News

Graphic Adventures:

Hot on the heels of 'Day of the Tentacle', another cartoon-like
graphic adventure from LucasArts will be 'Sam and Max Hit the
Road', based on comic books by Steve Purcell. In it you will have
to search for a missing Bigfoot in various spoof American tourist
traps such as the Celebrity Vegetable Museum, the World's Largest
Ball of Twine and the Mount Rushmore Prehistoric Bungee Cavalcade.
It is due in the Autumn.

Sierra are as busy as ever; look at the list of titles they have
planned.  'Police Quest 4' features new photorealistic graphics
with digitized backdrops from downtown LA. The author of PQ4 is
ex-LA police chief Daryl Gates.  'Gabriel Knight' stars a new hero
of that name. He's an amateur sleuth and must solve the mystery of
a family where all the males die at 33. 'Quest for Glory 4:Shadows
of Darkness' will use the same system as QFG3. In 'Leisure Suit
Larry 6', Larry visits an upmarket health spa called La Costa
Lotta.  The latest in their Discovery series, 'Pepper's Adventures
in Time' is already out; in it you play both Pepper and her dog
(Lockjaw!) as they try to straighten out history after a mad
professor mixes it up with a time distorter.

Coktel Vision are working on 'Lost in Time', a graphic adventure
featuring full-motion video graphics in some scenes, illustrations
by French cartoonist Segar for others and 3D rendered graphics for
the rest. Their adventures may be weird but no-one can accuse the
French of stinting on graphics!

At first it looked as though 'Return to Zork' would be CD-ROM only
but, no; it will also be available on floppies. How many? I
wonder, since it uses full motion video clips and over an hour of
audio dialogue - maybe most of that will be CD-ROM only.

'Simon the Sorcerer' from Adventure Soft will be a LucasArts-type
game but, unusually, the graphics have been scanned in from
hard-drawn artwork. The game will be humorous, drawing heavily
on Terry Pratchett's books. Simon is a young lad who inadvertently
finds himself transformed into a sorcerer when he is transported
into a magical land. Only 12 verbs will be available but over 100
locations. It is hoped to be the first of several games using the
same system, AGOS II.

'Legend of Kyrandia II' is already being previewed from
Virgin/Westwood whereas Mirage are working on a Jack the Ripper
murder mystery game which uses reports and data from the actual
investigation in 1888.

Spectrum Holobyte are working on an SVGA graphic adventure based
on 'Star Trek:  The Next Generation'. Some of the writers and
designers also worked on the series. Interplay are also on the
Star Trek bandwagon with the 8-mission game 'Star Trek:Judgement
Rites' which features sampled speech from some, if not all, of the
original characters from the show.

Shock, horror! The next Legend game will be a graphic adventure
but with a more friendly interface and, we're promised, no need to
play "hunt the pixel". As a Piers Anthony fan, I'm looking forward
to seeing it as it is based on his latest Xanth novel and will be
called 'Champions of Xanth'.

The 'Rex Nebular' engine, already re-used for 'Return of the
Phantom', will be used again for a third MicroProse title,
'Dragonsphere'. This time it's a pure fantasy game where a king
must defeat an evil sorcerer.

RPGs:

The Underworld style of display has caused a lot of interest in
the RPG world. There are more than 6 games of this type being
worked on at the moment.  Firstly, Origin/Raven Software are
bringing out 'Shadow Caster'; your character will actually change
form for certain situations eg become a frogman to travel through
water or a flying dragon when the ground is too rough to walk on.
Secondly, a new firm, Dolphin, are working on 'Forgotten
Castle:The Awakening' - it's said that the graphics are better and
the scrolling smoother than UW with good fine detail and
depth-of-view scaling.

A third UW-style game will be 'Secret of the Seventh Labyrinth'
from MicroProse; this is set in seven dungeons, each representing
a lost civilisation. It will also feature a map editor to build
your own dungeons.  Yet a fourth will be the next Might and Magic
RPG, provisionally entitled 'Might and Magic Arena'.
(Incidentally, 'Might and Magic V:Darkside of Xeen' should be out
any day. Also 'World of Xeen', a CD-ROM containing M&M4 and 5.)

Another UW clone will be Interplay's 'Stonekeep' which will need a
massive 30MB hard disk space! This is partly because it will use
digitized graphics as much as possible and there will be 13
different style levels of dungeon.  A sixth is the first in an RPG
series from Bethesda Softworks called The Elder Scrolls, Chapter
One:The Arena.  Dungeon Master 2:Legend of Skullkeep will feature
many improvements over the first game - 256-colour graphics,
indoor and outdoor sections, trading and intelligent monsters who
can heal themselves and tell their allies about you, making life
just that tiny bit tougher for you!

Origin are also working on Ultima 8 which will use an isometric 3D
view like Populous only three times bigger. The game will be set
in Pagan, the Guardian's homeland and will feature 5 baddies and
100-200 NPCs of which under 50 will be relevant to the plot.

Simulations/Strategy:

The first X-Wing mission disk, 'Imperial Pursuit', is already out.
The next will be out soon and will feature the B-Wing. Two more
similar games are also due from LucasArts called 'Rebel Assault'
and 'Tie Fighter'.

We're still waiting for 'Sim Farm' but the next Maxis title is
already being plugged - 'Sim City 2000' - which should be out by
Christmas. Using an A-Train style isometric 3D view, it features
underground railways, new facilities and extra terrain features.
What's more, you can load in your original Sim City cities.

The space strategy game 'Masters of Orion' from MicroProse is
described as "Civilization in space".

Recent Releases
---------------

(1) Software

1869 - Flair (PC, œ35; Amiga, œ30) - trading sim
Airbuskcs v1.2 - Impressions (Amiga, œ30; PC œ35)
Ambush at Sorinor - Mindcraft (PC, œ40)
A-Train Construction Set - Maxis (Amiga joins PC, œ15)
Battle Isle '93 - Blue byte (Amiga and PC, œ26)
Caesar (deluxe version) - Impressions (PC, œ35; Amiga, œ30)
Dune - Virgin (CD-ROM joins PC and Amiga, œ50)
Dune 2 - Virgin (Amiga joins PC, œ31)
Fields of Glory - MicroProse (PC, œ45)
High Command - Three Sixty (PC, œ45) - war sim
Ishar 2 - Simarils (Amiga, œ30)
Legend of Ragnarok - Mirage (PC, œ40)
Nippon Safes Inc - Dynabyte (PC, œ35; Amiga, œ30)
Pacific War - SSI (PC, œ40)
Patriot - Electronic Arts (PC, œ45)
Protostar - Tsunami (PC, œ40)
SimLife - Maxis (Amiga and A1200 versions join PC, both œ35)
Stronghold - SSI (PC, œ36)
Ultima7:Part 2 add-on, Silver Seed - Origin (PC, œ20)
Warlords 2 - SSG (PC, œ45)
Whale's Voyage - Flair (PC, œ35)