools, from designing their own custom flight and tank simulators to using a modified version of Doom (known as "Marine Doom") to encourage better team-work and hand-eye coordination amongst their soldiers. Now the NPSNET Research Group, based at the Americans' Naval Postgraduate School and with over fifteen years of experience developing multiplayer games (sorry, sims) for the US military, is working on a new project which will apparently be based on a well-known 3D graphics engine. We're guessing Lithtech or Unreal, but we could be wrong.

The issue of graphic violence in computer games has hit the front pages over recent years, and Spanish developers Rebel Act Studios and their publisher Codemasters seem to be courting controversy by highlighting the amount of gore in their third person fantasy action game, "Severance : Blade of Darkness". The press release announcing Codemasters' signing of the game a few weeks ago boasted that the game would feature "some of the bloodiest combat scenes seen on PC", and would "draw mass attention due to the graphic violence displayed in its combat scenes". It went on to explain that "the sword-wielding player can hack an opponent's limb off, pick up the dismembered bloody limb and use it as a club to batter the victim, as jets of blood pour from wounds, into submission". Good clean fun for all the family then?

The issue of "player killing" is one that has caused problems for most of the massively multiplayer role-playing games released so far, and developers have generally been unable to come up with a satisfactory solution. Some players see fighting each other as an important part of the game world, while others tend to be put off when their newborn character is reduced to bite-size pieces by a level 47 wizard. Some games ban player vs player combat (known as PKing) completely, some only allow PKing between consenting adults, while others banish PKers to seperate servers or zones of the world.

"Odyssey" is another title from Cryo's Legend Collection, which utilises the same graphics engine used in "The Time Machine", and is based loosely on Homer's novel "Odyssey" and Greek mythology. This subject is one of the few that held my attention in history lessons at school, and one that is perfect to center a game around.

The latest release schedule has just arrived from British publisher Virgin Interactive, with several changes to their line-up. The perennially delayed real-time strategy game "War Torn" has unsurprisingly slipped another week to October 27th - that's not so much news as a running a joke now... Meanwhile off-road racer "Screamer 4x4" has been pushed back a couple of weeks to November 10th, although it has at least now kept the same title for two months running - it has been variously known as "Offroad Challenge" and "4x4 Trophy" over the last few months.

In this age of glorious 3D accelerated real-time strategy games with graphics card frying pyrotechnics and full 360 degree spinny-rotatey™ cameras, "Original War" is something of a throwback to an earlier era. Rendered in the traditional two dimensional isometric fashion of the days of yore, although admittedly at an eye-pleasing 1024x768 resolution, it certainly isn't going to win any prizes for technical achievement.

According to our chums at Daily Radar, the PlayStation 2's original launch line-up of some 33 titles in this country has now been shortened to 31, with another title expected to slip within the next few days. Disney's Dinosaur from Ubi-Soft and F1 World Grand Prix from Konami will not be available at launch; the former will arrive a fortnight later on the 10th of December while the latter we are told won't even make this year, slipping to around March 2001. It seems F1 was the unfortunate victim of a miscommunication, as Konami deny that it was ever going to hit launch. Another more interesting development is the rumour that THQ's Summoner may see a similar slippage announcement in the next day or two.

Another piece of the Xbox jigsaw puzzle has fallen into place today with the announcement from Microsoft that Western Digital will be providing the 8Gb hard disks that ship with Xbox games consoles. Only a couple of days ago we were quizzically investigating the Xbox brand and whether Microsoft's proposed route for it is such a sensible one. Our verdict? Developer and publisher support are key, but the name and non-solid state disk will be its downfall. In terms of specifics, the disks will be based on Western Digital's new Protégé single-platter design, which could also appear in video recorders, MP3 players and the ilk. Its 3.5" 5400RPM / ATA100 design will be available in 10Gb and 20Gb capacities for the home market. Microsoft's original Xbox spec still remains at 8Gb, but the drives are perfectly capable of 10Gb, so we may see another update to the specification before long. Perhaps the only reason we haven't yet is Microsoft's reluctance to make what will be viewed as "yet another change" to its less than ironcast original estimate.

Until now 3dfx have been best known for their "Voodoo" range of graphics cards, the first of which introduced much of the PC gaming world to the wonders of 3D accelerated graphics way back in the mid 1990s. But with 3dfx currently fighting back after a couple of bad years which have seen their lead in the 3D graphics market overhauled by ATI and NVIDIA, the Voodoo brand is now expanding to include multimedia products as part of a new policy of diversification.

With "Championship Manager : Season 00/01" set for release on October 27th in the UK, developers Sports Interactive have announced that a whole range of newspapers from around the country have signed up to appear in the game. Everything from big nationals like The Sun and The Guardian to The Bangor News and my own local rag, the Leicester Mercury, will be represented in the game through media reports on the matches taking place in your own little fantasy football world. National newspapers and magazines such as Four Four Two, Shoot and World Soccer will report on all of the big matches, while the local papers cover the teams in their region. So if you really want to know what the Leicester Mercury would have to say about your tenth successive defeat in charge of the Foxes, now is your chance... To find out more, read the press release.

British publisher SCi has announced a new deal with Gameplay.com which will see the European web portal distributing their games online, allowing customers to download games such as the "Carmaggedon" series and forthcoming titles such as "The Italian Job" and "Thunderbirds" via the Gameplay website. The four year deal will allow the "downloading and streaming" of games through Gameplay's broadband services, which will first be available through BT Openworld and Freeserve Plus. For the full skinny, read the press release.

The latest release schedule just arrived from Mattel, with the absences more noteworthy than the few changes. "Close Combat : Invasion Normandy" was one of the only movers, with its release actually being brought forward a couple of weeks to November 17th. Now there's something we don't see very often, a game being completed ahead of schedule! But while there were few movers, three titles had mysteriously dropped off the release schedule entirely. After checking with those lovely folks at Mattel's PR company, Bastion, we discovered their fate...

Homeworld : Cataclysm is the part-sequel, part-mission pack successor to Relic Entertainment's highly successful Homeworld. Cataclysm is not a "true" sequel to Homeworld in that it only provides a new set of missions, one new race, and a few interface and gameplay improvements over the original. However, it does not require a copy of the original to run, and unlike many mission packs it retails for the price of a full game.

The folks from the delicately titled "Clusterball" fan site Ball Snatchers sent word that they are organising the game's first official "All Star" match, with a selection of eight top players from around the world taking part in an hour of aerial ball snatching shenanigans on Sunday October 22nd. Spectators will also be able to watch the matches thanks to the game's new demo recording feature, which is being added in the next patch.

The controversial release of the original "Battlecruiser" way back in 1995 was marred by a whole flotilla of bugs afflicting the game, making it nigh on unplayable, mostly thanks to the publisher kicking it out the door before it was complete. Not about to let the same thing happen to him again, Derek Smart today announced that sign-ups have begun for a limited public beta test of the latest installment in the series, "Battlecruiser Millenium". The new game is designed from the ground-up to work under Windows (the original was a DOS game!), and will feature updated AI, a new 3D accelerated graphics engine, over 250 units, a new improved interface, multiplayer support, and the proverbial much, much more.

As he squints through light starved eyes, MI6 agent John Cord can just about make out the faces of his torturers, the evil Dimitri Nagarov and his thug sidekick Lukyan. Drugged and weak, Cord struggles hard to remember how he came to be in such a predicament.

Soon after Computer Artworks completed work on "Evolva", a third person action game in which you controlled a squad of four "genohunters" capable of evolving into bizarre new forms, three members of the core team behind the game split away to form their own development studio, Synaptic Soup. The company is currently hard at work on their debut game, but in the meantime they have just revealed the first details of their new game engine, known as "Cipher".

Human Head's official Rune website has today been updated with word that the Unreal powered third person Viking action game has now gone gold, meaning that the game is complete and has been sent off for duplication. Featuring some rather fetching 3D graphics, plenty of hand-to-hand combat, and more blood and gore than you can shake a severed limb at, "Rune" could be a breath of fresh air for the usually stale third person genre. We should know for certain within the next few weeks, as the game is due to hit shelves worldwide by the end of October.

CTW reports today that Tomb Raider and Ion Storm owners Eidos Interactive will remain independant despite the takeover talks that have been mounting lately. According to Eidos' statement, "the Board gave the approach serious consideration, but concluded that the terms did not represent fair value for shareholders". As such the Wimbledon-based publishing firm will not be taken over and shall keep trading. After the success of Deus Ex and the taking into account the forthcoming releases of the next Championship Manager and Tomb Raider titles, the company should be in fairly good stead come this year's Christmas period. As for its trivia title Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Eidos are confident that the show's reputation and an enormous advertising campaign should sell it by itself..

Why are Microsoft so happy with their Xbox? That's the question that's been puzzling me for the last few weeks as we see announcement after announcement about developer support. Surely anyone can see that it's digging itself into a hole the size of a small third world country and seems intent on tunnelling even deeper. The way the hardware specifications seem to expand and contract isn't helping matters, but it's compounded by Microsoft's incredibly naïve decision to include a non-fixed state hard disk. The implications of such a move on the console industry's target audience may be mesmerizing to watch. Without a one-switch restoration solution we may see an awful lot of confused and daunted buyers come 18 months time.

Totally Games' recent decision to develop Star Trek : Bridge Commander for Activision may have put them in poor sted with traditional bill-payers Lucasarts, but thanks to some much-needed investment backing from Microsoft we may well get to see a space simulation of some sort on the Xbox. Its Xbox development team should number upward of 20 within a few weeks. Project lead is Rick White formerly of Mattel, with John Wick named as story editor and mission designer. With such talent on board and an already proven track record of successful titles including the highly acclaimed "X-Wing versus TIE Fighter" for Lucasarts it's no surprise that Microsoft are itching to add them to an already growing list of successful developers.

The addictive massively multiplayer game "Everquest" has proven to be one of the most successful role-playing games ever, with 400,000 copies sold worldwide to date, and up to 67,000 players online at any one time. Now, with winter almost upon us, the game's European publishers have good news for both veterans of the game and newcomers alike who are looking for an escape from the long cold northern nights.

3dfx have had a hard time of it over the last year, with repeated delays to their eagerly anticipated VSA-100 3D graphics chip leaving rivals NVIDIA to tidy up with their GeForce series. The company might have taken a knock as the likes of NVIDIA and ATI overtook their technological lead in the PC 3D graphics market, but now they are coming back fighting, and part of their strategy to regain their place as one of the most innovative and successful graphics hardware manufacturers is .. a TV tuner card?!?

The fall-out from last week's collapse of the GameFan Network continues, as "Subspace" creators Harmless Games cut loose of the company. Originally Harmless had signed a deal with Brainscan Interactive to publish and help fund their new online game, "Infantry", but then Maximum Holdings took over both Brainscan and the GameFan Network, only to then be absorbed into Express.com itself. Now, with Brainscan's owners in disarray, Harmless have bought back the rights to Infantry and apparently signed a new deal with Sony.

Next Friday will see the launch of UbiSoft's latest game, but this one is something a little different... Described as an "e-mail detective game", all you need to play "Myster-E" is a computer with a net connection - simply sign up for the game and you will receive the first of a string of e-mails, setting up the mystery which you are to solve.