Latest Articles (Page 3634)

The folks over at Latest Updates have posted an interview with Valve developer Wright Bagwell. Wright is a level designer, who in his past life had done some funky quake levels such as 'The Vigil'.

It has gotten quite a bit of coverage but I'm sure this is one of the last times you'll hear about LookingGlassStudios. The now defunct, once great, games developer.

The final part of the tutorial on re-coding Quake 3's menu is now up on Q3Center

Straight from the annals of classic 2D beat-em-ups come the Arcade, Versus and Training options. They seem to have made up the core pre-requisite in most 2D fighting game design documents for many a year. There are 10 Combatants, each of whom heralds a few unique special abilities. The ferocity of these abilities is dictated by the increasing rage and animosity toward the opponent, represented by a Power Bar at the foot of the screen. Vibrations from the Dual Shock controller, which is fully supported by the game, further demonstrate this ferocity. While many of the Capcom and SNK titles that dominate this genre offer well-known characters that we can relate to, Guilty Gear's crew aren't too shabby. I felt a lot more endeared to them than I had expected to as I struggled through the Single Player game, and while there is always a sort of standoffishness about playing with any beat-em-up character in Multi Player, I developed my favourites very quickly and learnt how to most effectively make use of their respective arsenals. The actual combat was frenetic - the action is fast, fast, fast, and the combination manoeuvres border on the absurd. The developers have evidently spent a lot of time balancing the game out however, because the actual length of the bouts is not significantly less than most 2D beat-em-ups, presumably thanks to the time and effort put into creating the right balance of executive speed and damage infliction.

"The Life and Death of Tank Platoon" is a new feature over on SimHQ, charting the background, development and eventual demise of "M1 Tank Platoon 3", or "Tank Platoon!" as it became known. The game was intended to link up with Hasbro's recently released helicopter sim "Gunship!" to produce an "electronic battlefield", but poor sales of Gunship! apparently led to the whole project being canned...

Virgin Interactive (who publish the game in the UK) sent word that the v0.2 patch is now available for Messiah, fixing various graphics corruption problems and lock-ups, and generally improving stability. Amongst the more interesting sounding changes is "crash fixed when saving and loading during kissing animations". Um .. don't ask.

New today on EuroGamer is our preview of Dino Crisis, the forthcoming PC conversion of the Playstation hit. A Resident Evil style third person action romp, but with dinosaurs instead of zombies, can it make the grade on the PC? Read our preview to find out!

As the natural life of the Playstation draws to a peaceful end and developers find a hard time developing as many big games for the Dreamcast and PSX2, the profits need to be kept up.

Are turn-based strategy games dead? So asks GameSpot today. Ever since the earliest PC game, text based RPG's we have had a lot of turn based games on the PC. Indeed they were the life blood of PC gaming for some time. Civilization two and three sold a huge amount of copies and kept the turn based genre alive for some time.

With $150,000 being given away at the next CPL event in October it seems a few people have thought it would be good if you could play a real duel every week, more if you liked.  Well now Q3 duelers have that chance with the establishment of a Duel Ladder based in the UK, and one with a twist.

The game's release date might have travelled through almost as many eras of history as its time travelling hero, but after years of work and a seemingly endless series of set-backs at developer Ion Storm, John Romero's much-hyped first person shooter, Daikatana, is finally done. Already available in the USA, Eidos have now confirmed that the game will be released in the UK on June 9th - next Friday.

"Battle Isle : The Andosia War", the real-time sequel to the classic turn-based strategy games of the early 90s, will be beta tested online starting on June 13th, and the German developers at Blue Byte are looking for 2000 volunteers to take part!

After E3 I remember hearing something about this great looking new RTS from TimeGateStudios called, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. Well Gamespy have gotten their hands on that same movie and now we all can have a look at it, not just the lucky ones who were at E3.

Tribes was the first game to really get me into on-line gaming, to take away my life and drag me to a server 5 or 6 hours a day. My first clan of any nature was a tribes clan, Electric Mayhem, all of who's members I met online. Most of those members I have since met, and now call friends in real life. Tribes is played in every corner of the world, and in all those places there are stories like mine. All of these people who are waiting for tribes 2.

We all like to see charts and voting, who is top and who is not. Post E3 each year we get told what games will be good, and what games do not look so good. One problem is that game sites generally stick to their genre, it is rare that you get all the genres, and all the best upcoming games in one place.

New today on EuroGamer is our review of Starlancer, the new space combat sim from Digital Anvil and British developer Warthog. Created by the Roberts brothers, who were behind the classic Wing Commander and Privateer games, can it live up to its excellent pedigree, or is it just another derivitative mongrel? Read our review to find out for yourself!

Back in the day there was only one name when it came to space combat sims, and that name was Wing Commander.

Those fine ladies over at Women Gamers have posted an interesting article on game concepts that could, should, or indeed might happen. "Everyone has a game concept that they would love to see happen". I personally want Sensible Soccer mixed with Championship manager, and done properly, I'm sure others might want Quake 3 crossed with AOE2, where you fight and shoot to gain land and advantage, Risk style. The list could go on and on.

At E3 Microsoft surprised a lot of people by announcing that they were canceling two of their more popular sports games - NFL Fever and NBA Inside Drive. This set a lot of people in the games community aback. The folks over at SportPlanet got a hold of Shawn Quigley, Director of Business Development at High Voltage Software, the developers of NBA Inside Drive 2000 and asked him, among other things, if this decision was directly related to the happenings surrounding the X Box.

Our UK release date list here on EuroGamer has been updated again, this time with the latest information from Mattel Interactive, a company which owns several labels, including Red Orb, Mindscape and SSI.

Kazi Wren, the Dark Mistress of Ragnarok herself, has uncovered the arcane secrets of the combat system and weapons to be featured in Human Head's Unreal-engined Viking action game, Rune.

The date of the CPL's Frag 4 tournament in Dallas has changed again, this time due to the venue "exercising an option to cancel the event under certain circumstances". The new date is Thursday September 28th to Sunday October 1st, while the venue remains the same. As an added bonus, the admission price and hotel room prices have been reduced slightly. Check the CPL website for more details...

Following on from last week's article on overclocking the new Celeron II 566 processor, this week our resident tech head examines the Celeron II and the Pentium III E to work out just why the real world performance of the Celeron II was so disappointing in comparison.

Until recently Intel had always been the dominant force in the desktop CPU market, especially amongst power users, as their chips have always been renowned for their high performance.

The X-Men are soon to take over your Playstation… again? That's right; confusingly, Capcom have already produced Marvel Vs. Capcom on several formats, and are now working on Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. Capcom's Marvel stuff is being published by Virgin Interactive. Paradox, a completely different company, coupled with publishers Activision, are working on X-Men: Mutant Academy, a game which visually resembles Marvel Vs. Capcom, but is wholly different. Despite the fact that both use the same cartoony style, and both are using the popular license to create a fighting game, the two are unrelated as far as I can see. But if both games look the same, and use the same characters, what is there to attract the public to X-Men: Mutant Academy's stable of fighting as opposed to Marvel Vs. Capcom's? And how the heck did this twisted state of affairs come about? No idea about the latter, but the former I can help you with.

I remember clearly the first time I saw the AVI of Halo, and gasping in shock at the claim that it was being rendered in real time, it was actual footage, not a movie. How can something look this good actually in game, well Halo plans to answer these questions. In case you are one of the few not straining at the lead to get your hands on it. Bungie are the fine people making Halo, and as far as we can tell, they are doing a fine job aswell. It is being aimed at the same type of person who would play Tribes 2 or Team Fortress 2. The shots and information make it seem very like Starseige Tribes, a game with a massive worldwide online community.

Thousands of dollars in prizes are at stake in the Nox World Cup, a worldwide tournament sponsored by Westwood Studios to find the worlds best Nox player. The competition will begin June 1 on westwoords own gaming service, Westwood Online. The Nox Grand Championship will bring the finalists to sunny Las Vegas to battle for the title of best Nox player in the world. Each selected country shall hold tournaments and the top two players shall be brought to to Vegas to battle for the title.

Before the death of Looking Glass Studios there were several games in various stages of development. One of the long term games a lot of people were looking forward to was the world war two flight sim Janes Attack Squadron. There already was a publisher in Electronic Arts, but as there is no one to actually finish the game, so now it just dies.

Harvey "Witchboy" Smith, lead designer on first person RPG "Deus Ex", has spoken about the challenges of designing a game that allows the player a lot of freedom. As he explains, "allowing people to play the game multiple ways complicates the balancing issues".

When you talk formula one games there is only one name that is of any importance, that is Geoff Crammond. Both GP and GP2 were the best racing games of their time, and his last title, Grand Prix 2 sold well over 1 million units worldwide, and his games are seen as classics by fans of the genre, almost before they are released.