Spring E.C.T.S report By Richard Hewison The latest European Computer Trade Show (E.C.T.S) was held (as always) at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London from April 10th - 12th. All the major publishers important to the European scene were present, although some were harder to find than others! I haven't seen any games on CD-ROM yet that would convince me as a consumer to buy a CD-ROM drive. (However, being a freelance employee for a number of publishers I had to buy one ages ago to get the work!). Anyway, most of the major publishers think that CD-ROM is the future of computer entertainment. Virgin were showing a couple of titles on CD-ROM. "The 11th Hour" is the follow up to "The 7th Guest" which sold by the bucket load last year without actually being a very good game. This sequel is similarly chock-a-block full of 3D Studio rendered locations and animations. Once again it looks as if it will involve the solving of logic puzzles and will contain a mixture of rendered rooms and filmed actors. Westwood Studios were showing off a number of quite staggering CD demos on the rather cramped Virgin product stand. First off were some brilliant animations from "Command and Conquer" which is a war strategy game which will employ an improved version of the very good "Dune II" user interface. The rendered animations of aircraft and tanks were very impressive. Oddly, there was no indication of what the game looked like but the intro will be stunning (and CD-ROM only). It also included some very high quality digitised video which is easily the clearest I've seen yet - and in full colour too. Also on show from Westwood were more equally stunning rendered animations from the follow up to "Lands of Lore". Not only did you get to see some wonderful looking rendered country side amblings, (including a giant animated red dragon) but this time you also saw what the in-game animations will look like. One in particular showed a rendered archer pulling out arrows and shooting them towards you. How playable all these rendered games will be remains to be seen, but Westwood have certainly done the business with the visuals! Interplay have been showing off "Stonekeep" for quite some time. Imagine Dungeon Master with rendered graphics and a full screen to accommodate them and you will get a pretty good idea what this game is shaping up like. Interplay have been making a lot of noise over the fact that there is no interface visible on-screen to allow the whole screen to be used for the visuals. Whilst this does make the game look quite impressive, it means that the control system is fiddly at best and nowhere near as "intuitive" as they would lead you to believe. In my brief play I didn't come across any monsters but I remember them being obviously digitised men in silly costumes from the last E.C.T.S. Let's hope they have improved on those by the time the game is released. One game that Interplay weren't showing off directly (for the second show running) was "Dungeon Master II". The game has been finished on the Amiga for quite a while but the graphics are almost identical to the original. At present Interplay are debating whether to get the graphics re-done on the Amiga or release it as it is. The PC version will almost certainly have improved graphics over the Amiga version, but no one was mentioning release dates. Mike Singleton certainly gets around these days. Not content with finishing off the recently released "Starlord" for Microprose, he's also about to work with Psygnosis. Domark also have a Mike Singleton product under development and you might just recognise the title - "Lords of Midnight: The Citadel". According to the press blurb "Lords of Midnight is the ultimate fantasy role playing game. Lead the Lords of the Land of Midnight against the Black Citadel of Boroth the Wolfheart in this huge and intriguing adventure, complete the full animation in real time and stunning 3D textured mapped landscapes" (sic). No mention is made of the original Spectrum games "Lords of Midnight" or "Doomdark's Revenge" but it's safe to assume from the plot that this is the third game in the series rather than a PC remake of the original. Having had a peek at this game at the end of last year, I have to admit that it doesn't look too good at the moment. It seems quite slow and the graphics are far from "stunning". The press blurb mentions a May release date on floppy and CD-ROM but somehow I don't think it's going to make it! A recent internal re-organisation within Domark might also lead to much more adventure and RPG related product in the future, especially now that THE Ian Livingstone has taken an active interest in the development side of things. Cyberdreams were showing off their latest adventure related PC game, "Red Hell". To say it looked similar to Virgin's "KGB" (a.k.a "Conspiracy" on CD-ROM) would be putting it mildly. (The plot also has strong Russian connections). However, the graphics looked very sub-standard for a 16 bit game and the animation was also very poor. Again, maybe things will be spruced up prior to release so I shouldn't be too hard on it. Renegade had their first graphic adventure release on show. "Flight of the Amazon Queen" is a game in the Lucasarts mould written by a new programming team from Australia. Hopefully all those arcade playing fans who bought "Sensible Soccer" and "The Chaos Engine" will finally get a chance to enter the adventure genre with this release. It should be released just before the Summer on PC (including a talking CD-ROM version) and an Amiga version is also planned for later this year. Silmarils were showing bits of "Robinson's Requiem" which is looking quite interesting. "Ishar 3" looked very similar to parts 1 and 2, but they only seemed to be showing a still graphic slide show of the game. This usually indicates that the game is some way off, so don't hold your breath. I didn't catch sight of any of them on their stand, but Microprose are working on three "Star Trek: The Next Generation" games. "A Final Unity" is more of a strategy game and will be PC CD-ROM running in Super VGA only. The strategy elements involve sending the Enterprise around the Galaxy, whilst the adventure side comes into play when you beam the away team down to the planets. "Future's Past" is for the S.N.E.S and is a strategic puzzle solving game, whilst "A World For All Seasons" will be for the 3DO system (Clips from early development versions on the 3DO were seen on Equinox (Channel 4) a few months ago). Microprose also have another graphic adventure written with their M.A.D.S system in the pipeline. "Bloodnet" is an interactive role-playing game that combines Cyberpunk with Vampires in the year 2094 A.D! (Weird!). The CD version will contain 150 digitised voices and it will also features "3-D rendered Hallucinographic art". Pardon? Adventure Soft had the CD-ROM talking version of "Simon the Sorcerer" (featuring the vocal talents of Arnold J. Rimmer...sorry, Mr. Brittas...err...quite remarkably...Chris Barrie) on the PC. The sequel (I don't have to say what it's called, do I?) is planned for release in September (just in time for the Autumn E.C.T.S). U.S Gold were tucked away down a darkened corridor yet again so I was unable to fight my way through the bottle necks that formed nearby to get a sneak look at Lucasarts "Tie Fighter" or the CD-ROM version of "Sam and Max Hit the Road". Why they decide to put themselves out of the way where no one can reach them is beyond me. It's almost as if they don't want people to see their forthcoming products. Around 95% of the adventure/strategy/RPG products on show were for the PC with around 75% or more of them on CD-ROM. Hopefully Westwood Studios can inject the same level of gameplay into their excellently presented CD-ROM product as was found in their previous floppy games (Eye of the Beholder, Dune II, Legend of Kyrandia, Lands of Lore etc). Other developers are churning out CD-ROM graphics with no history of gameplay experience to fall back on. Maybe a few spectacular flops will persuade some of the publishers to re-evaluate what they are doing in future. Of course, the result of all this frenzied activity on CD-ROM means yet more expense for Joe Public. Good CD-ROM drives are still far too expensive and so are the CD-ROM only products to run on them. It's interesting to note that the publishers are all abandoning the Amiga like rats leaving a sinking ship, yet the Amiga's share of the software market is still much higher than the PC's! I wonder if anyone can work out why? Answers on a postcard... - o -