Messages

Few more:

Resident Evil:Gaiden (GBC).Set onboard a ship, had you punching the undead!

Arcade Hits (Defender+Joust) GBC


Dropzone (GBC)

Few more that sounded interesting, never made it:

Discworld Noir (PS1/PC) Perfect Entertainment.

Harrier 2001 (N64) Paradigm.Had 2 E3 showings, boasted 20 missions, 50 weapons etc, looked great, never saw it.

Sounds Of Thunder (PS2)Sounds like few ideas from ye olde Amiga/C64 etc classic The Time Machine, as plot was:

It's 2038 and time travel is a reality, but a group of religous nut-jobs is f**king about with it, messing with the past, causing horrors to appear in the present.

You had to be very careful what you did as each action had a knock-on effect, so destroy a life forms food source or predator and it'd have consequences later on.You'd be dealing with intelligent puzzles, results of your own actions, time paradoxes etc.weapons would have included lasers, ion guns, sniper rifles, plus you could manipulate time itself etc.



It was being done by the team behind PS2/Xbox The Thing

Deep Blue (Konami):underwater/diving game, break from the 'norm' of PS1 fare


Tiny Tank: A 3rd person shooter with some nice original touches on how to complete objectives, great sense of humour etc.Think Toy story crossed with Wild Metal Country (but great fun!).


Ball Blazer Champions:retained the 8-bit's classic gameplay, but introduced weapons, new arena's, upgradeable ships etc in bid to give game longer lasting appeal.

Trap Runner (Konami) take the trap-laying antics of 8 bit Spy Vs Spy and soup it right up!.

Unholy War (Edios), think a board game, but with projectile-based fights.

Aironauts (Red Storm)-influenced by Running Man movie, Smash TV arcade game, with parts taken from Pilot Wings and Nights, you play a criminal battling for his freedom via gameshow and you find yourself strapped into some wierd hang-glider like craft, as you do various challenges to gain freedom.


The Divide:Enemies Within (think PS1 Super Metroid)


Then if games are'nt your thing, you've things like:

Music+Music 2000 (Codemasters) and Fluid (Sony) etc.

Last one for now, but quote from Jeff Minter (talking to PC Zone) about why he concentrated on developing for consoles for much of the 90's and not PC:

'It's a question of what was interesting at the time-PC's were'nt games machines, you had CGA graphics and i chose the Atari Jaguar.It's different now, but it's still a nightmare compared to consoles-you have to deal with so many configurations-it's a tremendous burden on developers to do all the platform checking.If your a small company like us, with only 2 people working code, given the choice you'll pick consoles'.


And Jeff on his reputation of working on ill-fated hardware (Jaguar/Konix etc):

'I work on things that interest me.NUON arose because some friends from Atari were starting up and asked if i wanted to get involved-to have a part in chip design, which i'd never done before.I had offers from larger companies, but i chose that.I'm not motivated by money and MS is'nt exactly a lost cause.....'


Thought since we could'nt get Jeff to do an interview on here :-(  i'd try my best to fill the void somewhat with quotes from interviews he has done, talking about formats etc we do on here.

Few more odds 'n' sods:

Time Commando was a novel slant on the beat-em-up genre.Looked gorgeous, had an intelligent fighting system (lure foes to their death, get them to fight each other, not you etc), but sadly let down by frustrating contols.

Great range of time periods to fight through though:Prehistoric times, ancient Rome, medievil Europe, feudal Japan, the wild west, WWI, then couple of future-era settings.The weapons avaiable to you of course were from that era.

Power Diggerz:Original game for sure (mental at times with you being given a range of play options from the more sim-like approach of digging+dumping soil etc into a truck, to an obstacle course creation kit type level or smashing in cars houses etc, to saving turtles or serving up curry!.Best thing about the game? the Jap madman shouting randoms at you!).

Panzer Front: WW2 Tank stategy game that's not for the faint-hearted, if it's depth your after in a console game....


Namco's Ace Combat was based around Arcade Air Combat 22, but rather than just convert the coin-op, Namco felt it better to develop something more designed for home play, so nice to see some developers not content just to do straight ports.


Tempest X:Rather than attempt straight port (like the saturn version was) of the Jaguar game, which used the Jaguar custom chips to great effect in terms of generating phosphorescent particles, trippy effects etc, developer (High Voltage) used the PS1 hardware to best effect, so we saw shimmering side panels, blaster fire lighting up tunnel walls, effects bleeding off edges of things etc.

I prefered the more 'coming right at you' brillance of the Jaguar version, it 'feels' more hypnotic and 'pure', but again great to see a developer doing more than straight port.

Talking of DC unfinished Dreamcast games:Red Lemon Studio's Take The Bullet, which never got completed on Dreamcast (though there are claims early version was leaked, someone has a 'white label' copy', did have a second crack of the whip, with developer trying to re-work it for PS2 (after being bought out i seem to recal), but abandoned it as just could'nt get the game to come together well enough to be a final product.

Also, Fur Fighters had a feature dropped as developer ran out of time- Bizarre Creations had hoped to use the VMU's '2nd screen' potential in the split-screen mode of the game, by displaying player health, ammo etc on the VMU and not the TV, thus hiding it from other player.

Anyone know what happened to B&W for the DreamCast?

Sega (who were to be publishing the DC version) basically got sick and tired of waiting for Lionhead to actually finish the game and thus pulled out of the publishing deal, leaving Lionhead without a publisher for the console version at that time.Think the official statement from Lionhead talked of distribution issues...

Peter had made a bit of a fool of himself in a Dreamcast Magazine over here (will have to see if it was Official DC magazine or DC-UK), when promoting the game, basically he listed every game he'd done previousily, slagged each and every one off saying they were boring, etc, whilst saying how, like 'amazing' DC Black And White was going to be, how DC would be the best version etc.

Slight problem there Peter, basically, not only did those games get created by a team, not you on your Han Solo....so your slagging the works of others, not just your own efforts, but in each of those games you've mentioned, prior to release you were hyping up as being amazing, best version ever-just as you are now, so why should people believe you now?.

I'll see if i can dig out the article/s.

One for Katz:

Spindizzy on the Amstrad CPC of all things had such an effect at the time on Glenn Corpes (who went on to help code Populous etc) seeing it in 4 colours and running at 320X200 it influenced the graphics engine of Populous years later.

Not only that, but Glenn actually met author of Spindizzy (Paul Shirley) and told him he'd completed the game, to which Paul then accused Glenn of cheating!.Glenn swore he had'nt and Paul told him he was a 'sad bastard'.

:-)

Ok, mentioned quotes from Minter and Graftgold oh how industry was changing even in 16 Bit/Jaguar/3DO era, turn of Bitmaps now, following question was put to them:

Q)10 years ago (at time of interview), you were setting trends that everyone else has since picked up on.You were using pop musicians for a soundtrack, you were the 1st 'celbrity' programmers with a high profile, interested in talking to the media.That seems to have been a template for  how the games industry has developed in last 10 years.How do you feel about that?

A)'..it's a huge compliment.at the time we decided to do some of these things, we looked at the industry and thought that most of these people were working in bedooms and garages and were spotty.Nowadays, we're getting closer to pop stars.There are parallels between development houses and pop groups-they're selling to the same people-and in some cases, games outsell pop records.


think the more you look into it, even in these earlier years before the Japanese 32 bit RISC based CD machines hit, there was a drive from within the industry to get out of the 'geek' image and into the Hollywood/Music industry cool image.

Designers, musicians on board, cut scenes etc etc, plus coders who were used to being freelance, now working for publishers and not being used to being told how a game should be...

@Greyfox:

Re:Speedball 2100:

Technically., it's NOT a Bitmap Bros game (gasp!) as it was done by an external studio (outside London) that Bitmap's owned.They used them, rather than did it in-house as A)Said studio had done PS1 work before and B)Bitmaps did'nt like to work on 2 projects at once (and were working on Z2 at that time) so too busy.

Just a little comment on how either 'taken in' by P.R claims some mags seemed to be:

Both C+VG and Mean Machines printed the C.G.I cut Scene footage from Alien Trilogy and claimed it was in-game footage.Mean Machines claiming it'd make Jaguar AVP look like the Wizard Of Oz and C+Vg under headline...They're Back....

'Feast your eyes on these shots, they're not from any intro, this from Acclaims Alien trilogy and it's like nothing we've you've ever seen before'

Indeed, very high res, detailed, fantastic lighting, no jaggies etc, i'd never seen actual game footage on anything at that time look that good...

Few snippets from that feature in MEGA on the Jaguar i mentioned earlier (just to give some idea of how much machine was 'feared' or not as case might be...)

'Cybermorph is very, very impressive indeed..Jaguar is powerful as a 3D graphics generator...but without a good libary of games, it's dead'


'No one's actually seen any decent games on Jaguar yet.and who's to know if any will materialise?'

'Humans on the MD.Not very good in the 1st place....so why make it a key title for a new super console? Baffling'

'MD gamers were enjoying Raiden well over a year ago...and soon Jaguar owners can do the same.Bit dated though is'nt it?'

Parasite (Psygnosis) PS1, a cross between Doom and Flashback with superb visuals (very atmospheric looking too).

AVP PS1 shown in early stage at an E3 (scrolling still rough, missing lot of the detailed texture maps etc) said to be a 'bigger, better brother of the Jaguar game' levels no longer flat, more action based, more detailed enviroments, you could now look up+down as well as left-to-right.

Sweevo's World (Speccy/CPC) been mentioned? (well recived by press, Crash Smash and Amstrad action Rave etc).

Now a PC game that i seem to be the only person who's ever played, Abomination.Done by Ex-Xcom chap, Peter Moorland, published by Edios, featured randomly generated missionsinsane cultists, Zombies, creatures built from corpses, dynamic A.I etc and influenced by Syndicate, Xcom, Resident evil and Diablo.

'....there's a guy called Rob Zdibble who's worked for Atari for a long time.He's actually working on the 64Bit version of star Raiders! i cannot wait.'

I am sure he meant Rob Zydbel who as well as programming Warbirds for the Lynx also wrote the 3D engine used for Hover Strike and Space War 2000.

Might be a typo on their part (not mine this time, lol).