News

Infogrames are working on Alone in the Dark 3 which will be set in
a 1930's Californian Wild West Town complete with ghostly cowboys.
Once again, you play hero Carnby and Emily Hartwood makes an
appearance as the woman you have to rescue. The release will be
initially on CD-ROM with a floppy version to follow. This is the
opposite way round from the way AITD games have been released
previously.

The CD-ROM version of AITD2 will be out in September, featuring a
longer animated intro, speech and a 63-track soundtrack. Changes
have been made to the CD-ROM version to make the game slightly
easier for the player as many complaints had been made that AITD2
was too darn hard. Nice to see programmers taking note of
criticism!

Infogrames are also working on Shadow of the Comet 2:Prisoner of
Ice, which moves the action from the South Pole to the Falkland
Islands, Argentina and, finally, back to Ilsmouth where SOTC1 took
place.  In it, hero John Parker must foil the Nazis' plans for
world domination. There will be over 200 detailed sets and 60
animated interactive characters in the game.

Bullfrog have released the CD-ROM version of Syndicate which
includes the data disk, American Revolt. It also has network
support for up to 8 players and costs œ39.99.

Meanwhile, on the budget side, Kixx have released several cheap
CD-ROMs - only œ14.99 each. These include Eye of the Beholder,
Cruise for a Corpse, Pirates, Larry 1, Police Quest 1 and Space
Quest 1. Each is fully playable from the CD, contains a
screensaver (Johnny Castaway, worth œ19.99) and 20 demos, both
interactive and rolling.

An enhanced version of Frontier:Elite II is due soon, called
Frontier:The First Encounter. It is a more complex extension of
Frontier with the same engine. Frontier has evidently sold over
200,000 copies - just in Europe!

The other mammoth selling title of the moment is SimCity 2000.
That has also got a boost with the release of the first in a
series of data disks, a range of disasters covering various
American cities.

Kyrandia III is being worked on by Virgin/Westwood and it is
promised that it will have much larger character graphics and
rendered backgrounds. No title has been given for the game yet but
it has been rumoured that a CD-ROM triple pack of all three games
will be released in limited numbers.

I recently heard from Dave Malmberg of Softworks with two bits of
news.

First, the winners of the 1993 Adventure Writing Contest.  Once
again, it was a closely run contest and the decision was made to
give a joint first place to The Jeweled Arena by David S. Raley
and Klaustrophobia by Carol Hovick.  Congratulations to both the
winners as well as those who gained honourable mentions.

Secondly, all Softworks products, including Master's AGT, are now
Freeware. Dave said he just doesn't have the time to answer
questions, pack orders etc or answer 2 AM phone calls.

Outpost, Sierra's "Civilisation in space" has been delayed until
July, having originally been promised for spring.

As well as Dark Seed II, Cyberdreams are producing a series of
RPGs in collaboration with Gary Gygax, the creator of AD&D - with
a pedigree like that, the games should be tremendous! The first
game, Hunters of Ralk, like the others in the series, will be
based on a completely new system. A CD-ROM version is already
being advertised in the American magazines.






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