News from the Net From our reporter, Alex van Kaam @~It's been quite slow on the RPG & Adventure front, as far as I @~can tell, so first off here is a list of release dates taken @~from http://www.voodooextreme.com/Alteredworlds/rpgrl.htm for @~those of you who are not yet on the net: 1st Qtr. '99 Acheron's Call Microsoft 1st Qtr. '99 Akolyte Eidos 4th Qtr. '98 Anachronox ION Storm RELEASED! Ancient Evil Silver Lightening Soft. Sometime '99 Avaris Bifrost Creations RELEASED! Baldur's Gate Bioware/Interplay Summer '99 Darkstorm:Well of Souls Mythic Games RELEASED! Dark Sun Online 2.6 TEN Sometime '99 Dark Sun Online:Age of Heroes TEN 4th Qtr. '99 Deliverance from the Dark Studio Blue Sometime '99 Destiny Web Works Interactive 4th Qtr. '99 Deus Ex ION Storm Summer '99 Diablo II Blizzard 1st Qtr. '99 DragonFlight Grolier Interactive RELEASED! Duel:The Mage Wars Mythos Games Sometime '99 Dungeon Bane Lost Dragon Software 1st Qtr. '99 DungeonCraft Game Spring Sometime '99 Elysium Cavedog Entertainment March '99!!! Everquest Sony Interactive RELEASED! Fallout 2 Interplay RELEASED! Final Fantasy VII Squaresoft/Eidos Sometime '99 Gothic Piranha Bytes Sometime '99 Gothica Tinman Studios 1st Qtr. '99 Grimoire Central Dynamics RELEASED! Heretic II Raven/Activision RELEASED! Hexplore Infogrames Multimedia Sometime '99 Homeland Dragonlore Sometime '99 Illusia Living Mask Prod. 1st Qtr. '99 Infinite Worlds VBDesigns/Interplay 1st Qtr. '99 Lands of Lore III Westwood Studios Sometime '99 Legacy of the Watchers:Nightfall Ward Six 1st Qtr. '99 Legends of the 5 Rings Activision Sometime '99 Lucifer Eclipse Entertainment Sometime '99 Magic 4S Humansoft RELEASED! Mask of Eternity Sierra Studios 4th Qtr. '99 Middle Earth Yosemite Summer '99 Might & Magic VII New World Computing 1st Qtr. 2000 Mystic Isle Big Red Rock Sometime '99 Neopagan AlienPhobia Sometime '99 Neophyte Alien Software 1st Qtr. '99 Nethergate Spiderweb Software 1st Qtr. '99 Nox Hyperion Released Panterra Realms Network Summer '99 Planescape:Torment Black Isle/Interplay RELEASED! Quest for Glory V Sierra Studios RELEASED! Return to Krondor Sierra Studios RELEASED! Rages of Mages Nival/Monolith 2nd Qtr. '99 Rages of Mages II:Necromancer Nival/Monolith 2nd Qtr. '99 Revenant Cinematix 1st Qtr. '99 Runesword CrossCut Games Sometime '99 Septerra Core Valkyrie Studios Sometime '99 Soulbringer Gremlin Interactive 4th Qtr. '99 Stonekeep II Black Isle/Interplay Summer '99 Swords & Sorcery Hueristic Park Sometime '99 System Shock II Looking Glass Studios 4th Qtr. '99 The Elder Scrolls:Morrowind Bethesda Softworks RELEASED! The Elder Scrolls:Redguard Bethesda Softworks Sometime '99 The Awakening Project DT Enterprises 4th Qtr. '99 The Begotten Ward Six 4th Qtr. '99 The Lady, the Mage & the Knight Larian RELEASED! Thief:The Dark Project Looking Glass Studios Sometime '99 Third World Redline Sometime '99 Tlon Emerald Software Summer '99 Ultima:Ascension Origin RELEASED! Ultima Online:T2A Origin Sometime 2000 Ultima Online II Origin 4th Qtr. '99 Vampire: The Masquerade Nihilistic Software Sometime '99 Werewolf: The Apocalypse Dreamforge Not Soon Enough! Wheel of Time Legend Entertainment 3rd Qtr. '99 Wizardry VIII SirTech @~At http://www.gamepen.com/preview/ @~Playstation/07_01_1999_552_1.asp is a preview of Final Fantasy @~VIII, below is a small bit from this preview: The hero of the game is Squall Leonhart, a student of a military academy known as the Garden. The Garden is where children (boys and girls) aged six to nineteen are trained in the ways of war. We find Squall training hard to become a member of SeeD, an elite unit like Green Berets. If they pass the placement exam, SeeD members are then placed into the service of an allied country and put to work. The SeeD test is evidently very difficult because they only choose recruits that are the best at a certain skill. SeeD is made up of several individuals who are specialists in their field, and they are called on for the toughest tasks. The cast is vast! Squall's nemesis is Seifer Almasy, a brash, trench-coated individual who gave Squall the scar on his face in a duel. Other Garden students are Zell Dincht and Selphie Tilmitt, all of which are taught by Quistis Trepe, a teacher and former student at Garden. There appears to be a love triangle between Squall, Seifer, and Rinoa Heartilly, a member of the Forest Owls resistance movement. She hires SeeD member to protect their land from Vinzer Deling, the President of Galbadia and archenemy of the Forest Owls. Galbadian forces own the area that the Garden stands upon, and Galbadia plays an important role in some dream sequences that Squall and his companions have. There are parts of the game in which your party dreams of three Galbadian soldiers, called Laguna Loire (Squall's character), Ward, and Kyros, who go on adventures and seem to be searching for some greater truth. Ultimately, your group is questing to assassinate an enigmatic Sorceress (a.k.a. "The "Witch") and keep Vinzer Deling from taking over the world. @~Sounds good, just hope the irritating bits from VII are fixed in @~this release, am talking save points and experience problems @~mainly :-) @~At http://www.shadowbane.com/ there is some nice info on @~Shadowbane, here is an extract from the page: June 30th, 1999 Big news day here at Wolfpack.. SHADOWBANE title announced First off, you'll probably notice that we've finally settled on a name for the title.. so without further ado, welcome to Shadowbane, the newest (and greatest, we believe) title to hit the MMORPG (that's massively-multi-user-online-role-playing-game) market.. well, ever, to be quite frank. ARCANE ENGINE UNVEILED! That's right, the first round of SCREEN SHOTS have hit the press - check out the Sorcery - Screen Shots section of the website for a quick preview of the Arcane Engine in action! Also, while you're there, be sure to check out the Wireframe Shot -- we put this in just to keep the sceptics at bay -- these are shots taken from the engine itself, raw and unchanged. PLATFORM SUPPORT Wolfpack is proud to announce OpenGL support for both PC and Macintosh platforms to be released simultaneously. CONCEPT ART Also, just for the curious, we added a Concept Art section. Hopefully these will give you all a good feel for the top-notch creative team we've assembled. .. and that's just the beginning. Keep those bookmarks pointed to www.shadowbane.com for more to come.. @~Lost of hype as you can see, guess we have to wait a bit longer @~to get more and better info on all this. @~Talking about multiplayer games, some of you might know that @~Brian Hooke has left ID and went to work for the people behind @~EverQuest. So his official Ask Hook page is now stuffed with @~questions about EQ and multi player RPGs in general. It can be a @~good read as long as you take his replies with a pinch of salt, @~he often feels his answer are the only correct one . @~Anyway head off to: @~http://www.voodooextreme.com/ask/askmenu.html @~for that, remember there's also a lot of 3D card and stuff @~questions there @~For you Sid Meier fans I found this little piece: Sid Meier Announces Antietam On the anniversary of Gettysburg, the battles of the Civil War continue as FIRAXIS Games announced Sid Meier's Antietam!, the first product in the previously top secret Sid Meier's Great Battles Series. The game is the follow-up to Sid Meier's Gettysburg! and is scheduled for release in the fall of 1999. "Since the release of Gettysburg! fans have been requesting that we continue our tradition of innovative and immersive battle games, and Sid Meier's Antietam! is just the beginning of an exciting new series," said Jeff Briggs, president of FIRAXIS Games. "This Great Battles Series places gamers, history buffs, and Civil War enthusiasts directly on the battlefields of some of the most famous conflicts in history." FIRAXIS has responded to its loyal audience by including many enhancements requested by Gettysburg! fans, such as new troops (Union and Confederate Zouaves, the Irish Brigade, Sharpshooters, the Louisiana Tigers and more), new terrain features and many new AI enhancements. @~As some of you may know, M&M7 has been out for a bit, and unlike @~M&M6 the party choice is much more important, I found a very @~nice page at: http://members.aol.com/tenernie7/, it's not all @~just cheats and stuff, but some good info and pages, some even @~better then the manual and can be a good help for the starters @~among us. @~Interstate 82 is still being developed, like last year , so @~the guys as Voodoo Extreme have posted an interview with Zack @~Normal, the lead programmer of the game at @~http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/i82.html Below is @~a small part of the interview, as usual in VE style Voodoo Extreme: First, could you give us your full name and your title? Zack Norman: Zachary Albert Norman. My title is director, lead designer, writer for Interstate '82. VE: For those of us who have hit the crack-pipe a little too hard, what is Interstate '82? ZN: Interstate '82 is the sequel to Interstate '76. Automotive combat action in the American Southwest behind the wheel of 80's exotics, 70's muscle cars, hotrods, all with exotic types of weaponry mounted on the hood and top. I guess it's like the Road Warrior meets Miami Vice, as opposed to Interstate '76 which was the Road Warrior meets Shaft. We have flipped it to the 80's and left our Afros in favor of Jerri Curls and our bell bottoms in favor of teal linen suits. VE: You know I liked Shaft! ZN: Good [laughs] VE: What improvements have you added to Interstate '82 over I'76? ZN: Well. that's a good question. Essentially, the core improvement is an upgrade of an engine technology. We are using the Dark Side engine, the same engine that Heavy Gear 2 is using, with specific handlers to deal with features that we have specific to our title. So, the hardware acceleration, dedicated hardware acceleration, is the first thing that comes to mind. We have a completely awesome physics model that allows the cars to react in extremely realistic ways, while maintaining controllability at high speeds. The sheer number of different vehicles that are now available to you is cool too, like you can get behind the wheel of everything from a 1932 Phaedra to a 1982 Fiorello sports car. VE: I hear that you secured the rights to some unreleased tracks from Devo. How hard was it to secure these tracks and how kick- ass are they? ZN: Well, the Devo story is kinda simple. Basically, we approached Mark Mothersbaugh and said we would like to do some of your songs. He got excited when he heard that John Hinckly Jr. was a character in the game and he has actually collaborated with Johnny on a song in the early 80's, which got him excited creatively about the project and Josh Mansel was able to write a bunch of songs for us. We made a deal so that we would have a bunch of original music that was written by the organization, as well as songs that were written by Devo. back in the day, early 80's, songs that never made it onto albums, like "OH NO IT'S DEVO". In the course of cleaning out their basements they came across three songs that [were never published]. They pulled them out, we listened to them and we all looked each other like "Why weren't these part of the album?" They're so cool. So, we got the unreleased tracks. VE: Are there any other bands that have songs that are gonna be on the soundtrack? ZN: Nope. www.cdmag.com has a lot of news, reviews and previews up this time, so check out: http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/020/081 /mm7_qt.html for a quick review of M&M7 http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/020/148 /swordc_review.html for a review of Baldurs Gate, tales of the Sword Coast http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/020/050 /diablo2_preview.html for yet another preview of Diablo II..... one wonders if it will ever be released!!! http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/019/100 /lol3_review.html for a review of LOL III http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/020/030 /never_fl_.html for a E3 preview of the Real Never Ending Story http://www.cdmag.com/articles/020/008/indiana_e3.html for an E3 preview of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine preview from Lucas Arts and finally http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/019/189 /starti_e3.html for a very early preview of Star Trek: Insurrection @~Below you will find the text of this page and I sent Sue a @~screenshot, but there are more screenshots at the page itself When Interplay cancelled its Star Trek adventure game, Trekkers and adventure gamers alike wailed (the ones who were both wailed particularly loudly). Would we never get another Star Trek adventure? Well, it's not exactly what you might expect, but Activision's got something for you: Star Trek: Insurrection. Set nine months after the movie of the same name, we return to the planet that was such a bother a pregnancy's length ago. The prodigal sons and daughters of the Baku have returned, but the healing's only just beginning, and they aren't integrated into Baku society. Instead, they're setting up their own separate colony, and, in the process of doing so, the remains of an ancient civilization are uncovered. What is this civilization? More importantly, why did it die out on a planet that offers its residents immortality? You play a human Star Fleet ensign raised by Vulcans. With you on your mission to answer these questions are Picard and Data, and you'll encounter plenty of other peoples as well. The gameworld consists of pre-rendered backgrounds with dynamically rendered 3D characters and objects (because the backgrounds are pre-rendered all the 3D power goes into people and effects). As you move throughout the game screens, your perspective shifts amongst a variety of cinematic camera angles (rather like the old Alone in the Dark). Activision's Eric Delaire says that they have a mandate to make the game feel like an episode, and as such are working to make as much of the Treknology in the game usable. Pick up a tricorder and you can use it, tap your communicator and you'll be able to contact Picard or Data (you'll be able to talk with them any time). Puzzles in the game will be largely real-time, and often action-oriented; also, everything's mission-based, so there will be little chance of you wandering around trying to figure out what you're going to do next. @~Sounds good, and as long as I don't have to play ##$%#Jane @~#$%Way I'll be happy ;-), nope I don't like her. - o -