Odds And Ends: Tuesday News Roundup

DreamCatcher Games has announced Cold War: Behind the Iron Curtain, a new PC stealth/espionage adventure thingum due out in the UK in Q4 2004 with Mindscape handling distribution. It sounds vaguely interesting. Apparently we get to play a freelance journalist called Matt Carter on the run in the USSR in the 80s. He winds up in a KGB prison barely half a day into the country, for no obvious reason, and it'll take lots of fighting, infiltrating and improvising to get out and prevent the government's overthrow - across 23 non-linear levels that touch on Lenin's Mausoleum, Chernobyl and other familiar places. Get your screenshots here.

For anybody heading to Edinburgh for the festival next month, here's another incentive to stop by the Edinburgh International Games Festival. Apart from Sports Interactive's planned first demonstration of Football Manager 2005, you can also listen to Heavy Iron Studios' Lyle Hall discuss the process involved in developing the videogame of Disney/Pixar's forthcoming film The Incredibles, which ought to be fairly interesting. Like the SI unveiling, the Incredibles session will take place at The Odeon in Edinburgh, with more details available on the festival website.

Digital Jesters has added to its adventure canon with the addition of The Moment of Silence from "German adventure masters" House of Tales, which the Britsoft firm plans to publish this October on the PC. The Moment of Silence is a conspiratorial adventure game set set in a near-future New York, which has been augmented with some new areas "to create a world with incredibly variety, in which no-one is what they seem". You take control of Peter Wright, a communications designer working on the government's "Freedom of Speech" campaign, who finds himself thrown into a world of corruption, power and global domination after his neighbour's flat is raided by SWAT and he's never seen again. Expect rendered, animated backdrops, a traditional point-and-click interface, FMV by the team that worked on Rogue Leader for the Cube, apparently, and eight hours of recorded dialogue. Click the following hotspot to unlock some screenshots.