PC Games Now – News

It has been declared dead, dying or at least in bad shape. Yet developers keep creating new adventure games. Adventure games used to be a large genre, spawning such titles as Police Quest, Space Quest, Discworld, Gabriel Knight and many more. A 6-page article has been published on IGN with a fascinating discussion on adventure gaming. Why do adventure games no longer attract a large crowd? Is there too little publicity for them? Are gamers no longer interested? The adventure gamers community seems to be alive and well at sites such as Just Adventure and Adventure Gamers. In my opinion the lack of innovation in the genre is dragging it down hugely. If you look at the releases of last year (there are exceptions of course!) you see a lot of games that are VERY similar but with a different look and different character names – like some of the recycled crap (pardon my French) that comes out of Hollywood. It’s clear that developers want to avoid risky changes to game play. You have to take risk to hit gold, so think outside the box for once in your next games, please.

If you have 20 minutes – read the IGN feature on adventure gaming.

It’s been almost 5 years since Westwood Studios released Command & Conquer Renegade, their first FPS game in the Command & Conquer series. The game failed to meet public expectations and Westwood Studios closed shop shortly after its release. Unlike Renegade, Tiberium will put you in the role of battlefield commander. Your job will be to secure areas, gather intel and make sure the main battle groups can work efficiently. The Forward Battle Commander (you) will be wearing heavy body armor with Crysis-like features, such as the ability to jump on top of buildings and other objects. EA has not forgotten the story. The storyline will continue where Command & Conquer 3 ended. A highly modified version of the Unreal Engine will be used for the game. Although there are several screen shots available already which look quite impressive, the game is not near completion yet. We are looking at a late 2008 or early 2009 release.

Tiberium isn’t the first first-person shooter EA has created out of its popular Command & Conquer real-time strategy franchise, but it is the first attempt in over half a decade. As such, Tiberium will bring all the latest technology to the fray, and developer EALA looks to craft a game that will blend the squad control of the RTS games with intense first-person shooter gameplay. Along the way, Tiberium will also fill in huge holes in the history of the Command & Conquer universe. We finally got our first look at Tiberium recently, and EA showed off some of its core gameplay and features.

Go to GAMESPOT for the first impressions of Tiberium!

Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures is not a game for the faint-hearted. Violence, suspense and a lot of blood are all involved in playing Funcom’s upcoming MMORPG. Thousands of people are eagerly waiting to see if Funcom was able to recreate the Age of Conan world, and stay true to it’s storyline and characters. The screen shots we’ve seen so far are impressive, and we are curious whether they will be able to optimize the frame rate enough to make it run decently on the average computer. What worries us slightly is the PvP action. In a title like Age of Conan you can’t have World Of Warcraft style PvP combat, it needs to be more direct to immerse the player. And although the combat system does include some new features it isn’t revolutionary from what we’ve gathered.

On our first foray into the Hyborean wilderness, we encountered the very same prostitute we’d met in earlier previews. We opted to rescue her in exchange for the promise of some future “reward,” which, from what we could gather, was going to somehow involve some lasciviousness. Immediately apparent was the distinctly mature flavor of our initial activities, because Age of Conan doesn’t sugarcoat anything: combat is bloody and brutal, sex workers are brazen and lascivious and men are covered with densely matted hair and look like they smell as bad as the other animals we encountered in the jungles surrounding Tortage.

The jungle environment makes World of Warcraft’s Stranglethorn Vale look like a kiddie pool lined with fern fronds. The wilds rimming Tortage are packed with marauders and vicious predators that attack at the slightest provocation. The tangled vines and dense foliage create an ominous atmosphere and we could almost feel the soft loam beneath our feet sink just a bit with each step. In terms of graphical fidelity, the jungle encasing Tortage was simply stellar — totally capturing the feral fauna and overgrown flora and presenting them as though both were locked in constant combat with Tortage, threatening to devour the small but fiercely defended community of brigands and wildmen.

Go to GAMESPY for the full preview!