next gaming PS2 - PLAYSTATION - DftEAMCAST - PC - N64 - X-BOX - GAME BOY OVER 250 GAMES PREVIEWED! ■ llll Uir huge 2tN2M1 rundown. Ml the games - all the systems! METAL GEAR SOLID 2 • WIPEOUT FUSION RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN’ ONI TRIBES 2 • POD 2 • SONIC ADVENTURE 2 DINOSAUR PLANET • FINAL FANTASY IX TflNY HAWK 2 • LEGEND OF DRAGOON Realistic 3-D environments , day and night missions and true line-of-sight bring the battlefield to life. Dominate the Internet with intense 16 -player action , including Capture the Flag and cooperative play. ASSAULT THE HILL BY COMMANDEERING A TANK BRIGADE. Battle as the ^^&fuAor as the ragtag revolutionary Sprawlers in 20 challenging single-player missions. Utilize powerful controls , Inc/aS and building rm targeting ancfa www.activision.com YET TO BE CLASSIFIED AcliVisioN PANDEMK EarthLink Activision Is a registered trademark and All rights reserved. All other trademark THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE 10000 REIGN FROM ABOVE. REIGN IN THE TRENCHES. - - > t*1 ■J V V 'Ji TAKE DEFENSIVE i t ACTION TO RESCUE vv YOUR TROOPS. 1 . ---- 7 Sfc For the first time ever in a Real-Time Strategy game, run your war from the traditional RTS view or zoom into the heat of battle using multiple camera perspectives. You're down in the trenches seeing the direct effect of your decisions. If a platoon eats it, you'll be there to count the bodies. This is war, up close and personal. Welcome to the battlefield of the future. Welcome to Dark Reign"2. “Dark Reign 2 looks set to take a commanding lead among the next wave of real-time strategy titles." GAMESPOT kirk Reign is a trademark of Activision, Inc. C tgg? 2000 Activision, Inc. or trade names are the properties of their respective owners »HYPER contents 06 . NEWS 12. FEATURE - E3 BLOWOUT! THE GAMES OF 2000-2001. WE SPEW OUT MORE SCREENSHOTS OF UPCOMING GAMES THAN YOU CAN FIT IN YOUR BRAIN. 32. SUBSCRIPTIONS SUBSCRIBE TO HYPER AND WE LL GIVE YOU FREE STUFF! 34 . WAREZ WE CHECK OUT SOME UPCOMING ADD-ONS FOR THE DREAMCAST. THEY ROCK! 36 . FEATURE - THE FUTURE OF GAMING WE SPEAK ONE-ON-ONE WITH SOME OF THE WORLD S MOST IMPORTANT GAMES DEVELOPERS IN PART 1 OF OUR PEEK INTO THE FUTURE OF GAMING. 44 . NET TRAWLIN’ COME AND VENTURE FORTH INTO THE RUINS OF KUNARK. THE LATEST FOR EVERQUEST. PLUS THE LATEST NET NEWS AND TASTY URLS. 48 . COMPS WIN GAMES!! reviews NINTENDO 64 58. PERFECT DARK 70. EXCITEBIKE 64 PLAYSTATION 62. COLIN MCRAE RALLY 2 74. TOMBI! 2 77 . N-GEN RACING 78 . DISCWORLD NOIR 78. ... GEKIDO: URBAN FIGHTERS 78. ... STAR OCEAN: SECONO STORY OREAMCAST 66. .... RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA 75. ... SWORD OF THE BERSERK 76. .... TIMESTALKERS PC 64. .... DARK REIGN 2 68. ... MOTOCROSS MADNESS 2 72. .... SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR GAME BOY 80. ... DRIVER 80. ... LE MANS 24 HOURS 80. ... SPEEDY GONZALES: AZTEC ADVENTURE 80. .... 1942 82 . REVERSE ENGINEERING THE GLORY OAYS OF THE NES, ANO THE WONDERFUL METAL GEAR! 84 . VERSUS MODE VIRTUAL REALITY VERSUS ACTUAL REALITY. WHICH IS BETTER? 86 . ANIME 87 . ARCADE MODE 88 . CHEAT MODE 92 . INCOMING MAIL TAKE A TRIP THROUGH ELIOT'S E3 DIARY AND READ UP ON WHAT OTHER READERS THINK OF THE STATE OF GAMING. PLUS OTHER WEIRD STUFF. 97. HYPERMART 98. 12 . SNIAK A PtW AT OVER 2oa omsi SINCE E3, THE HYPER OFFICE HAS BEEN OVERFLOWING WITH NEW GAMES. WE'VE PUT TOGETHER A GALLERY OF ALL THE GAMES TO LOOK FORWARD TO OVER THE NEXT YEAR! C0MIN6 NEXT ISSUE! contents issue 82 MUST 2010 Editor: Eliot Fish Art Director: David Harvey Deputy Editor: Cam Shea Publisher: Jim Flynn ADVERTISING Advertising Manager: Gill Oliver National Sales Director Victoria Meades Advertising Production Co-ordinator Dylan Fryer Ph: 02 9699 0333 Fax: 02 9310 2012 Production Manager Melissa Doyle Circulation Director Karen Day Finance Director: Theo Fatseas Managing Director Phillip Keir Subscriptions Enquiries ph: 1300 3611 46 Fax: 02 9699 0334 email: subs@next.com.au CONTRIBUTORS: Dan Toose, DMC, Tim Levy, Kevin Cheung, James Ellis, Adam Duncan, Arthur Adam, Martin English, Frank Dry, Brett Robb, Roland Flanagan, Qantas, Bill Gates, UNATCO and XTC. Printed CTP by: Offset Alpine Distribution by: Gordon & Gotch Customer Service Ph: 1300 65 0666 Fax: 1300 650777 All copyrights reserved by Next Publishing Pty Ltd ACN 002 647 645 ISSN 1320-7458 WWTH0HYPBII 78 Renwick St, Redfern, NSW 2016 Fax: 102) 9281 6188 E-mail: freakscene@next.com.au Hypermart: hypermart@next.com.au Perfect. It describes the gameplay, the options, the visuals - oh, and Joanna. Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 was just what we needed this month to kick back and enjoy after an exhaust¬ ing trip to Los Angeles. Check out our 20 pages of upcoming games! Besides the arrival of Perfect Dark, some other long-awaited games arrived at the office this month... Colin McRae Rally 2 (the actual finished game, not some dodgy preview code which another magazine reviewed). Dark Reign 2 for the PC strategy freaks and Code Veronica for Dreamcast lovers (which includes me). In fact, the Dreamcast stole the show at E3 in Los Angeles. Lots of great GAMEPLAY to look forward to... now if I could only stop Cam playing Ecco... ELIOT FISH >> editor r- Cff »HYPER AUSTRALIAN PLAYSTATION 2 LAUNCH DATE CONFIRMED Sony sent out a press release confirming that the Australian launch date of the PlayStation 2 would be the same as it is for Europe - October 26th. One million units will be shipped to service both Europe and Australia, so we’re hoping that we don’t get short-changed locally by the demand overseas. Also confirmed was that the Australian PS2 will ship with the same backside expansion unit that has been added for the American PS2. The expan¬ sion bay will be used for an upcoming hard disk and an ethernet network adapter. Unfortunately a price point was not officially confirmed. Hyper still believes we can expect to pay around $599 for the unit, * x though some are saying as high as $699! SONY HANDHELD RUMOURS PERSIST The industry rumours are stitt flying that Sony are secretly developing a handheld to challenge Nintendo with their Came Boy monopoly. The word is that Sony are approaching game developers who have developed for Came Boy. in the hope of wooing them to their project. Some of the more outlandish rumours describe the Sony handheld as being similar to a discman, with full PlayStation compatibility. We don’t think that would really be the case though, considering that the PS2 will already have backwards com¬ patibility with the original PlayStation. We expect the real facts to stay fairly top secret for a while yet. but it makes sense that Sony would want to enter the handheld market, as opposed to just relying on PocketStation. 'v RIDGE RACER NINTENDO DOLPHIN! V ON Namco have agreed to develop Ridge Racer V for the Nintendo Dolphin. The sexy PlayStation 2 racer will be given some visual improve¬ ments and hopefully some new additions to the gameplay options for it’s Dolphin incarna¬ tion. At this point in time though, the only solid information is that it’s definitely hap¬ pening. Maybe the Nintendo Dolphin will have the definitive Ridge Racer title... we shall see. Namco are also working on a racing title for the Sega Dreamcast, but as to what exactly that is, we can only currently guess... PLAY PLAYSTATION GAMES ON YOUR DREAMCAST! BLEEM! have indeed been working on a PlayStation emulator for Dreamcast. and they had it on display on the floor at E3. More important for Dreamcast owners is that not only does Bleem for Dreamcast allow you to play PlayStation games on your Dreamcast console, but it actually enhances these games MORE than the PlayStation 2 does! Bleem for Dreamcast emulates PlayStation games on the Dreamcast console, as well as adding effects to them, such as four times the resolution, anti-aliasing and special graphical effects that are not seen when running PlayStation software through the PlayStation 2! Each Bleem Pak will cost US$20 and will enable users to play 100 different PlayStation 1 games on the Dreamcast. Users may have to purchase different packs of Bleem to get all your games to work on the Dreamcast, but the increase in visuals and performance combined with the low price make it more than worthwhile. Naturally, this is Sony’s worst nightmare, and they have in fact filed a new lawsuit against Bleem! which will soon make it to court. Who’s going to win this round? news CAPTION THIS! PART * Number 9 Number 9. Number 9. Ahh, well, Beatles fans will get it. You know what to do - write a screen caption for this pic and send it to freakscenea>next.com.au or post it to Caption This! Part 9, Hyper, 78 Renwick St, Redfern, NSW 2016. Good luck! OVERFLOW POKEMON - GOTTA EAT 'EM ALU . t . Those curly little buggers have finally become an edible product! Pokemon the breakfast cereal is the lastest thing in the USA! Kelloggs themselves have finalised a deal with Nintendo that will see Pokemon pop tarts and sprinkles making their way to our tables. Each box of cereal will come with a Pokemon giveaway of some kind, which you can bet your booty will be part of a collectable series. Gotta eat ’em all! vV SNEAK PEEK! Here’s a first look at the Blair Witch Project survival horror PC title from Terminal Reality — due later this year! X-BOX GETS FASTER Hrt3 in Los Angeles, Microsoft burned a few heads by revealing that the specs for the Xbox had in fact increased a notch. Running at the show in the Xbox dev kits were a 733Mhz CPU as opposed the earlier announced 6ooMhz. There was also quite a bit more RAM, but that’s because these were dev kits, and the extra RAM is needed for ;4pvelopment purposes. f : < V ) III I till! AIIIICCIHIHI! The head of Sega Japan, Shoichiro Irimajiri, recently resigned as president. New Sega boss, Isao Ohkawa, will head some major internal restructuring to ensure that business keeps keeping on. The Dreamcast is in its strongest phase currently, so the last thing Sega needs is to lose momentum. Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid 2 on the PS2, was recently quoted as saying he was a little disappointed with the PlayStation 2 hardware. “I was actually expecting something much better*. Ouch, those are some serious words. Even so, he will continue to improve Metal Gear Solid 2 for its 2001 release. The game is looking incredible already. Dave Perry, creator of Earthworm Jim and Messiah, has spoken out about the Nintendo Dolphin. “Nintendo needs to be a whole lot more aggressive this time, if they’re going to dominate Sony, Sega and Microsoft.” He also had some stinging comments about the upcoming Game Boy Advance - “I personally think Game Boy Advance sounds terrible”. Thanks for that Dave! Sony have secured the PlayStation 3 trademark in Japan with the Japanese Patent Office. The gaming giant is obviously planning a very rosy future. Nintendo-loving Star Wars fans hoping that LucasArts haven’t switched all their powers to the PS2, can sleep well at night knowing that they recently advertised for a lead Nintendo Dolphin programmer. Looks like Episode 2 games on the Dolphin are a done deal. Because of bad reviews so far, there is actually a pretty funny petition on line to prevent Daikatana coming to the Mac. http://www.utterer.com/ will show you what to do... Oh God. Michael Jackson has been included as a playable boxer in the upcoming Ready 2 Rumble sequel being developed by Midway Games. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 will give fans, or maybe non-fans to punch out the “king of pop”. Cool! Remember our review of Wmback on the N64? We loved that game, but it still hasn't seen a local release for some odd reason. Well, we’ve now heard that Koei are bringing a version of Wmback to the PlayStation 2. so let’s hope we get to play that one! Mmm... »HYPER 8 »HYPER news GETTING YOUR PS2 ONLINE Many people have been wondering how long we re going to have to wait before we can play games online with the PlayStation 2. Well. Sony seemed to be happy to just say "wait for broadband", but when will that become available to everyone exactly? Why not pack in a modem? Thankfully, a british company. SN Systems, have developed a toolset called TCP/IP Stack which will allow game developers to provide support for USB modems in their games titles. This means that you could theoretically purchase a game that comes packed with a cheap USB modem and start playing online before we even see Christmas. Of course, it requires the developer to make it an actual feature in the game, but at least it means the possibility of playing multiplayer PS2 games online with just a modem is a reality. Maybe we won’t all have to wait for broadband after all... WINNERS STARLANCER A. Ficara, NSW R. Brownlow, VIC S. Bell. NSW C. Bowden. OLD D. Moloney. NSW JEDI POWER BATTLES Came AND video: D.Douglas. TAS D. Leech. VIC J. Austin. SA R. De Carvalho, NSW A. Lawson. OLD Just game: I. Hubbard, SA A. Hill. NSW H. Curley. NSW M. Turton, NSW D. Maloney. NSW MEDIEVIL 2 S. L. Wainwright. QLD C. Allen, SA K. McEwan, NSW I. Hobbs. OLD C. Kershaw. NSW SYPHON FILTER 2 M. Stock, VIC S. Van Reede. NSW D. Ferguson, NSW J. New. NSW J. Baxter. OLD HOW MUCH IS THAT POOCHI IN THE WINDOW? Sega Toys in Japan are releasing their new electronic dog, SupeT Poo-chi, in the wake of Sony’s Aibo. Sega, however, plan on an electronic cat and bird also! Super Poo-chi can do everything you’d expect from a cyborg dog (what is that exactly? — Ed) as well as lie-down and sit from vocals commands. Cute. Super Poo-chi will also develop its own personality as it grows depending on how you treat it. Super Poo-chi sells for about 5980 Yen. E.T. GO HOME Amblm Pictures and Universal Studios have signed a contract with NewKid Co to develop new games on all platforms based upon the big 8o’s Spielberg hit film, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Despite the fact that the only previous E.T. game, E.T. on the Atari 2600 was one of the worst videogames ever made in the history of the indus¬ try, the deal is going ahead. E.T. on the Xbox? Yeah, it seems so... Eliot will have to review that one! EZfc ***«#•> I*->/:•» tru: LTfc«.a* CLASSIC GAMES IN YOUR BROWSER Midway have cleverly coded some of their all-time classic games in Shockwave so you can play them for free in your browser! Ten games have so far been finished - Defender, Spy Hunter, Rampage, Joust. Defender 2, Robotron 2084, Sinistar, Bubbles, Satan’s Hollow and Tapper. If you’d like to waste a few hours with these retro babies, then head over to www.shock- wave.com and absorb the classic gameplay goodness. GDi (KJOcDDogj gtjBQOo iw. ' : Satisfy your craving for dirt-bike action, head-numbing crashes and outrageous stunts on over 40 tracks in 6 events including Stunt Quarry. Nationals. Baja. Enduro, Supercross and Multi-player Tag. and get that blood of yours pumping. Download the free trial version of Motocross Madness 2 at www.microsoft.com/games/motocross2 R rainbow itisn Gaming ZONE Microsoft & 2000 Microsoft Corporation All rights reserved Microsoft ond Motocross Madness 2 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U S and/or other countries YAMAHA is a registered troaemoHi ond s used with permission of Yamaha Motor Co ltd HONDA®, the Wing® logo. CR®. XJT V ond the distinctive likenesses of *ts motorcycles ore owned by HONDA MOTOR CO.. LTD and licensed by AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO >NC in the U S The KTM Trademarks ore used by Microsoft with express written permission of KTM Sportmotorcycle USA Inc MKZ29383'HYP news intelligence $200 ticket * $20 compact disc * $50 t’sUrt (good!) ^$100 cock ring JAMES HETFIELD "METALLICA" A THERE SCREENS ARE ERIN A MASH ANIMATING GREATER RT A RISGRRNUER NAPSTER USER! METALUCA AND THE NAPSTER DEBACLE No doubt most of our internet roaming readers have heard of, or used a program called Napster. This doozy of an app allows users to trade mp3S with anyone else who’s connected to the Napster servers, effectively creating a massive, searchable free music network. Napster has enjoyed phenomenal success, racking up io million regis¬ tered users in its first nine months in operation alone. It’s so popular that the University of Southern California recently found that Napster was responsible for 40% of all their internet traffic. Log on at any time, and you'll be able to download from a database of several hundred thousand songs. Unsurprisingly, the big boys of the record industry aren’t happy about it. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is already in the process of suing Napster over copyright infringement, as are rock demi-gods Metallica. Metallica have taken it a step further though, taking matters into their own hands and hiring a private internet detective to investigate "Metallica pirates’’. The result? A list of 343,000 users compiled over a single weekend (and another list a couple of weeks later). Metallica demanded that these users be banned from using the service. The backlash from fans was instantaneous and huge, especially when Napster succumbed to Metallica’s demands, and banned the majority of users on the list. Metallica have failed to understand just how influential the internet now is in shaping popular opinion. They already filed a lawsuit against the company, yet still pursued a course of action that can only be described as a stop gap measure at best. If Napster gets shut down, rest assured countless other pro¬ grams will spring up that do a similar thing. Not only that, but working instructions on how to get back on Napster are freely avail¬ able online. All Metallica have succeeded in doing for now is to generate a huge amount of negative press. Other more open minded artists like Public Enemy recognise that digital distribution is not only a great promotional tool, but an innovative way to decentralise the current I mode of music distribution, and get their music heard by more people than has ever been possible before. Chuck D has been an mp3 advocate for some time now, and has thrown his weight behind Napster. However, on the flip- side, another 230,000 users have been banned after Dr.Dre pressured the Napster creators. Sell out! To add further interest to the story, in spite of numerous lawsuits and possible damage payments to the RIAA of over $100 million US, venture capital firm Hummer Winblad recently secured a $15 million US funding deal with Napster. What this means for Napster remains to be seen, but it’s doubtful that it can continue in its current form, especially if the US congress is swayed by the recent report by the Progressive Policy Institute entitled "Napster and Online Piracy: The Need to Revisit the Digital Millennium Copyright Act". The report's recommended steps included requiring users to provide personal information before using a file sharing program like Napster and allowing judges greater freedom in granting injunctions against similar emerging technologies. One delicious piece of irony that has arisen from all this is a quote from James Hetfield in the liner notes of Carage Inc, talking about the early days with Lars Ulrich, when he would "stay over at his house for days mak¬ ing tapes of his records and sleeping on the carpet". The word hypocrite springs to mind. Our advice is to watch the Napster debate unfold as closely as possible, as this is an excellent example of the issues that the music industry will face in the future, and one of the most important cases in establishing the new rules for digital copyright in the new millennium. . rnietallicster MW* A NAPSTER CARRIE RESIGNER SPEGIHCAEIY TR RISTRIRITE METALUCA STIEE! NAHAHA! INSANE IN THE CAME After many years of pretending to be an OC, rapper/actor Ice T will be getting busy on a DC near you soon. Believe it or not, but Ice T is providing the voice for the lead character of a new third person sci fi action game from Monolith called... Insane in the Membrane! Pity they didn’t get B Real isn’t it? In any case, Ice T’s character will be using psionic powers to beat off the forces of evil. Well waddaya know? His lethal weapon really is his mind! ANOTHER NEW CRAZE? To add to Pokemon and Digimon, comes Fonzimon from US company, Hero Food Inc. Fonzimon are a collection of 1950’s inspired gangs, which you can naturally train and fight. Discover the Bodgies, the Creaseballs, the Dodgers, the Blazers and a series of other hot-rod loving gangs who all have their own unique powers, such as Hairspray attack, Burger grease, switchblade and even plain old knuckledusters. The Fonzimon, in contrast to Pokemon. have been pitched at the 40-50 year-old age group, and can be played on mobile phones and pagers. Maybe mum and dad will get into games after all! BACH POK6MOM FOSSIL TH6M6 PBCKS. CAU YOU Pie UP ALL TH6 FOSSIL CARPS? Two million years ago, the first known Pokemon walked the earth. Only fossils remained, and scientists thought they were extinct — until now. A remote island has been discovered in the south seas, an island where the Pokemon fossils have come to life. Dig into the new Fossil expansion for the Pokemon trading card game. Trade with your friends, show off your favourites, build your own personalised decks and, most of all, do battle with your friends. EACH POKEMON FOSSIL BOOSTER 11 randomly inserted Pokemon cards. Features cards from Pokemon releases as well as 42 new Pokemon cards and five new trainer cards. www.harVeynorman.com.au (Q Harvey Norman IIIPB v-r' •AUBURN i PARK SUPACENTA • PENRIT • HUv-KnAMrlON NC • OPEN 7 I • CAI I SUPERSTORE • BALGOWLAH SUPERSTORE • BLACKTOWN • CAMPBELLTOWN • CARINGBAH SUPACENTA • CHATSWOOD CHASE • GORDON CENTRE • LIVERPOOL MEGACENTA • MOORE • PENRITH SUPERSTORE NOW OPEN • WILEY PARK . ARMIDALE • BATHURST • COFFS HARBOUR • DENILIQUIN • DUBBO • ERINA • GRAFTON • INVERELL • LISMORE • MAITLAND • MOREE • MUDGEE • MOSS VALE • NEWCASTLE SUPERSTORE • NOWRA • ORANGE • PARKES • PORT MACQUARIE • TAMWORTH • TAREE • WAGGA WAGGA • WARRAWONG • YOUNG • FYSHWICK • WODEN PLAZA • ASPLEY OPEN 7 DAYS • BROADWAY ON THE MALL OPENS JULY • CARINDALE • EVERTON PARK OPEN 7 DAYS • INDOOROOPILLY NOW OPEN • MT GRAVATT • OXLEY . GOLD COAST OPEN 7 DAYS • TWEED HEADS SOUTH OPEN 7 DAYS J • NOOSAVILLE OPEN 7 DAYS • SUNSHINE COAST OPEN 7 DAYS • BUNDABERG • CAIRNS OPEN 7 DAYS • GLADSTONE OPEN 7 DAYS • MACKAY OPEN 7 DAYS M ROCKHAMPTON NORTH • TOOWOOMBA • TOWNSVILLE - OPEN 7 DAYS • DANDENONG • GREENSBOROUGH PLAZA • MARIBYRNONG • MOORABBIN . NUNAWADING • PRESTON H DAYS • ALBURY • BALLARAT • BENDIGO • GEELONG • MILDURA • SHEPPARTON • TRARALGON • WARRNAMBOOL " . ENFIELD NOW OPEN * MARION OPEN MON SAT CANNINGTON • JOONDALUP • 0 CONNOR NOW OPEN • OSBORNE PARK • PORT KENNEDY ' jlTT 7 ' • ALBANY • BUNBURY • BUSSELTON • GERALDTON • KALGOORLIE • KARRATHA • PORT HEDLAND • DARWIN OPEN 7 DAYS - OPEN 7 DAYS • HOBART CITY • GLENORCHY • ROSNY • OPEN 7 DAYS • LAUNCESTON • DEVONPORT • ULVERSTONE www.harveynorman.com.au The prices lor goods shown in this advertisement are in Australian dollars and are GST inclusive 12 »HYPER Bursting through the walls of the Los Angeles Convention Centre in mid-May was this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. If you wanted to have your head pummelled by polygons, then this was the place to be. Hyper Ed, Eliot Fish, hopped on a jet and spent three days wiping the drool off his jacket to bring you the biggest bunch of previews you'll find anywhere! THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGL Y Los Angeles is one big town. My hotel was one big hotel. The first burg¬ er slapped in front of me, was one big burger. Hold on, there 's a recurring theme here. If you wanted to gener¬ alise, you could say that in America it's quantity over quality, or that bigger is better than better. After spending three days pushing my way through the hordes at £3 2000, the same can be said about the games. There were 2,400 new titles here this year, but in actual fact there were only a handful of games that truly excelled in graphics and gameplay. All the big players were here - Sony, Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft - plus a huge array of third party developers, everyone waving their flags and blow¬ ing their whistles to try and prove to the media that they were "where it was at". As you can see from the snapshots, the booths were enormous structures worthy of a Spinal Tap concert stage dressing. Aliens hung suspended in strange liquid-filled tubes, girls wan¬ dered around in very little clothes, huge TV screens bleated and blared. Certainly, three days of E3 is too much for any malnourished gamer to handle, yet somehow I managed to see just about everything that was worth see¬ ing. From chatting to Lome Lanning about Munch '$ Oddysee on the PS2 to stroking the silver casing of the "X- Box" and gawking at Ulala on the Dreamcast stage, there were many thrilling moments which I can now reveal to you, our dear reader... 13 Everyone who walked through the front doors of the LA Convention Centre headed straight to the Sony booth to see the "power” of the PlayStation 2. At the end of the three days, the general consensus was that ultimately, the PS2 lineup was strangely disappointing. Graphically, the quality of the titles seemed a little inconsistent, with some titles looking a little too undercooked to be on display for all to see. However, on the flipside, if you searched the convention centre well enough, there were many very exciting titles tucked away with the third-party developers. Big games like Metal Gear Solid 2 were enough to have any gamer wetting their pants at the future of PlayStation. So what were the picks of the show for the PS2? WIPEOUT FUSION PS2 PSYGNOSIS AVAILABLE: Q1, 2001 The fourth in the Wipeout series was presented behind closed doors, and then later brought down to the floor in the form of demo footage. Everything is pointing to this being a fantastic release. Visually, the game is stunning, with extremely solid and realistic tracks that curl away into the horizon. Everything from complete 360 degree loops and corkscrews to huge leaps of faith through cloud cover makes Wipeout Fusion look like the futuristic racer dreams are made of. Psygnosis promise 400 tracks in total for you to "finish" the game, which is quite sim¬ ply mind-boggling. THE BOUNCER PS2 SQUARESOFT AVAILABLE: Q4, 2000 lust say the words "SquareSoft" and people turn their heads. Their booth was packed the entire three days as gamers craned their neck to get a glimpse at the gorgeous-looking Final Fantasy film, as well as the very promising action title, The Bouncer. ODDWORLD: MUNCH’S ODDYSEE PS2 ODDWORLD INHABITANTS AVAILABLE: Q2, 2001 In a private viewing, we got to see the superb animation, the intuitive 3D engine and the astounding character dynamics that we thought were only achievable from the master of game design, Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the Mario and Zelda games). Lome Lanning and his Oddworld Inhabitants have the makings here of yet another brilliant action/adventure/puzzler that shows true visionary strength. Both the characters, Abe and Munch, have the ability to move about the environment with the ease and flexibility of Warner Brothers cartoon characters, despite the fact that they’re bound to the potential glitchiness of a complex 3D world. The camera moves intuitively with your character so that you are never confused, lost or stuck and unlike most 3D third-person games, you’ll never find a part of the environ¬ ment that you can’t experiment with. METAL GEAR SOLID 2 PS2 KONAMI AVAILABLE: Q3 2001 Though there was no playable version at the show, the footage that we saw was amazing enough to have people calling it the "game of the show”. Most notable was the stunning realism, cinematic style and superb animation! 13 »HYPER 14 »HYPER ££> RUN LIKE HELL Interplay rock. ^UNREAL TOURNAMENT Can the DualShock 2 cut it? SS>STAR WARS: STARFIGHTER An adult Rogue Squadron. ^ DARK CLOUD Pretty, but not as interactive as we thought. DRAKAN 2 PS2 PSYGNOSIS AVAILABLE: Q1, 2001 It was surprising to hear that Drakan on PS2 was a sequel, not a port. Look forward to a whole new adventure, with the 3D engine now allowing for true seamless transitions between environments! Otherwise, this looks like what you would expect on a high-end PC. ft w £> DRAKAN 2 More fantasy-based romps with dragons. £> FORMULA K Formula One racing just won’t die. ^MIDNIGHT CLUO STREET RACING £S>thunderrirds These guys are "go"! 2> ARMOURED CORE 2 Gorgeous Commoner Great design in this Action/RPG! $S>THE GETAWAY When we see gameplay... $> SMUGGLERS RUN Crazy action Stunning visuals. $S> EXTERMINATION ASonygem. SS>FIFA 2UU1 Life-like animation. RIDGE RACER V Oddly disappointing. But pretty! ££> TITANIUM ANGELS Also coming to the PC ^S>bis ssx Better looking than 1080. $>MAUUEN NFL 2U0U Hardcore! $S> RAYMAN 2: REVULUTION £> RE UN EDGE Seriously weird! SS>WURLU DESTRUCTION LEAGUE Battletanx dejavu. GUNSLINGERS Activision sprung this shooter. 15 »HYPER 16 »HYPER E3 $$>ETERNAl RING First person RPC. ^STREET IETHAI Motoring madness. ££>LEGI0N: LEGEND OF EXCALIBUR Amongst all the PlayStation 2 hype, it was easy to miss the old PlayStation. Luckily, there was still a very strong array of titles for the ageing system, which gave us faith that the PS2 will have a great back-catalogue at the very least! There were RPCs everywhere you looked amongst the old grey machines, but games like Tony Hawk's Skateboarding 2 and Colin McRae Rally 2 proved that the machine can still cut some great action! There was no doubt though, that the PlayStation was having a hard time holding it’s head up amongst all the Super Consoles and great-looking PC titles. Still, check out these exciting games to look forward to! FINAL FANTASY IX PLAYSTATION SQUARESOFT AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Who ISN’T looking forward to this game? Final Fantasy IX seems like it’s a real return to form for the Final Fantasy series, and a sad yet wonderful way for Square to bow out of PlayStation 1 develop¬ ment. The classic, big-head style characters look excellent, and the gameplay looks like it’ll be keeping us all up for weeks, maybe months! Naturally, people wanted to know about Final Fantasy X and XI, but you’ll need a PlayStation 2 for those babies. In the meantime, you'll be more than happy with this fantastic looking Action/RPC from the masters of console role-playing adventures. DINO CRISIS 2 PLAYSTATION CAPCOM AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Capcom surprised everyone by showing a sequel which actual departs from the original in style and gameplay. Of course, Dino Crisis 2 looks infinitely better! Basically, this time around, you can expect loads more action, with Regina still in control naturally. She can carry different weapons in each hand, making for some very cool combo attacks which is a surprising change, but a welcome one! This game was scary as Hell! £>TENCHU 2 Those Ninja assassins are back! $$> VAGRANT STORY Could be the best RPC on PSX. ££> BREATH OF FIRE 4 Good old-school RPGing. Bib ' - ii ■fr *»i £>GRIND SESSION Skate or die. ^JUNGLE BOON The kids’ll love it. ££>100NEY TONES RACING Karting. ^MIllE MIGUA Race classic cars. INCREDIBLE CRISIS Bizarre and totally brilliant. CHRONO CROSS Add another great RPC ££> MIKE TYSON BOXING Mash those buttons. £S> MEDAL OF H0N00R: ONDERGROUND sequel! £>MATT HOFFMAN PRO BMK Tony Hawk-ish. BLADE Did you see the movie? Action-packed. ££>fl 2000 See, I told you it wouldn’t die. £>ALADDIN: NASIRA’S REVENGE g> ANIMORPHS Yep, the cartoon. ^ ARMY MEN: AIR ATTACK 2 17 »HYPER 18 »HYPER mm ^DESTRUCTION DERBY RAW Out very soon! g>H0GS RE WAR Third-person piggy action! £^IN COLD BIDOD A very ambitious adventure title. DRAGON VALOUR Disappointing RPC from Namco. $2> STAR WARS: DEMOLITION Twisted Metal... CRASH BASH PLAYSTATION SONY AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 What do you mean you thought Crash Bandicoot had hit his peak with Crash Team Racing? Expanding into new game genres, Crash Bash is the Mario Party of the PlayStation. Take all your favourite characters from the Crash Bandicoot games and throw them into this button¬ bashing party game for some seriously whacky fun. You’ll need some brains and good reactions times though, as Crash Bash attempts to offer some more skill-based games over just plain button-mashing. CHASE THE EXPRESS (A.K.A COVERT OPS) PLAYSTATION SONY AVAILABLE: LAST 2000 Chase the Express is an incredibly nice surprise. At first, it seems like a poor third-person action game, but after only a few minutes playing, you’ll find there’s a whole lot more going on here. If you blending Resident Evil with Metal Cear Solid and put in on a fast-moving train, then you’d have Chase The Express. Hide from patrolling guards, peer through the windows of doors, use a variety of interesting gadgets, and of course, keep that trigger finger limbered up for some frantic action also. It’s nice to see that this game is also coming to the PlayStation 2, so there will be a bigger, better version coming our way after this one... M-MEN MUTANT WARS £>SPIDERMAN Looking awesome 1 £> WORLD TOURING CARS: WRC ££> BUES 6 TAZ TIMEBUSTERS V ££>ARMY MEN: SARGE’S HEROES 2 ^MOTO RACER: WORLD TOUR ££> SHEEP DOG AND WOLE g> WOULD DESTRUCTION LEAGUE if* 4 £>SPYRO 3: YEAR RE THE DRAGON ^X-MEN MUTANT ACADEMY ££>STRIOER 2 Old-school but great. £^TEIM BUDDIES Cutesy, but full of gameplay. RONALDO V SOCCER Soccer fans rejoice! $>TERRAC0N One of many E3 games featuring Greys. VIB RIBBON PLAYSTATION SONY AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 This came out in Japan late last year, but it’s only now making it to a western audience. Looks weird, eh? Well, it’s a refreshingly freaky music-related title. As the music plays, it distorts the thin white line with loops, bumps, jags and drops and it’s up to you to keep the character from falling or tripping up. I think we can safely assume this one is going to become a cult- hit alongside Parrappa the Rapper and Urn Jammer Lammy. 19 »HYPER 20 »HYPER E3 i\ii\TEi\nn t.^1 Nintendo had a very strange E3. Whilst it seemed that Sony, Microsoft and Sega were all trying to bite each other’s heads off, Nintendo quietly dominated a corner of the convention centre with a sexy line-up that was true to their motto of "quality over quantity”. Whether it was the cool Mario Tennis or the hilarious Conker’s Bad Fur Day, to the plethora of Pokemon product and Came Boy games. Nintendo was quietly confident, you could say. The reality though, is that everyone was disappointed that there was no mention of the Dolphin or the Came Boy Advance! Ah well, it seems we’ll have to wait for the Spaceworld show in japan for that news later in the year. Meanwhile, we can enjoy some truly great Nintendo 64 games... DINOSAUR PLANET NINTENDO 64 RARE AVAILABLE: Q1 2001 Only announced recently, this action/adventure from Rare could give Zelda a run for it’s money! This was second to only Perfect Dark in the graphics department, and the characters and story look classy! PERFECT DARK • NINTENDO 64 RARE AVAILABLE: NOW! Urn... maybe you should just turn to our review on page 58 to see why this is the best Nintendo 64 game ever made! THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: MAJORA’S MASK NINTENDO 64 NINTENDO AVAILABLE: Q4 2000 Shigeru Miyamoto has kept a keen eye on the development of Majora’s Mask - once known as Caiden. Whilst it’s no huge visual departure from Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, it looks like Majora’s Mask has some much meatier puzzle- filled gameplay. The whole concept of morphing Link into other creatures with masks to solve his adventure is an exciting prospect. CONKER’S BAD FUR DAY NINTENDO 64 RARE AVAILABLE: Q1 2001 Conker kicks arse. This is one funny game, and shows Rare are still at their creative best. £>HEY YOU, PIKACHU Voice controlled. 2S> OGRE OATTIE 64 RPC/Strategy. £>PAPER MARIO Super Mario RPC 2. ££> MARIO TERRIS Classic Nintendo. £S>kiroy 04 The pink freak is here! $> AIDYN CHRONICLES Ambitious. £> BLUES RROTHERS 2000 ugh ££> INDIANA JONES AND THE INFERNAL MACHINE $S>POKEMON PUZZLE LEAGUE Get out your wallet. RESIDENT EVIL 0 This looked really good! ££>STAR WARS: EPISODE I: RATTLE FOR NAROO SS> TUROK 3 Third time around for this shooter... MEGAMAN G4 The classic MegaMan returns! jcz SS> INDY RACING 2U0U Fast cars. SS> SGOURY DOU lust like the show! ^UERCULES Beat 'em up. SS> WWF: WRESTLEMANIA 2000 THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH NINTENDO ELECTRONIC ARTS AVAILABLE: Q1 2001 Although this is actually coming to just about every gaming platform you care to mention, the fact that it will be on the Nintendo 64 and not the PlayStation is quite an interesting fact. Is it the promise of the GoldenEye cash-in, or is it because there’s something in the Nintendo 64 hardware that made it worth it? 21 »HYPER 22 »HYPER Sega had a great show. Their booth was always brimming with grinning gamers, hustling to get a go at the huge array of excellent titles. Some people may think the Dreamcast can’t cut it against the PS2, but they’re dead wrong. Just look at these awesome games! $£P0D2 Sequel to the PC hit! SS>MARVEL VS CAPCOM 2 Sexy. $>4 WHEEL THUNDER Monster 18 WHEELER DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 This rocks in the arcade, and it rocks hard on the Dreamcast. Basically, it’s Crazy Taxi with a mother- flippin’ 18 wheeler! What more do you want?! S^MAG FORCE WipeOut clone... ^ JET GRIND RADIO Truly original. ECCO THE DOLPHIN DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: JULY The animation and environments are stunning, plus they’ve stuck to the good old Ecco gameplay. The atmosphere is brilliant, thanks to lovely sound and top graphics. Hopefully we’ll review it next issue! $^EL DORADO SS> D1ACK & WHITE Wow! Stunning news that this is coming to DC! azr 1 9 T 9 D Mh SS>AERD WINGS 2 For the Top Guns. SS> BOARDIRZONI Yes. THAT genre SS> CANNON SPIKE Very arcade like. ROUAKE 3 ARENA Can you wait? Roeep fighter Underwater action. Rdraconus Medievil adventure. SS>rVII DEAD Bruce was at the show! Roracon riders of pern R SANITY Top Secret? SS>BUST A MOVE 4 A classic. $$>02 A long-awaited sequel... ROARK ANGEl Demonic fighting. Revolution 2 A hearty followup. R ETERNAL ARCADIA cooIrpg R HALF LIFE Single-player only. OUT TRIGGER DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: LATE 2000/EARLY 2001 Kind of like a third-person Quake 3 Arena, but much more extreme and arcade-like. Should be an absolute killer on the Dreamcast. Creat multiplayer fun. R PROJECT EDEN They couldn’t wait for PS2. ££> NBA 2K1 Even better than the first! p if 1 if, * 'f\ Q V- ■ »> J: V R STUNT GP RACE Rheadhunter Survival Horror. Rill bleed Third person action. R SYDNEY 2000 R WACKY RACES R MTV SKATEBOARDING R GAUNTLET LEGENDS R STUPID INVADERS SEGA EXTREME SPORTS 23 »HYPER 24 »HYPER ££> NFL 2K1 Can it beat Madden on P$2? ^PEACEMAKERS Strategy! $&>IECA gt Sega’s Cran Turismo. ^ SFR 2049 Showing promise. SS> SHENMUE Out in time for Xmas. $$>sno cross Chew through snow. £S> SPACE CHANNEL 5 ULALA! ££) SPACE RACE More Looneyness. SPAWN Visually incredible. STARLANCER Fantastic port! METROPOLIS STREET RACER DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: AUGUST We've had a taste of this in the office, and we cannot wait to drive away in the final game. Take bits of Cran Turismo, but give yourself far prettier environments, and a bit more style. The car models are gorgeous and there’s a lovely replay mode, of course. This is another game we hope to be reviewing for you next issue, if the developers stay on target and get the job done. Shiest drive: le mans SONIC ADVENTURE 2 DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: MID 2001 Yes, you read that correctly! Sonic is coming back in an all-new adventure! You can bet this game is going to be better, bigger and more beautiful than the last. The Sonic Team have been hard at work on this since finishing the first Sonic Adventure game, so you can expect something pretty darn solid from this talented team. We’ll bring you more news as we discover more about the gameplay, but expect it to be bigger and beefier, with a few surprises. SS> STREET FIGHTER 3RD IMPACT SS> SUPIlTMAGNETIC NEO E3 SS>TOKYO HIGHWAY CHALIEHGE 2 VIRTUAL OH 2 Will we get it here? HTj# PHANTASY STAR ONLINE DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming seems to be the new trend out there. The Dreamcast will have such a game, made by Sonic Team, which will allow Action/RPGing for users all over the world. Language barriers will be broken down with the availabilty of symbols to communicate wiht as well as standard typing. The game will play in real time! POWERSTONE 2 DREAMCAST CAPCOM AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 You can’t go past a sequel which not only pleases fans of the original, but does it with a brand new concept. Powerstone 2 is nothing like the first game, but it’s fantastic in new ways. Now you can play co-operatively with a friend, rather than just concentrating on beating them senseless. The variety in Powerstone 2 is immense, and you should mark this one down on your shopping list. Capcom keep proving why they’re well known for their fighting games. Are you surprised? SONIC SHUFFLE DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: EARLY 2001 Another new Sonic game! This is in the tradition of Mario Party, and uses that new visual style which you may have noticed in titles like let Grind Radio.If you want mini-games, you got ’em, as Sonic Shuffle is literally bursting with them. This title is being developed by Sega of America for a change, so it may possibly be luke-warm on the Freak-o-meter. Whilst we’re certainly excited about this one, you can't beat the news of Sonic Adventure 2. STAR WARS: SUPER BOMBAD RACING DREAMCAST LUCASARTS AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 LucasArts plan on bringing this on e to the PC also, but it looks more like a console experience to us. Mix Diddy Kong Racing with Star Wars, and there you have it. Each character gets around in their trademark vehicle (Darth Maul on his Sith Speeder, Sebulba in his pod etc) and battles it out for the finish line. Powerups will help you get there, but you’ll also have your own character’s special individual attacks, strengths and weaknesses. SAMBA DE AMIGO DREAMCAST SEGA AVAILABLE: EARLY 2001 What a classic! Sega have come up with a pair of maraca peripherals and decided that the world needs a new twist on the Dance Dance Revolution craze. Yep, shake those babies and score big points in this groovy, and yes, freaky concept for a game. We had a great time at the show watching poor punters get up on stage and humiliate themselves. 25 »HYPER 26 »HYPER E3 never fails to reveal some stunning PC games which hadn’t previously been on the release schedule. Hitman, Fallout Tactics, Empire Earth... there are some great looking titles on the way. We also finally got to play Warcraft 3, Daikatana, Black 6 White, Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Diablo 2, plus have a good chat with Warren Spector, Chris Roberts, Will Wright and some other PC game design gurus. Now take a look at what we saw... BLACK & WHITE PC EA AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Peter Molyneux was there to guide us through this remarkable looking game. The Artificial Intelligence in Black 6 White is stunning, with each individual villager having a personality. In fact, personality plays a huge part, as your giant creature will adapt depending on YOU... ^hitman Ambidextrous assassin action. ££>CLEOPATRA ££>DEUS EX An undeniable classic! Huge. £^IINREAl 2 $$>X-C0M: ALLIANCE looksgood! $$>EMPIRE EARTH stunning title ^ESCAPE EROM MONKEY ISLANO SACRIFICE ££>WARCRAET 3 More of the same. £>AL0NE IN THE OARK Cinematic! FREELANCER Epic space adventure. ££>ANACNRONOX More from Ion Storm. 2>zeus Bearded guy with lots of power. £>ARCANUM Industrial fantasy RPC. INTERPLAY AVAILABLE: Q1 2001 "Sacrifice has been in development for two and a half years. It's Shiny’s first mul¬ tiplayer PC game. It’s a 3D real-time action strategy game with RPC elements. Basically, a game that you can play as you want to play it. Whether you’re a strong RPC player or you prefer action, you can adapt the control system and the way that you use the creatures and the characters in the game to suit your style of play.” - Shiny Entertainment. $$>BAIDURS GATE 2 It’s coming. ££>STAR TREK BRIDGE COMMANDER £> CARMAGEDDON TDR 2000 E3 £$> GANGSTERS 2 Cement shoes ahoy. DUNGEON SEIGE Huge gameworld. SS>evoiva Worthy of Dave Perry. FI WORLD BP 2000 Ahhhhhhhhhh! $$>NARLEY 0AVIDS0N $£>DIAD10 2 Can you say "review next issue”? ££> GIANTS Another game with true style! ^GRAND PRIX3 Is it the best ever? ££>I’M GOING IN GoldenEye meets Soldier of Fortune. £>100SE CANNON Interstate *82 meets Driver. ^ICEWIND DALE RPC from the masters of PC RPCs. 27 »HYPER 28 »HYPER I-WAR 2 PC INFOGRAMES AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 People couldn’t keep their hands off this game at the show, as it was stunning¬ ly beautiful and had all the meaty inter¬ activity of the original. It was also dis¬ played on a gorgeous widescreen digital monitor! Sure to please the space combat buffs, Independence War 2 has nothing to do with Will Smith and aliens blowing up America. lust remember that. I-War 2 is far more intellectual... $>INSANE Codemasters know fun. ££> RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN Kill the guard get the key. Is it still fun? £>STAR TREK: AWAY TEAM Engage! £>LINKS 2000 Golf your night away. $>MIDT0WN MADNESS Scary stuff. 2£>NASCAR RACING 4 Bum rubber. ULTIMA WORLDS ONLINE: ORIGIN £^STAR TREK: NEW WORLDS E3 TRIBES 2 PC DYNAMIX AVAILABLE: Q1 2001 Tribes made a bigger dent in Quake 2*s multiplayer dominance than anyone thought it would. That's simply because it was a squad-based game which did every¬ thing Quake 2 couldn't. Tribes 2 is set to come along and wipe the floor with both Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, with it’s immersive teamplay action. If you plan on playing Tribes 2 (and you should), go out and buy yourself a headset so you can do the whole serious team thing at your next LAN. It’s the way this game was designed to be enjoyed. The environments look massive, and whilst the visuals certainly are a big improvement over the original, the meat of the changes have been made to improv¬ ing performance online and adding more options than you can point a gun at. $$> VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE REDEMPTION Review next issue of this gothic RPC. £>startopia Freaky. ££> MICROSOFT OASERALL 2001 ^VIRTUAL POOL 3 $£> MUSIC 2000 $$>C&C: RENEGADE No longer top-down. ^LEGENDS OF MIGHT O MAGIC £S>STARFIEET COMMAND 2 £>RE0 ALERT 2 Command 6 Conquer. ^RATTLEREALMS A Fantasy romp. £>SPRINT CAR RACING From RatBag. ££> ANARCHY ONLINE Go nuts! ^WIZARDS AND WARRIORS ££>THR0NE OF DARKNESS ££> STAR TREK VOYAGER ELITE FORCE 29 »HYPER 30 »HYPER Tucked away amongst the mountains of Pikachu toys, Nintendo had their money-making Came Boy games on display for all to evalute and even purchase if you so desired. Of course, the exciting new titles like Zelda: The Mystical Seed were only for looking, maybe touching, but definitely not for taking to play on the long flight home... Coddamnit. They even had Came Boy "babes” to help you find that magical gauntlet. We asked very nicely, but none of them would tell us anything about the Came Boy Advance. Maybe it was because they had no idea what it was, or possibly they were cleverly avoiding my deviously worded probings. Almost all the games publishers at the show had some Game Boy up their sleeve, which just goes to show you how successful this little device has been. Nintendo could probably exist on the Came Boy alone. * ££> KTREME SPORTS Woah dude! ££> ALONE IN THE DARK Spooky. ££> CRYSTAIIS Another RPC cometh. 2£> HARVEST MOON 2 Farmboylink. O Q loJL . *4* ££> INSPECTOR EADGET GoCadget <£> ARMY MEN 2 Play with soliders. £> ARMY MEN AIR COMRAT DONKY KONG COUNTRY GAME BOY COLOR NINTENDO AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Wow, we played it on the Super Nintendo, and now we’ll be revisiting banana land on the Came Boy. Who would have thought? The Kremlings are still causing trouble, and if you have a Came Boy Color, you’ll be able to help Donkey and Diddy put a stop to their evil schemes. This is a great platformer, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any better on the Came Boy. Rare know how to make some¬ thing fun, playable and challenging, so we applaud them for bringing this to the hand-held. And to think this was once a state of the art console game... ££> LEGEND OF THE RIVER KING ££> CANNON FODDER The PC classic. r 1 o .o i N lH^iJ DAMAGE FELONV g> DRIVER 2 Mini mafia motoring. £> HERCULES Beefcake! Beeeefcake! ££> LOONEY TUNES CULLECTOR ALERT ££> LITTLE MERMAID 2 Er... yeah. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE MYSTICAL SEED GAMEBOY COLOR NINTENDO AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Any gamer with half a brain would consider going to buy a Game Boy Color just to be able to play these mini-Zelda classics. Mystical Seed is the first in a new trilogy of Zelda games on the Game Boy and we cannot wait to get our hands on a final (and English translated) version. It was great fun to play around with at the show, but the booth babes were useless when I started crying about the Triforce. Shortly after I was escorted from the convention centre. Ah well. POKEMON GOLD/ SILVER GAME BOY NINTENDO AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Don’t think for a second that this year would pass without new Pokemon Game Boy titles! Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver will be the two new companions to Pokemone Blue and Pokemon Red. ££> RUNEIORDS More adventuring PERFECT DARK GAMEBOY RARE AVAILABLE: LATE 2000 Well, we didn’t think they could do Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy but we were wrong! Perfect Dark actually looks like it will be packed with interesting gameplay, regardless of the hand-held format. Just think - your own pocket Joanna to play with any time you please! swiv Another old classic returns. $£>WARI0 LAND 3 W is M upside down. ^ PRO POOL Become a shark. WACKY RACES Remember this? SHtARER ££> UEFA 2000 More ball kicking. POCKET SOCCER Small balls! I 'tt E3 [ ] [ 3 33 [3 0 £> POKEMON TRADING CAROS $> XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS ^ WARIOCKED RTS on the Came Boy. ra w as ££> TEST DRIVE LE MANS Fast cars. ^ TITUS THE FOX A platformer! Shock! 31 »HYPER subscriptions [VERY SIISCBIBER GETS A PRIZE! Subscribe to Hyper and receive 2 Star Wars PC Games Discs! If you subscribe to Hyper magazine this month, you’ll be getting Australia’s best games mag way before it hits the shops and much cheaper too! Subscribing is like getting a handful of free issues every year, so you’re nuts to not consider getting your Hyper sooner and cheaper! As a bonus this month, we’re giving away 2 copies of PC Games, the best of Star Wars, to [litHY subscriber! That’s right, two discs packed to the brim with Star Wars action for THtt! Just subscribe! NNER FROM HYPER #80 Prize: SEGA DREAMCAST with Dead or Alive 2 ANTHONY VERTIGAN, VIC HYPER #82 Terms and Conditions Terms arid Conditions: 1. Each person subscribing from Hyper issue 82 only will receive a one year subscnption to Hyper, plus one copy ol PC Games issue 8 plus one copy of PC Games issue 19 which will be sent 4-6 weeks after the first Hyper magazine has arrived The offer is open only to those subscribing from issue 82 on sale 21st June. Offer begins 21st June and ends 31st July. The promoter is ■ ABN of 78 Renwck Street. Redfem, NSW. 2016. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE 1 2 Call us tollfree on 1300 36 1146 Monday to Friday 9am-6pm EST Fax a copy of the completed form, with credit card details, to: 02 9699 0334 Please tick I'd like to subscribe for myself I'd like to send a gift subscription 12 issues @$50.00 ($55 inc. GST - after and inc. 1st July, 2000) □ □ □ Enclosed is a cheque/money order made payable to Next Publishing for $.. Or charge my credit card for $. 3 Cut or copy the form and post it with a cheque or money order, or your credit card details, to: Hyper Subscriptions Reply Paid 634, 78 Renwick St. Redfem, NSW 2016 Visa Mastercard Bankcard Card Number..... Expire Date. Signature... Offer only available to Australian Residents, Expires 31.7.00 Please print »HY0082 My Full Name. My Address. Suburb. Postcode. My Telephone Number...~. My Email Address.. Please send a flTFul r] magazine subscription to Full Name......—« Address.. Suburb. Postcode. Telephone. TAX INVOICE Next Publishing Pty Ltd. COOH13» 78 Renwick St Redfern, NSW 2016 ABN 88 002 647 645 check out our website at http://publishing.next. com.au/subs Bring in a copy of this ad and pay only Perfect Dark imais+j. $ Perfect Dark offers a traditional 2-4 player deathmatch mode. Choose from over 40 unique weapons, take aim and fire. An intriguing storyline, an enticing leading lady and awesome gameplay combine to form an irresistable package. Harvey Norman Offer valid from 1st July to 31st July 2000. / 50 fTWAR® | I PRICE '^guarantee* www.harveynorman.com.au *1 n ivi i m n l. WEB Norman DMUIME SYOHEY METRO • AUBURN SUPERSTORE • BALGOWLAH SUPERSTORE • BLACKTOWN • CAMPBELLTOWN • CARINGBAH SUPACENTA • CHATSWOOD CHASE • GORDON CENTRE • LIVERPOOL MEGACENTA • MOORE PARK SUPACENTA • PENRITH SUPERSTORE NOW OPEN • WILEY PARK NSW COUNTRY • ARMIDALE • BATHURST • COFFS HARBOUR • DENILIOUIN • DUBBO • ERINA • GRAFTON • INVERELL • LISMORE • MAITLAND • MOREE • MUDGEE • MOSS VALE • NEWCASTLE SUPERSTORE • NOWRA • ORANGE • PARKES • PORT MACQUARIE • TAMWORTH • TAREE • WAGGA WAGGA • WARRAWONG • YOUNG ACT • FYSHWICK • WODEN PLAZA BRISBANE METRO • ASPLEY OPEN 7 DAYS • BROADWAY ON THE MALL OPENS JULY • CARINOALE • EVERTON PARK OPEN 7 DAYS • INDOOROOPILLY NOW OPEN • MT GRAVATT • OXLEY • GOLD COAST OPEN 7 DAYS • TWEED HEADS SOUTH OPEN 7 DAYS QUEENSLAND COUNTRY • NOOSAVILLE OPEN 7 DAYS • SUNSHINE COAST OPEN 7 DAYS • BUNDABERG • CAIRNS OPEN 7 DAYS • GLADSTONE OPEN 7 DAYS • MACKAY OPEN 7 DAYS • ROCKHAMPTON NORTH • TOOWOOMBA • TOWNSVILLE MELBOURNE SUPERSTORES - OPEN 7 DAYS • DANDENONG • GREENSBOROUGH PLAZA • MARIBYRNONG • MOORABBIN • NUNAWADING • PRESTON VICTORIA COUNTRY - OPEN 7 DAYS • ALBURY • BALLARAT • BENDIGO • GEELONG • MILDURA • SHEPPARTON • TRARALGON • WARRNAMBOOL ADELAIDE • SOUTH AUSTRALIA • ENFIELD NOW OPEN • MARION OPEN MON SAT PERTH METRO • CANNINGTON • JOONDALUP • 0 CONNOR NOW OPEN • OSBORNE PARK • PORT KENNEDY WESTERN AUSTRALIA COUNTRY • ALBANY • BUNBURY • BUSSELTON • GERALDTON • KALGOORLIE • KARRATHA • PORT HEDLAND NORTHERN TERRITORY • DARWIN OPEN 7 DAYS HOBART METRO • OPEN 7 DAYS • HOBART CITY • GLENORCHY • ROSNY TASMANIA COUNTRY - OPEN 7 DAYS • LAUNCESTON • BURNIE • DEVONPORT • ULVERSTONE www.harveynorman.com.au The prices lor goods shown in this advertisement are in Australian dollars and are GST inclusive. We will motrli any retailer's pike on o like software ten Die sollwoic item must be in stork. An original ropy ol on odverfsemenl lor the software item must be presented, including price. The advertisement must be current. This does not include mail Older catalogues or Internet sites Pricing presented must be in Australian dollars 4139 34 »HYPER warez Whilst many have pondered how the Dreamcast is going to fare against the DVD equipped PS2 and X-Box, Sega have been working on solutions. One of those is a DVD player add-on! If you’ve also had an issue with the measly 33k modem, then look forward to the LAN adaptor! The goodness doesn’t stop there. Also on the way is an MP3 player and the DreamEye video conferencing unit. Sega’s LAN adaptor will allow users to connect to cable modems for high-speed transfer of data. This will allow music and video to be streamed in real time as well as enabling graphic-intensive web pages to load in seconds. Not only will this improve your surfing and open up the possibility for cool new downloads to your VMU or upcoming Dreamcast harddisk, but it will change they way we f play games online with our Dreamcasts. - The MP3 player is Sega’s peripheral that allows users to download MP3 files off the Internet and store them in a portable player. The device comes with a set of headphones and can also use the Dreamcast CD ROM drive to place songs into the MP3 players memory! The Dreameye, Sega’s Video Conferencing unit, allows Dreamcast users to connect to other Dreamcast owners over the Internet or via direct dialling and send full motion video and sound through the Dreameye’s digital camera and microphone. The Digital camera is also detachable and can be used to take up to 31 images, which can then be transferred online via the Dreamkey’s email software. DREAMCAST PERIPHERAL CRAZY! GOE Sega revealed new peripherals for Dreamcast at E 3 in Los Angeles including an MP3 Player, LAN adapter, Video Conferencing unit, Mouse and DVD Player! The Mouse will allow Dreamcast users to re-create their PC control environment in games like Quake 3, Half Life and the upcoming Soldier of Fortune conversion for Dreamcast. On display with the Quake 3 game units at E3, the mouse afforded users the smooth control that PC users have been accustomed to with 1st per¬ son shooting games like Quake. We sat down for a blast session at E3 and found that it made quaking on the Dreamcast virtually identical to the PC experience which is a first for console based shooters! Finally, we can forget about having to struggle with the control pad in first person. Most importantly, the DVD player will allow Dreamcast users to play DVDs through their Dreamcast console. The exact technical details of how this will work haven’t been offi¬ cially confirmed by Sega, but it seems to be a DVD drive which sits under the Dreamcast and plugs into the modem port. The Dreamcast modem port operates at 50MB/S which is fifty times that which is needed for DVD playback, so it should work marvellously. Now we just have to cross our fingers that all these add-ons will be available in Australia before too long... IHE MP3PimR ’When you present an original copy of this advertisement at any Harvey Norman computer I department from July 1 to July 31 2000. jp* Conditions apply. See store for details. Colin McRae Rally 2 PSX (G). Experience jaw-dropping visuals, even more detailed cars and incredible scenery as you race on over 80 new international rally tracks. 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We will match any retailer's price on a like software item. The software item must be in stock. An original copy of on advertisement for the software item must be presented, including price. The advertisement must be current. This does not include mail order catalogues or Internet sites. Pricing presented must be in Australian dollars. 4140 36 »HYPER feature fuhure 0 Eliot Fish and Hyper's UK correspondent Derek dela Fuente got on the blower and tracked down consoles, the future of the PC and the future of gaming in general... some of their responses will surprise, games developers think of the consoles? Have you always wanted to know what kind of ambitions they have for feature C the biggest names in the games industry (from 3DFX to Electronic Arts) and then grilled them over the super some will delight and some will downright knock your socks off! Have you always wanted to know what the the future of gameplay? Then read on and discover some true opinions in one of our biggest features yet... 37 »HYPER 8 »HYPER feature hhe fuhjr 3 .1 believe it will happen this year with the release of Munch’s Oddysee. I also think Black 6 White will open new doors. Fully simulated self aware worlds are the future. 1 ^ Most people are not evolving gameplay. There are a couple of solid reasons for this. As game costs rise publishers are more adverse to taking risks with creative con¬ cepts that haven’t been proven. Also, if you see what’s going on out there, the game design community just doesn’t appear to be injecting much new creativity. So, most games will look better, but will be the same old game. Just like what we saw from Tokyo last week. However, a few games will break the mold and will be such rich and entertaining experiences that the bar will be raised and a new generation of game design will follow. ^ Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee will be more focused on world simula¬ tion and the behaviours of characters and eco-systems to achieve much more ’’living” impressions. We are simulating entire life cycles for all the characters in the world, all the communities, and even the land¬ scape. We are truly going for a "world” simulation approach rather than gauntlet types of puzzles that you saw in our previous games. We are also spending a ton of effort in advanced behavioural, simulation, and social chemistry models. CameSpeak(tm) will also now allow you to move around and manipulate a large number of characters in order to have them do your bidding and re-shape your landscape. CameSpeak has become more highly evolved and smarter, but simpler to understand and make use of. Munch’s Oddysee is a gene splicing of Action, Adventure, RPC, Strategy, and emulation, with Hollywood storytelling and production value sprinkled all over it. It is quite difficult to describe this when nothing quite like it has been done before - to see and play will be to believe. As for familiarity of this universe to previous fans, the good news is that this has been planned from the beginning. Meaning, we introduced Abe(tm) and Oddworld in 2D while always planning to evolve them into 3D when the technology was there. So it’s not like we’re devel¬ oping an after-thought. The creativity and the conceptual qualities are com¬ pletely in sync with the universe we’ve developed thus far. In the final analysis, we believe that existing fans will be much happier about the oddness of Oddworld in 3D than they ever could have been in 2D. I can’t imagine that anyone will say, "But ya know, I really liked the old 2D games from Oddworld better.” I guess we feel that the Playstation 3D world of Oddworld is far more "Oddworld.” _6. How far into the future? Near term is controllers. Mid term is eyeglasses. Long term is a multitude of options including Neural Implants for those crazy enough to do it. But this is purely hardware, it’s the software side of things that will become really interesting. Like all those digital sexual peripherals that will inevitably arrive. TOM SARRIS LUCASARTS l Based on early reports, these systems, like Dreamcast, appear to be very viable. As such, LucasArts will consider developing titles for them, while continuing development for the PC platform. z One of LucasArts’ core legacies is development for the PC and we foresee a very comfortable coexistance between that platform and next generation consoles moving forward. The bottom line is that LucasArts will support all viable platforms as it has in the past. & That’s no easier to predict than the next hot Internet stock! Do you have any good tips? In seriousness, one of the next phases of gaming we foresee as taking interactive entertainment to another level is the Internet. Verant Interactive has proven with EverQuest that there is HERE’S WHAT WE ASKED THEM! 1. What are your impressions of the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 and (from what you know) the X-Box and the Nintendo Dolphin? LORNE LANNINC Oddworld Inhabitants (the genius team behind Abe and the Oddworld games!) 2. Where does the PC fit into this new oncoming console era? l Dreamcast is the most powerful system on the shelf today. However, when the PS2 gets here, it’s a whole different ball game. The PlayStation 2 is a very serious machine that we are very excited about. However, it is very difficult to program for and has some funky limitations that make it clear it was designed by engineers who don’t understand how to make great looking computer graphics. It's causing a lot of extra work to get around some basic technical oversights. But in the end, it’s still one hell of a machine, and I’m sure it will live a fabulous life. The X-Box is an even more serious machine with even more potential. Let’s hope Microsoft delivers what they promise. If they do, then gaming has even more potential. All that the world needs now is more design¬ ers that are creative and take advantage of these new and powerful machines (PS2 6 X-Box) to create truly new experiences - unlike the most recent stuff that was shown at the Tokyo Came Show. As for the Dolphin, it seems as though Nintendo has made it clear that they are a toy company only and have no interest in being a true media entertainment company. They want to keep making machines with limited potential so that they can keep con¬ trol over game developers and publishers while enforcing those insanely high manu¬ facturing costs. The Dolphin is not on our radar screens. z Cood question. It’s not clear at all how the PC is going to be able to compete with consoles like the X-Box. PC game sales are dropping while consoles keep increasing. We don’t think that PC games are going to go away, but more and more PC game developers are setting their sights on machines like the PS2 and X-Box. If you go to a Sony PS2 technical conference, more than half of the audience are PC developers who are changing gears. They know they can sell more games on console, and now that they’re able to build more of the games they want on these new consoles... it’s going to be a very interesting next couple of years. We will keep converting our games to PC as long as the power is there to properly deliver the vision of the game. 3. When and what do you think will be the next revolution in game design? 4. Will all this new hardware result in only a visual improve¬ ment to games or will we see gameplay evolve too? 5. Tell us about a game (or a game concept) you’re working on now for one of the new systems. 6. In a nutshell, what do you think the future of Gaming looks like? (VR headsets? Neural implants?) Discuss! feature o f c\ a rn i n $ a strong market for massively multiplayer online games. That's why we think the time is right to develop a Star Wars Online title, something which we just announced in partnership with Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. We expect that title to be ready in late 2001. 4. Both, considering the sheer power and technical capabilities that are expected with each of the next generation systems. It's been seen in the past that with an improvement in technology come breakthroughs in gameplay. The expected Internet components of the upcoming next generation systems should have a pro¬ found effect on gameplay and the way people play games. 5. LucasArts have announced many exciting new games at the E3 tradeshow in Los Angeles. Starfighter, Battle For Naboo, Escape From Monkey Island... the list goes on! RORY DUNCAN Developer/Relations Manager for 3DFX (The people who are making the 3D graphics cards that we all want!) l I think they’re very good examples of the evolution of gaming taking place in the console market right now. By using sub-sets of today’s PC technology, players in this market can produce products that appeal to a mass audience. This is generally a good idea, as the more people adopt gaming technologies, the bigger the market becomes and the more pervasive this technology is, etc. etc. There’s certainly no beating them for ’pick up and play’ appeal. 2. As ever, the PC continues to push the boundaries of technical innovation which the consoles then distil and fit into a dedicated box. The problem is, though, that no matter how advanced a console is, six months later it will have been overtaken in terms of power, performance, and ultimately the total playing experience, by the open design of the PC. What many people don’t realise is that ALL games titles, whether destined for platform or not, are designed, created and pro¬ grammed on PCs. 2L I don’t really have an answer to that one. I’m afraid. it. The visual improvement is brought about by increases in speed and power of chip, and associated, technologies. But this is a general improvement also - CPU core speed, peripheral enhancements, networks, storage etc. etc. will all con¬ tribute to the evolution of gameplay. Faster access to more information, players, interaction, feedback etc. will multiply the opportunities for fresh gaming experi¬ ences. Imagine, for example, playing a RTS game where armies are made up of thousands of individual players controlling one soldier or ore or whatever each. Suddenly, gameplay issues such as effective use of communications or distribu¬ tion of equipment or the effect of morale on the success of a battle will become more important - perhaps a more realistic, immersive experience of war? 5^ Not applicable. 6;, In the short-term, nothing dramatic will happen, but in the medium-term, we will see more use of WAP devices and set-top boxes as the main means by which the average consumer, especially new users, will access interactive entertain¬ ment. In general, wires and cabling will become redundant as wireless and/or infrared communications becomes more practical. Hardcore gaming will continue to push the boundaries of the immersive experi¬ ence, using the latest technologies. However, while controllers/joysticks will become more sophisticated and sensitive, it’s difficult to see the QWERTY key¬ board being usurped by any other device as the primary means for inputting complex information - look how long it’s been around, and what some of the other options have been. It’s realistic to say that viewing screens will become larger and have higher res¬ olutions - maybe 3D glasses will also catch on in a big way. I think it’s fairly safe to say that any type of intrusive technology (implants etc.) are very far off, if they even get adopted at all. There is a psychological barrier to this kind of thing - we need to feel secure in the ability to turn even the most realistic simulation ’off’ e.g. the Star Trek Holodeck has 'safety proto¬ cols’ and ’exit commands! PETER MOLYNEUX (Mr Visionary only had time to answer a few questions. He was trying to finish his upcoming game. Black 6 White.) L Well the PS2 is a coders dream with all that power but I feel it will be many years before we see people push the machine to it’s limits. I’m sure there will be some incredible games on it whereas the X-Box is more familiar to me but I am excited by all the new systems. The early release of Dreamcast is an advantage for Sega as the developers are only now getting to used to the system and all it can do - there will be some great games for it while on the new consoles it will take some time and some games release before we can see what the other machines are capable of. The hard disk on the X-Box is great for paging in and out of graphics and game levels which also means that the game world on an X-box will have higher-res textures. It’s a great scratch storage service. As for the DVD drives on the X box and PS2 the main thing it will offer the gaming world is an increased potential audience as the DVD player will encourage people who wouldn’t normally buy a console to buy these new machines and then once they have them they may start to play games on it too. It. Initially the temptation to put games out very quickly for the new systems will result in games that look fantastic but perhaps do not play as well as they should. But as developers learn more about the new systems then we’ll see some great gameplay - particularly as people realise that it is games with great graphic, sound and gameplay which go on to be the most profitable. 39 »HYPER 40 »HYPER feature Hie fuhjr ASAM AHMAD THQ (European PR division) L Both Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 are incredible machines. Visually, new consoles are reaching a level of detail and polygon complexity that allow for richer, more diverse games environments. As games become more real¬ istic in this respect, the interactive experience is more immer¬ sive and rewarding. Where these consoles, and newer machines such as X-Box and Dolphin, are taking gaming even further is multiplayer capability. Consoles have always been traditional¬ ly ’lounge-based’ entertainment machines, and multiplayer used to mean a crowd on your sofa with split-screen. With Internet capabilities through modems, and soon broadband, the gaming arena is about to explode with multiplayer games. The potential to battle hundreds of players simultaneously will be a great leap in the way games are designed as players demand more varied and diverse games to exploit this new community. 2LThe PC will always have its place. The beauty of consoles is that the machine has a specific capability and hence when a game is produced, it will play the same way on all machines. This plug ’n’ play facet means that consoles are great for the mass market that just want to play the game with as little hassle as possible. Even with newer console features such as email ability, the capability is streamlined for a mass-market audience. PCs will remain the toys for the big boys, always after the latest hardware and innova¬ tion. Aside from the obvious aspect that a PC can be used for just about everything from accounting to word processing, graphics and of course games, the PC will always remain a constant technology leader where consoles are only released every so often when technology has leapt far enough to justify a whole new machine. 3. The biggest area, which is holding back the next generation of games is the archaic technology, used to ’see’ games. Consoles and TVs are still 2-D devices. Carnes these days are held back by simple flat displays, and whilst worlds are cre¬ ated in true 3-D space within a game, they are only ever perceived through the 2- D viewport of a CRT. The next stage must newer visual display technology - holo¬ graphic TV or 3-D specs. Obviously it will take some time, but it*s a real area where games are held back. Once the technology exists, the word ’immersive’ will take on a whole new meaning. ^Gameplay will evolve to redefine how we perceive the 'playing field’. With the growth in multiplayer, games are likely to develop more and more innovative ways to challenge of fellow friend. From puzzle games to outright first-person shooters, multiplayer capacity will be exploited. It will no longer be the case that you are playing your console, more that you use your console to play against another person; the console just becomes nothing more than an instrument to fight your duel, the game being the rule-set. 5. One of our key products for the new generation is to be Summoner, an RPC from Volition. Appearing on PS2, it will be a multiplayer fantasy game. The PS2 allows for stunning visuals which help realise this fantasy world, and allow for larger, more complex worlds. More information can be seen at www.summoner.com. For Dreamcast, we have in development Evil Dead: Hail to the King. Being pro¬ duced in conjunct with our Heavy Iron development team, Evil Dead will feature the star of the films Bruce Campbell and is being worked on in conjunction with the original director of the Evil Dead films, Sam Raimi. Consoles such as DC and PS2 allow for developers to create such highly detailed worlds, and help converge entertainment forms like film to create new, but recog¬ nisable. immersive experiences. & As I mentioned before, in order to make games more immersive, a technology leap is required to bring true 3-D space to the gamer. Often there is talk about things like neural implants, but the reality of such like is way too far away and potentially controversial to be a reality. I can just see a vision of mentally affected kids overdosed on neural implants to such a degree that they can’t think for themselves any more! VR headset are more likely, and will address the issue of true 3-D, however by their very nature they remove a person from their social surroundings. From an observers point of view, all you would probably see is a mad person with a helmet on, twitch¬ ing and ducking - something that only the hardcore would really indulge in. I think the reality is going to be more down to Earth. There are so many opportu¬ nities to create new games based on community and internet gaming, that this is really where new concepts will be focused - certainly in the short term. These communities allow for gamers to play alter egos in massive online soap operas; from role-playing games to action games, the online world will allow for more diverse experiences. THQ’s recent acquisition of Genetic Anomolies. an online gaming tech¬ nology company, was strategic to ensure that as a company we are there to exploit the brave new internet gaming world. l Dreamcast is kicking butt right now... However it’s looking like PlayStation 2 will get the advertising and games they need to pull ahead. That said, the X-BOX demos looked amazing and I am now seeing Microsoft worry Sony and not having to ship a machine for 18 months or so. Dolphin will have Nintendo’s great library of designers behind it and RARE. 2001 - 2002 is gonna be a really crazy-ass blood battle of a year. DAVE PERRY | Shiny Games (Perhaps the most respected and famous of all develop ers. Creator of Earthworm Jim, Messiah and MDK). 2^ The PC is getting way to expensive to match the new consoles... Try building an X-BOX for a few hundred dollars without Microsoft helping you! 3^ Speech control/recognition/communication. (It’s getting better day by day). 4. It will generate new kinds of games. It’s a completely new tool to play with as a designer. ^ We are working on an action fighting game... It’s in pre-pre-pre design... So right now, it’s just a bunch of ideas. Our other new game is called Sacrifice, check it out at www.sacrifice.net. & It will radically change over time, real-time photorealism, real anatomical sim¬ ulations, speech recognition, thought recognition etc. Wherever it goes, you can bet I will be there in my wheelchair. feature Cj a rn i n c*j DAVID BRABEN Mr. Elite himself. Just one piece of news, yes, another Elite is being planned! l Dreamcast - It is great to have a new console after so many years. Sadly, there are no really good titles yet (i.e. ones 1 would personally buy a machine for); at least not that I've seen. Crazy Taxi is quite fun, and Shenmue looks good (but I haven't played it yet as my Japanese is not up to it). It is disappointing that the network support for games has not yet appeared -1 think this has disappointed a lot of people, me included. For these reasons I think it may now be overshadowed by PlayStation 2. PlayStation 2 -1 think the jury will be out on this for some time, but I think this is a very impressive machine, despite the fact the launch titles in Japan are a little disappointing (they are still better than those on the Dreamcast, I think). Some of the things I have seen previewed were very good, and the specs are exciting. RUSSELL RITCHIE Head of PTomethians Having recently finished Renegade Racers on PC/PSX and Dreamcast - five titles are in development on the afore¬ mentioned formats and PS2, including PICASSIO. L The Dreamcast is very easy to read and the programmers know its limits. The rest are still being explored. We are expecting a lot from these new consoles and certainly have lot planned. 2^ Where it’s always been, the expensive but powerful machine, good for real¬ time, strategy. Role Play Games and for people who want to be cutting edge. The PC is constantly evolving. It may not be up to a new console's standard on the release date but I believe it will always catch up and then overtake as it always has done. The PC will also remain the main tool to go online for sometime. X-Box - This is still a way off, and will have a fight to compete with PlayStation 2 which is likely to have been around for a year by the time X-box is released. Nevertheless the announced specs are pretty good. My concern here is whether Microsoft can keep the amount of 'state' in the machine to a minimum. By this I mean issues of different display drivers, OS version etc, and whether the concept of installing a game is going to be used. The reason this is a worry is (as I under¬ stand it) the machine has an 8G HD and that is plenty of room to have installed drivers, viruses and other software that might cause a game not to work, and lose much of the advantage of it being a console. Most of the advantages of an HD can be mimicked with a large memory card as on the PlayStation 2, but at least the mem card can be removed easily, and you are back to the 'virgin' machine. Having said that, the X-box is a very exciting machine and will doubtless give Sony a good deal of solid competition. Dolphin - This is the 'dark horse’ of the race. As I understand it, the Dolphin is going to be hard on the heels of the PlayStation 2, outside Japan, at least, but with a higher spec. Historically, Nintendo have had the best games (I think), despite the fact there are far fewer available. Games like Mario 64, Zelda, Goldeneye, and Banjo-Kazooie made the N64 very desirable, so for this reason I think the Dolphin is a serious contender. 2. People have been saying the PC is under threat since the early days of the NES. Arguably the consoles have already taken over for certain styles of games, cer¬ tainly in terms of sales. Different people understand different things when you say 'PC' - some take it to mean the architecture - hence Linux PC, Windows PC etc. Some mean the very idea of having a unit with keyboard 6 monitor that does not go through the TV (e.g. Macintosh. Amiga), which is what it used to mean. Arguably the X-box is already a spin-off PC designed to sit under the TV, which confuses the issue further. If the only defining factor of the ’PC’ is the presence of a keyboard, then 'PCs’ will grow hugely as more and more people want email and web access, and want the ability to type URLs and emails, and ultimately PlayStation 2 etc may be consid¬ ered as PCs. Fundamentally the PC will carry on changing as it has over the years, and this question will keep being asked. 2 l Appealing to a wider audience. Carnes that don’t include killing. The current fashion to blame computer games for tragic acts of violence in the US particular¬ ly. and the willingness for people to believe this is causing publishers to get very worried. 'Games’ like the Sims hint at this already. 1t. Gameplay will move forwards a good deal. Particularly the increased memory, and on-line possibilities will change what can be done a good deal. 5. Another Elite... 6L VR headsets are still a way off. Those we have had already were awful to use, and made many people feel sick. Also seeing a kid even further disconnected from the real world may alarm parents. I think the TV screen will be the norm for at least the next few years, but with a move towards more social games and away from single player games. i. We are already working on one of the items that we believe to be the next revo¬ lution in game design. This is quite simply co-operative gameplay, one person drives the boat whilst the other skis. This can be seen in our soon to be announced game ’WakeBoarders’. It. Better visuals give a high sense of realism, this in itself will enhance gameplay. However other developing factors will certainly contribute to the evolution of gameplay. For example, more ram. faster processors, a higher level of AI, better testing and advanced physics. 5. We are now working on a game designed for the next generation consoles. It’s called Picassio. It’s a non-violent game opening up a whole new genre. You are a cat-burglar who must infiltrate the biggest art museums from around the world with the most advanced security systems. Use your shadow hologram generator to give the guards the wrong idea of your position clearing the way for you to escape. Consult your digital sound detector to find out exactly what direction those footsteps are coming from. Place micro cameras and whilst in one room, watch what’s going on in another. Be stealthy or be caught. & There’s so much going on making predictions is really only useful for generating ideas. Computers already inform every part of our lives. Things like quantum com¬ puters, biochips and all that stuff mean that computing power, and miniaturisa¬ tion, is advancing at a phenomenal rate. Computers are blurring the meaning of reality, the visions of the cyberpunk writ¬ ers look less fanciful every day. Games developers are always looking forwards, and we are no exception, trying to make tomorrow into today, borrowing, bending and inventing. It’s an extraordinary time. HERE’S WHAT WE ASKED THEM! 1. What are your impressions of the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 and (from what you know) the X-Box and the Nintendo Dolphin? 2. Where does the PC fit into this new oncoming console era? 3. When and what do you think will be the next revolution in game design? 4. Will all this new hardware result in only a visual improve¬ ment to games or will we see gameplay evolve too? 5. Tell us about a game (or a game concept) you’re working on now for one of the new systems. 6. In a nutshell, what do you think the future of Gaming looks like? (VR headsets? Neural implants?) Discuss! 41 »HYPER 42 »HYPER feature STEVE DAUTERMAN Electronic Arts (Head of the new EA Studios 01 in Queensland, ex - LucasArts honcho) L Any new platform is exciting for a developer and both the Dreamcast and PS2 fit that bill. Both are extremely powerful and let us continue to push graphics and gameplay at least in terms of sheer horsepower. At EA we have not been currently doing any Dreamcast development and have been focusing exclusively on the PS2 for the moment. We have a close eye on both the X-Box and the Dolphin. The specs for the X-Box are fantastic (particularly the hard drive) and we are now waiting to see if Microsoft can pull it off from a marketing and distribu¬ tion side and make it a real competitor. 2. The PC continues to move along. While the game market size is still stagnant on the PC, there are plenty of opportunities for companies to make profitable games for the platform. It is still the only platform that can truly do internet-based gam¬ ing. It will be interesting to see how the X-Box will affect the PC market if it becomes a reality since it is basically a stripped down PC anyway. I don’t believe the PC will go away by any means, but it will still remain a somewhat niche and hobbyist market. 1 liken it to people who love to tinker with old cars and love to have the hottest engine in town. That’s what the PC market seems to be for the highest end games. Where it will become difficult for PC developers in the future is to try and justify multimillion dollar budgets to produce the quality of produc¬ tions that we will see on PS2 when the market size for the PC is still much smaller. We are already starting to find that today. ^ When studios and publishers are will¬ ing to take some more chances or there is a revolution in the industry like the indie film business in Hollywood. The biggest problem with trying to have anything revolutionary right now is that the risks are way too high financially for publish¬ ers and developers to try anything new. It will come from some small game out of nowhere and possibly even through the inter¬ net where someone independently takes a risk. I think the next revolution has to be around the multi¬ player and internet aspects of gaming when there is real mass market broadband capability. 4. In the first generation of games, I think you will see primarily visual improve¬ ment. It won’t be until 2-3 years from now that we see any improvements in real gameplay. I have yet to see anything innovative yet out of the current releases. I do think the gameplay can be improved through increased immersion into the worlds in terms of better graphics and AI. I think gameplay is fairly evolved these days and hasn’t changed much in the 10 years I’ve been in the business. It’s a matter of improving the environments and the quality of the experience. Frankly, I would like to see games be built tighter and shorter where the average person has the chance to complete a game. I think we have got into the habit of really overbuilding games these days where it is very rare where anyone completes it and sees all the hard work that has gone into making it. It’s like making a movie and having everyone walk out in the first 15 minutes. 5^ Unfortunately, our studio is just starting up and we are in the early design phases so I can’t say anything for now. & You probably will wake up searching for this guy named Morpheus while falling into something called the Matrix... nah. Seriously, I think the future of gaming will be the same as it ever has been. It is an activity that can be enjoyed individually against an imaginary opponent that is in the mind of some program¬ mer/designer. Or it is a community/social activity that brings people together for a good time in a competitive or cooperative mode. The hardware will get better, the peripherals more interesting, but the best games will be relatively simple in nature in their ability to immerse people in an environment where they can do things they could have rarely thought of doing in the physical world. SIMON JOBLING Projects Manager at Iake2 Games Europe, gives the company’s views on the next gen machines and what to get excited about... or not! h After a blistering first weekend I believe the outlook for Dreamcast looks tough. Stock problems, software line-up (the old problems) certainly hit the Christmas sales but even if these are put right, the consumer now seems to be focusing on Sony and beyond, so they will need to pull something rather excep¬ tional out of the hat to breathe long-term life back into the proposition. As for Sony, its consumer franchise, its development relationships plus its product quality do suggest it is set to build still further on its success. They need to sort out their teething problems but history suggests they will. Whether they will achieve their 1 in every 2 households goal for PlayStation 2 ,1 don’t know, but, as things currently stand they should at least replicate PlayStation’s success. Microsoft does represent a new, and potentially the biggest challenge Sony has faced in the Games market. Machine specs look fine, and they have already started their usual spoiling tactics. But you can’t ignore a company with all the credentials (and stacks of cash) that Microsoft has. The key weakness is giving Sony at least a year’s head start - but if they get ail the key stuff sorted, they have got to be a contender. Nintendo - who knows? I don't think there is room for three major hardware for¬ mats, and they seem to be being pushed more and more into the toy category. Still, the success of Pokemon shows they can do some things well and maybe the future for them lies in concentrating on some niches within the overall market. ^ Some would say it is redundant but I think that exaggerates the position. And I think this needs looking at in the context of the position that PC fills in the minds of consumers. The scramble for Internet access means that, as far as the mass market is concerned. PC still has some years left in it. However, WAP and developments in mobile technology plus Broadband development are obvious threats to the role of the PC in consumer’s lives but if anyone can accurately forecast all of these I would like to meet them. 4. Not only the new hardware but the afore¬ mentioned mobile technology developments could certainly lead to a different type of game i.e. quiz; fantasy league etc taking hold. But Broadband offers the biggest opportunities, as finally multi player gaming could become a mass-market proposition all around the world. •k Pass! ^ Next! & Who knows? But people were demeaning VR headsets six years ago at trade shows and look how many millions of units they have sold! No, what I would say is one of the real changes PlayStation has facilitated is to make gaming a more social past time. I see this con¬ tinuing and I am not convinced that the mass market, which is where the key battle now is, really want to lock them¬ selves in a virtual world for hours to get their gaming experience There will always be a hard¬ core looking for the ultimate experience, but I believe the social interactivity of gam¬ ing will continue to increase in importance, and technolo¬ gies, which enable that, such as Broadband, will be the win¬ ners in the mass market. ho be conhinued nexh issue!! gaming news • reviews • game guides • competitions • gamer forums • hints Si tips • game polls • free downloads Lara Croft & Tomb Raider 1,2.3, & Tomb Raider - the Last Revelation (c) Core Design Published by Eidos Interactive. All Rights Reserved. 44 »HYPER net trawlin’ » ADAM DUNCAN WWW Penny Arcade Comics These guys have come up with some classic gaming related comic strips. Always good for a laugh. http: //www. penny-arcade, com/ It’s just over a year since EQ made it’s name as the greatest online RPC to grace our PCs, and it’s perhaps only now that gamers who bought it are finally beginning to pull themselves away from it’s evil, social life destroy¬ ing grip. Unfortunately for those who were on the path to rehabilitation, Verant may have put the final nail in the coffin with their new expansion pack, Ruins of Kunark. Recently the people of Norrath have walked with more zest in their step. Everyone seems more alive and excited with knowledge of the rediscovery of the ancient land to the south. For with this news is the promise of new adventure and treasures to be had. In fact, Kunark offers around 20 new zones, a new lizardman race to play as (the Iskar), and the ability to reach level 60 as opposed to the maximum of level 50 previously. LET ME EXPAND ON THAT... First off, it must be said that the worst thing about the expansion pack is actually purchasing it! If you choose to order it through Verant, the shipping costs are enormous. It o With Quake3: Arena, id were mainly focused toward refining the art of deathmatch. With their new mission pack, Team Arena, the tables have turned because as the title suggests, the emphasis is now all about teamplay. Currently there are at least 3 game-types planned. From the screenshots it’s safe to assume that there’s a hybrid CTF game in the works. However we know a little more about the other two game- types. One is called Harvester and involves collecting the heads of your enemies once you frag them. Fans of headhunters will be look¬ ing forward to that one. Another game-type is called Overload and it involves destroying a powerful artifact in your enemy’s base whilst at the same time defending your own artifact. To add spice to the matches some pretty cool sounding items and powerups will be available: Invulnerability: When used an impenetrable shield surrounds the player for a short while. You won’t be able to run around with it on but you’re free to let loose on the net trawlin’ enemy without getting a scratch. Kamikaze: A nuke that will not only obliterate you but anyone within the blast radius. Good to use when you’re overwhelmed by the enemy. Portable Portals: Possibly a varia¬ tion of the Translocator in UT. Doubler: Doubles the damage you can dish out. Scout: Doubles your running speed. Excellent for flag runs. The mission pack will also intro¬ duce three extra weapons. The Chaingun from Q2 and Nailgun from Qi make a return, and to top it off you’ll be able to make a nice lit¬ tle mess with the new Proximity Mine Launcher. Also of note are the new teamplay models and highly customizable HUD in the works. With 12 new maps for gamers to relentlessly frag each other on it looks as if we’re in for a gib soaked treat with Team Arena. worked out to be over 120 dollars AUS to buy the pack in time for Kunark going online on the EQ servers. And even then, most Aussies who ordered it this way got their copies late. Verant did however remove the shipping charges to anyone who didn’t get their order on time, but for an expansion pack to cost more than a full game is just ludicrous! Our third world curren¬ cy is also to blame in this case, but that’s another story. Now that RoK is actually in stores here, we are treated to yet another terrible marketing ploy. You cannot buy the expansion pack by itself; instead you must purchase a box that contains both the expansion and the full game together. So basi¬ cally, if you want to play the expan¬ sion you have to buy the full game again too... Laughable stuff. Ok, so money is no object and you’re still interested in what Verant have put together? Well, read on. Thankfully the company’s game creat¬ ing skills far outweigh their marketing ability for RoK is an impressive piece of work. Catching the new ship from the demi-human land of Faydwer to the new continent is the first surefire sign of what Kunark has to offer. The thing is simply so gigantic that it makes the old ships look like row¬ boats. It’s enormous sails fan out like dragon wings to propel the ship at speeds relative to that of a jet, zoom¬ ing you off into the sunset with great anticipation of what is to come. IN THE ZONE The zones in Kunark are markedly larger and more detailed than what was commonplace in Antonica (the old continent). The most noticeable of the enhancements would have to be the trees. The new land is fortunate enough to actually have wind to blow the tree branches around! It looks lovely too. Apart from that you’ll see all manner of statues, old ruins and other landmarks littered throughout the zones making the new environ¬ ments very pleasant to explore. The price you pay for the cosmetic upgrade is a noticeable increase in system requirements. You may need to turn the resolution down a notch or lower the clipping plane distance or else suffer playing in a slideshow when you come across thick forest. Populating the beautiful new zones are dozens of stunning-looking crea¬ tures. Like everything else in the expansion, the new monsters have had greater detail put into them, more polygons and better texturing results in some awe inspiring foes to smite. One great bonus with having the new larger zones is that they real¬ ly help to disperse the player popula¬ tion. It’s so nice to not have to bicker with 20 other people over who gets killing rights to creatures in a partic¬ ular area. Overpopulation was the bane of Everquest and it’s lovely to feel like your party is the only one around. Verant have also played their cards right when dealing with camp¬ ing, another of EQ’s major failings. Special boss NPCs who held important items always spawned in the same spots on the old continents. In Kunark, these named NPCs wander around the place and spawn random¬ ly so people can’t camp them. In fact there’s even a chance that normal ’unnamed’ creatures will drop some¬ thing very nice, so there is always a good prospect of getting some great loot no matter were you go. These factors simply add more excitement to your hunting trips. This is how Everquest should have been like from the start! FEELING OLD? For players who had reached level 50 ages ago and got bored of EQ, the most enticing addition to come with the expansion would have to be the ability to progress to level 60. Upon reaching *)w ww World Population Counter This site isn’t much to look at, but it’s interesting to occasionally check out just how overpopulated the planet is. http://www.census.gov/cqi- bin/ipc/popclockw 45 »HYPER 46 »HYPER net trawlin’ o level si, characters are treated to a new title i.e. Warriors become Champions. Additionally each level after 50 gives you a new set of devas¬ tating skills or spells to pick from. These new accessories are quite impressive for most characters. Rogues and Monks get especially cool new moves like ‘Assassinate’ which obviously kills creatures with a single blow. SweetlKeep in mind that while there are a few places for new Iskar characters to play, a majority of the lost continent is meant for high level characters so they can get though the last ten levels. Heck, a lot of it actu¬ ally needs hefty numbers of cooper¬ ating high level players to survive... People who are playing EQ for the first time have a very long road ahead of them before they can see a lot of what Kunark has to offer. Simply put, the new add-on is very nice. We still can’t get over how insane it is to make people buy the whole game again to play it... but looking past that, gamers who loved EQ will love Ruins of Kunark. The one thing that certainly hasn’t changed however, is the amount of time you’ll have to spend playing the game to get anywhere. Be prepared to lose friends, jobs, fail exams and of course never sleep again! Looks great and adds a lot more to an already excellent game. Requires a huge amount of spare time to play. Expensive to upgrade. net.news Unreal Tournament News Anzac Gaming League The ACL runs competitive online leagues for Unreal Tournament and variety of other games. UT is prov¬ ing very popular online as is evi¬ dent when you look at how many clans are vying for top position on the ACL ladder. h Q Mil ..r-“ nuanlUUIIx MiMmm 4* niMm M v, mm •/*«. ApnouOc*M#flt» Nn*» TAC ladder Bagitu' ANZAC DAY CHALLENGE'!!! T http://www.anzacleaque.com/ Inoxx map pack _ Inoxx, respected mapper for Epic has released a new map pack for UT. These are levels that weren’t quite finished in time for the final release of UT. so expect some good quality stuff. There’s even a sequel to the popular 'Facing Worlds’ CTF map! http://www.planetunreal.com/ o MODS Strangelove MOD This cool mod allows you to ride your redeemer rocket when you fire it! Fortunately you can hop off at any time to avoid being nuked. http://ofus. com/mods/ Ultima Online ~3 net trawlin’ everquest links ■ ^ The links below will make you an EQ expert in no time... ' * EQ resource sites These sites cover the everyday goings on in Norrath. EQ Vault http://www.eqvault.com/ EQ Stratics http://eq. stra tics.com/ For all your quest and item information as well as anything else EQ... AllaKhazam’s Magical Realm http://everquest.allakhazam.com/ EQlizer http://qameznet.com/eq Everlore http://www.everlore.com/ EQ Atlas houses all the zone maps of Norrath you’ll need. EQ Atlas http://www.eqatlas.com/ Aussie/NZ Everquest Guilds To get anywhere in Everquest you really need to be part of a guild. Australian/NZ guilds exist and are probably your best bet since their players are generally online at similar hours of the day. Southern Legion The largest Aussie/NZ guild. It is primarily based on the Tribunal server and has around 100 members. http://leqion.qql.org War Brigade http://briqade.aus-i.au.nu/ Raptors http://members.dinqoblue.net.au/steve_bond/Evermainpaqe.htm WW L33t Sp34k Generator This site owz joo! Oh God, I can’t believe 1 typed that. Heheh. Well l33t speak, annoying as it is, is very prominent in the gaming scene. This clever little site trans¬ lates anything you say into ’l33t speak’ for you. Hours of fun. http://www.qeocities.com/ mnstr_2000/ o 47 »HYPER 48 »HYPER comas That crazy scot is back! Ripping through the mud, fishtailing his way through paddocks, grinding apart the gravel, is Colin McRae in his second rally title on PlayStation. We all know how influential the first CMR was, and now number two has found its way into our PlayStations with as much addictive power as the original. If you’d like to win one of five copies we have to give away, then answer the following question: Who is Colin McRae’s co-driver? Put your response on the back of an envelope with your name and address and post it off to: Rally Cool, Hyper, 78 Renwick St, Redfern, NSW 2016. Vroom and stuff. MOTOICIISS MADNESS 2*'« «> mcmsih Husnu mu Nothing warms the heart more than a well made sequel. Actually, we just made that up, but Motocross Madness 2 is seriously good fun - just read our review on page 68! Launching yourself virtually into space on the back of a Honda just became a possibili¬ ty. Not only have Microsoft agreed to give away three copies of the game, but we have a Freestyle Pro controller to give away to the first correct entry drawn! Yeah, baby! The Freestyle Pro is an awesome PC gamepad that is motion sensitive for that full immersive experience. It works a treat with Motocross Madness 2. To win a copy of the game, and be in with a chance to win the Freestyle Pro controller, answer the following question: If 95 was before 98, what was before 95? Get it? It's not that hard! Put your answer, along with your name and address on the back of an envelope and post it off to: Microsoft Madness, Hyper, 78 Renwick St, Redfern, NSW 2016. Vroom again and stuff. KmaupEffl Wic luicja Uncluicm Entries close July 14th neighborhood technology clothing brand 400B Smith St COLLINGWOOD Victoria 1 26 South La Brea Ave LOS ANGELES California DJ Ben Rubin Immigrant Records i / / Noriyoshi Fujiwara. Futsal Player. Nike Holland Game Jersey. NIKE0139 56 »HYPER game of the month NINTENDO 64 Rare keep the Nintendo 64 alive... and how! Read our review of the best Nintendo 64 game ever seen! review intro REVIEWS GREEN FOR DREAMCAST YELLOW FOR PC RED FOR NINTENDO 64 BLUE FOR PLAYSTATION Eliot fish - Editor 1. Deus Ex - PC Simply one of the most addictive PC games in months and months. 2. Colin McRae Rally 2 - PlayStation 3. Motocross Madness 2 - PC 4. Perfect Dark - Nintendo 64 5. Marvel Versus Capcom 2 - Dreamcast Cam Shea - Deputy Editor 1. Perfect Dark - Nintendo 64 Four years in the making. Sweet sweet multiplayer action. 2. Code Veronica - Dreamcast 3. Motocross Madness 2 - PC 4. Super Mario World - SNES 5. Mario Kart-SNES Dan loose - Reviewer 1. Dark Reign 2 - PC Just when I thought I was going to have time to play through Ultima IX... Gee thanks Pandemic. 2. Ultima IX-PC 3. MDK2 - Dreamcast . 4. StarLancer - PC 5. Code Veronica Dreamcast All in-house PC previews and reviews are done on Gateway computers. www. au. gateway. com reviews» 1 //m S i L //1ft i 1 ^ i I. J reviews DARK Rare have taken their sweet time 'perfecting' it, but Roland Flanagan thanks his gaming gods for their wise decision. I EAR PIERCE VOIR EAR FIRM HERE SUCKER AVAIlARlf NOW CATEGORY 1st person shooter PI AYERS 1-4 PUBLISHER Nintendo PRICE $115 (witlllM pal); $90 (witfcut) RATINE M SUPPORTS RAM Pak. Rumble Pak & Memory Pak Only N64 enthusiasts may remember that Coldeneye was one of the most revolutionary first person shooters of the nineties. In a decade that was ruled by tales of doom and earth-shattering quakes, an unassuming N64 title gave Nintendo owners a reason to stand tall. Until Coldeneye arrived, all first person shooters had consisted of mindlessly slaying legions of monsters as you col- lectod keys to open doors. James Bond’s adventure introduced shooting fans to complex mission objectives, the element of stealth and a brilliant con- sole-based deathmatch mode. It’s been almost three years since Rare unleashed this masterpiece and it is a testament to their skill that no other console developer has been able to come close to dethroning their game. Perfect Dark has finally arrived in our eager little hands I can tell you that not only does it drastically improve on everything that made Coldeneye great, but it adds so many exciting new modes of gameplay that it absolutely dwarfs the original. NEW BEGINNINGS Some people may be disappointed that the follow-up to Coldeneye is not another James Bond licence. However, Rare should be congratulated for shedding this restriction and allowing their imaginations to run wild on this epic tale of a sexy secret agent and her harrowing battle against evil, conspiring corporations and the aliens they cohort with. Taking control of the lethal agent, Joanna Dark, your first mission involves penetrating the DataDyne HQ. Wading through the wake of corpses you leave on your path to the skyscraper’s base¬ ment involves the same sort of action you’re used to in Goldeneye. Admittedly it looks a lot better, but it’s not until the second mission that things really crank into gear. Once inside the DataDyne labs your mission to locate and rescue the defecting scientist, Dr. Carol, taxes both your reflexes and your grey matter equally. People who don’t want any of their perfection spoiled should stop read¬ ing right now and skip to the heading ’You can open your eyes now’ because I’m going to take you oh a brief tour of the second level to illus¬ trate the game’s style. Your first mission objective is to locate and photograph an experiment the scientists are performing on some radioactive isotopes. The problem is that once you find the room, walking into it gives Joanna acute radiation poisoning, causing you to walk around with blurry vision for a couple of min¬ utes. Take a quick look through your inventory, however, and you’ll find a little spy cam. This device can be remote controlled by you and can safe¬ ly hover about the room unnoticed and unaffected by the radiation - very cool. A little side note: I was using the cam¬ era on a later mission when I made the mistake of leaving it where a soldier 59 »HYPER 60 »HYPER reviews» % ■ p KM JIT KIIUNE 111 THE MATRIX WANNABES BUCK ME UP! What’s the only thing better than a sexy secret agent? Two sexy secret agents. One of the best features of Perfect Dark is the two player co-operative mode. By getting a friend (or the computer) to take control of Ioanna’s sister, it’s possible to play through all the single player missions with two play¬ ers. While the frame rate does suffer notice¬ ably with all of the game's action being pre¬ sented in the split screens, there's so much fun to be had going through the main adventure as a team, you'll hardly notice. Put on a really serious military voice and shout commands like "Okay people, we’ve got to do this by the numbers", "Backup! Backupl I need backup!" or "Cover me, I’m going in” and you'll feel like a hardcore marine. I know I did. As if the co-operative missions weren’t enough fun. Rare have gone and added an ingenious counter-operative mode in which one player controls Ioanna Dark, while the second player adopts the persona of one of the enemy guards trying to thwart her mis¬ sion. If the enemy the second player is con¬ trolling is killed by Ioanna then they will be transported Matrix-like into another random guard. While this does give the second play¬ er an almost limitless amount of players to throw against Ioanna, each guard only has a fraction of the life she has - so like Chinese water torture, it’s a slow process of erosion. Both of these modes are tremendous fun and we can only hope that other developers will follow Rare's lead. could see it. He walked up to the cam¬ era, tapped it curiously, scratched his head for a second and then levelled his rifle at it and sent it to a fiery grave - ultra cool! Anyway, you’re next mis¬ sion objective is to reprogram the maintenance droids to help you pass through some of the tricky sections of the level. You see, try as I might there was no way I could get past a corridor that was blocked by a series of criss¬ crossing laser beams. I tried shooting them. I tried distracting them with grenades and I even tried barging through them, hoping that Joanna was tougher than they were. No luck. However, after finding a couple of maintenance droids (looking very sim¬ ilar to the little courier droids that Chewie scared the crap out of on the Death Star) I was able to reprogram their paths so that they now patrolled the laser infested corridor, deactivat¬ ing them as they pass - hurrah! The mission is completed by shutting down the remaining experiments so that their transmissions no longer block your codebreaking gear from unlock¬ ing Dr. Carol’s cell. Although most of the scientists are pretty co-operative about shutting their experiments down when you shove a machine gun in their face, the last one is a bit of a smart arse and hits the alarm ’accidentally’. As you progress through the game you’ll see plenty more example of the ene¬ mies exhibiting personality like this. YOU CAN OPEN YOUR EYES NOW Sorry about spoiling a bit of the game like that but 1 thought it was the best way to give you an idea of the cool sorts of objectives you’ll have to complete on each mission. Sure, there’s still more than enough death and destruction at the hands of high pow¬ ered weaponry to keep even the most hardcore Rambo happy, but the mis¬ sion objectives keep the action varied and really make you feel like a secret agent. Later objectives that were per¬ sonal faves include taking a high posi¬ tion over one of the levels and protect¬ ing a hostage from execution by taking out her captors and all of the snipers on the surrounding buildings, using the super zoom of your rifle. Another great objective involves knocking out a scientist in the showers and stealing * his outfit. Once you’re wearing the out¬ fit you can pass by all of the maching gun toting guards without incident, they’ll even say hello to you and ask you how you’re doing. Oh, how much fun I had exchanging pleasantries with Bob the guard about the good morning he was having, then walking past him, pulling out my silenced pistol and capping him in the back of the head. Oh, and don’t get me started about the mission in which you creep around with your night vision goggles after the power has been cut, zooming in on unsuspecting guards with your sniper pistol and making a mess. Something that is unique to Perfect Dark is that there are often a coupfe of different ways to complete an objective and if something occurs to you that would work as a solution in real life, then it probably will work in Perfect Dark’s world. For example, while infil¬ trating the famous Area 51 hangar. I was having a huge amount of difficulty getting past one section in the level. There is a big gate that could be opened briefly but the problem was that in the yard behind it there are three sentry guns that cut you to pieces. Running in and taking cover behind some pillars was proving to be almost impossible so I came up with the idea of going back a bit in the level and grabbing a hover bike that was floating around. By pushing this back to the gate, as I suspected. I was able to jam it between the gate’s doors as they were closing so that I could then use the half open gate as cover, taking out the guns with relative ease. While the game is packed with plen¬ ty of cunning levels that will see Joanna through one of the biggest adventures ever, make sure you play the game on at least the medium diffi¬ culty level. Playing the game on easy removes the vast majority of the objec¬ tives, and presents you with a lot of locked doors and a simple adventure that can be finished in a day. Crank it up to medium and many of the doors will open up and you’ll find yourself entwined in a much tougher and more satisfying epic. Notch it up to hard though, and you’ll really be in for a challenging treat. Remember that hostage I mentioned that you had to protect with the sniper rifle? Well, on the hard mode. Joanna is disguised as the hostage and must defeat her cap- tors unarmed so that she can grab their guns and take out all of the snipers on the surrounding roofs - very tough! IT'S GREAT BEING SINGLE Even if Perfect Dark only had its sin¬ gle player adventure, it would be the best game on the N64. Thankfully though, Rare has gone crazy with this game’s extras. For starters there is the Carrington Institute. This is Joanna’s home base and as well as being able to wander around and chat to all your friends, you can earn weapon training medals for every single weapon in the game and compete in a number of combat training missions inside some¬ thing looking very similar to the holodeck from Star Trek. Tired of being the Lone Ranger during the main adventure? Well, every single mission can be played with a friend either cor operatively or counter-operatively (check out the boxout for all the juicy reviews details). However, it’s the deathmatch mode in which Rare have really gone crazy with the options. Not only can you take each other on in the usual one to four player deathmatch. but you can now add in a number of computer sim¬ ulants (bots) to spice up the action. This means that even if none of your friends are around, you can have a great time challenging up to eight simulants by yourself. And unlike games of Turok: Rage Wars’ quality, the simulants in this game have about 20 different personalities to choose from and when cranked up to the highest level, provide an incredibly stiff challenge. While it is possible to still add eight simulants on top of a four player game, the frame rate takes such a hit that you’re better off keep¬ ing it to a sensible number. The graphics are probably the least spectacular part of the game. That is^ not to say that they aren’t great, because Rare has made a number of improvements over Coldeneye’s (still impressive) graphics engine. However, these modifications are subtle and have taken the backseat to gameplay innovation (not a bad thing when you consider Turok 2’s 'nice graphics, shame about the gameplay’ approach). The most noticeable improvement would have to be the lighting. While it was possible to shoot out the lights in Coldeneye, it had no effect on the graphics. Shooting out lights can now be used to realistically darken rooms and give you an advantage coming in The enemy soldiers now sport much more complex animation routines. As well as their standard jumps and rolls to avoid fire, the soldiers will now lie down on the ground and continue fir¬ ing to make it very difficult for you to hit them. Shoot the gun out of their hands and they will scream, shake their hand, then run to retrieve their weapons. However, if you spray enough bullets around as they try to grab their weapon, they will decide to leg-it instead. If you shoot them enough times, without killing them, they will actually start limping around in tremendous pain and may even decide to surrender. While I’m on the topic of the enemy soldiers I should mention just how much smarter they have become in this game. In Coldeneye it was a very effective tactic to shoot a few shots into a room to get their attention, then gun them down easily as they ran through the door. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that the soldiers will now almost never run into a room they know you have covered, and may even decide to retreat and collect reinforcements. If you’ve got a surround sound setup at home then get ready to get very happy because Perfect Dark has been encoded in full Dolby. Now you can hear when a soldier is coming up behind you and spin around to face the threat. The gun effects and the explosions are also surprisingly crisp and satisfying when belting out of a powerful stereo. As with the graphics, it’s the enemy soldiers that are the highlight of the sound department. They no longer accept their fate silently. After shooting an enemy you will often hear things like "You bitch!", "Why me?" or "I don’t want to die." When the enemy first sees you they will also mutter things like "It’s her. Kill her!” or "Target sighted.” The comments add to the lengthy dia¬ logue sequences in the cut-scenes and give Perfect Dark a much more absorbing atmosphere. PERFECTION I have heard many people criticise Perfect Dark because the frame rate slows down a bit. However, very few of these people have actually played the game. Had they bothered to get past the N64 S dated graphics then they would have found arguably the most enjoyable and addictive console game ever created. Sure the game doesn’t have the resolution or frame rate to compete with current PC or DC titles but Rare have provided a game of staggering complexity that offers almost limitless modes of play and I’m not going to do anything but applaud them for pushing the N64 a bit further than it can handle. PERFECTION-O-METER 2$>S>S> $$>$$>$$> $»$$>$$>& PLUS Oeep and enjoyable single player missions. Staggering wealth of multiplayer modes (including bot matches). MINUS The frame rate suffers in the split screen modes. VISUALS SOUND CAMEPLAY 93 95 98 OVERML Perfect Dark is easily the N64's best game, and its only weakness is that the N64 can’t keep ap with it. DIRE TIOI III TIE I ACE-MAPPING OPTION III TREY Ilf I ARTHUR S EKE IN THERE ERR RIME REASON 62 »HYPER reviews» COLIN RALLY CMC meets DMC in a battle royale on PlayStation... / 7 \ McR 2.0 AVAILABLE Now i i Rally Racing PLATERS 1-2 PUBLISHER Codeaasters k PRICE $89.95 I S G * SUPPORTS Dual Shock Rally racing is perhaps motor sport’s finest and most dangerous incarnation (just ask the numerous spec¬ tators who’ve been taken out trackside by skidding cars). A stream of games have attempted to bring the near death experience of rallying to our consoles, few with greater success than Colin McRae Rally. The original was a huge seller, with a physics engine and track design of unparalleled excellence, offer¬ ing the best rally action available on PlayStation (and perhaps any console). The art of the sequel is a delicate bal¬ ancing act, innovating enough to keep the license new and fresh, whilst retain¬ ing the elements that made the first game great. By combining the best of the old, with new physics and better graphics, Colin McRae 2.0 has been turbo-charged into a totally absorbing seat of your pants ride of a game. EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN The core of the first game was the genuine rally experience, of driving around long muddy tracks in the middle of nowhere, racing against the times of your other opponents. No change here. What has changed though is a brand spanking new physics engine. The game physics of Colin McRae were second to none, taking the art of the controlled skid to new heights. The best way of describing 2.0 in comparison with the first is more ’floaty’. The cars feel lighter on the track, giving the impression of almost skimming across the surface. This lends itself to some serious edge- of-the-seat-about-to-have-your-brain- smeared-across-the-inside-of-the- windscreen-due-to-impact-with-a-tree hardcore fanging. This is also facilitated by less angular track design, and wider paths. Despite this, there is no less pre¬ cision required in your driving. While this may all be a little less real¬ istic than the first game, it plays better and what’s more, feels more intuitive. Purists may be a little annoyed, but the adrenalin pumping danger of careen¬ ing off the muddy track into oblivion at break neck speed, combined with the near orgasmic bliss of sliding around a good corner with absolutely no trac¬ tion, should have them quickly shut¬ ting their mouths to play some more. Despite the souped up driving model, Colin McRae 2.0 is a no nonsense pedal to the metal racer. Mastering the game still relies upon knowing when to ease back and take your foot off the pedal, letting your car gracefully drift around a particularly tight corner, before slam¬ ming it into top gear again. Make no mistake, this is one deep game, and hella tough to master. One of the great things about the original Colin McRae by comparison with another well known rally game (Sega, I'm looking in your direction), reviews SCOT-O-METER 2>2>S>2>2>S>$>2> PLUS Easily accessible, but deep Excellent track design. was the sheer number of tracks. This was no arcade racer, but a game that took serious dedication to complete. That feat has been replicated here, with tracks from eight countries. The tracks feature different racing surfaces and conditions, including mud, grav¬ el, snow and rain, all of which affect your driving. Also included this time around is a 'race' mode, for those who like to see their opponents, rather than just their times. Options have also been included to overcome flaws in the game design of the original, par¬ ticularly the ability to select individ¬ ual stages to practice, a feature the first sorely lacked. You can also select rallies from three countries to begin with, rather than the rather restrictive one that was on offer in the first game. NEW-MILLENNIAL MINIMALISM Taking a leaf out of the oh-so-styl- ish book of \Vip30ut, Codemasters have opted for new-millennial minimalist chic in their menu design. Loading times have also improved greatly. The graphics have been tweaked (let’s face it, the first game was pretty ugly), although it is still best viewed from a distance. While the cars look good, get up close and the environments start to look like they’re made of lego blocks. Worthy of particular mention, howev¬ er, is the superb sound. The engine grunts and screams like a pig mating with a combine harvester, and the environmental effects, like the sound of mud and gravel thrown up by your tires, are beautiful. All this said, there are a couple of downsides to version 2.0. Some wrongs of the past haven’t been improved upon. The vocals of co-dri¬ ver Nicky Crist still appear to have been recorded while smothering him with a pillow. An unfortunate omis¬ sion is the absence of the driving tutorial. Maybe Codemasters believe (perhaps justifiably) that everyone has played the first game. While you can pick up the skills in game, an easy introduction may have been appreciated by many. These are merely minor quibbles with a game that excels in every other way. While graphically limited by aging technology, the gameplay feels so damn good that anything beyond the satisfaction of the next skid becomes totally irrelevant. ■ Colin McRae Rally 2 is coming to the Sega Dreamcast! Eliot had a good rip around some tracks when he was at E3, and it’s looking like a very fine version for the Sega system. MINUS It’s not on PlayStation 2. Yet. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 86 89 93 A OVERALL 92 The best rallying action in town, bar none. 63 »HYP 64 »HYPER reviews» PC DARK REIG Does Dark Reign 2 deliver the polish that its predecessor lacked? Dan Toose believes so... available July CATICORY Real Time Strategy PLAYERS 1 -mult i PUBLISHER Activision k PRICE $19.95 m RATINE M W REQUIRE! Pll 233MHz. 64MB RAM. 500MB HD space. 30 Accelerator DESIRED Pll 300*. 128MB RAM. 32MB 3D Card Earth, 26th century... The "ruling class” is the JDA (Jovian Detention Authority), a sort of New World Order that was formed in an effort to turn the masses of criminals into useful citizens. The rest of humanity lives outside the JDA’s city domes, fending for themselves out in the toxic sprawl... Thus the "Sprawlers". Brute force tends to rule out in the sprawl, so you’ve essential¬ ly got an oppressive police state ver¬ sus downtrodden rebels. The game plays out through the last day of Earth’s existence, and the power struggles that take place up to that moment for what may lie beyond... Around two years ago, Activision’s real time strategy title Dark Reign had the most flexible RTS engine to date, although the way things panned out, it lacked a little polish next to the other big strategy title of the moment, Total Annihilation. Now we see Pandemic taking the reins, and Dark Reign 2 looks to have the "Wow!” factor that the first title may have lacked, due mostly to it’s truly amazing visuals. UNBELIEVABLY WONDERFUL Dark Reign 2 features a graphics engine that allow you to not only rotate the viewpoint, but also very simply adjust the angle at which you are look¬ ing at the centre of the screen. You can pop down to ground level, or look down from directly above, almost giving you an old school 2D top-down feel. You can also hold down a key so you can look around freely with the mouse just like in a Quake style game, and you've got the perfect way to view the action. It’s not the viewpoints that make the game pretty though, it’s the unbeliev¬ ably wonderful 3D environments and highly detailed unit models that will keep you mesmerised. From a distance, a JDA guardian (basic grunt with rifle) may not look so flash, but zoom down to ground level and get up close, and you can see that the level of detail in the texturing is fantastic, and this goes for every unit in the game. Top this off with excellent animation for both the units, and the marks they leave on the envi¬ ronment, and you have visuals that are hard to complain about. Pandemic’s audio department should take a bow, because the sound in Dark Reign 2 is really well done in pretty much every aspect. The music drifts between dramatic military themes, through to sleek techno beats, and it’s quality all the way. Units give verbal responses to your commands like in any RTS, and each unit type is very distinct, making it easy to know who’s buzzing you. There’s also a dis¬ tinct difference in the weapon sound effects, so you can guess what’s going on in general just off screen, simply by listening to the gunfire. Of course, all this audio-visual splendour would count for squat if the game played like a dog, but thankful¬ ly, it does not. The interface for Dark Reign 2 features building and squad managers, which allow you to not only to get building and squads to do what you want without looking at them, but also check their "health” at a glance, ■ Pandemic were not the folk behind the original Dark Reign — in fact it was Aussie developer, Auran, based in Queensland. reviews GRUNTRUSH-O-METER PLUS Amazing visuals. Nice interface. Plenty if multiplayer options. Very polished. Occasional pathing problems. Stock standard units. cles in its way. It doesn’t always hap¬ pen, but it’s annoying when it does. That’s the only gripe you can have with the way your units behave how¬ ever, because there’s five settings you can quickly apply to either groups or individual units to make them do their job, as you'd like, without having to keep an eye on them. Setting up effective defences is not a chore by any means. One could go into detail about all the units and buildings, but there’s little point, as you can really sum it up by saying both sides have a variety of infantry, tanks, artillery, hover vehicles, aircraft, sea vessels, healers, and spy units. There’s noth¬ ing remarkably inventive or new in this sense, and that’s probably Dark Reign 2’s only weak spot. Having some units that did something special to the terrain would have been not only nice for variety, but also done justice by the fantastic visual engine. There are multiple ways to play mul¬ tiplayer (king of the hill, etc), and you can play co-operatively, even through the single player campaigns. There’s also a map editor, and the ability to record and play back your missions, so all up, there’s plenty of gaming here for you, and there’s an option for mods, so we can expect some interest¬ ing extras in the future no doubt. Dark Reign 2 is a fantastic transition to 3D for the real time strategy genre. Other titles like Homeworld and Myth have been here before, but Dark Reign 2 is the first of the Red Alert style games to come across. There’s plenty here for either a single or multi player enthusiast, and it doesn’t require a beefy PC to get a good game on. If you didn’t like the first Dark Reign, don’t dismiss this as more of the same, as it’s a whole new game. ■ which is very handy with squads. Each button offers a label if you leave the mouse on it, and tech tree require¬ ments pop up too, so you don’t need to go reaching for the manual when you first start playing. The only real gripe to be had with the interface is that the minimap is a bit too "mini” for any practical use if you play the game in a decent resolution, and there is no obvious option to configure keys to function the way you want. BEAUTY, BUT... BRAINS? AI is a mixed bag with Dark Reign 2, with "smart targeting" being very handy. This makes a unit attack the most relevant threat by default. It must be said that the pathing could be bet¬ ter though. There were many times I ordered a unit somewhere, and it didn’t go in a straight line, even though there were no apparent obsta¬ VISUAIS SOUND EAMEPUY 96 90 92 OVERALL 93 Dark Reign 2 sets high standards for the rest of the upcoming 30 RTS games to match. Excellent stuff. 65 »HYPER 66 »HYPER reviews» HIDENT EVI CODE VERONI Hyper's own Buffy, Cam Shea, takes some time out of his vampire slaying schedule to take on some zombies as well... Miftiftf Now CATKNV Sarvival Horror waters t PUBIISHIR Olisoft PRICE $89 95 RATING M SUPPORTS VMU With suspense and atmos¬ phere in blood-filled bucket¬ loads, Resident Evil gave us a chance to play out our favourite B- grade horror films, and to revel in the bloodletting. Since then, Capcom have had a field day. Resident Evil 2 was far superior to Resident Evil. The third installment, however, although bril¬ liant, offered little that was new. I think you’d all agree that the original survival horror series needs an injec¬ tion of fresh blood (pun intended) to recapture the magic of the earlier games... and here it is. To be blunt, Code Veronica has fried my swizzle stick. This is a master work, and almost everything we were hoping for from a Dreamcast Resident Evil title. It’s funny how you can become so blase about a franchise, and then it’s elegantly taken to the next generation and suddenly it all feels fresh again. EXPERIMENTAL CRISIS... Graphically there are very few other games that can compare to Code Veronica. The pre-rendered back¬ grounds have been relegated to the ’’too old-skool” bin, replaced by a polygonal world, and how the game benefits! If the camera mechanics in Dino Crisis were the experiment, then Code Veronica is the real deal. Although there are still plenty of fixed angle switches, in Code Veronica the camera is much more versatile — track¬ ing Claire down corridors, panning around rooms, and zooming in certain situations. Not only does this seem more natural, but it eliminates many of the problems from earlier games - you’re far less likely to be bamboozled amidst a horde of zombies by the cam¬ era constantly switching angles. The level of detail and atmosphere in Code Veronica is absolutely sumptuous. The environments look so real you can almost reach out and touch them. A lot of work has gone into this game artisti¬ cally. It’s not just the level of detail, but the number of unique and skillfully textured locations, as well as the sheer flair in the visuals. From the grittiest, grimiest, dankest, most disease infest¬ ed rooms to the grandieur of a man¬ sion, or the cold reflective metal of an Antarctic base... it’s all good, baby. Special mention must be made of the cutscenes throughout the game. Mostly using the in-game engine, they often reveal wild plot twists and unexpected situations, and are executed brilliant¬ ly. While ogling the level of detail, and the lifelike animations and facial expressions, you’ll also be impressed with the direction. Stylish is the only way to describe these cutties, and there are even a number of nods to the Matrix to enjoy. SMALL TOUCHES TAKE TWO... Lighting effects in the game are deft, and used in just the right places to add atmosphere. There are many small graphical touches too, like the camera tracking Claire down an underwater corridor from outside the glass walls, with air bubbles periodically floating up past the camera, and Claire’s body wavering slightly through the water. This sequence is literally about ten sec¬ onds in the game, and of no conse¬ quence, but it’s moments like these S>2>$>2>S>2>2>S>8> PLUS Ih so good. The definitive RE game... MINUS Storage chests, controls, voice acting cringeworthy in places. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY GIBBAGi PATCH KIPS An element that we feel Capcom should have improved for this title is gibbing. When are we going to be able to blow chunks with the lighter weaponry? I want a visual indicator of how close the zombie is to carking it - "Oh look. I’ve blown off both his arms, that means one more shot should do itl”. Surely this gener- ation of machines would allow for bullet exit points or some Soldier of Fortune style shred¬ ding of limbs? After all, if we want to get tech¬ nical about it, these are decaying zombies we're talking about. Ripping off a zombie arm would be as hard as breaking apart a french loaf, or pulling a party cracker. Ah well, at least we can still revel in explosive weaponry and shotgun hcadshots. reviews that make all the difference. The small graphical details are also complemented by superb positional audio effects. With every door you go through, you’re listening out for the sounds that lie beyond it, be it eerie silence, the sound of moaning zom¬ bies, or an unknown menace. Regardless, it keeps the atmosphere dripping off the TV screen. The music is largely a best of Resident Evil megamix, but Capcom have this element so down that keep¬ ing familiar themes is fine by us. Capcom also know that less can be more when it comes to scaring people. A few spooky piano notes, or even silence can do more than a fully orchestrated piece. The audio effects also act to compliment the graphics in remembering certain locations, or finding items. On the negatives front, the control is still a struggle. I honestly thought that Capcom should have revamped it for Resident Evil 2, but several games later and we’re still waiting. RE2 on N64 had the option to switch to a mode where you point where you want to go, so why not implement the same thing here? Indeed, why not allocate a strafe button? Hold it down and you’d able to keep facing the same way, but you could simply move to the side or back up, without having to turn around. There is a quick 180 turn move, but quite frankly, it’s not enough. This lack of thought on Capcom’s part is further compounded by the fact that all the environments are now 3D. Thus, the camera pans along with you more, instead of just moving from one static spot to another. Thus, there’s less danger of the player becoming con¬ fused as to which direction to press because of all the camera changes. Resident Evil is all about immersing the player in its terrifying world. Now that the game looks so real, it’s a pity that we have to be plucked from our survival horror trance to regularly struggle with the controls. Take note Capcom - bear¬ able shouldn’t be good enough. Despite this, Code Veronica is a phe¬ nomenally enjoyable game. An immersive plotline, decent characters and puzzles, mad visuals and sound, an unlockable battle mode, and lots of stuff to shoot. Does it get any better than this? ■ 94 91 90 OVERALL Capcom have worked the Ireamcast 2 hard, aid created the host Resident Evil game io the sories. no question. m IT S TIMES EIRE THESE VOH REEI MINTIES 68 »HYPER MOTORCROS MADNESS 2 Cam Shea has always been a BMX bandit at heart... so let's take it up a notch. BAM! AVAIL AIK NOW CATICIIY: Dirt like Racing PlAYISS: 1-Multi PllllSNII: Microsoft k ran: $89.95 \ umt C V RQHRtl Pll 266. 32MI RAM V KSIRU: Pill 400.12IMR RAM. 32M0 GeForce DDR Ahh... the graceful ballet of Motocross racing. The glory of the faceplant from twenty feet up. The perverse beauty of reconstructive surgery. The badge of honour that is breaking both legs and a couple of ribs at once. These are the reasons that I’m not and will never be a crusty demon of dirt... or a dirty demon crust for that matter. It looks like great fun, but goddamn those dudes are crazy. Not to worry, however, as there’s always the option of experiencing the thrills and spills of Motocross racing vicariously. Two years ago, to do this you’d probably have to live in a fanta¬ sy land, have dressed up in tight leather and attempted to convince col¬ leagues that you need only one more win in the professional scooter circuit to land a sponsorship deal with Yamaha. You’d probably have been labelled mentally unstable, or at least have been ridiculed for living your dream. But then, from out of left field, Microsoft came to the rescue (wow, how often can you say that?). Motocross Madness hit the game scene, and the world stood still for a while... at least for this reviewer. A brilliant physics engine, a host of very different but equally compelling gameplay modes, and more air than Arthur's bowels, it was a beautifully crafted racer. Thoroughly addictive is really the best way to describe that title, which begs the question - how do we describe this one? The answer is - thoroughly, thoroughly addictive. MOTOCROSS MADNESS 101 Let’s start with the basics. What has changed for this sequel? Well, there are now two entirely new play modes - Enduro and Pto Circuit. The graphics engine has been substantially upgraded - outdoor environments are far more detailed and a lot larger, and there are now tens of thousands of objects and vegetation in the terrain, as opposed to the bare landscapes of the original. There are also a much wider variety of terrains, and the bikes now handle differently on gravel, dirt, mud and ice. The game physics have been tweaked nicely mak¬ ing massive jumps harder to land than in the original bringing a better balance to the game. The rider animations and col¬ lision detection have been improved greatly, as has the opponent AI. Professional Motocross rider Stephane Roncada has had an active role in ensuring that the game feels just right, as well as in track design. The game now has proper licensed bikes from Honda. Yamaha and KTM, as well as a range of 125CC - 650CC engines, each with its own unique power curve and handling abilities. Stunts are improved, and multiple stunt bonuses have been introduced. True positional 3D audio has been incorporated, and the sound effects are much more convincing. Finally, the multiplayer component has been expanded and Microsoft will now host a worldwide ranking system and pro¬ vide online results for every race. AMATEUR TREE WEDGING... With tens of thousands of trees, cac- tai, hay bales, and berry plantations littering every course, you’ll be glad to hear that you can turn the vegetation collision off. However, you’d be mak¬ ing a mistake if you did. Crazy half luck/half skill runs through light forests and cactus fields are one of the most addictive new features in Motocross Madness 2. And should you run into something, the stacks are spectacular and surprisingly realistic. It’s not uncommon to get wedged halfway up a tree, or to launch off a shallow jump straight into a cactus, resulting in a huge thud and your rider catapulting high into the air. Phenomenal stuff. Motocross Madness 2 is a truly rewarding sequel. In short - you must play this game! Hyper’s hallowed Big Rubber Stamp says that you’ll love it. ■ reviews ■ Once you get the game, hop online and download the new terrain editor ■ for track creating mayhem. You'll also be able to grab bike and rider skin I templates. The reign of the Hyper bike is nigh... Mua-ha-ha-hah! One of the strengths of Motocross Madness 2 is that there are so many play modes, each with its own learning curve and unique gameplay. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick rundown of all the play modes: BAJA: Wide open, massive environments to boon through. Race the competition through a series of checkpoints. Each terrain has three different sets of checkpoint layouts, plus you can assign any number of random gates to appear - making for essentially unlimited racing. NEW! ENDURO: Similar to Baja racing, but set in slightly more built up environments. From an Arizona trailer park, to an open pit mine, to a deserted Costa Rican airfield, these races are packed full of daring short* cuts through heavily vegetated areas, mas¬ sive changes in altitude, and obstacles to avoid (or jump over) like tour buses, bull¬ dozers, ski lodges and trains. SURERCROSS: Indoor courses packed full of bumps, jumps and tight turns. This mode requires great concentration and the ability to use something called "a break pedar. All the courses were designed by Supercross champion Stephane Roncada, and exhibit the kind of lunacy and attention to detail in design that only someone who lives the sport can bring. NATIONALS: Similar to the Supercross, but set in the great outdoors. Nationals has greater changes in altitude, and more varied terrain. A good middle ground between Enduro and Supercross racing. STUNT QUARRY: Bust better tricks than the opposition in a race for points. Just be care¬ ful, as Superman Seat Crabs and Nac Nacs can be damaging to your health. TAG: A multiplayer only mode where you must try to be "it" for the longest. NEWl wo CIRCUIT: The career mode, where you start out as a farm boy racing in a che¬ quered shirt and jeans. The idea being to pull yourself up out of the sticks, drag your leg out of the combine harvester, stop sleep¬ ing with your sister, and to make a career racing motorbikes. Starting out against easyish opposition in the Enduro courses, with hard work and dedication you'll earn prize money and sponsorships, and move through the events until you can enter the professional Supercross circuit. wmm wmm Motorcross Madness 2 improves on every aspect of tho original. A must boy title. PLUS So many environments, so many playmodes. such rich gameplay. Hefty requirements to run the game with the graphics pumping. 69 »HYPER 70 »HYPER EXCITEBIKE 64 James Ellis gets dirty with Nintendo's latest offering. AVAILABK Now CATEGORY Motorcross racing PLAYERS 1-4 PUBLISNIR Nintendo PRICE SJS.S5 RATINE 6 SUPPORTS Mem pak. Expansion pak There’s no doubt that the phrases of the moment are made up of words like Playstation, Xbox and millions of polygons per second, but it is important to remem ber that amongst these visionary technical marvels that lay baking on the gaming horizon, are games with a more immediate presence. One game that has stirred a slight tress of inter¬ est in the gaming community of late is the N64 incarnation of the classic Excitebike. So, is the hype justified, or is it just a bunch of over the hill gamers, reminiscing their romantic retro fantasies? After giving Excitebike 64 the run through, I have a tendency to think it’s the latter. BUT, ITS... EXCITING... RIGHT? Developed by Nintendo and their buddies at Left Field. Excitebike 64 is the most recent motocross game to hit the system from the current slew. You start off and are greeted with more than the stock standard usual options, with the option to play on special tracks appearing along stan¬ dard options like season and exhibi¬ tion racing. These special tracks con¬ sist of novelties like a desert race, where one player races through huge sand dunes with other bikes in an attempt to extinguish a series of campfires, the mandatory stunt track as well as other token games like the original excitebike and motocross soccer. This is all good and well to inject some variation in the title, but who’s going to care if the gameplay smells like road-kill Pikachu. Like the latest all girl pop groups. I’ve found that most motocross games have a tendency to be dull and unin¬ spiring. Where’s the ball breaking excitement associated with the makeshift motocross stadiums packed to the teeth with working class cus¬ tomers, eager to see fate dispense a harsh blow to the groin of some young dirt bike kid? Well Excitebike 64 can claim to be the best motocross game on the system, but realistically that’s not saying much. It simply has the best jumps yet. % diet: 00:44.31 Lap t 00:44.11 Best: 0100.00 IIOE IT URi A NIRSf HIT. Til MISIT WAIT TO WATCI TNAT HIDING ...OKAY, A MIXED BAG THEN. The game engine itself is easy to pick up and start playing, so there are no real hassles when you grab some friends over to play. However, there are enough tricks of the trade to make sure that a learning curve is at least present, so rookies won’t be getting continually lucky and humiliating the experienced rider. In fact the fun factor of the game is derived from this learning curve, as you learn how to maximise your jumps, and to navigate multiple mounds. The problem is that along with these good elements the game also has some exas¬ perating factors that may have a few N64 pads broken after each session. For one, players knock other players off bikes if they clip the opponent’s front wheel with their back wheel. Seems simple enough, but you’ll find that this is a double edged sword, as it provides unfair protection for the lead¬ ing bike around bends, where most overtaking is most likely to occur. Not only that but if you are starting off on a race then the person who is on the same side of the track as the first cor¬ ner has an instant huge advantage. The other major downer of this title is the mixed bag of track design. When I’ve reviewed motocross games in the past, I’ve always argued that there should be more interesting tracks that are not set in some dirt filled arena. Well Excitebike does take the action outside, but the speed of the game drops remarkably, making the bikes seem as if they are all traveling in first gear. Whilst the outdoor tracks look nice, and have some interesting tex¬ tures in some places, there is just too much for the N64 to handle. Graphically the game serves only to enhance the comparison between the N64 and the newer generation machines, with sketchy models and some under whelming animation. However as with a lot of N64 titles these days the game does include a hi-res option thanks to some expansion pak compatibility, that sets up the screen in a cinematic or letterbox mode to keep the frame-rate consistent. Although consistent really is all that it is, with the hi-res mode not being able to churn out a race as silky as EA’s Supercross 2000’s hi-res mode. After experiencing this in a one-player game, I straight away resigned myself against the hi-res mode, and conceded that low-res is what this game should be played in. Still, the two-player mode is quite good on the stadium levels, and there are a lot of courses to be unlocked and stunts to be learnt, leading to a lot of variety in this cart if you can see past the said hindrances. It's too bad, the 3 and 4 player modes couldn’t be a bit more playable, but it’s the case of Nintendo leaving it all in there and allowing those who aren’t put off by dodgy frame rates to have the option, rather than not bothering at all. Overall there is some enjoyment to be had with this title, but it’s not terribly addictive nor highly polished, making it a good choice for a rental. ■ PLUS Lots of options and variations in gameplay. MINUS Gameplay is a mixed bag of fruity flavours and those “other black ones". VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 71 »HYPER 72 »HYPER SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR With a penchant for samurai-style phat pants, DMC was already dressed for total war. SiG 1 MJBBER®. iAMP, , OF ’RO' /?\ ^U| AVAILABU: Now MTtCMY: Strategy PIANRS 1-8 PUBIIBMB: Ik k PIICI $89 95 \ RATING M 1 RIQUIRII P200. 32MB RAM f DISIIIO P350. 64MB RAM. 3D Card a> Shogun: Total War drops you straight in the middle of the most violent and turbulent period of lapanese history, where clans continu¬ ally fought it out for dominance and the title of Shogun. This is a game that con¬ veys the thrill of being a power hungry warlord on an epic scale, controlling everything from provincial development to the timing of a cavalry charge. To achieve this feeling of complete control, the game has been divided into two parts. One centers on strategy at a national level, the other allowing you to get down and dirty on the bat¬ tlefield with a cast of thousands. Like a raisin covered in chocolate, or a mon¬ key in a cowboy suit, Shogun has put two good things together to create something truly sublime. CHECKMATE, DAIMYO TRAMPOLINE!! The first part of the game is classic strategy, reminiscent of board games like Diplomacy and Risk. Action takes place on a beautifully rendered map of Japan, divided into a series of provinces. Each province is blessed with certain resources, from rich farmland to gold and silver deposits. As the Daimyo of one of eight clans, you control a number of these, providing you with a certain amount of revenue (Koku). Koku allows you to develop each province, with buildings from ninja schools and castles, which give you greater military capability, to improved farmland, mines and ports, increasing your revenue. It costs Koku to build and sustain your units. These include samurai, archers, cavalry, musketeers, warrior monks, and peas¬ ant spearmen amongst others. As your troops and generals engage in battle, they develop experience and honour, giving them an edge in future combat. Cameplay is turn based, rather than realtime, each turn lasting for one sea¬ son. One unit can be created per turn, and buildings take from 4 to 12 turns to develop. This lends itself to a very strategic form of gameplay, and you’ll find yourself spending hours contem¬ plating a single move and the possible reactions of your inscrutable oppo- reviews nents. Balancing development, mili¬ tary might and your bank account is a difficult and very involving task. Diplomatic maneuvering plays a large part in this game: Military might on its own will not do. You need to develop the skills of your geishas, diplomats and ninjas, flipsides of the same diplomatic coin in friendly ol’ feudal Japan. These can be used to gain information, create alliances, and assassinate enemy generals. Effective use of these is an essential precursor to success on the battlefield, allowing you to estimate and undermine the enemies strength. Be warned though, the clans are all sneaky backstabbing sons-of-bitches who will betray you at the drop of a hat, usually when the odds are most stacked against you. Apart from the backstabbing. other unexpected events, like earthquakes, plagues and Mongol Raids also affect your game at this level. The second limb of the game comes into play when the Machiavellian instinct gets the better of you or your opponents, and your armies clash. You can take the easy option, and let the computer resolve the battle automati¬ cally. or take command of your forces personally. The incentive to do the lat¬ ter is that, firstly, it’s bloody fun, and secondly, if you hone your skills, victo¬ ry is far more likely. WAR! HUH! GOOD GOD! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? When you accept command of your armies, the game switches to a real time battle mode. While the environs are rendered in 3D, your troops are sprites, which works beautifully (check the screens), allowing your PC to pump out up to 5000 on the battle¬ field at one time. Yep, this is wargam¬ ing on an epic scale. Each province has a certain battle¬ field, whose characteristics are deter¬ mined by the topography. Lowlands afford the best opportunities for large attacking armies, wide-open spaces allowing you to outmaneuver your enemies. Highlands are better for defense, allowing troops to retreat to hilltops and rain arrows upon the slowly advancing enemy. Rivers can pose problems, their sin¬ gle crossing point a death trap for attacking armies. Battle command is comprehensive, but you get a handle on it quite quick¬ ly. Before the battle begins, you deploy your units personally, or automatically arrange them in different ways, including tight, loose, and wedge for¬ mations, and emphasising all out attack, or skirmishing (engaging with the enemy while retreating). These can also be altered on the fly. You can command at the level of the individual unit, groups of units, right up to send¬ ing the entire army in at once. The battle engine is quite complex. Performance is affected by weather (e.g. cavalry will be bogged down by mud), and the environment (more damage is done by charging down¬ hill). Units react to battle conditions individually, getting tired and gain¬ ing or losing morale depending upon their own circumstances and your army’s overall fortunes. Different troops also have different morale lev¬ els: peasant yari ashigari will turn and flee as soon as the going gets tough, while elite veteran cavalry are more likely to stick around. This is all beautifully packaged in funky Japanese design, accompanied by beautiful FMVs. The battles in par¬ ticular look amazing, truly conveying the epic nature feudal combat. Tasteful music and fantastic sound effects also compliment the action. Battlefield sound is particularly good: as you sweep the camera over your troops, you hear their footsteps, jangling weapons, and warcries. Shogun: Total War has been designed along the precepts set down by the great Sun Tzu in his classic 'The Art of War’, and comes complete with an extract for your instruction. To win, you can’t just play: you must become a Daimyo. So this isn’t one for the lighthearted. Shogun is serious gaming. A production of class and depth, and an absolute must for any strategy gamer. ■ PLUS Totally involving. Deep, complex, but intuitive gameplay. OVERALL Totally immerses you in the art of war. leautiful. 73 »HYPER 74 »HYPER TOMBI! 2 DMC is the Hyper monkey boy, a living Tombi if you will. Tombi appears to be the result of mad scientists attempting to splice the genes of Tarzan and a troll doll (sick puppies all, those mad scientist types). He’s a kind of pink-haired monkey boy, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease (well, he can jump proficient¬ ly), and whose language capabilities extend to a few chirruppy noises. As you can gather, Tombi 2 will not find you engaging in debate on the finer points of existentialist metaphysics. But there is plenty of the running, jumping, and collecting objects that makes for good platforming action. TAKE ME TO FUNKY TOWN The game is played in a kind of pseudo-3D, echoing games like Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, or Pandemonium. The characters are fully polygonal (last time around they were only 2D), and conduct their mad shenanigans around environments that are rendered in three dimensions, but are only interactive in two. This engen¬ ders a radically different gameplay to 3D platformers of the Ape Escape vari¬ ety, harking back to the old school action of 16-bit platformers. Where it varies, and takes advantage of the 3D environments, is that arrows appear above your head, indicating when you can take varying branches, and move into the background. While a great idea, this does have its occasional problems, and you’ll often accidentally take the wrong path as the camera shifts angles and you not sure quite which way which arrow is pointing. But it does add much greater complexity than if it was straight up 2D. The levels quickly become maze-like layers of intersecting paths that you can follow. The complexity of these layers has been increased over the original, giving the game greater depth. PIGS MIGHT FLY, AND SAILORS MIGHT BLUSH... Gameplay revolves around the tradi¬ tional running, jumping on bad guys and platforms, and solving simple lit¬ tle puzzles that make up the platform¬ ing genre. There are set objectives that you need to complete, in exchange for which you receive 'Adventure Points’. This allows you to unlock boxes around the world, furthering your adventure. As with any good platformer, there are plenty of levels, and lots of sub-games to keep you entertained (including the ubiquitous mine-cart ride). Unfortunately, some of these are frus- tratingly difficult, leading to the cre¬ ative use of language in ways that would make a sailor blush. Wackiness abounds in both charac¬ ter and level design. The colours are bright and garish, with a cartoony feel. The character design is comical, your main opponents being odd pur¬ ple pig thingies (there is a strange pig theme running throughout the game actually), and the many friendly char¬ acters you run into have not-too- bodgy amusing accents. Hardly a gaming revolution, but if you are looking for well crafted plat¬ forming action that combines elements of the old and new schools, Tombi 2 has enough depth and nice design touches to keep you entertained. ■ I The developers, Whoopee Camp, should be applauded for bringing us a sequel which doesn't re-hash the first game’s gameplay. Tombi 2 has been rebuilt from scratch. PIG-O-METER PLUS Quirky design. Lots of tasks to complete. MINUS Ibis is well-trodden gaming ground. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 84 78 83 84 * Weird enough to keep you platforming into the night. I ■ Sword Of The Berserk is based on the manga "Kenpuu Denki Berserk". seri aiised in Young Animal magazine. That’s why the characters are so good. dc reviews SWORD OF THE BESERkHH When it's close to deadline, Eliot Fish goes into the odd berserker rage... /!\ AVAIL ABU Now CATEGORY Slash ei* up PLAYERS 1 PUBLISHER Eidos PRICE MM RATING M15* SUPPORTS Vibration and Memory Init Button-mashing beat ’em ups rarely bother with plot. Usually, the aim of the game is simply to survive or make it to the end of a level to "rescue” some person or thing. It’s refreshing then to sit down in front of a game that attempts to provide you with a rich story from the opening sequence. Sword Of The Berserk is like watching a polygon- based adventure cartoon more than it is an action game. Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the problem lies. MEET THE DRAGON SLAYER Your character, "Cuts”, is the tall, dark and silent type. That is, until he whips out his 7-foot Dragon Slayer and cleaves everybody in his path into a variety of gibs. Once Cuts gets into the "swing” of things, he goes on a bit of an Arnie inspired berserker rampage. The developers, ASCII, obviously want¬ ed the action to be focused around the meaty swordplay of your character. Your Dragon Slayer dwarfs most of your enemies, and the quantity of blood that splatters around the screen is worthy of any B-grade horror flick. You have a few tasty moves at your disposal, plus a variety of secondary weapons to dispatch your enemies with, but there are some real problems with the core gameplay. For one, most of the environments you have to fight in are too enclosed, and you find your character unable to swing his sword properly without being stunned by clanging it into a wall. It’s silly that they give you such a big tasty weapon, and then shove you into tight environ¬ ments where you aren’t given the opportunity to really lash out. There are other weapons, like a wrist-cross- bow, throwing daggers and bombs, but these are not only limited in sup¬ ply, but clumsy to use when you get surrounded by enemies. If the controls were a tad more responsive, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but the action is really quite lacklustre, and it becomes a bit of an exercise in frustration try¬ ing to get your big lug to dispatch his foes with any kind of elegancy. There are also problems with the camera position in the environment when you’re in "action" mode. The perspec¬ tive sometimes cuts to an angle that looks cool but makes fighting extremely tricky - an age-old problem with 3D third-person action titles. Whilst the gameplay mechanics are bothersome, the actual cut-scenes are really well done. All the characters are quite stylish, the voice acting is good and the story is interesting enough to keep you watching the oodles of cut- scenes. As an animated cartoon on TV, Sword Of The Berserker would be quite fun to watch, but it seems they spent too long on the story and left the gameplay sequences for the work experience kid to program. There just isn’t enough to do. and when you’re left watching cut-scenes for up to ten minutes, you begin to wonder where the game is that you paid for. If you persist, there are some rewards in the form of the Prize Box, which fills with bonus options after you complete sections of the game. You can view the movies, look at character bios, even play against the bosses or select any stage you wish to replay - it’s just a shame that the gameplay isn’t that fascinating. There are some real problems with Sword Of The Berserk, but it still has a good story, characters you’ll care about, and some fun hacking and slashing. Just set your expectations low. ■ S>8>S>2>2>a> PLUS Pretty to look at. and a decent story to follow. MINUS Tb egameplay is seriously lacking. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 85 84 67 OVERALL 71 You may prefer watching the cutscenes to playing the game. 75 »HYPER 76 »HYPER TIMESTALKERS Kevin Cheung makes like Doctor Who and goestimestalking... Brought to you by Climax t/s Entertainment, who developed Alundra for the PlayStation and Landstalker on the Megadrive, there's no doubting that Timestalkers comes from a family of notable RPC breeding. As only the second RPC to grace the Dreamcast, there is a lot of expectation riding on this game. Timestalkers initially puts you in con¬ trol of a young warrior named Sword, who is dragged against his will into a strange land with no apparent escape. With numerous others having been dragged in both before and after him, Sword’s quest is to conquer the dun¬ geons in each section of the land in a bid to find a way out. As you move through the game, Sword will encounter other warriors who can join his party. boss. Only occasionally will you get a sub-quest, which requires you to do much the same thing anyway. Every battle is turn-based, where each group of combatants is located on their own grid on the screen. Ergo, good guys in the middle, and several teams of nasties to the left and right of them. At your disposal are different weapon and magical attacks, as well as special abilities like capturing the monsters in a very Pokemon fashion. If you’re familiar with the Climax style, you’ll recognise Timestalkers straight away with its vibrant fantasy- based settings, as well as the distinctly elven appearance of the main charac¬ ters. Beyond that, Timestalkers is a massive disappointment. The entire graphical package could pass off for an N64 game with its static and blurry low-res textures, which isn’t helped any further by the fact that the charac¬ ters are very plain and poorly animat¬ ed. What’s worse is that not a single word is uttered by anyone, drawing more attention to the poor music and implausible text-based dialogue (ie. badly translated from Japanese). At the heart of Timestalkers’ prob¬ lems, however, is the fact that the game is easy but time consuming which, without an engaging storyline to speak of, makes the game an exercise in tedi¬ um for experienced RPC fans. Fighting with the monsters can almost always be avoided by simply not walking in their vicinity. The story is also poorly thought out. Sword, for instance, is an unwilling hero who complains every time someone asks him for help. Given the uninspiring challenge of the game, it’s very easy to agree with him. Finally, there are the randomly generated maps that look bland and monotonous. Climax should have stuck to pre-pro¬ grammed maps that would’ve at least had better design and look. Ultimately, none of the components in Timestalkers have come through to make a solid product. It’s the worst RPC on any console since Holy Magic IS THIS YOUR FIRST CLIMAX? Essentially, Timestalkers is a dun¬ geon exploration RPC, largely inspired by games like Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and the RPC mode in the Tobal games. Alundra 2 on PlayStation, also by Climax, is identical. As you travel through the randomly generated dungeons, you can pick up items (which you sell in the town), fight monsters, and eventually defeat a final Century on the N64. But this is no big loss for Dreamcast fans: Evolution is an infinitely superior dungeon exploration RPC and that’s also available now. ■ IETEI PLUS Magic effects have their moments. MINUS Shockingly awful dungeon designs. Poorly translated dialogue. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 70 68 70 OVERALL 68 Of all the obscure Japanese RPGs to pick for local release, this was the most questionable. I POb Wipeout Fusion on the PlayStation 2 was looking awesome at E3. The solid, photo-realistic tracks and wicked design make this one of the strongest PS2 titles in development. reviews N GEN RACING Arthur Adam takes a look at the next generation and wipes out. / 7 \ MlftAKf; Now CMHNI: Racing PUVEH: 1-2 publisher Infogrames MCI: $79.95 RATINE: GO* SUPPORTS Mem card. Dual Shock Having utilised the office w Xerox to duplicate perfect copies of their buttocks, several members of the Wipeout team were given their marching orders. Shortly after, the banished mem¬ bers developed their own racing title, N Cen Racing (Next Generation Racing). Does it replicate gameplay, or is N Gen a fresh new beast? IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE... NO. IT'S ADATSUN! It isn’t difficult seeing certain aspects of NCR that resemble those of the Wipeout games. It’s fast, edge-of- the seat (at times) racing and follows the same pattern of precision competi¬ tion with a few weapons to boot. That said; don’t expect the same adrenalin pumping polish that Wipeout threw at you by the bucket load. There are some imperfections within NCR, which limit it in following its brethren into the realm of classic video games. Pilfering a few ideas from Gran Turismo, NCR sees you start off with a wad of money in your pocket. Not hav¬ ing the choice of blowing it on beer and women, you are forced to spend it on a jet plane. Of course, with the measly amount (in jet plane terms), you’ll have to purchase something that looks like a Datsun 120Y with wings. Fear not readers, for as you win races you’ll build up your kitty enabling you to hop into the seat of some jets with funky, ass-slapping engines. Initially, I was surprised at how slow the game played. It wasn’t a, ’My- Cod-I-don’t-know-how-that-corpse- got-in-my-trunk-officer’ kind of sur¬ prise, but a surprise nonetheless. You'll be dawdling about the skies like some hippie on loony weed. After being dragged through these tediously tardy races with a ’trainer’ jet, the next class of ’fighters’ will give you a right kick in the pants. This is where a small aroma of Wipeout leeks through. Zipping about tight corners, picking up boosts that slingshot you along quicker and having a rocket jammed up your tailpipe from the halfwit behind you are all too familiar. But again, even with these resemblences, the makeup of NCR isn’t as sophisticat¬ ed as the aforementioned. Firstly, because you’re way up in the air, the scrolling countryside can sometimes seem to crawl along. It’s only when you fly close to the ground or in- between valleys that a true sense of speed is attained. QANTAS ISN'T THE ONLY ONE THAT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD AT THE MOMENT... Quite frankly, the visuals of NGR aren’t anything special and some might go as far to say they’ve taken a serious beating from someone wielding an ’ugly’ stick. When close to the ground or mountainside, you’ll cop an eyeful of some of the biggest pixels this side of the Atari 2600. Along with this, the racing maps are barren and under detailed, as are the jet planes. There’s nothing that leaps out and screams, ’Hey, over here. Look at me!’ Give us some detail, something to look at. On the other hand, there are features in abundance to fiddle with in NGR. You can tweak your plane from the engines to aerodynamics. You can sell and buy planes, shoot a few rockets, earn flying permits, take part in championships, sin¬ gle races and the likes. These features coupled with well-balanced controls, enough types of jets to wipe out the China and groovy 2-million-beats-per- second techno music add some merit to the game. But alas, it’s as though we’ve seen this type of game before. NGR is compe¬ tent and you’ll get something from it if you’re into racers, but as a whole it just doesn’t manage to excite. ■ LIKEWOWOMETER 2 >£> PLUS Loads of features and can get fast and furious at times. MINUS Graphically underwhelming and not a constant’ sense of velocity. VISUALS SOUND GAMEPLAY 73 72 70 OVERAU | They should have called it Star Trek: The Next Generation Racing to sell a few more copies. 78 »HYPER byte size DISCWORLD NOIR PLAYSTATION As the title suggests, Discworld Noir delves into the seamy underside of Ankh Morpork, leaving behind the bright cartoony graphics of previous titles as film noir meets Terry Pratchett's brand of satire. Discworld Noir is an absorbing, and at times utterly frustrating game - although it must be said that I wasn’t born with what is commonly known as "adven¬ ture game fanboy logic". Playing as a private investigator named Lewton, this is a dark game, full of strange encounters and unexpected plot twists. Discworld Noir exudes atmos¬ phere. The music is subtle, but enchanting, and the graphics move from one dark film noir location to the next. Unfortunately, the game’s low resolution graphics lead to a lack of personality in the characters and settings - they’re a poor com¬ panion to the dialogue. The voice acting is of a high stan¬ dard, although J. Peterman wanna be Lewton takes a while to warm to (ain’t that always the way in these gritty tales of crime and hard drinking detectives), and the actor could have injected a lit¬ tle more charisma into the role. The heart of a good adventure game, however, is in a good plot, inter¬ esting characters and great dialogue, and in these depart¬ ments Discworld Noir doesn’t disappoint. The conversations are true to the wacky sensibility of previ¬ ous Discworld games, with plenty of puns and sarcastic one liners. Nothing much we haven’t heard before, but still good fun. After all, crusty first mates who burst into bouts of existential angst always help make for an interesting game. Discworld Noir is a must buy for Terry Pratchett fans, but be prepared for frustration if you don’t own a PSX mouse. CAM SHEA VlSUAlS 72 m GAME PI AT 79 1 GEKIDO: URBAN FIGHTERS PLAYSTATION Cekido is a beat ’em up in the tradi¬ tion of old scrollers like Streets Of Rage, with the addition of some ambitious fighting game elements and a dash of manga. There is some serious mayhem to be had here, as with a MultiTap, Cekido is one hellishly frantic button mashing exercise. There is a lot of room for improvement though. For starters, mrai: i-i _ H ttlSHH: Iwfogranies PRlCt $79J5 _ RATING M supports MultiTap. Dual Shock the animation and sound seem very below par. Executing kicks can some¬ times slide your character along the ground even if you're not meant to be moving, and if you make contact (which is sometimes very hard to judge) there is a pitiful lack of crunch¬ ing sound effects. This gives you the impression that you’re wandering through the streets laying into bags of wet bread, rather than hard as steel bad guys. There are, however, a tonne of moves to discover, with everything from fighting-game "throws" and combos to special moves for each char¬ acter. Playing with four friends in Arena Battle can be quite amusing, but the one or two-player Urban Fighters mode (where you play through with a story, wandering the streets beat 'em up style) is where the attraction of the game really lies. There are some nice moments, but you don’t need to know much more than to bash your buttons. It’s not the most polished product, but Cekido has a unique style and some good old mindless action. FRANK DRY IffllillRlIEl STAR OCEAN:SECOND STORY PLAYSTATION The understanding most main- streamers have of RPGs is a combina¬ tion of DSD/Ultima and a vague sense of Final Fantasy. The former they are unlikely to ever experience it if they already haven’t; and the latter is such cooked up Hollywood fare that they wouldn’t know a "real" console RPC if it hit them. Names like Secret of Mana and Wild Arms are completely lost on them. That’s where Star Ocean Second Story comes in, which genuine console RPC fans will flock to in droves; but which will be largely overlooked by the masses whose indifference and igno¬ rance of the genre has been usurping the place of quality RPGs for the last 5 years. No doubt, many of you can hear the bitter "it’s about goddamned time" seething through this very text. Star Ocean is the model of what every "real" console RPC should be. The setting is a mix of your character’s high technology with the picturesque natural environment of a far-off world you’ve been transported to. On top of the expected sub-quests, each individ¬ ual team member from your group can embark upon an independent mission of his or her own. This opens the path to around 80 possible endings. Also noteworthy is the unique battle system where you can interchange between real-time and turn-based controls. Finish that with the some of the most exquisite 2D artwork on the PlayStation, and it’s no wonder why Squaresoft of Japan are terrified of any RPC from Enix. Even Final Fantasy IX has changed its release date several times to avoid conflict with the long- delayed Dragon Quest VII. A pity the voice acting is a little grating, but you can’t have everything. At $49.95, this game’s a steal. KEVIN CHEUNG suucitchn .beat Cyberspace Invader DATA: identified wrist object NAME: Swatch .beat MATERIAL: aluminium DATA CONTAINED: local time, second time, alarm, timer, stopwatch functions, strange animations EXTRA DATA: features Internet Time ORIGIN: unknown, most probably Switzerland RSP $180. Avai lable at Centrepoint: The Swatch Store, Pitt St Mall (02) 9223 2996. Darling Harbour: The Swatch Store, Shop 261 Harbourside Shopping Centre (02) 9211 1748. And leading Department, Jewellery and Duty Free Stores around Australia. www.swatch.com > > > E N D 80 »HYPER ame bo\ 1942 DRIVER LE MANS 24 HOURS SPEEDY GONZALES: AZTEC ADVENTURE \JL/U 1 UUIU: Nov | CATEGORY Shoot 'Em Ip PRICE $49.95 K PUBLISHER Capcom FORMAT Game Roy Color only 1942 has finally found its way (%/ onto Nintendo’s portable, only 16 years after its arcade debut. Many things have changed since then - Eliot has abandoned the mullet as a hairstyle (hey, no m fair! - Ed), despite the appro- t , priateness for his name, and K k I’ve ditched my denim jack- m M et with the mad studs on m ^k the back (that’s better... heh heh - Ed), cos Disco Stu doesn't advertise. ^k The top down shooter genre has changed too. with bigger and better ^k graphics, and recently, the move into a 3D setting - Raiden and Raystorm being good examples respectively. Despite this. 1942 is undeniably a clas¬ sic. and a good Came Boy game, but I’m not convinced ^ 0 ofe that anyone \ will get a whole lot 1 out of it. The \ replayability 1 is very low, ■ since it 1 doesn't take long (a couple V of hours most) to beat the game, and the levels are all V kind of the same ■ The real opportu- nity for this title would have been linkup play, but alas, it’s not supported. By all means get this game if you loved it as a kid. but be warned - the age of the milk- bar is over. dSl^ew lllunFT li N ow UTECICI: ICtlU ^ CRTESBRV: Racing B, CATEGORY 7 latformer PRICE $49.95 MCE: $49.15 PRICE 49.95 mam-. laiayraiaes A HUB: lafafraaas unsoft IIIMtl: Ca«a loy Calar only FIRHJtl: Cana lay Calar aaly Wk FORMAT ame loy/Caao loy Color Who would ever have thought there was anything even remotely resembling car handling on the If the Came Boy is your only means of gaming, then Le Mans 24 Hours is a pretty decent racing There h< of Looney Speedy Cc is been a steady stream Tunes games, and nzales: Aztec Came Boy? Using the simplistic yet f effective top-down perspec- tive ala old classics like Spy Hunter. k Driver on the Came k Boy Color is a remark- ff ably enjoyable driving k game! Offering us the k same kind of options as k the PlayStation version, you take the role of an V undercover cop infiltrating a crime ring in the guise of a "driver"... y'know, the guy who drives the getaway car. W Steering your way through 39 peak-hour traffic, trying to Bf shake tailing cops, and trying not to total your car in the process is strangely addictive in this Game Boy i ncarnation. The screeching of your res and the manoeuvrability of your :ar is a delight, and you can have some pretty hair-raising chases throughout Miami. New York and Los Angeles. With over 30 missions in the Undercover mode alone, there’s enough here to keep you hap¬ pily trashing cars for hours. If they had included some kind of link cable mode, then this would have earned a few extra points... game to spend your money on. Obviously, the Came Boy’s weakest area would have to be racing games, as the hardware just can’t do the genre justice. So don’t expect this title to be worth playing over any racer you have on any other system. For the Came Boy Color however, this is pretty intense stuff. The speed, visuals, options and "feel’’ are all of a very high standard, and in fact, you’ll find yourself becoming pretty bleary-eyed fighting for a winning place in the races. There is some real challenge in this title. Race a championship, an arcade mode or go the Le Mans (which doesn’t really go for 24 hours, but it feels darn intense) with another 20 cars on the track. Visually, this title has squeezed quite a bit out of the Came Boy. looking better than some old NES games. The problem of the disappearing horizon is still there though, as it is in all Came Boy racers, although it’s nowhere near as problematic as it is in other titles. The tracks feel a little tight, and maybe they should have pulled the camera perspective back, but this is still a really solid title. Adventure is yet another mediocre instalment to chuck on the pile. Borrowing design elements from Mario Bros and Sonic The Hedgehog. Speedy Gonzales doesn’t manage to capture any of the gameplay from either of those classic games. This is nothing but an average platformer, which may look quite pretty, but offers nothing much more than some very mindless button pressing. In fact, the only times the game becomes a challenge is when it becomes annoyingly frustrating. Puzzles tend to be based around inhu¬ man timing instead of the need for some brain power. Visually, Speedy is ani- | mated \ really m *r well and | the back- 1 grounds 1 look lush, I but what a - shame that ^ the level designer < J ' they hired was an idiot. Andale, andale! FRANK DRY 6/10 7/10 7/10 4/10 www.wickedgames peed cable Internet can take you there. Get ready to gun it, because Optus @Home high-speed cable Internet is here. Up to 100 times faster than a 28.8K modem, Optus @Home gives you the latest online games at breakneck speed. Best of all, you get the fastest unlimited Internet access for a flat monthly fee, with intense multiplayer gaming at no extra charge. So check it out right now. Visit our Web site at WWW.optllshome.COm.au to sign up today. OPTUS @ Home 1800 504 504 The service will be available in Optus cabled areas in Sydney. Melbourne and Brisbane (for technical and commercial reasons not all homes can be connected). Optus@Home is a trade mark of Excite@Home Australia Pty Limited. OPH5287 A 82 »HYPER reverse engineering nfivmnuMia aa'xaAm The first time I heard the name Metal Cear Solid, I thought the age of cyber erotica was truly upon us. What kind of deluded Japanese mind had concocted such an odd title? Hideo Kojima and his marvellous psyche were mutually responsible for the inception of this strategic action fest with diabolical game- play. He is the reason I spent four nights straight shunning society, disturbing the neighbours and refusing to brush my teeth. This game was almost addictive enough to warrant a designated area of Kings Cross where people could anonymously play Metal Cear Solid for hours without fear of parental intervention. Unbeknownst to many, this was not Mr. Snake’s first pixe- lated adventure, for the world had been saved twice before... IS THAT A SNAKE IN YOUR POCKET OR...? Solid Snake first slithered from the slimy hollow of Kojima’s skull way back in 1987. In the same way Monkey Kong was misconstrewed to read Donkey Kong in the West (possibly a myth - Ed), the same silliness has taken place here. Think about it. Solid means hard, and hard means bad. See the connection? It's just a shame there are so many perverts out there willing to make fun of a hero. By the same token, liquid means water and water is cool (and occasionally rid¬ dled with Criptosporidium)... hence your even less tastefully named Liquid Snake. But who cares? When you have an erection fighting an ejaculation, not even Brian Harridean could conceal a smirk. While his name was ridiculous, his mission was simple. Solid Snake, freshest recruit to the all American task force, Fox Hound, was to infil¬ trate a heaviliy fortified South African base with little more than his bare hands, and nine frames of animation. Whilst holidaying in hell, Snake man¬ aged to rescue Fox Hounds captured agent, Cray Fox, which he did quite stylishly. Old Cray had been sent in following NATO’s discovery of the enormous threat to Yankee domina¬ tion, Outer Heaven. Apparently some¬ body had gotten hold of a Beta copy of MechWarrior, and designed a nuclear equipped walking battle tank accordingly. Now most of us would simply like to stomp around in one of those babies during the peak hour traffic on Pitt Street, but Outer Heaven had far more devious plans. As with real life, the source of evil came from but one voracious madman. Plunging his creative will into world domina¬ tion, Big Boss couldn’t be bothered thinking of a decent name for himself and deserved death on this fault alone. Of course, the fact he was also the head honcho at Fox Hound, responsible for sending the inexperi¬ enced Snake in the first place didn’t cull any sympathy from our boy either and that’s when he got mad. In an attempt to upstage Jesus. Snake saved us all from the terror by killing Big Boss in a firey display of mass destruction that puts the WTO protests to shame. Outer Heaven burned to the ground, the world was safe and Snake became more heavily decorated than an English Christmas tree... BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! But Christmas doesn’t last for long (except in Target), and Snake soon hurtled back into action for Metal Cear 2: Solid Snake. Ever the consci¬ entious watchdog, NATO noticed somebody was audacious enough to be building another weapons depot in Zanzibar, central Asia. Evidently they weren’t too quick off the mark to quell this one, but who can blame them. After all, Zanzibar comes last in the phone book. A closet masochist, Snake agrees to penetrate the fortress in search of answers, retribution, and a bit of good old fashioned biffo. The whole mess involved stolen scientists, oil profits and killing by the truck load. Gamers were pleased. Having remembered to wear his thermal underwear into battle. Big Boss had survived to perpetuate the series just long enough for the developers to think up a new enemy. Snake was tired, frustrated and just a tad emo¬ tional when he found Big Boss to be still very much alive and scheming, so he killed him. Hey, we’ve all had one of those days. YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY These two neat little adventures were prim¬ itive, yet fun. Despite the crummy (or is that grainy?) graphics, they are still worth playing today. If nothing else, those who subscribe to the (apanese school of dodgey English translations should get a good belly laugh or eight. You have to fire up your emulator and load your Rom for this one: Snake waits cautiously for the guard to doze off so he can sneak past unscathed. But how can he tell whether the guard is alert or not when he is so miserably devoid of detail? Lucky for Snake the guard is given to talking to himself regardless of his level of consciousness. "I'm getting sleepy...” yells the guard, throwing in the tell tale elipses, shortly before revealing "I feel asleep!” Marvellous stuff. 83 »HYPER 84 »HYPER versus made Brett Robb Virtual Reality - or VR - is escapism. Before technology, armchair enthusiasts could only sit back and watch their sporting or action hero do their job and dream of doing the same. No longer is this the case. Now any sweatpants-wearing, beer-chugging, kebab¬ eating console owner can BE his/her sporting hero minus the huge contracts and adoration of fans. No longer must we strive to achieve, now that we can all be legends in our own lunchbox, or X-Box to put it accurately. And no matter how much Eliot may try to convince me that it’s okay to jump on Cam’s head I know that it’s wrong and that coins will not in fact be the result. VR is safe from political correctness where it is not okay to rip off anoth¬ er’s arms or call somebody a "censored”. And things like Virtual Pets don’t die - and if they do it’s no big deal because you can just design a cuter one. But the greatest thing about VR right now is the anonymity. Nobody knows your true gender, race, lifestyle or grotesque form. Virtual Reality produces tolerance and harmo¬ ny... provided you’re not in the same room. But there are drawbacks. Technology is slow to catch up to what we truly can imagine in the future. Why must we be detached from the world that is on our screens? How long must we wait until we are fully immersed in the game? When will control pads and keyboards be replaced by neural implants? Not bloody soon enough I say! But the day will come when the line between reality and digitised entertainment will be blurred and we will be able to escape the drudgeries of real life... for simulated drudgery. ■ 4 ; tf ■! 1 * rEoul-u l“hE vErdicI"! ««««« For now at least, Actual Reality gets the thumbs up from us at Hyper. If you haven’t given it a try then we suggest you do. Put down your games for a while and get some sun into you before winter really sets in - if it hasn’t already. Games are not everything - although sometimes it can seem that way. I repeat, Lara Croft is not a real person. That girl eyeing you off in the classroom/office/nightclub/fast-food chain is! I hate to sound like an old man, but get out and live a little. Whilst games are great fun they cannot replace true-life experiences, except in the case of Arthur - he’s about as much fun as a cold shower. If anything we can only hope that virtual reality does become a socially conscious exercise and does not blur the lines of reality so greatly that we cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not. Or even worse, make us loathe life so much that we depend on VR. In the end, games should be a break from life, not something that consumes it completely. Word. peruflL rE We’ve all seen the ads. You can feel the wind on your face because there really is wind on your face. You can feel the ball because you’re actually holding it. But what does actual reality really have to offer? Well, as great as virtual reality is, there is no such thing as virtual exercise that has a real effect on your health. You can’t really have a virtual social life and get virtually drunk with your virtual friends down at the virtual pub. Sure, there’s virtual sex, but what about virtual love? There is seldom a need to upgrade peripherals in actual reality and life will run at the same pace at all times with little sign of slow-down in frame rates. Just about all situations in actual life are multiplayer too, and some of the AI is quite advanced. I said some of it. Heck, there are still a few aspects of actual reality that Bill Gates doesn’t control yet - so get out there and play hard because it wont last long. And do you really think that the nice people at Temco bother to draw anything underneath those bikinis in Dead or Alive? Of course not. Remove the bikini and you have a roughly shaded polygon that covers a wire-frame. Think about that next time you’re ogling a game character and remember that she’s just a rather shapely coat- hanger underneath. So yes, actual reality does have a thing... or two... going for it. umjuvju sler r ost\i