Unfortunately, look forward to my social habits to decline and my productivity to decrease as I just started playing Mask of Eternity. Did I mention that I'm not done with Fallout 2?
I think good ole Stuart's already made a review, but here are my first impressions:
3D engine is pretty good, not exactly Unreal standards, but a very impressive one nonetheless, it pulls off a neat trick with the magic map. Characters actually move their lips, animation texture mapped upon polygons creepy...
The interface (which seems to be the usual bitch in the buzz) takes some getting used to although I really do NOT enjoy the way camera control is handled, very ungainly. Combat is not as "adventure-destroying" as most loyalists have been anticipating.
But enough, on to the news!
"Enough about me, let's talk about
YOU. What did YOU like about my new album?"
Matthew
Arcilla
| PC Data's Top 20 of 1998
PC Data has revealed the tallies of its retail monitoring endeavors, bringing us the biggest selling retail games list, so here it is: the bestsellers of 1998. Not for the faint of heart.
Creepy, innit? ---c/o Matthew Arcilla Cyan Releases Sketch, Myststers
Go Crazy for Autographed Copies
One of the artists at Cyan (Myst, Riven) has leaked the latest drip of information regarding the company's next project. While most Myststers are still pondering what the sketch really is, most are really excited about what the team has dubbed The Next Project. Most are still making retrospective examinations of the rumored relationship of Cyan with Headspin Technologies, and the potential maneuver to acquire Headspin's Plasma engine. Regarding Headspin
and Cyan, check out the previous JANews!
report here. More details on the Next
Project as JANews! gets them.
"GT: We Bring Good Games to Life."
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Anyways, here's more news for ya.
Oh, and I may have said this before but here goes: Fallout 2 is fun.
"Death is a mug's game. I suppose
you'll all die, cause you're stupid."
Matthew
Arcilla
| Genuine Simulated Iraqi Footage
I'm too lazy to actually go around and research, so I'm commiting a heinous act of plagiarism by snagging stuff from the GameSpot Newswire:
Beginning Wednesday, NBC-TV has been using the capabilities of Jane's Fleet Command, an upcoming title from Electronic Arts' Jane's Combat Simulations division, to illustrate bombing campaigns waged from US battleships and aircraft on Iraq ground locations. A production team from Jane's utilized in-game graphics from both F-15 and the unreleased Fleet Command games to visualize the current situation in Iraq with 3D models of ships and aircraft - as well as detailed looks at the terrain from a bird's-eye perspective. The result has been beneficial to both the general public, who lacks any official footage of such attacks, and Jane's, who in the words of Jane's senior publicist Kristen McEntire has now benefited from "huge exposure" for a game that isn't scheduled to ship until spring of next year. McEntire came up with the idea of utilizing gameplay to illustrate likely battles several months ago. And about six weeks ago, when there was much talk of air strikes on Iraq, McEntire and the game's Connecticut-based developers went into action and began generating tape to be used by NBC. Those strikes were called off, but for Jane's, it meant further preparations could take place. Just last weekend, a tape with four to six hours of Iraq-specific footage was delivered to the NBC affiliate in Hartford, Conn., where it was uploaded to the NBC satellite and transferred to NBC production facilities in New York. When the bombing raid was announced by President Clinton on Wednesday, all the pieces were in place. The rest, as they say, is history. The Jane's-generated film clips have appeared numerous times on various NBC national feeds and will continue for as long as NBC producers deem them useful. O Come All Ye 'Countants
The NPD Group, reports that games have been selling pretty well by an upper of 32 percent compared to last year. Sales were up every month in 1998 compared with the same periods of 1997. Gains have been ranging from 16 percent to 52 percent. The report projects sales (alone) to reach $6.3 billion versus 1997's $5.1 billion, and
The report makes a deep breakdown of the industry sales:
Action games dominate on the consoles, accounting for up to 60 percent of all games sold in 1998. The consoles also saw a significant increase in the adventure/role-playing unit shares, mostly due to titles such as Final Fantasy VII and other Japanese-style RPGs that found success in the United States. The PC market, on the other hand, reflects its older audience, with the most popular genres being strategy and sports titles. Both those genres garnered a 20 percent share each." The RPG Mania Continues
Volition Inc., makers of Descent: Freespace (which in case people do not realize, was titled Descent simply because of the copyright hassles with the makers of FreeSpace the compression utility, and not a cheap capitalist move by Interplay) has had a web site makeover. The site reveals details about three new titles in development... one of them is an RPG called Summoner. Not to be confused with SSI's The Summoning (a stellar RPG released in 1992), Summoner, is the company's firsy role-playing game enterprise. Summoner utilizes a third-person
3D interface, dynamic camera system, in-depth storyline, and in-game cinematics.
Development began last July. More details as JANews! gets them.
The System of System Shock
The whole press
release reveals that character's abilities don't develop via arbitrary
level attainments and "skill point" expenditures, but rather it's more
of a "character matures as you play" a la Quest for Glory.
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