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There is a worldwide community of net gets admission to that lets in human beings to connect. Security is now great available than ever earlier. Human beings around the arena play those forms of video games.
Due to their excessive gameplay experience, they have a difficult time competing. Those days are lengthy gone. Collaboration globally has grown to be less difficult due to this. Gamers can have to get admission to an entire global of soccer.
There are numerous gadgets in recreation that may be bought by the use of digital currency. Global competitions offer prizes well worth tens of thousands and thousands of dollars. Champions League and Europa League activities also are famous amongst gamers. The Europa Conference is new. Is a completely famous model. A dream squad may be constructed from hundreds of gamers from around the arena. There is a network wherein gamers can interact. Players which include Messi and Ronaldo may also be found in Heroes.
Soccer legends can be present. The participant can play unmarried suits take part in competitions and substantiate himself in web-primarily based seasons. Inside the holiday mode, you could play the manager of a designated member or lead a solitary participant. On the off threat that we select out the process of a mentor, the recreation, other than gambling suits, will likewise allow us to ship gamers for preparing. Arranging actions and selecting techniques and the correct putting of the organization earlier than the match.
Players which consist of Messi and Ronaldo will also be discovered in Heroes. Football legends may be present. A massive amount of pastime modes. The player can play single fits participate in competitions and substantiate himself in web-based totally seasons.
The excursion mode, you can play the supervisor of a delegated member. On the off danger that we pick out the manner of a mentor, the pastime, aside from playing fits, will likewise permit us to deliver game enthusiasts for preparing. Arranging movements and deciding on strategies and an appropriate placing of the business enterprise in advance of the match.
I know that EA Sports understands that fans are alarmed to find the new changes really outside the plastic that they have wrapped with the latest differentiation in their soccer game, both when they have data in doubt and in the modes most loved by the fanatics.
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When gamers play video games, they may be frequently packed. A diver who broadcasts harm for the duration of talent execution can be responsible for a judgment. It is going past beauty manipulation. A range of bodily confrontations and remarkable tackles also can be observed in this match.
Football video games are often developed. We prevail at reaching the pinnacle via competing in tournaments and suits. Data from the actual global is blanketed with inside the recreation, along. Did you remember to choose PC or Mac?
Will your selections run on your system? Note: Columbia House reserves the right to request additional information, to limit membership or reject any application, or to cancel any membership.
Offer limited to residents of the contiguous United States. Applicable sales tax added to all orders. Then stop talkin' and start chalkin. The HD dish Chalk up your mouse for Virtual Pool and get ready for all the fun of a high-class pool hall, without the second hand smoke!
Insert the Virtual Pool diskette in your 3. Change to your 3. Select the hard drive to install to type C: where "C" is the letter of your hard drive. Unfortunately, we can't provide technical support for problems you may encounter with The Floppy or Virtual Pool. But should your copy fail to run at all, or display error messages that indicate the disk itself is bad, send a letter to the address at the right for replacement.
Suite Burlingame, CA Indicate any error message you receive. The Floppy is manufactured by MegaSoft, one of the foremost disk duplicators in America. Before duplication, it is rigorously tested and certified to be virus-free. You can even check out the full review by our own editor-turned-pool- addict Matt "Frisco Fats" Firme see page You'll see the full version is much more than even this demo will show.
We've been having a blast with the network feature. High or low resolution graphics are offered depending on what your graphics card can handle and if it's supported in the demo. As you can imagine, 4-ball is a fast game. You must sink, in order, the one, two, three, and nine balls. The real chal- lenge is sinking the 9-ball on the break without cheating.
Well, it's not cheating, but one of the many features on this demo is the ability to turn target lines on. This draws lines showing exactly where all the balls will head. So far, Todd's sunk the most 9s in a row on the break with- out cheating : five. With more practice, the blowhard thinks he'll be unstoppable. We find the same weaknesses in our real game show up here!
Try This Means War! A decade after the hideously addictive Snarl c Hunter made computer gamers its helpless prey. Following a series of riots, explosions and bad hair days, mankind was nearly The strategy building game for people who like to blow things up! Except for a handful who beat the game. The few. The proud. The totally weird. Now, you must stop these demented dictators from rebuilding the world in their own images.
Because if they succeed in War, things could get pretty ugly. With a little help from its customers. Blizzard Entertainment may just move into the ranks of the game-publishing elite with this sequel to their hit Warcraft.
Warcraft II promises to incorporate scads of customer suggestions to bring us an even better ores vs. I Witf's so special? I Warcraft was such a hit, a sequel was probably inevitable. All too often, though, we've seen disap- pointing follow-ups that are really just more of the same. I Why should I care? I Blizzard proved, with the original, that they know how to make good games; now they're ready to up the ante and prove they can make great ones.
I Watch for it around the holidays, possibly by Thanksgiving. O f you still haven't played Warcraft, you're missing out. Whether you're into strategy, god games, or tactical combat, Warcraft is one of those titles that draws you in and holds you, eating up hours and hours of your time before you know what hit you.
What makes it work so well? A lot of things, like the dis- tinctly animated ores and humans that make up the opposing sides. Or the little touches of humor that, although you'd never have missed them if they weren't in there, add so much to the game and show such refreshing commitment on the part of the developers.
Talking with producer Bill Roper, you get the sense that the crew at Blizzard probably wouldn't know how to approach a game with anything but total commitment. In fact, Roper isn't specifi- cally the producer of Warcraft II; although he wrote the docs and even did the voices for the original "Quit Poking Me! Yet as he talks about the upcoming Warcraft II, he's filled with the kind of earnest enthu- siasm that goes way beyond mere public relations hype. Roper is, first and fore- most, a gamer — just like the rest of the Warcraft II team.
And so in looking for the inspira- tion and suggestions that would make the sequel worthy of its predecessor. Blizzard quite naturally turned to other gamers — namely, Warcraft owners. This isn't just lip-service, either. A surprising number of the new features and design choices that are going into Warcraft U are the direct results of cus- tomer input. Blizzard has managed to create a much more organic look than most 3D-mod- eled titles achieve. Looking almost like a crab's shell, the orcish destroyer is sure to send terror through any human mariners unlucky enough to uncover it beats this carrier for hauling ores across open attention to what our fans want.
So the humans will have elves and dwarves as allies, and the ores will have trolls and ogres. Roper says that unlike the first game, where each sides' units tended to mirror one another like chess sets, Warcraft II will feature units with considerably different attack preferences.
Another important — and cus- tomer-suggested — addition to the game will be air and sea units. In it, we see the zep- pelin-like aircraft and huge, vaguely skeletal ships of the ores — all won- derfully detailed, and perfectly in keep- ing with the distinctively fantastic world of Warcraft.
We ask 'OK, how do they have submarine technol- ogy? How could they do that? Or the sub might function like a whale, having to surface for air regularly — which would add some interesting strategic considerations. You can expect a lot more new spells, too — something else people have been asking for. And Roper says Blizzard is happy to comply, to bring new gameplay elements into the mix.
Not to complicate the game, he says, but to give people a much wider variety of tactical options. Not all the enhance- ments will be strictly mili- tary; expect economics to play a more important part in Warcraft II than they did the first time around. In Warcraft, you had to send workers out to gather gold and lumber — the raw mate- rials of empire.
Now, you'll have to search for four materials: gold, lumber, oil, and ore. Oil might be necessary to building ships, say, while ore would be vital in creating better armor for your troops. It's time for some SVGA graphics. Lead 3D artist Duane Stinnett obvi- ously had a lot of fun working with the enhanced graphics; that intro sequence, which shows the weaponry, settings, and characters of Warcraft II close-up, is proof of the care and imagination that have gone into these new graphics.
Your first look at There are more building available now, along with plenty of new unit types and machines of war. In fact, Stinnett is working on some new techniques to give Warcraft II its impressive look. And basically Duane looked at it and said, 'Well, I could do that!
But by hand-drawing the textures that form the "skin" of the character, much more believable results can be achieved. As we know, though, pretty intros and cutscenes are all too common in today's games; quite often, though, the in-game graphics just don't compare. That won't be the case in Warcraft II, though, because the intro characters and objects are the same ones used in actual gameplay. The ships you see in the intro sequence are actually the units we'll use in the game.
And as an added bonus, the game will ship with a Windows-based map editor that will allow you to create your own levels from scratch. And among the items you can specify in your map files will be where resources are located, as well as the starting posi- tions for each side's town halls. You won't be able to specify unit types and strengths, but it'll be easy enough to tell your friends how many and what kinds of troops to place in order to play the scenario the way you intended it.
Playing against other humans will, of course, be an option, thanks to the game's modem, serial, and network options. Roper says there are even hopes of getting up to seven additional players on a network game at once and letting them choose to play cooperatively, per- haps with one player controlling the humans while another marshalls their elven allies. You can't always count on finding human opponents, though, and so Blizzard — and more specifically, AI pro- grammer Pat Wyatt — is undertaking to considerably enhance the AI in Warcraft II.
We're creating an AI that — as catch- phrasey as this sounds — will learn and adapt and respond, as opposed to fol- lowing a set path. In the first game, you could set up specific defenses that you knew would work every time against the computer. Now, the computer won't repeatedly send its unit against a row of archers, where they'll be decimated. It'll say, 'Oh, gosh, he's got a row of archers there. I better send some catapults around and bring in some dragons and flying units to take these guys out In Warcraft II, it'll start with a townhall and farm, just like you do.
It'll build as you do, because we want to make it as much like playing another person as possible. You can bet there'll be plenty of the humor, too, that helped make the origi- nal so addictive.
In fact, you can count on Warcraft II boasting more of all the things you loved about the original, with damn near every improvement you might have hoped for. Warcraft II should be great, great stuff. And why not? In a way, we all helped to design it. But that gray area just below the mine may contain a whole army for all you know; the only way to find out is to send a soldier into the area, so he can see it for himself. FX Fighter is first to use BRender" technology, the most advanced 3D rendering system ever developed.
We recorded over actual sequences from martial artists and acrobatsfor this game. Roundhouse kicks have never been so smooth. Forget side-only views. We've got every angle covered— -in three dimensions.
Hear that giant sucking sound? Little brothers everywhere are kissing up to play FX Fighter, the most advancedfighting game ever createdfor the PC. FX Fighter was specifically designed to take advantage of your new Pentium, but it still screams on a , too. Flying 3D Camera. Not just a highlight film, the point-of- view changes as you attack. Choose among eight characters, with over 40 attack moves each— including incredible combinations.
For about the cost ofa two-bit game cart you'll get a superior game withfifty times the speed, four times the color, and twice the resolution. Very smart. But to be honest, with all that power sitting on the desktop, we just felt that the last thing the world needed was another damn word-processor. Savage Warriors Is "thinking person's fighting game" an oxymoron?
Do the robotic perfor- mances from the char- acters in your fighting games leave you cold? Mindscape may have found just the remedy for your malaise. Owing little to its predecessors, Savage Warriors seeks to chart new territory. I jafs so special? I In a word, movement. With the development of 3D Bio Motion, pixelated characters become more organic and realistic than ever before. I Hhii should I care? I The further development of this technology will cross over to enhance other game genres, but you can be one of the first to enjoy its benefits now.
I And uihen s it coming out? I Summer You can pick any of the ten warriors to represent you. Zia's strengths lie in the martial arts of the East. R emember those old "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots" of the sixties? A couple of ten-inch high plastic fig- ures, designed to let the average kid take out his aggression in an approved manner.
Just the right shot on the chin, and your opponent's robot would pop its top — literally. All the action was mechanical, of course, and you might think that today's more sophisticated analogue, the com- puter fighting game, would be just that — more sophisticated.
But even now, most of the biggest sellers still have a decidedly mechanical feel about them. Mindscape wants to change that situa- tion with Savage Warriors. As with most games in the genre, the plot of Savage Warriors is far from complex. A mysterious warrior, known only as the Master, seeks to establish his martial supremacy and has magically transported the ten greatest fighters of all time to his secret island.
In the savage island jungles, each fighter must battle the other nine competitors to meet the master in a final showdown. Just that simple. You, of course, play one of the ten fighters, choosing your character with regard to the style of fighting you're most comfortable with.
Each character has his or her own special abilities and moves, and guided skillfully, each has an equal chance of meeting the Master for the big brawl in the volcano at the end of the game. Up to this point you're probably thinking "yeah. But plot- ting is not what this game is about — smooth, realistic, and complex action is. With a new on-the-fly rendering process — 3D Bio Motion, developed in France by Mindscape's European subsidiary — Savage Warriors exhibits the most natural body motion yet seen in a PC action game.
Mindscape Bordeaux's Director Nicolas Gaume says that with the devel- opment of 3D Bio Motion, his group of designers saw an opportunity to bring something unique to the PC in the way of action fighting games.
They didn't want to produce just a port of some car- tridge or arcade game, but rather some- thing that played to the strengths of the PC. The secret of 3D Bio Motion is in the level at which the process operates. While other games animate their characters in a modular way — that is, body parts are manipulated as more or less intact entities — 3D Bio Motion brings rendering and animation down to the pixel level. This means that each pixel is tagged with information not only on its color and absolute position, but also on its motion relationship to each adjoining pixel.
Taking manipulation down to this level produces much smoother, more organic, movements. When a character throws a punch, it's not just all arm, or arm and shoulder. The pixel movement is mapped so that the arm, the shoulder, the trunk, the legs — anything involved in the production of a real punch — react naturally. This level of rendered animation even goes beyond the charac- ters to include shadows that change to reflect differences in light sources.
Calculating movements on the fly is rather tricky, especially when variables such as inertia and gravity are factored into the equations. Without some slick programming, and the aid of today's faster and Pentium computers, a game could get hopelessly bogged down. But if you can pull it off, on-the- fly calculations can reward you with smoother movements — by way of up to ten times more sprites, or animation objects, per move sequence. And you get all this with smaller files, because the movements aren't calculated beforehand and held in a data file.
The 3D Bio Motion engine also pro- vides for more varied gameplay. Because the characters are not the traditional bit- mapped or rotoscoped sprites, there's much more flexibility combining moves. Most games feature characters with moves that can be combined in finite ways. With the high number of both pre-designed and calculated moves each character has in Savage Warriors, a player might never discover all the pos- sible move combinations.
The engine also allows for more interaction with the environment than is possible in many games. Indeed, your character's moves might involve swing- ing from a rope or using the odd tree to gain a bit of leverage. The Mindscape Bordeaux designers took a very cinematic approach to the overall design of the game. Backgrounds exhibit a great deal of depth, adding to the three-dimensional feel of this virtual world.
And the action's not all with the fighters. The designers took great pains to fill this virtual world with small details that may not be obvious to the player engaged in furious battle, but that give it a sense of completeness lacking in the sterile backgrounds of other games. So, a completed jump might result in a spray of dust or a splash of water to accom- pany the natural sounds of the jungle. A nicely done cartoon prologue and epilogues for each of the ten fighters also lend a film-like flavor.
The opening sequence, for example, is a compendium of camera angles and lighting placement, with some excellent perspective modula- tion thrown in for good measure. Beyond the visual experience. Sav- age Warriors is meant to be heard. There's a ton of digital sound six megs, actually for the game itself, and as a bonus, there's a musical sound track that can be enjoyed with or without the game.
At present, the designers are work- ing on improving a couple of the game's areas. Because they wanted the game to work with slower computers, they had to sacrifice both some size and some graphical fineness with the animated characters.
Work is underway to pro- duce a game optimized to the Pentium with drastically improved graphics and smoothness. And although the game's premise cries out for modem play, that's not yet an option. Mindscape Bordeaux is, however, working on adding it to later versions.
From all I've seen, Mindscape Bordeaux is definitely on to something here. With further refinement, the 3D Bio Motion engine could be one of the most influential game design factors of the future. As it is, the technology brings new life to a venerable if sometimes neglected gaming genre. Savage Warriors, in its finished form, should make the raft of other "beat 'em ups" look as mechanical and clumsy as those old toy fighting robots of years past.
Primal Rage Deadly dinos duke it out to the death! Everyone loves playing with those mean and nasty dinosaurs — especially if you get to control them in a bloody battle for the survival of the fittest.
And these ain't garden- variety dinos: They spit acid and fire, and do round- house kicks, to name a few of their special abilities. I Hhu should I care? I Arcade purists will love that this uses the source code of the coin-op game, but Time Warner has also designed versions for 4MB, 8MB, and 16MB machines, as well as controls for two- and four-button joysticks.
Iflnd when's it comiiii out? Who can forget the Rise of the Robots debacle, where a game that looked so promising during its development stages wound up being one of the biggest disappointments in recent gaming history? But one good thing came of that whole affair: Time Warner learned the hard way that there's more to a great fighting game than sexy graphics.
So for its second attempt at bringing high-tech combat to the PC, the company decided to go with a proven champion: Primal Rage, one of the biggest arcade hits of There's little chance that players will be complaining about limited moves and boring gameplay in the PC CD-ROM translation — everything you'd expect to see in the arcade version is included here, and there are plenty of extras to boot. So what is Primal Rage? Well, it's a head-to-head fighting game in which one or two human players control "prehis- toric fantasy creatures" — i.
There's a story that tries to explain why you're battling it out with six other types of creatures for control of the "new Urth," but it's really superfluous. Hey, who needs justification for grabbing a joystick and pounding all hell out of a dinosaur bent on rip- ping your throat out? And because these are dinos, a whole new world of attack moves becomes available — tail sweeps, reclining bicycle kicks, powerful overhead slashes, and more.
Each creature has a total of 70 possible moves, 8 special attacks, and 3 fatalities. One of the most dis- tinctive things about Primal Rage is its large, wonderfully lifelike crea- tures.
All the character animations for Primal Rage were created with stop-motion animation, the same technique used in classic horror and fantasy films like King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts, The Valley of Gwangi, and others. Posing the puppets for each frame of animation is a painstaking process, but the payoffs are fantastic. The critters here have a very convincing 3D appearance — they look as if there's some real substance to them. How close will the PC translation be to the arcade game?
Pretty damned close, according to Ken Humphries, who's busy producing eleven versions of the game for Time Warner. Getting the game "up and running" initially required 32MB of RAM the arcade game uses 32MB of ROM , but Humphries says "we've cut that down to 16 megs by taking out a lot of the things that don't have to be in memory at one time and loading them from the CD and hard drive.
We also let you perform certain moves by, say, pressing and holding a button, or by tapping a button twice. Everything that's in the arcade version, from the number of special moves and fatalities to the inclusion of bemused natives staring agape at the dueling dinos, is in the PC translation. And besides the aforementioned modem and network play options, Humphries and Co.
If we can make it work and the game is still running fast enough, we'll certainly implement it. If you've got any arcade- gaming blood in you at all, it's a date you'll want to remember. PCB version, we've cut down on the number of animations. With approximately frames of animation per dinosaur, we obviously couldn't maintain all of that in memory at any one time.
So we reduced the number of animations by half for the eight-meg version, and it's working out pretty well. Most of the game will run right off the CD, but we'll include options to install various parts of the game on the hard drive to speed up play — and for the four-meg version we'll probably have to have some sort of hard-disk buffer.
Sauron Not as nimble as many of his opponents, Sauron depends on sheer size and brute force for survival. Diaiafo Here's an Allosaurwith a difference — he just loves to hurl fireballs and give ene- mies a king-size hot foot. Armadon This dino's special attack moves are swift and incredibly deadly.
Vertigo His favorite attack is to teleport in and start spraying Venom Spit. After Leong sketched out his creations, Platt took the drawings and built clay models with movable arms, legs, mouths, and so on. The models were painted, then posed and photographed in a progressive series of movements. Here are the seven monsters as they appear in their final incarnations.
D esigning the creatures for Primal Rage was an involved process. Battles 2 41 Great Nav. Offer good through June 30, No COD on hardware items. Overnight shipping available in the U. Your card is not charged until your product is shipped. FedEx shipping times are guaranteed.
Never a hidden surcharge. COD's now accepted. FedEx 2-day and overnight delivery available. Foreign orders subject to additional shipping charges. Returns require an RMA and may be subject to a restocking fee. Additional shipping charges may apply to hardware items Expert consultation and game recommendations.
Contact us on GEnie at Titan-Games. On the internet at titangam netcom. Call for 3. The InterWave chip crams all the latest sound technology on one little chip: a downloadable, bit, voice wavetable syn- thesizer; a bit audiophile codec for CD-quality digital recording and playback; an audio mixer compatible with the MPC Level 2 standard; a Plug and Play- compatible interface for trouble- free installation; a joystick port; a serial digital signal proces- sor port for upgrades; and a MIDI port.
On-chip pro- cessing gives designers control of special effects like vibrato, tremolo, chorus, echo, phase shifting and reverb. The pin Am78C chip fully complies with the Plug and Play specification that promises to make hardware conflicts a thing of the past.
The chip's built-in power management features make it perfect for portable computers. Sound board mak- ers can establish the per- formance of the chip by changing the amount of memory available to the InterWave.
The InterWave chip from AMD packs all the latest sound technol- ogy you could want onto one tiny, Plug and Play-com- patible inte- 1 grated "Game developers have eagerly awaited the audio capa- bilities provided by the Inter- Wave," said Zachary Simpson, director of technology at Origin Systems.
The Am78C is cur- rently being sampled in limited quantities to customers and developers; volume production is slated for later this year. Fortunately for us, a handful of game companies left their offices unlocked when they headed for the big show, so we kept working and were able to bring you these tantalizing tidbits Diablo This demon can t wait for you and your friends to show up in the multi-player world of Diablo. Blizzard will publish this gothic horror roleplaying game devel- oped by Condor.
Diablo is set in a town that has been deci- mated by the armies of the undead; naturally, it falls to you and your party of coura- geous adventurers to set things right. The difference is that you can play Diablo solo, or over a network with as many as three friends.
The game will also fea- ture a random dungeon-level generator for added replay value; any time you start a new campaign, you'll have all- new dungeons to explore. Dia- blo should be on the store shelves sometime in the sec- ond quarter of Parallax Software, developer of the outstanding 3D shooter, has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Inter- play. Interplay will publish and dis- tribute the next four software titles that Parallax develops.
Interplay will also hold the exclusive license for the Descent game engine for as many as six new products. Descenthas earned a strong following with its degree environment, first-person view, 30 levels, and network and modem-play.
Interplay hopes to continue the successful tradition started by the game. Bright Future Ahead Cyberia 2 on the way as developers join with Virgin Virgin and Xatrix Entertainment are planning a sequel to Cyberia, which fea- tured great 3D-modeled graphics.
F he next hot action-adven- ture game is on its way from Virgin and Xatrix Entertainment. Xatrix entered an exclusive distribution and publish- ing agreement with Virgin for its next three titles.
Xatrix's first title, Cyberia, an action-adventure game that featured terrific 3D- modeled graphics, was published by Interplay. The sequel, Cyberia 2, will be one of the titles that Vir- gin will publish and distribute for Xatrix. Virgin also will distribute the three titles in the Untied States and will have worldwide publishing rights. They're also excited about their new agree- ment with Virgin. Meen is the first game ever to combine smooth scrolling degree 3-D action with solid educational content.
Good and good for you. But when PC gaming started making waves in the mainstream press, Shatner was quick to pick up on the potential of his creation. The Tek universe, with its cyberpunk underpinnings, lends itself perfectly to computer gam- ing, Shatner said in a recent interview. The TekWar PC game will cast players in the role of a near- future troubleshooter, falsely accused of a crime and impris- oned in a cryogenic coma.
Shat- ner's TekWar persona, the manipulative Bascom, has the gamer revived to serve his pur- poses, just like Greg Evigan's character in the TV series. Shatner said the basic con- cepts behind the game and its plot are his, but that he had lim- ited input on the actual game- play. Beyond acting as a consul- tant, he has left the game's design in the capable hands of Capstone's developers. But Shatner isn't just putting his Tek ideas into the game and his name on the box; he'll actually be appearing in the PC incarnation of TekWar.
And to ensure that the video sequen- ces are tailored to the game's plot, he headed up to the show's Toronto set and slipped into his Bascom togs to film some scenes intended specifically for the game. Will TekWar be a hit? But with the success of the TV series, and with Shatner's seventh Tek novel, TekMoney, making the rounds of gaming fans, the PC game has a lot going for it.
Select from a wide range of topics such as history, literature, art, music, sports, theater, movies, travel and more. Delve into the world of science and nature. Beautiful pictures and great sound accompany you as you match wits with your opponent whether it is computer or human. The sim will offer three levels of gameplay, two full courses and eight computerized opponents with varying degrees of artifi- cial intelligence. A training section will cover putting, bunker play, fade and draw, and handling windy conditions, and a caddie will advise gamers on each shot and hole with digitized speech recorded by professional voice actors.
Art Data is even throwing a golf ball autographed by Faldo into each package. Viacom New Media's Zoop is an action-packed puzzle game intended for players of all ages. Gamers are challenged to eliminate rows of shapes from a grid by taking aim at them with an ever-changing shooter.
It promises to be one of those games that look child- ishly simple on the surface, but are diabolically difficult once the action heats up. Zoop will be on store shelves before the end of this year. Continued on page 51 Virtual Mingling Fujitsu and CompuServe to launch online community f lectronics giant Fujitsu Limited and online behe- moth CompuServe have announced plans to collaborate on a new interactive world for internet users.
Fujitsu's WorldsAway will add graphic adventure-style ele- ments to the social dimension of CompuServe's real-time chat services, by letting subscribers from countries worldwide meet, interact and work together to build a virtual world. In a traditional chat area, the user stares at screens full of text and types messages back and forth to other users logged into the area.
WorldsAway will create a graphical area for inter- action, complete with objects that lend the area meaning and context. A room with chairs, pic- tures, and a sofa, for instance, would be used as a living room where users could sit or stand while chatting with others.
Sub- scribers can pick up objects in the room and share or exchange them with the people they meet online. Users can even create and decorate their own "apart- ments" in WorldsAway's online community. With WorldsAway, Compu- Serve subscribers will choose and control their online identities — called avatars — either bas- ing them on their actual person- alities or creating unique online identities.
A variety of social activities will be available, including social functions like scavenger hunts, and users will actually be able to run their own virtual businesses. In addition to text mes- sages, all visitors to the Worlds- Away environment will be able to communicate through "thought balloons," avatar facial expres- sions and gestures. WorldsAway is based on object-oriented technology, which means the online world will grow with its population.
As new members join the virtual community, new locations such as buildings, parks, and forests can be added on the fly. Since most of our new sub- scribers fall into this category, we want to provide entertaining products and services that have broad appeal but don't require a lot of technical know-how.
WorldsAway is a perfect fit. Last year, Fujitsu became the exclusive distributor of CompuServe in Australia. Fujitsu plans to make the basic technol- ogy behind WorldsAway avail- able to third-party companies for other entertainment programs and commercial applications. An industry first: Violence Level Adjustment with password only gel gore il you want it!
This is the game you've been waiting for. An all-out blast-fest. The u n re lenting blood and fire rampage of your most twisted night- mares. With ten incredibly vicious weapons, you annihilate the enemy. Your machine gun blasts holes in the walls.
Sparks and metal fly as you blow apart everything in sight. Mass destruction has never been this fun! Gray Rd. Supports serial, modem, and 1 1 -player network Individual or team play. Open hailing frequencies and prepare for the unexpected.
Control the U. Enterprise as you encounter treach- erous alien ships, visit strange new worlds, and travel from the outposts of Federation space and beyond— into the uncharted dangers of a massive nebula. Take your post and Engage! All Rights Reserved. Spectrum HoloByte is an Authorized User.
Other trademarks are the property of their respective holders. Frotiuef Information Number Beam down to exotic worlds as the mystery of an ancient and highly advanced civilization slowly unfolds. Alert your Away Team and pick the right combination of talent for each critical mission.
Just establishing a connection between two computers can be a hit-or- miss affair with gamers having to agree on the proper procedure beforehand, then hang up and hope their modems can agree, too. And once you're up and running, communicating with your oppo- nent means stopping to type a message and hoping it'll fit on one line , then waiting for the other guy to respond.
Until recently, there was really only one way around the problem: You and your friend could both get a second phone line, so you could speak on one line while your computers chatted on the other.
But how many of us could justify that expense just to make the occasional session of Doom more enjoyable? The Personal Communica- tions Division of U. Robotics has announced a new solution: the Sportster Vi Modems with DSVD can transmit and receive the spoken word and computer data over a single phone line. And unlike earlier, analog modems that let you switch between voice and data on the same line, DSVD modems digitize the speaker's voice and then transmit it in packets along with the data stream, so users can speak to each other without inter- rupting the flow of data between their computers.
The DSVD standard was cre- ated primarily for certain kinds of business applications, but the implications for PC gaming should be even more obvious: Imagine playing a game of Descent and threatening your opponent in your own voice, rather than making yourself a sitting duck while you type a message on the keyboard.
When you tire of getting your butt kicked in some godforsaken inter- planetary mine, you can challenge your friend to a quick Heretic deathmatch. You don't even have to hang up the phone to move on to a different game because your DSVD modems will let you stop and start data transfers regardless of whether or not a voice conver- sation is going on.
The process briefly reduces the modem's transfer speed as voice and data share bandwidth, but DSVD modems will return to their maximum speed any time no voice packets are being transmit- ted. Digitizing conversation, trans- mitting it, and decoding it on the other end takes a little time, but the delay is insignificant. The first version of the Sportster DSVD modem is an internal PC card with a blis- tering speed of 28, baud and a flash ROM that lets users upgrade the modem's features by downloading new code via tele- phone.
An external model will follow. More products using this standard will appear from many of these companies during the year. DSVD ensures that all modems using the standard will work together. Because the specifica- tion is digital, the kinds of informa- tion that can be exchanged along- side traditional data are unlimited, including voice, graphics, pho- tographs, and video.
For more information about the Sportster Vi Use your own golf clubs with Thrustmaster's new system olf-sim fans looking for a more realistic approach to their game should check out the Pro Play Golf Sys- tem from Thrustmaster. The system, designed for IBM PC and compatibles, has a sensor and electronic unit that works with your own clubs. A piece of reflective tape goes on your club, and when you swing it over the base unit which holds your ball , an infrared laser registers the motion.
The Pro Play Golf System can calculate your club speed, the club's face angle and height, the direction of your follow through, and the trajectory of your ball. With all these options, and the opportunity to use your own reli- able clubs, you should be out on the links with a better golf game in no time. It comes with a floor mat, foam golf balls and rubber tees, a net and frame, RS cables and connectors, Windows-based training software, and a com- plete golf game program.
For more information, call Thrustmaster at Interplay President Brian Fargo said that when he visited the Waterworld sets in Hawaii, he knew the movie had all the right elements to make a top- notch computer game.
In a story written by Sam Johnson and Chris Marcil authors of the Beavis and Butt-Head Ensucklopedia , the guys embark on a quest to join their idol Todd's gang of hoods. The game will feature voice acting by series creator Mike Judge the only guy in the world who can really laugh like Butt-Head, though God knows we all try and anima- tions by MTV Animation.
Are you threatening me? Looks like Beavis is on another sugar jag in Viacom's new game. Tenta- tively titled Aztec, the game will feature Hollywood acting talent amid film shot in Mexico and Central America and ancient sites re-created with 3D graphics. Luminaria says Aztec will use an enhanced version of the Wrath of the Gods game engine, including a new, more intuitive interface and smooth-panning 3D graph- ics.
Like the previous game, Aztec will feature a built-in hint line. This one should be out in the first quarter of next year. I This "galactic empire simula- tor" comes to us from Blizzard and Changeling Software. The folks at Blizzard are saying Pax II will be even more detailed and involved than Micro- Prose's Master of Orion, and it'll have network support for as many as 16 players.
The original Pax Imperials an award-winner on the Macin- tosh, so space-strategy nuts will probably be lining up around the block for this one. Congo Michael Crichton's bestseller- turned-blockbuster-movie will be the subject of an action- adventure game from Viacom. Navy Fighters air combat simulation that will give gamers a chance to take to the air as a modern-day flying leatherneck.
Marine Fighters will give owners of the original game a chance to fly three new planes: the U. All the new jets feature vectored-thrust nozzles that let the pilot direct engine power for vertical takeoffs and landings, as well as some exotic moves in combat.
The scenario disk also adds a new mission campaign over the Kuril Island chain in the Sea of Japan, and new weapons like the Snake-eye bomb and LAU rocket pods. Marine Fighters will be of interest to anyone who has enjoyed USNF's air-combat action and high-res graphics, but it will be of particular interest to a handful of hard-core sim jock- eys who have already been fly- ing Harriers in the game without the new disk.
How are they doing it? Maschino now known online as the "Raider of the Lost Aircraft" fig- ured out how to make the planes available for missions, then wrote a Windows program that makes it easy for anyone to get to them. But why are the planes there in the first place if they weren't meant to be used in the game? But the planes them- selves — minus their vectored- thrust flight mod- els and personal- ized cockpit art — were left in the game, where ambitious hack- ers found them and began flying them ahead of schedule.
WUA f. Sir trademark-. Congo will mix characters from the film with adventure-style puzzles and 3D graphics, to set players on their own quest for the Lost City of Zinj. Viacom expects to release Congo during the fourth quarter of this year. JetSki Rage This unusual action game from Velocity drops you in the sad- dle of a JetSki for some near- future aquatic racing. There's also plenty of combat judging from all the futuristic racing games on the market, the sports world is going to take a violent turn in the next cen- tury.
As a bonus to gamers who prefer to create their own worlds, JetSki Rage will include a version of Velocity's level-design tools that will. The software lets users have real-time voice conversa- tions over the information super- highway simply by dialing into their local Internet provider and taking advantage of the capabili- ties already built into their multi- media PCs.
Internet Phone uses Vocal- Tec's own voice compression and voice packet reconstruction technologies to send vocal com- munications over the Internet.
Ray Wright, marketing director for Motorola Modem Products, said anyone with a fast modem, sound card, microphone, and speakers can use the Internet Phone; it's just a matter of log- ging onto an Internet real-time chat area and contacting another Internet Phone user. It's possible in most major cities to contact Internet nodes all over the world via your local Internet provider.
That means people who would normally have to pay long-distance fees to speak on the telephone will be able to use Internet Phone to Motorola is bundling Internet Phone software with its Power Class The software uses your sound board's analog-to-digital converter to digitize your voice, then compiles it into Internet Pro- tocol Packets that can be trans- ferred to another computer.
The result is real-time voice communication with only a very brief delay in transmission. Wright said communication on the Internet Phone is half- duplex. That means voice data can only be transferred in one direction at a time, so the two parties having a conversation need to be polite and take turns speaking.
The software doesn't require a 28, baud modem, but Wright said the sound quality usually is better with a faster modem, which is why Motorola is bundling Internet Phone with their latest Last month's Playlist got an unexpected response from our readers — especially those who live in the Golden State.
The bay? The beautiful, green hills? The great food? The sea otters? Who doesn't love sea otters? The fact is, we're loving it here. Sure, those first few weeks were gloomy, what with all the rain and stum- bling upon that family of dead sea-lions. But when the clouds finally moved on to wherever they were sup- posed to be in the first place, we had to admit the San Fran- cisco Bay area is every bit as beautiful as our old digs in North Carolina.
Where else could we sit at our desks and watch windsurfers on the bay, then turn and see some- one leaving the office with a pair of snow skis in hand, planning to make a short drive to the north for a week- end of shushing on mountain slopes?
And truthfully, we've been spoiled by the balmy weather, so much so when the temperature drops below 65 degrees we start whining like babies. Which means we get to play the hottest com- puter games while they're still glowing red. Here's what's been occupying our time this month: 1. There is no debate. HardBall is the best-selling PC baseball game series of all time.
And now, HardBall 4 has refined playability and realism to an unfair level that has the experts adjective-silly. Stat compilation in over 75 categories. If you want a PC baseball game, get HardBall 4. Scodudj Want to try HardBall 4? HardBall 4. Product Information Number 81 It could easily be a novel by a top-selling science fiction writer: A dash- ing astronaut, a beautiful TV reporter, and a scheming scientist inves- tigate a myste- rious asteroid, only to stumble on the remnants of an incredibly advanced alien civilization.
But The Dig is first and foremost a graphic adven- ture game — the most impressive one yet from LucasArts Entertainment. Top-selling Sci-Fi writer, Alan Dean Foster, once the undisputed king of movie and TV adaptations and now the author of a raft of popular origi- nal novels, will write the paperback ver- sion of The Dig, to be published by Warner Books. What could have persuaded Foster to make a rare return to the world of nov- elizations?
Probably it was the intriguing story line, created by project leader Sean Clark and inspired by none other than mega-director Steven Spielberg. The Dig opens on a space shuttle mission in the very near future. A huge asteroid is on a collision course with earth, threatening to snuff out the entire planet.
Commander Boston Low, a veteran astronaut, is in charge of an expedition to explore the big rock and save the earth. Hungry for positive publicity to bol- ster their failing image, NASA has con- sented to let a television news reporter, the lovely and adventurous Maggie Rob- bins, tag along for the history-making mission. Rounding out the team will be the distinguished German geologist, Ludger Brink. The first order of business is to make sure the asteroid doesn't smack into the mudball we call home.
NASA's plan is a daring one: Low and his team will plant small thermonuclear charges at strategic points on the asteroid's surface, and use them to literally shove the thing into a sta- ble orbit.
If everything goes as planned. Earth will be safe, and we'll have a new moon to gaze upon during those clear summer nights. Of course, if everything went as planned. The Dig wouldn't be much of an adventure game. Low and company pull off the first part of the mission perfectly; the nukes do just what NASA said they'd do.
But now it's time for phase two. With the asteroid diverted from its disastrous path. Low, Robbins, and Brink return to explore it. Sounds simple enough: suit up, collect some samples, and head home. And it probably would've been a routine spacewalk, if the asteroid had been nothing more than the big rock it appeared to be. Eventually, they find an alien arti- fact that proves to be too much of a temp- tation to pass up; it's a geometric puzzle just begging to be solved.
The puzzle — one of the first in the game — triggers an alien device, and the asteroid reveals its true nature. In a gor- geous sequence created by the computer animation wizards at LucasFilm's leg- endary Industrial Light and Magic facility, the big rock morphs into a huge, crys- talline spaceship and whisks the three explorers away at many times the speed of light, to dump them on a barren world orbiting another star.
Turns out the asteroid wasn't an asteroid at all. It was an alien vessel, sent out to find another race intelligent enough to activate it and then fetch them to the aliens' homeworld. Why did they do it? Where are they now? And what's behind the ghostly apparitions Low and company keep seeing? Those are the questions the gamer will have to answer as Boston Low. Then there are the more obvious ones: How are you going to survive on this strange new world, and how will you get back home? All those questions will eventually meld into a single goal, Clark said, but only after many hours of gameplay.
I'm expecting plus hours for the average player. In place of those verbs is a new, con- text-sensitive system that chooses what- ever action is appropriate in a given situa- tion. Click on a closed door, and your on- screen counterpart will try to open it; click on an open door, and you'll go through it.
But doesn't that make things too easy? Not according to Clark. We're pretty proud of it. The main purpose of your Pen Ulti- mate is to let you communicate with Mag- gie and Brink at any time in the game. The game will use a seamless blend of traditional two-dimensional and advanced 3D-rendered graphics, similar to those in LucasArts' latest release. Full Throttle. Details, Details, Details We're doing some very tradi- tional things here, and then doing some very non-traditional composit- ing with computers to make it all mesh together very well.
Clark sees 3D- rendered graphics the same way he sees most "hot" new com- puter game techniques: as a means to an end. They're just another tool, and they're only effective when used sparingly. The nice thing about telling a story in a 3D environment, Clark said, is that it allows game designers to choose from an infinite variety of viewing angles on a given scene.
Clark and the rest of the team are taking care that the dramatic shots they create serve the story, rather than being demos for the latest 3D-rendering systems. The Dig will also feature some impressive lighting effects. Each charac- ter in a given scene will have his or her own individual lighting, with shadows and hues changing subtly as they move through a scene. All of the action is painstakingly planned on storyboards, Hollywood-style, before a single pixel is placed on the screen.
In this sequence, a menacing alien creature sneaks up on Maggie Robbins. Product Information Number 95 Mama mia! Build a pizza empire with your personal recipe for success. Decide on a location. Decide on the menu. Decide on your relationship with the mob. Borrow money from them. Buy and sell guns for them.
Anything goes. So uncork that bottle of Chianti and get ready for the game that really delivers. So what about full-motion video? Can a graphic adventure really be com- plete these days without grainy Betacam footage of bad actors? Actually, Clark said he considered using video-capture sequences for The Dig, but he decided the technique didn't fit the game. And that might be animation, it might be 3D or 2D, it might even be video. But we're not going to stick video into a game just because everyone's hot on video.
They'll be sticking with their policy of hir- ing talented unknowns. And the mysterious alien "ghosts" you'll encounter later in the game were ani- mated by Gordon Baker, another ILM alumnus who now works for Disney.
The game's sound effects will reflect another Hollywood-style approach, Clark said. What we're going to do with our sound- track will be just as unique. It's not melodic, but it has a sort of the- matic edge to it.
More than a few game publishers would pay dearly to know the answer to that one. According to the people who work for George Lucas' game company, though, making great computer games is simple: You set your sights high, surround yourself with talented people, you let them do what they do best.
The Digs project leader, Sean Clark, sums up the LucasArts approach this way: "You try to pretend — at least for the first ten minutes of discussing a new idea — that there are no restrictions, and then figure out how to do it with the restrictions that are there.
I think because they have that 'ownership 1 from the moment the first words are written on the first design document, the games are injected with so much passion — you get that attention to detail, because there's so much invested in each product by the team that builds it. Being a subsidiary of a huge movie company has meant more to LucasArts than just having the world's best special-effects facility create animated sequences for their programs. It's also made it easier for the people at LucasArts to stop worrying about beating Hollywood at its own game, Seserman said.
T he Dig project leader Sean Clark says experi- enced gamers will need as much as 60 hours to cover it all. And we're very comfortable with that. I think the best thing about us is that there's no pretension that anything has to happen.
This sequence takes place after Astronaut Boston Low has led a shuttle mission to divert the course of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. The mission went as planned until Low and his crew unwittingly triggered an alien device while exploring the big rock. Then, as this sequence shows, the asteroid morphs into a huge, crystalline starship and whisks the explorers across the galaxy.
It was the use of samples that led to Polygram's interest in publishing The Dig's music, Clark said. If it turns out half as well as earlier titles that have used the sys- tem like TIE Fighter and Dark Forces , it should be amazing. Clark and his team are also working some gameplay and story-telling innovations into the mix. As the game's plot thickens, the way your supporting characters react to you can change, Clark said.
Unlike in so many other graphic adventures, they won't just follow you around mindlessly; as Clark points out, that's just not believable from a story standpoint. Maggie and Brink have Mass-transit, alien-style. The explorers will have to learn to use a bizarre tram to get around on the planet. They'll even call you up on your communi- cator from time to time. Like any good story-teller, Clark would rather give his audience just enough information to let them figure out what's going on for themselves.
That's not realistic either, Clark said. We just decided not to do that with this game. But you do get the sense that things could bejdangerous.
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