Last year's Champ Man 5 was the name with no game. Unrealistic and riddled with flaws, it was a pale shadow of its former self. So, Beautiful Game Studios (BGS) clearly has its work cut out if it wants to win back all those former fans.
The one selling point of CM5 was its speed, and this is something CM 2006 is poised to build upon. In previous CMs it was impossible to run every league in full detail. CM 2006 wants to change all that with its new 'Simulated World' option: a feat of
Last year Vivendi Universal bewildered many by letting some of the biggest talents in its games division (Blizzard's Bill Roper, Dave Brevik, Erich and Max Schaefer) resign.
But being dynamic, self-motivated types with brains the size of goblin zeppelins, the day after quitting they all gathered, formed a new studio and came up with a preposterously great idea for a new game.
That game was Hellgate London - a first-person, near-future RPG. It's the year 2030 and sulphurous demons have only
By
Edge_
posted February 15, 2006
It seldom seems to matter these days whether or not the games industry's technology is building worlds too complex for its games.
Designs are drowned by details, ideas are pushed aside by economics, and the price of construction routinely undermines creativity. Except in the case of Tycoon games, however, where the building of worlds is the design.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, for example, has continued to demonstrate how both attention to intricate detail and a runaway sense of scale can combine
Back in 1999 an American wildlife survey team visited the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to assess the impact of the accident on local flora and fauna. They were astonished by what they saw.
They expected to find blackened scrubland, sick with radiation poisoning. What they actually found was a full-blown wildlife preserve. A thriving ecosystem populated by wolves, eagles, black storks, rodents, wild boar and deer.
That idea, of a hostile place that teems with life, is coming to the
It probably won't do for graffiti what the Tony Hawk games did for skateboarding, but Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure has gotten a pretty bad rap lately. A game about a graffiti artist living in a police state where tagging is a capital crime, it's been called everything from a celebration of vandalism to a gang-recruitment tool. But regardless of what its critics say, Getting Up takes an interesting spin on the urban-crime genre and, if done right, could be a lot of
On a crowded shelf of shooters, TimeShift boasts one unique weapon: the ability to manipulate time. You play Michael Swift, a test pilot who willingly dons a Quantum Suit for the government to become the world's first time-traveler. While the experiment works, letting you journey from 2007 to 1911 and back, you return to an alternate present-day ruled by a fascist dictator, Krone. Worse still, your knowledge of timeshifting immediately makes you a wanted man. You'll need to take full advantage
This is a rock-star moment for Shane Dabiri. He's the producer of the world-conquering World of Warcraft, standing in front of 6000 Blizzcon attendees, about to announce the first details of the World of Warcraft expansion.But his players are uppity. Much of the detail of his presentation, and the introduction of a new race, the Blood Elves, has found its way on to the web already. It's going to have to be quite a show to satisfy this audience.All it takes is a little flash of charisma to turn
There's no movie sequel to the The Incredibles on its way, but that hasn't stopped THQ from making up their own. With a plotline that follows on from the original film, Rise of the Underminer begins right where the film ends, where the Underminer is threatening to wreak havoc on the residents of Metroville. You have to battle against him, travelling through the city and the underground maze beneath it. You play as Mr Incredible or Frozone, who each have their unique skills. Mr Incredible uses
Familiarity breeds contentment. That seems to be the message from Ensemble Studios, the creators of strategy games whose successes are measured in millions of copies. This is the fourth Age game, and still its fundamental structure is the same: build structures, collect resources, churn out soldiers, attack the enemy."We wanted it to be familiar but not the same," admits Bruce Shelley, Age senior designer. "It's the Age of Empires II gameplay that'll keep you coming back." It's surprisingly
By
Edge_
posted September 26, 2005
Sometimes a name is enough. When the teaser trailer for Neversoft's Gun hit at E3, the simple conjunction of those two words was enough to grab everyone's attention. It had long been known that Neversoft was going to diversify from its Tony Hawk empire to work on a very different property, but there was little more than pure speculation on what it might be. And then: bang! There was Gun. The trailer was enough at odds with the Tony Hawk's easygoing tone to pique interest - bloody, pounding and
