While scouting around ECTS I came across this game that is very early in development. Majorem is an Israeli company and they seemed rather eager to set up interviews, if not to actually run on schedule with them.
The idea of the game will be familiar to any RTS player; you build and control an army then use it to rule the world. In this case control cities, build things like castles and generally cause mayhem. [read the full story]
Published by the same people behind IL-2 Sturmovik, Perimeter is shaping up to be a nice-looking RTS game with an innovative feature-set. Perimeter is being sold as a Real-time Terraforming Strategy game, you see. You get to play about with the landscape in ways never before seen in the genre. As well as this, Perimeter uses a kind of unit-alchemy system to produce units; there are just three basic types (soldiers, officers and technicians), from which others can be formed (tanks, planes, transports etc). What’s more, these combinations can be made and split up during play, which allows for some interesting tactical possibilities. Note that I wasn’t shown how this actually works, since only an early build of the game was being demonstrated. [read the full story]
Picture the scene, if you will. You roll into a desert cannon, the sun shines across the desert the colours of the sky shifting to evening. Its is peaceful, quiet. Too quiet.
*WHAM*
You’ve been lazy, caught off guard, as a missile strikes your flank. You return fire with your machine guns, and load a bouncing bomb into your vehicles cannon while you reverse and swing around to face your attacker. You smile, he’s fast, but he’s got no armour.. you drive straight at him.. you can take this puppy.
Welcome to 10 seconds in the life of Bandits. One of the most interesting shooting games I’ve played in a while. Developed by GRIN and published by Pan Vision this is one of those games that will haunt LAN parties for years. [read the full story]
My Christmas present came early in 2002 when I was presented with the opportunity to visit Digital Anvil Studios to participate in a freelancer fanstock, where I got a sneak peek of their upcoming release: Freelancer.
Digital Anvil Studios put us up at the Radisson hotel in downtown Austin, TX, just a couple blocks from their studio. By the time I had gotten settled in my hotel room, I was starving; luckily, a dinner at Ironworks BBQ had been set up, where we would meet and have dinner with some of the guys from Digital Anvil (DA). I met up with the other eleven fanstock participants in the hotel lobby. [read the full story]
This is (or, more accurately, will be) a game based on the series of books, not the film. You play Clarice Starling, the FBI agent, and you have to act within the constraints that implies; you can’t go about shooting just anyone, you will have to make arrests and capture miscreants, for example. The game is meant to encompass investigation, action, and ambience. [read the full story]
Set in a parallel dimension, Mistmare’s premise is that the Roman Church has suppressed scientific research in favour of learning about magic and the occult. This kind of approach is not without a certain amount of trial and error; in fact, about a thousand years before 1996 in this other dimension sorcerer priests managed to summon this evil mist that now covers most, if not all, of Europe. A thousand years after the event, only a few cities survive, depending on enchanted bells to repel the mist. That’s not all; in the mist are beasties the likes of which you really don’t want to bump into. [read the full story]
Arxel Tribe is a developer I’d never heard of before I got yanked into their stand at ECTS by a combination of three-and-a-bit nearly-finished games, and the enthusiasm with which they were demonstrated to me. They come from a merger between French and Slovenian companies (and include people from Italy and Canada), and have several titles under their belt that I’d also not heard about before, including Ring an adventure game released in ~50 countries, and generating around 2.6 million Euros of revenue, since 1998. Other titles include Pilgrim in 1997, Faust in 1999 and others.
Arxel Tribe have four titles in development, three of which have just entered beta testing, the other being at the technology-demo sort of phase. All four were being demonstrated at ECTS. [read the full story]
Techland had a plethora of games on display at their booth at ECTS this year, though none were playable. Instead, there was a rolling marketing video, showing:
* Roots, an RPG set in ancient times. The roots of trees are meant to hold magical power, and there is a great evil invading the land, chopping down said trees. You play as a character that is banding together with other good people, using the power of the remaining trees to stave off the assault. [read the full story]
Many people who attended ECTS this year will have noticed something was different from previous years. Not the booth babes, they were still there in their un-PC glory, no something fundamental had changed.
It was smaller.
ECTS is perhaps the European trade show for computing. However in recent years it has suffered from the worst sort of counter publicity you can get.
People think it doesn’t matter. Sure E3 is all big and brash, and in your face. Great, go there if you’re in LA! The PC market is not only dominated by American companies, and funded by American money, it’s starting to think that there’s only the American market! [read the full story]
I stayed there with my family for six nights in three different rooms and what can I say about this place but that they seriously need to do some work with the plumbing. Seriously though out of the six nights we were there the toilet would not flush at all for four of those nights. Everyday we told the front desk and every night we got back to the same shit. Which was inconvenient when you get back at 1 am exhausted and wanting to drift off to sleep after hitting the toilet, but were we able to do that no we weren’t. [read the full story]
