IM.J n ■= =»;<H 1 ■i-'i L'i =1 3 HJiU ENEMY TERRITORY: CHI/VKE WARS 0hfJlLjFTT57^m^S^^^RMDrity INSIDB \i Ionline only.Iteam based.Ireally f-ing coolI ^ ZFF DAVIS MEDIA Display UnUJanuay 17 THIS IS WHAT IT TAKES TO ACHIEVE VICTORY. For performance that leaves your buddies’ systems chugging in the dust, play Call of Duty® 2 on a PC powered by an Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition. To check out a free live demo of Call of Duty® 2, visit www.intel.com/go/gaming CALLDUTYg ©* 2005 Intel Go^ration. Intel.' Intel Inside, the Intel'ln^^ogo, ang^jjP ^^^tea demarks £r registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in ^he United Stat^ diner counlries, ©^^05 Activision- Publishing, Inc. Actlvlsidn and Cali of Duty 2 are registered trademarits of Activision Publishing, Ifib^The ratings icon is a registered trademark of the Entertainment Software Association, Wl rights reserved. Ail trademarks are the M^perty of their r^pective owners. wKmM .0 Forge alliances with players from around the world Discover the secret origins of Vana’diel Emhark on missions while facing fierce heastmen THE COMPLETE ORIGINAL GAME PLUS EXPANSION PACKS FOR ENTER THE EXPANDED WORLD OF VANA’DIEL with everything you need on one easy-to-install DVD for Windows* SQUARE ENIX^ pyp www.piayonline.com .'V' Published by Square Enix, lnc..\:^ CtOOi-ZOOS SQUARE ENIX CO . ITD. All Rlgiits Reuncd TAI« Oss>G" bV VgsnUiia Amano. FINAL fANTASY. . ItTOAMASIER PlAYQNlllK,Ui(PliyOnlif«li>go.mSeOfTN£ZllAai,l«lVANAm«ien?g>4l»iM inaemirts o! Snua'C Enn Co.. Lid. THE CHAINS C^PROMAIHIA. SQUAm ENIX and iMSdiun EnK lc«o v< Uidomaiks ol Sown Enix Co., Lid, « 1 998-2003 ACCESS CO , LTD. A« Rljlm flsMivM. The latmji Kan Im lradsiiiatkDlltieEijl!italnnnmScltwsA!socUtwjn.Sot1wteplattormlogo"’ati()0)EMAJM<. EXEC RISKS STUDIO WITH SsooMit deal Share your movies and watch others at: a tiiemo<vtesgame.com ACliyiSION, activision.com »l!SiARSi Customize looks and deal with tantrums and egos. ^ blowing r 0 at 0 5 © esdfPaH f>i ■ ©fta»ue> 0 ® •• ©W-ch 0 © erMMM 0 ©"K9 (>i ■ ©Dr- ©@ [ @ 8h— 0 Dell recommends Windows'^ XP Media Center Edition Don't let the polished exteriors fool you. Beneath lurks raw power in its purest form. Now you can play with savage fury, get the bad guy before he knows what hit him and unleash the twisted gaming genius within. The Intel" Pentium*’ D Processor with new dual-core experience processings will take your XPS'“ 600 desktop into another realm. The scorching graphics and screaming sound capabilities will kick your senses into overdrive. And your play-it-safe side will value the 1-Year Limited Warranty* and l-YearXPS Warranty Support, featuring support from specially trained XPS technicians. Readyto run your opponents into the ground? Experience XPS today. 'intsl* Pentium* D Processor with new dual-core processing is available as an opbon for Dell' XPS 600 desktops. IT'S A To start your XPS experience, call our XPS-trained sales specialists at 1-888-617-9680 or visit dell.com/cgw For hearing/speech impaired: 1-877-DELL-TTY (toll-free) 5907 ^ CONTENTS JflNUflRV 2006 IBBUE #EBB 14 Editorial A great man once said: “Fool me once.. .shame on you. Fool me. ..you can't get fooled again." Our equally bewildered boss has this In mind as he ponders the Star Wars Galaxies "reboot.” 16 LEttara You don’t send us flowers, you don't write us love songs. ..but you do complain to us about everything on the planet. Thanks! 68 1... I. I J . I .', JUt 4. 1 . ' . , . I . ■ COVER STORY ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS How does Quake make the jump from claustrophobic corridors to the great outdoors? This month’s cover-story scoop blows the doors off of Enemy Territory: Quake l^ars and examines why it’s more than just a sci-fi-slanted Battlefield 2 killer. 20 Radar Curious about what happened at Blizzard's first- annual BlIzzCon? Want to see what goes on at Battlefield 2 boot camp? Wondering what games to get for the little ones in your life? We tell you all this and more in this month's Radar section. 81 RBViEWB it’s shooter month at CGW, as we deliver the goods on Quake 4. Call of Duty 2. F.E.A.R., and Star Wars Batilefront II. Plus, we gush over Civilization IV. the sequel to one of our favorite strategy games. 82 Civilization IV 84 The Movies 88 Shattered Union 88 NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 90 Earth 2160 90 Sniper Elite 92 Star Wars Batilefront II 94 Call of Duty 2 96 F.E.A.R. 98 Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico 100 Quake 4 102 Heroes of the Pacific 1 0 > COMPLfTER GAMING WORLD COMPUTER CAMHUC WORLD QIIQIS 106 Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None 30 Battlefield 2 94 Call of Duty 2 50 City of Villains 82 Civilization IV 102 Combat Mission Campaigns 90 Earth 2160 68 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 96 F.E.A.R. 24 Half-Life 2 40 Half-Life 2: Aftermath 105 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 1 02 Heroes of the Pacific 36 Hitman: Blood Money 106 Law & Order Criminal Intent 84 The Movies 88 NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 100 Quake 4 103 Rag Doll Kung Fu 88 Shattered Union 90 Sniper Elite 92 Star Wars Battlefront II 22 Star Wars Galaxies 26 SUN: Soul of the Ultimate Nation 48 Supreme Commander 98 Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico 20 World of WarCraft 116 Torn VB. BrucE Can you believe the guys have been bashing each other up for four whole years? Happy anniversary, Tom and Bruce! REVieWB tcontinuEd) 103 Rag Doll Kung Fu 105 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 1 06 Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None 106 Law & Order Criminal Intent 108 Tech Ready to go on a holiday hardware shopping spree? This month, we test out some of the newest (and some of the strangest} peripherals, Whether you need wireless speakers or a keyboard with removable keys, we've gotcha covered. 122 ScnrchEd Earth All good dogs go to heaven— but you get to live a hell on Earth. CGWJEFF.1UP.COM Could it be true? Is CGW editor-in-chief Jeff Green two-timing on WOW with 2003 Coaster of the Year Star Wars Galaxies? FPSADDICTS-CLUB.1UP.COM This one's for all the Counfer-Sfri/ce and Quake junkies out there. With more than 1,500 members and counting, the FPS Addicts club has no shortage of eager opponents. TOONUP.1UP.COM Are you an aspiring cartoonist? Check out Toon UP, 1 UP.com's official community comics blog, for a chance to get your name out there! CGW.1URC0M <11 As CLOSE TO WAR AS you'd EVER WANTtoget ■^Official XboxJ/lagazine Infinity Ward returns with more cinematic intensity and chaos than ever before, in World War ll's most climactic battles. Join your squad and choose your single-player missions, or go online for intense multiplayer action. www.CALLOFDUTY.coM xeox360 ACliyiSION activision.com itc.WmjiMi M Ctll ol PclY art itfSltiM liidetnaikr ol AtKrWwi PuDlisliitt, IK. Allrigliti rtMrvid. D<vit»»td ty miinity Wtr4. HiUMtll, Uoi, IMi MO, and tilt lOoi (marks of Hicrotoll Cttpotatln di ttx U.S. iMAr olker cocntjiis. Pintiim, Initt and Iht Initl Insidt loto are Iraltnarks or rtqisltred Iradtmarb d Inlet Corpwilion « ds nlrits. KVIDI*. IW KVIOI* Logo and The Way ll’s Meant lo be PItred logo are leglsleted Iradeinaits and/oi Irademaiks ol NViSIt Corporallon in Uia IMIed Slates and other etnark of the tnlerlainmentSolliuare association. PC CD-ROM logo (bend TKiCMh 2004. AH other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their leipective owners. Pvt--: ■'A. A.!;. ' r 1 V i I Ini 1 Ul 1 1 lUl 1 1 1 t Blood Mild language mj r S STAFF SmELLE LIKE BRNTHR star Wars Galaxies to fans: OMG! You're right! Our game stinks! ' my old friend ANNIE HALL USED TO SAY, » “Well, la de da. La de da.” This was my first reac- hearing about the big changes coming to Star Wars Ga/ax/es, Sony Online’s massively disappointing MMORPG, which launched two and a half years ago and has been bumming out gamers ever since. That “la-de*da” is meant to convey pleasant sur- prise. Because what we have here is the rare occa- sion of a game publisher admitting to the world, “We blew It,” and then doing something about it. Without f ii getting into the details, which you can read about inside this issue, Sony has essentially decided to "reboot" the game, giving players an entirely different experience — this time with fun addedi It’s way too early to assess whether it will work or not, but here’s a thumbs-up to Sony Online for at least acknowledging the problem and trying to fix it. Of course, Sony’s primary motivation is less a selfless desire to please fans and game journalists than it is to keep making money and not lose more potential players to WOW and other MMOs. But still. If any game has a right to be better than it is, it’s Star Wars Galaxies. So thank goodness Sony is giving it another try— even at the risk of alienating the existing player base {composed largely, one would assume, of masochists) that has stuck with it all this time. The larger issue for CGW is how we cover online games like this that go through massive changes — or even smaller changes introduced in patches. Do we review them again? Do we abandon the notion of one "definitive review” and keep revisiting them over time? How, indeed, do you judge a game that is essentially never finished? It’s mysteries such as these that truly make my job a pain in the freakin’ tush...err, I mean, a lot of fun. What would Yoda do? / JEFF GREEN editor-in-chief Now Playina: CallofDuly2. BaWefield2. Civ4 lUP.com Blog: cgwjeff.1 UP.com CGW SPECIAL OPS RYAN scon EDITOR (REVIEWS) Class: 14lh level Rogue/Wizard Role Roll: +10 to hit; 1d6+2 damage Bear: Thundering Staff +2; Eye of Vecna; Cloak of Protection +3 Special Ability: Sneak Attack +Ad6; Lightning Bolt SHAWN ELLtOn EDITOR (PREVIEWS) Class: Low Role: Played out Gear: High Special Ability: Tofu tough talk, risky Jenga tugs Now Playing: CallafDuly2‘, l^st Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives lUP.com Blog: egnishawii, lUP.com MICHAEL JENNINGS ART DIRECTOR Class: Stealth Role: Support, Demolition Gear Mind bullets Special Mility: Levitation Now Playing: REAR lUP.com Blog: cgwJennings.1URcom Now Playing: Nerdy tabletop RPGs lUP.com Blog: cgw-ryan.1UPcom DISC PRODUCER Class: Hacker Role: Reconnaissance Gear Overcoat, shades, cell phone Special Ability: Bend time/dodge bullets Now Playing: The Matrix: Path ofNeo, Star IVa/s Balllelront II 1UP.com Blog: logans_run,1UPcom 31. ZIFF DAVIS MEDIA" EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT Editor-In-Chief v'etf Gr.j+'i Managing Editor Knslen S^lore Edrtor Hyjti Scoll Editor Shnwn Elliott Disc Producer Logan Parr DESIGN CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Loyd Cji'it. Irirn Chick. RoOed Coltey, Jason Ooss, Bruce Geryk Vice President and EdiloKel Director John [Javison Group Creallve Director S.ihon Co' copy DESK Copy Chief Tcit Edwards Copy Editor Grrin Ford Copy Editor Susie OcHs PRODUCTION Senior Production Manager Anno Marie Miguel Production Manager Mnrxa Brent CIRCULATION Consumer Marketing Director of Retail Sales f'— TERRITORY MANAGERS AND ACCOUNT EXECS GAMING ACCOUNTS Northwest Regional Sales Director Aniy Mshra Account Executive Brent Martyn Southwest Sotillit'rn Crililornia and Amaita Regional Solos Director Losie C. Gatfand Account Executive Hita KImo East J.. 'tR. CO. CT, DE. FU. QAk O, IN. KS, KY. lA MA. ME. M, AW. Account Executive Jessica Repack CONSUMER ACCOUNTS Senior Director of Coiisumer Advertising Solos Marc Callison West Regional Sales Director Laura Hill East Regional Soles Director Bruce Kaplan Account Executive Je^-ic.! Bcii'nil Automotive - Detroit Regional Sales Manager Kr m StubUefeld Promotions Manager W.;n:iy DotKihue Senior Advertising Coordinator Tipler Utibelohde Administrative Assistant Lyrm Fortunato Sales AsBlstnnt liffany Oii 1UP.COM EdItor-ln-Chlol Sam Keniwiy Senior Manager of Client Services Alex Jakovleski Senior Manager of Ad Operations Adam Cany Manager of Ad Operations Str-vun Ng Audience Development Manager Ndpadon Wongpakdas MARKETING Senior Director Roy Le iclor Roy Ledd.T Jlreolor May Tong 3f Jd'ion Fi^enfllds ._....,or Vanessa Alvarado Marketing Graphic Designer Drow Hathaway To oontBCI SolM A AdrarUsUig. plooM uD (416) S47-m0 ricoiuuin. at iiuuriiii t-rv vv. Uiarairino fiSSrSw S Ziff Davis Intcmell SENIOR VICE PRESIDENTS Jasmine Alexander (Toctmoiogv ft Salas Oporations) Kenneth Bench (CorponiKi S.fe) Jim Loudorhack (Editoiial D.reclor. Inlernel) Angelo Mondarano (Sa'vs and Marketing, Intemell Martha Schwartz (Costem SoWlons Grajp) Elda Vale (Pc>s.:.)rciv?,<a’kui imeSgence & CcxpevalG Marketing) VICE PRESIDBKTS Ira Becker llntcrnel) Aiden Colie (CTO, 2rff Dnv« Inlomet) Bill Danlhor (Ops and Busirmss Development. Game Group) John Davison (Editorial Diructer, Game Group) Sara DeCarlo (Consumer M.Trkolmg ft DataCoso Management) Aaron Goldberg (Market &p^) Barry Harrigon (interret) KrisQn Holmes (intematom Michael Kiieger (Market Experts) Rick Lehrbaum (Internet) Carloa Lugo (Prrrdiiction Eric Lundquist (EcWor-iri-Clnnl, eWfEK) Chris Maglnn iim'jrnet) Jim McCabe (PCMsgaWro) Scott McDaniel (^ies, Game Group) Paul O’Reilly lEvent Marketing Group) Ellen Poarlman Ecitor-in ChiS. C/0 frisrghl) ~ seta (Human Resources) Sutton (inlBrnot Audience DevetopmonI) Volth (EnlHrpnso Group PubTshing Director) /lla (Event Mjikcitmg Group) ndndy Zone (Corporate; Coriiniutne.Hions) IT West Coast. Senior Technical Analy^ Bin Schmelzer Desktop Administrator Nek KYmtcr Stephen Stephen Monica Vila (Event 1 4 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Visit www.esrb.org for updated rating information. yeaiia.5eKj Pre-Drder your copy today and RECEIVE THE GAUCiVZ BONUS PACK WWW.GALCIV2.CDM mM ISSUE 258 LETTERS WTF? OMG! STFU. NOOB! KTH)^BYE. EMPIRE STRIKES OUT Sony Online Entertainment ripped me off, along with the rest of Star IVars Galaxies’ fans. In November, it sold us the Trials of Obi-Wan expan- sion. New planet. Mustafar! New loot to enhance our professions! Personally, as a creature handler, 1 was interested in a creature handler necklace that would allow me to tame more powerful pets. Then, the day after the expansion's release, SOE and LucasArts announced that soon, my profes- sion, along with many others, will no longer exist. They knew for months that professions would be eliminated (posts on their boards say they’ve been working on this for over a year) but still advertised loot that would help those same professions and got us to buy a useless expansion for $30. Adding insult to injury, the creature handler necklace never even appeared in the game. Isn’t that fraud? Last I checked. SOE isn't answering any posts about players wanting their money back. I know I do. Kelly Kirchner This, unbelievably, is one of the more polite e-mails we've gotten regarding the big Star Wars Galaxies switchover — and we've been buried in 'em since the news broke. For the record, Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts did offer a refund to anyone with a Galaxies account in good standing who purchased the Trials of Obi-Wan before November 3. On the other hand, once you get past the part that puts years of your character's progress down the tube, the Ga/ax/es-to-be is actually worth a second look (see story on page 26). CIVIL UNREST I understand the need to cut costs, but what's with game packaging nowadays? I was irritated when they started swapping CD jewel cases for cardboard sleeves that didn't fit in my CD storage slots. I’m furious now. With Civilization IV (great game, by the way), I didn’t even get the irritating cardboard sleeve! I got an insulting, bland CD envelope. What's worse is that I don’t even get a manual anymore; I get another CD-ROM in another witless blank envelope, and that’s supposed to be my manual. Mark Fischer Should we tell Mark that we're shipping our February CD-ROMs inside origami swans? OPEN WINDOWS I keep hearing about how Mr. Gates wants Vista to be a gamers’ paradise. Pardon my skepticism, but isn't this the same guy who prevented develop- ment of the much-anticipated Halo 2 for the PC? Here’s a bit of advice: Put together a proper DOS emulator for old games in Vista. Ah, the glory days of EMM386 and HIMEMSYS. Punks today don't know how good they have it, not having to juggle separate boot-up floppies for each game. I. Hayes What he said. I, PATCH I'm beginning to disagree with your reasoning on not reviewing patched games. When it comes down to it, I’m less interested in the game I get from a retailer than I am in the game that I end up playing with its available patches. Really, who doesn't have Internet access these days? We can debate the “ship now, patch later" mentality till we're blue in the face, but the fact remains that every game is patched sooner or later, and if a patch significantly improves or enhances a game, why not say so? I’m not sug- gesting that you rereview games after each and every patch, but why not add a paragraph or two about how the latest (at press time) patches alter products and factor that into the final review scores? Rather than misleading readers, it gives us the whole story. K.L. Reviews editor Ryan Scott chimes in: Not all patches are bad. But we believe they shouid address unforeseen technical issues (such as videocard driver stability problems or very rare bugs) or supply bonus postrelease content, instead of fixing fundamentally broken games that get rushed out the door (case in point: Ubisoft announced Far Cry’s first patch in the very same press release that confirmed the game's gold shipping status). Here's something Tip; Shoot at EB Games Visit our Counter- players named doesn’t care Strike server V “player” for easy about PC gamers. (MenOnAMission) points. Buy my used PC for obscenrty-free MAIL ^ BYTES iL,- — Cromanion games, bitches! fragging. — MammaJamma — ^ThreeDayRespawn to chew on: Console developers have to get it right the first time, so what makes PC developers any different? That said, turn to our new Next Level page, which was specifically created to examine major patches, fan-made mods, and other postrelease goodies. PRICE CHECK, AISLE 2 I’m considering buying a videocard that 1 saw in CGW. Problem is, I can’t find it anywhere for the low price you list in the Tech section. Are you making these numbers up? Alan Diep Penny-pinching tip of the day, Alan: Try www.shopping.com (where we get most of our pricing). SAY IT LOUD, SAY IT PROUD! Confession Is good for the soul. And while we may harbor some doubts as to wheth- er our readers actually have such a thing as a soul, we encourage you to get what- ever is bothering or pleasing you off your chest by writing to cgwIettersSziffdavis. com. You’ll be glad you did. Send your caption to cgwletters@ziffdavis.com with the phrase ‘Tastes like gibs" in the subject line for a chance to win Quake 4 and this quick dinner solution. 1 6 > COMPLfTER GAMING WORLD Hear to Believe creative Motherboard audio just doesn't measure up. Sound Blaster X-Fi'“ delivers the power of an CPU dedicated solely to audio, providing up to 40%* more frames per second while immersing you in a sphere of sound with 9 virtual speakers over standard stereo headphones. Upgrade your PC audio to Sound Blaster X-Fi for the most thrilling gaming audio ever! You with Sound Blaster X-Fi Them with Motherboard Audio niem.PU/NEO' '02005 Creative Technology Lid. Al! other brands are trademarks or regisiered trndoniarks of their respectivu holders. ' Based on periormanco insiing in Baillofieid 2 Wield the weapons of the mightiest warrior-heroes in the first historical strategy game to let you fight from the front lines. Command an army on the field, lead an invasion fleet to enemy lands, and fight alongside your troops at the hour of crisis to turn the tide of battle. EMPIRES RISE AND FALL BUT HEROES LIVE FOREVER. WWW. RISEAND FA LLGAME.COM t Blood Violence . Cft>MIDWAY BLIZZARD TAKES ANAHEim _.cqspi.AYAs wow expansion “announced” at first-ever fan convention ‘Hissed up as t 'te Bllzzarti ch ♦o'^eWng tj, i\c Far, Far Awray... Sfar l^ars Galaxies, one-time CGIV Coaster of the Year, gets a major reboot. But did SOE get it right this time? BY THE TIME THAT BLIZZCON— Blizzard Entertainment’s first fan conven- tion — finally got underway on October 28, the company’s biggest announcement was already old news, thanks in part to one blabber- mouth magazine editor (ahem) who inadvertently let some of the news slip out on his blog. Yes, World of WarCraft: The Burning Ctvsade, the offi- cial expansion to Blizzard's megabit, was no real surprise by day one of the show. That didn’t stop 7,800 faithful fans, who paid $120 a pop to attend, from screaming in excitement as the details were officially confirmed. (The biggest cheer went up for raising the level cap to 70.) Also not a surprise is what the company did not announce: anything new regarding the Diablo or SfarCraff franchises. Sorry, kids, Blizzard focuses on one game at a time — for now it’s still WOW. For those willing to wait in line a couple hours, Blizzard set up a giant network of PCs where you could sit down for 1 5 minutes with the expansion-in-progress and play as a newbie blood elf. Long lines were the order of the day at the sold-out event, as the Anaheim Convention Center was snaked with crowds of people waiting for their chance to play in a WOW: Battlegrxjunds tournament, check out StarCraft: Ghost on the Xbox, and, yes, buy Blizzard products. (“LineCon” was one anonymous Blizzard employee’s joking description of the event.) The big lure for some fans were the freebies. All attending WOW players got a free pet baby murloc — the only time such a perk would ever be made available. As expected, the cards were up on eBay within hours, going for hundreds of dollars, while enraged nonattendees spammed Internet message boards with complaints. The most fun for many of the fans and Blizzard folks was at the scheduled panels, where the game designers gathered to discuss in detail various aspects of the WOW universe, such as lore/quest design. While the Blizzard designers held their own onstage, the fans themselves stole the show during the Q&A sessions by asking the designers impossibly dorky, often righteous, and sometimes angry questions. Assorted WOW geeks stepped up to complain about what was wrong, unfair, or unjust about their particular character or class. For the most part, it was fun, with everyone taking the ribbing in good humor and loud roars of approval or boos accompanying every comment. But the highlight by far was the guy who stepped up to the mike in a full murloc out- fit — holding a stuffed baby murloc in one hand and a sign with the "no" symbol over the words “mutioc slavery" in the other — who launched into a hilarious tirade about being tired of having “his people” exploited and abused by Blizzard. “You call it a quest,” he yelled, “I CALL IT GENOCIDE!" Waving the stuffed baby murloc in the air, he screamed, "This is my son you are killing!" This, friends, is exactly why gamers will never fit in with the rest of the world. Jeff Green No justice, no peace for this mouthy reptile. ▼ O FFICI Al. S INTERVIEW WITH THE MURLOC TRISTAN POPE. A WOW FAN AND filmmaker, nearly stole the show at BlizzCon— he used the convention as a forum for protesting against “murloc slavery.” We caught up with him after the show to see how his campaign was going. CGW: Why muiiocs? What’s so special about them? Don't quillboars need saving, too? And what about the crocolisks? Tristan Pope: Why murlocs? I believe that is apparent as evidenced by Blizzard’s new campaign at BlizzCon. Instead of making them a part of the world, perhaps as a play- able race, they hand out the children of slain murlocs in so-called adoptions— aka slavery! Murlocs have been the brunt of every joke and at the bottom of every food chain since the world of Azeroth came to be. Why? Sure, quillboars, crocolisks, succubi, and most undead all need saving. But we can only take one step at a time. What we are trying to do here is take a step in the right direction and have all races unite and stand up for their rights against this monarchy called Blizzard. CGW: Baby murlocs are now going for about $200 on eBay. How does this hiake you feel? TP: It makes me wish I bought a few of ’em. I mean.. .to save them from the horrid act of slavery auctionsi We are regressing a couple hundred years here. Just watch — a few years from now, Blizzard will be compensating the families with the same money they made sell- ing them, although the money will come from the less fortunate! CGW: Have you ever killed a murloc in IVOW? TP: Did OJ’s glove fit? But as a representa- tive of the murlocs, sometimes it is neces- sary to kill murlocs that are trying to terror- ' Ize the masses. There will always be rotten eggs. Unfortunately, we have to fend for ourselves because Blizzard won't help us. I believe they hope for us to wipe ourselves out. We have even heard of murlocs being planted into our society by Blizzard with that intent. But we are a strong race and will not give in to the pressure. In the real world, Tristan Pope is a film- maker working in the burgeoning machinima movement. You can see samples of his work, including some WOW movies, at www.craftingworlds.com. m\fj II iprr*^ t 91 5TRR U^RRS ERLRXIE5: 5PECIRL EDITION Many Bothans died to bring us this preview SECOND THOUOHTS the Force had certainty gotten stronger with SIVG over the past two-and*a* half years (thanks in large part to the Jump to Lightspeed space expansion), the underlying game mechanics still stank like Wookiee breath. But this past November’s sweeping changes fix all that — and while the dark side still clouds our true feelings on the revamp (check out our next issue for an unprecedented CGW rereview), we have five reasons for you to give this much- maligned MMORPG a second shot. / Ryan Scott ^ REVISION IS NOTHING NEW TO Star Wars fans — at this point, it’s pretty much expected. Legions of fans cried foul over the numerous alterations to the classic Sfar Wars films, and now they get to deal with a different kind of change in the form of Sony Online Entertainment's recent Star Wars Galaxies revamp. You already know our take: Sfar Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided claimed CGI/V’s Coaster of the Year award for 2003. ..and while THE FORCE HfiD GOTTEN STRONGER WITH SWGOUER THE PAST FEW VERRB, BUT THE UNDERLVING GRfTlE mECHRNICS STILL STHNK LIKE WOOKIEE BRERTH. WHO'S SONNH FLV IT, KID? VOIP As CGW senior editor Darren Gladstone puts it, "In SWG, you aren't Luke Skywalker... you’re the guy who says, 'Your tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker.”’ In short: SWG really didn’t make you matter. Not so anymore — the opening tutorial (now narrated by C-3PO) throws you into the thick of things Immediately, as Han and Chewie rescue you from an Imperial prison ship and guide you through the initial batch of objective-based missions. Boba Fett, Darth Vader, and other Sfar Wars mainstays show up early on, mak- ing the universe that much more in tune with the Sfar Wars mythos and your role that much more significant. Having 30-odd professions to choose from can be pretty daunt- ing — so now everything’s boiled down to nine iconic professions: Jedi, bounty hunter, smuggler, officer, commando, spy, trader, medic, and entertainer. Don't see your character’s calling listed? No prob- lem — every skill is folded into at least one of these new job descrip- tions... almost. Some of the omissions already have a handful of creature handlers and bioengineers ready for rebellion, and SOE has even offered a refund to unhappy players who can’t accept change. Everyone else gets 1 0 free re-spec tokens to sample new professions and find the one that suits them — which sounds more than fair to us. 5TRR WRR5 GRLRXIE5 RADAR© OPEN THE BLRST DOORS When you think Star Wars, you probably imagine fast-paced space battles, frantic blaster shoot-outs, and balletic lightsaber duels. SWG didn’t quite convey any of this excitement, opting instead for drawn- out, EverOuest-style warfare. And while the last combat upgrade (met with vehement resistance by a large number of players) tried to address the situation, the revamp brings the action more directly In line with what Star Wars fights should look like. Expect quick and dirty battles, with a heap of FPS-inspired mechanics. You now aim at targets with an onscreen reticule, popping off shots as quickly as your overworked left- If you happen to be one of the proud few who actually completed the painstaking Jedi quests, don't panic. While the revamp opens the Jedi profession to everyone from the start, SOE promises some special bonuses to veteran Force users. You not only get a cool robe and a unique — and more powerful — lightsaber, but also enjoy the ability to take on the transparent blue "dead Jedi master” form that Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin are so fond of in the movies. Plus, you get to laugh at the new wave of rookie Jedi players— because back in your day, you had to earn the Jedi title, dammit. mouse-button finger can click. GALAXIES STARTER KJTB HERR mE BRBV, HOLD TOEETHER Call US crazy, but SWG's interface made for a solid case of TMI. The patch addresses a lot of lingering issues with the HUD, with the camera being the most obvious overhaul, it now utilizes a handy over-the-shoulder, mouselook-powered perspective, allovying for much more fluid movement and easier interaction with the people and places of the Star Wars universe. A stream- lined HUD punctuates the camera upgrade, as everything from the quest journal to the overhead map now shows the bare essentials — and none of the clutter that made the game so con- Ll'CA5ARTS The new Star Wars Galaxies Starter Kit includes the base game and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion — which all players received for free as part of November's content rollout fusing to the uninitiated. CGW.1URCOM 23 <§ RADAR IRON GRIP BASE GAME: HaIMffe 2 DEVELOPER: Isobt GENRE: RTS/FPS RELEASE DATE: January 2006 "THEY’VE TAKEN ANOTHER ONE,” HE thinks. The Rahmos general zooms up five stories to scan his precious remaining node, a squat black turret rimmed' by snowdrifts and smoldiering’dreck! He ...«wpops dotvh to organize his^stless troops '^into formations and barks an order to his ' major— “Right flank, pyicer, double back two blocks over." Surprise gunfire smacks the corner structure, and the general 'springs into action, going to ground. He crouches at the head of his platoon, MG in hand, ready to defend his zone’s node from the tattered band of Resistance fighters— clutching flam- ing Molotovs in rag-wrapped hands— arrow- ing toward them. 1984 meets Rambo7 Not exactly. Try Iron Grip; The Oppression, an upcoming Half-Life 2 mod conceived by a Dutch art student and funded with money he won in an art show. “What inspired me was mostly World Wars I and li, especially the Eastern European side a 1 ^ 1 11 r 1 T* r” i i \W of those conflicts,” confides Vincent van Geel, one of the founding members of Isotx and lead project manager of Iron Grip. “I’m also a big fan of Greek tragedy, which you can see in the story — with Iron Grip, I wanted to re-create this atmosphere of a beautiful world that’s been wrecked.” And wrecked It is, packed with blighted industrial architecture aplenty, but Iron Grip is hardly just another run-and-gun through Dystopiaville. In fact, you might say Van Geel’s mod has something of a split person- ality. It pits the top-down multiunit manage- ment of a real-time strategy game against the frenetic visceral maneuvering of a first- person shooter. Managers, prep your cut men, because it's going to get bloody— we’re talking genre on genre.. .RTS versus FPS. /Matt Peckham “You have two teams,” Van Geel explains, "Rahmos and Resistance. The Rahmos team consists of one person who plays the game as an RTS and starts at HQ, controlling the map with all its nodes. The Resistance has to destroy each node in a certain sequence in order to make the HQ vulnerable. Once that's destroyed, the Resistance wins, but they have to accomplish this within a certain time limit. before the Rahmos airships arrive. And that’s just for starters. ’The Rahmos gen- eral can spawn major and sergeant units, which can then be controlled by other players. If these guys want, they can actually play their units in FPS mode while the computer A.I. takes care of everything else.” And the Resistance? “They always play from the first-person perspective, and they fight outnumbered and have to hide a lot, so we’ve created 20 diverse character types, each with its own set of ‘kitchen’ weaponry, like bats, homemade bombs, Molotovs, hip mines, and stuff.” Genres, in your comers, please. Ready, set, FIGHT! 24 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD OVERHAULED INTERFACE: RTS style, intuitive interface gives you greater unit and city control at faster speed. atifiur 3D LIVING WORLD: Elaborate, detailed environment set in a vibrant and colorful world. NEW FEATURES: Introducing religion, Holy Cities, missionaries, Great People, variable scale games and loads of new civic options. A MODDER’S DREAM: An unprecedented level of modding power including: World builder editor, XML, Python Scripting Language, and coming soon; The Civilization IV SDK • mod the A.I. to meet your vision. MULTIPLAYER: Built from the ground up with Era starts, variable game speeds, hot join, team play and a bevy of connectivity options (LAN, internet, PBEM, hot seat and more). DICTATE POLICY THAT WILL HAVE THE ENTIRE U.S. SEEING RED. 1945 9.4 out of 10 "The only reason to stop playing Civilization IV is to tell other people just how good the game is." -IGN "If you have even a passing interest in strategy games, I world history, or getting less sle^ ' at night, you owe it to yourself to give Civilization IV a try. ' of 5 stars ★★★★★ "Civilization TV stands alone. No fan of strategy games should leave this on store shelves. " C rM) Wi'M Mnefn linm KlIB M W rtuml U WiM OnnlM n Oi aMaiM.a Ml, U B Cm IH(, d TMTm uwvim ttnn n II ntaMi iMWrWiM MacM (§) RADAR SUN next MMO Witness the rise of Webzen’s DEVELOPER: Wobzcn FCLEASE DATE: Sometime In 2006 ^ IT WOULD BE UNTRUE TO SAY THAT Soul of the Ultimate Nation (SUN), ^ the latest online opus from Korean developer Webzen (whose MMOFPS Huxley graced our cover two issues back), breaks all MMORPG conventions. The game com- bines single-player RPG gameplay with group hack-n-slash, its economy is based on collectible items, and its narrative finds you and your guild joining a band of rebels to fight the evil Immortal Emperor, who's hatched a nefarious plot to extract all ether, the essence of nature, from the land and convert it into dark energy. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff here. But during our chat with Aaron Rigby, senior producer of Webzen America, five facts did emerge that seem to set SUN apart: 1. QUICK-MOVING ACTION Rigby says players should “expect console- style gameplay in a PC-based MMORPG. We wanted to avoid the slower pace of battling in traditional MMORPGs and move toward the action of games like Fable." The idea is to introduce action-RPG-style play to the otherwise slower pace of a quest-based game in order to get players into the most exciting aspects of the game without first forcing them into a long, battle-poor learn- ing curve. “Even puzzles are often solved with a good, swift smash to the door," Rigby enthuses. Will this "console-style" play extend to the use of a gamepad? Rigby says that's to be determined — which, from where we’re standing, means it's entirely possibly. 2. CUSTOMIZABLE BATTLES High-level questing in an MMORPG like, say. World of WarCraft usually means entering specific instanced dungeons with a relatively set number of players and fighting specific monsters that, no matter how many times you enter that dungeon, will always be found in pretty much the same place and be called the same names, likely dropping the same loot each time. In SUN, players can actually create their own battle zones and set the parameters of these zones. "As players are questing through the main story line, they’re assigned mission maps that lead to either submaps or new mis- sion maps," Rigby explains. “The submaps are hunting maps, which are opened from mission maps that have been previously cleared. These are customizable by the player, who can select the number of play- ers, the strength of the monsters, the maxi- IN SUN. PLflVERB CRN fiCTURLLV CREfiTE ^ ^ THEIR OLUN BATTLE ZONES AND BET THE PARAmETERB OF THEBE ZONES. 26 COMPUTER GAMINO WORI n SUN RADAR® . j 'r- , 1 ..• «on w(|h •““•Cffp. 'Oo|,i„: ,7“»' but It I, '"•"■n.Mui"""'’- i? * ■*■ The Valkyrie handles multiple weapons— and apparently makes squats an integral part of her workout regimen. town for the holiday season. mum player level, and so on. By choosing different types of maps, number of players, degrees of difficulty, monsters, players, and even reward types, players custom- ize their gameplay. In this way, Soul of the Ultimate Nation features great gameplay experiences set by the players themselves. By comparison, WOW restricts preset maps to certain players who are qualifying under certain conditions.” A third type of map, event maps, will support recurring activities like sieges. Expect a PVP system to arrive as part of a major update scheduled for after the game’s launch. 3. LARGE-SCALE BATTLES A SUN combat map can contain up to 40 characters battling it out at once on various fields. The outcome of a battle in one field will affect the combat in adjacent fields, making battles feel almost epic in scale. 4. UNIQUE AESTHETIC “SUN'S backstory and gameplay designs marry Asian elements with a medieval fan- tasy feeling," says Rigby. “The development team wanted to blend the two themes evenly, without emphasizing either style too much.” You can see the result of their handiwork in SUN'S five character classes, most of which are pictured on these pages and, according to Rigby, “all of which are pretty balanced and essential to a questing party’s success in the game.” There's the berserker, “who serves as the ‘door crasher' of your party.” There’s the Shadow, “a magic caster from the Demon Clan who casts powerful dark spells.” The Valkyrie, “a fighter who can handle numerous weapons with fluid move- ment, is a range attack fighter who supports her party from the rear and also can use summoning skills as a supporting caster." The elementalist, meanwhile, “casts some seriously powerful assault spells and offers her party supporting spells.” And... 5. POLYMORPHING ...the dragon knight, seen directly to the right, is “a fighter character who can deliver impressive damage with his quickness and dazzling fighting skills— and depending on how a player progresses through the game, he can polymorph himself into dragon." Why kill dragons when you can be one instead? Kristen Salvatore An ABBA reunion! How exciting! CGW,1UP.CC»/t 27 <§) RADAR 50 VOU WFINNR.. 50 vou CGW's periodic guide to getting your game on ^ KICKED FOR TEAMKILLING, stranded in the same map match ^ after match, accused of cheating — sometimes playing on public servers sucks. If you’re serious about online shooting, it’s only a matter of time before the thought crosses your mind: I should be the admin doing the banning. Trouble is, how to start a server is a mystery to most folks. Have no fear; we’re here to help. First up: a lesson in lingo. A “server” is simply the PC running the master game that the rest of us connect to. Connected gam- ers are called clients. Now, you’ve probably heard of a dedicated server. All that means is that no one is actually playing on the box running the master game. (It is possible to play on the same machine you use as a server, in which case it’s called a listen server, but most modern games are simply too processor intensive for that.) Then there’s bandwidth. Broadband might afford you, and you alone, a lightning-fast connection, but hosting a handful of gam- ers brings it to its knees lickety-split. A server has to send updates out to everyone, so it needs a fat pipe on the upload side — precisely the point where most residential services stretch thin. Long story short, the quickest and easiest way to get your own server, with you in charge, is to lease one. For a fee, companies specializing in running game servers will set up your game and run it on a high-end box in a datacenter sitting on the Internet’s backbone. How much that sets you back depends on how many heads you want to support. The more people playing, the more server resources and bandwidth you need. It’s as simple as that. To get you going, we look at three of the most widely used game server solu- tions out there. Garnett Lee B SERVER SOLUTIONS TRINITY GAMING (www.trinitygames.com) With experience that stretches back to the origina) Tribes days. Trinity Gaming knows firsthand what it takes to provide high-performance gaming servers on the Net. Datacenters, equally spread across the country in San Jose, Dallas, and New York (as well as Amsterdam for our European friends], house beefy twin Intel Xeon servers running either a custom-tuned Linux or Windows system. And each of them is connected to multiple backbone providers at up to OC-192 speeds (that's 10 gigabits per second, folks!). Thanks to that power. Trinity's accounts are not ilmtted by bandwidth. Trinity hosts a wide range of games, from contemporary (Battlefield 2 and UT2004) to classic (Quake II and Red Facfton). As for control. Trinity gives users full FTP access to servers, which means that you can update with more or less any mod or map you'd like. For a 24-p)ayer ranked public Counter-Strike: Source server expect to pay around $72 per month. , ■ I CLAN SERVERS (www.clanservers.com) ^ Servers’ slogan is simple enough: "Frag, not Jag." Using Dell Poweredge Dual Xeon game servers to back up that I T claim, the provider has stations In six locations spread across H"! (■ •iH ' fh® country; Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, ®nd New York. A handy real-time map on Clan Servers' web- ~ ~ ®'*® 9*''®® Pl®9 estimates for each of its six areas. Plus you can switch your server’s site up to four times per month I M l — ini at no additional charge. — - Full FTP access is part of the package, but Clan Servers' tech support team will Install most popular mods for you, ~ - I free of charge. A 24-player Counter-Strike: Source server runs $48 per month. H GAMEDAEMONS (www.gamedaemons.net) GameDaemons' high-end hardware crushes the com- petitions’, but an added edge is the company's Game Development Extensions (GDX) technology, which man- ages server load to maximize stability. GDX also allows GameDaemons to dynamically apply patches the instant that they’re released. Plus, the company’s web-based kPanel offers an Impressive degree of control over your server's settings. In addition to 120 tabs to do things like stop and restart the server, the kPanel also allows you to change mods or even the hosted game itself from a few easy-to-use pull-down menus. That unparalleled power and ease of use come at a cost, though: A 24-player Counfer-Sfrike; Source server will set you and your clan back $202.50 a month. THE GOO D, THE BAD & THE UGLY Janu ary 2006 ^ THE UGLY Legal bottom-feeder Jack Thompson recently demanded the arrest of staffers working for the popular Penny Arcade web^e (www.penny-arcade.com) after they made a charitable donation in Thompson's name, clam- ing he welshed on a promise to make said dona- tion himself if anyone created software centered on targeting professionals in the videogame indus- try. Google “Zork Thompson" for an old-school text adventure created in Thompson's honor. > THE GOOD Pandemic Studios, the developer behind FuW Specfrum Warrior and Star * ^ IVars Battlefront II, is merg- ing with a little developer called BioWare. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, seeing as It counts Shattered Steel and MDK2 among its achievements? While Silicon Valley venture- capital company Elevation Partners architects the S300 million deal, we eagerly await Full Spectrum Batdur. ■ the bad '' Blizzard is openly using spyware called The Warden • — • to catch in-game cheat- ers. While most World of WarCraft mavens knew The Warden was making the rounds, one player discovered exactly what’s watched, which includes e-mails, website visits, and downloads. Web denizens already have a workaround: Sony's rootkit DRM (aka the lame copy protection on music CDs). jN'A WORCDlOakTRE ACM ER YM^U OlDE OElX FWe V e: R^ip NEIMASTG O L Dj 1 N^OM M O N ^IWiTWIiS^il i 1 PUAV If M/! ,IC^ iDRADAR BFZCOmBRT Battlefield 2 becoiws ^virtual MQIO Luis Alvarez, Werner Soeteman, and Allan ^ Hansen: BF2 Combat's Tour of Duty, a \flrtuat war featuring hierarchically structured divisions and multiple 10-hour-long battles every week. "Battlefield 2 is spectacular," says Lewis. "It’s balanced, It’s beautiful, It’s one of the greatest games I’ve had the privilege of playing, but, as I see it, it’s also a lot like paint: If you don’t have an artist to transform it into a work of ait, it sits on the shelf.” Or, maybe more aptly, the paint runs and smears in random patches of wiid and woolly pigment However you spin the simile, Lewis says, ‘Tour of Duty lets people play improve their own experiences, and we provide tools for them to do so.” Interestingly, the Tour is an independent project separate from BF2 publisher EA, although it’s actually testing a pay-to-play direction that the series might take somewhere down the tine. If, when you opt in to frie programat www. bf2combat.net, it feels like you've legitimately enlisted, that's the idea. (Lewis estimates friat “somewhere around 40 percent of our members have military experience of some sort.”} Once you’ve agreed to fight with American, Chinese, or Middle Eastern forces and decided on a divi- ^ THE PICTURE-PERFECT eA7Ti£F/£LD ^Bmatch is on Michael Lewis' mind. Define it by what doesn't go down as much as by what does: no pranksters flooring Humvees into friendly tanks, hoping to send it all up In smoke and hardy-har-hars; no teens combining curse words like Tourette's sufferers; basically, no bulls***. Clans — better bets for camaraderie and cooperation than come-one-come-all pub- lic servers— can’t address all of the concerns on Lewis’ checklist What’s on his mind? More or less what the 19-year-old history major has the game the way it was meant to be played. sion, your company commanding officer puts been making along with fellow Battlefield fiends People in our community have the power to you in a platoon. Then— like boots in their bar- WE flSK, THEV TELL sifh 8ICPl.ehkart Via e-mail, forums, and voice over IP, CGVV asked BF2 Combat’s enlisted men to sound off on their time in the Tour. Guess what? Unless some secret operating pro- cedure persuaded ’em all to blow sunshine up our asses, they’re all gung ho. “No more wandering in and out of servers to meet new people and titen never see them again; no more living for an average of six seconds before being shelled; no more frirovwng my keyboard across the room; no more stolen armor. In fact, now that I’m in an armored company, teammates offer me tanks and APCs." [BF2C]UNIGEE “lf& fantastic to see folks from almost every continent come to- gether beneath one banner. One of my favorite highlights is seeing how new members describe their first battles in forum posts. I’ve also enjoyed all the ideas— from the Army Choir, where members record battle songs, to the good old Globe Weekly newspaper reports." 30 COMPUTER GAMtNGVWDRLD Bpscomenr RADARD sets open to them. They choose a class and stick with it. Traning for a Tour of Duty provides a safe way to try and perfect things. For exam- ple, they taught me effective ways to use anti- tank weaponry, and how to HALO [high altitude, low opening] jumpH!! practiced doing it] over and over again until i could pop the chute on air force or tank service— you’re ensuring tiiat your division's Black Hawks and Abrams and Bradleys aren't wasted, and that whole platoons won't bunch up on the tarmac waiting to fly one F-35 while ttie enemy overwhelms your forward positions unopposed. In addition, truly capable troopers can aspire to Army Ranger School, a racks, minus the BO and gas— fighting men and women meet and greet in forums and dedicated Teamspeak servers, fostering the esprit de corps that makes the forthcoming clashes feel all the more meaningful. But COs must first make war- riors before sending them off to wan IN THE ARMY NOW So Battlefield sounds fun to you, but its near- IntinHe arsenal and never-ending acreage seem too daunting to deal with? Try Tour of Duty's basic training. EA product manager Darren Montgomery sees it as a sort of interactive how- command and touch down on a specific spot" Vets, on the other hand, are invited to quali- fication courses conducted on custom-built maps. By qualifying for particular duties— say, course designed and maintained by real Army Rangers (see sidebar on following page). “Our ranking system is meritocratic,” says Lewis. “We promote members based on their > ^ "CflPFlBLE TROOPERS CRN RSPIRE TO RRITIV 38PI45I1LT.IMPY5 24PI2I1 LT.MACKENZIE “You get to the point where you’d rather sacrifice yourself for your team than do things to pad your own score. And you're recognized "Before the Tour, I was losing interest in Bf2. With its squad- and-commander system, the game has the potential for coordinated, tactical warfare, but that’s generally wasted on public players. Plus, people behave worse than [players] in Counter-Strike, what with the blatant friendly fire, point farming, and vehicle hoarding. This community showed me [otherwise]. to: "in normal settings, most newcomers are too busy trying to not get fragged to pick up the skiil ’ RRNEER SCHOOL." “The neatestthing is getting to Imow the peopie you work with week after week. That, and being able to drop into the Teamspeak server at any time of day and still find someone to hang out with.” 3IFI1TAI1LT.RABBI f CGW.1URCOM 31 €>RAI)AR BFZComBRT ®ljE (Blwbe Heeklg MiDEAST, CHINA DECLARE WARI Say it^ so: The Tour^ infentry works in conjunction %vith its tank > abilities to command and communicate rather than on insignificant factors such as kill/death ratios and the time they've spent sitting in helicopters capturing flags. Oftentimes, battles come down to who controls vt^ich points aid when, and our commanders designate elite units to defend main bases. So, rather than looking at a flag as a source of free points, our members learn that holding on to one can turn the tide of battle. And it leads to scenarios that you don't often see in public play. When you and your three-man squad successfully defend a fire base against two tanks, and an assault helo, you'll know you're in BF2 Combat” ft’s in its series of showdowns that the pay- to-play Tour of Duty (a three-month stint sets you back S9.95, and S34.95 signs you up for one year) becomes something more than a meticulously managed clan. Divisions do battle twice a week on two different maps: One is set in stone and tied into the Tour’s story line, whereas winners of the previous week's scrim- mages select the second, secret map. “At the end of each battle, we tabulate statistics,” Lewis explains, "and — aside from the strategic plus of picking the secret map— whichever side wins more rounds also takes a new territory. We then update the world map on our site, and the winning side is able to select the next theater it wants to attack. For instance, the 24P People’s Liberation Army is currently driving the U.S. forces out of China, so if they win this Tour, they can start attacking U.S. interests in Japan orthe South Pacific in the next Tour." The Globe Weekly, an official newspaper penned by twenty-something philosophy stu- dent and TOD member Wintergreen, chronicles the Tour’s progress from a neutral perspective, creating a cohesive narrative and adding to the sense that what you do today affects what you’ll do tomorrow. “It's all part of the meta- game feeling, your little battle meaning more in a big war,” says EA's Montgomery. "The paper acts cis both information and snarky propagan- da— they don’t take it too seriously. In line with Battlefield's sense of humor.” Tongue-in-cheek stuff aside, the 1,600-mem- ber-strong Tour is serious business. Where Montgomery concedes “this type of meta- game is something [BF2 developer] DICE has considered in the past and will continue to consider,” Lewis insists that his service is the future of first-person shooting: "Overseeing a pay-to-play environment is as difficult as it is lucrative. We're providing developers with the option of integrating that functionality Into their existing games while freeing them to focus on producing, marketing, and improving their titles. By EA's own admissions in tiieir 2004 and 2005 reports, they’ve had 'limited success in finding ways of generating revenues and profits from online games.’ Of their pay-to-play online titles, only Ultima Online was a significant success. On the other hand, stuff like Earth and Beyond failed miserably, losing millions of dollars. So, considering the combination of massive devel- opment and maintenance costs and uncertain revenue stream, working with [us] instead of rushing into developing their own system is a no-brainer.” BF2 lead designer Lars Gustavsson is interested in the idea, too: “We do find this interesting and have been talking about it since when we started making BF1942. It extends gameplay from a couple of hours here and there and actually puts it into a bigger picture. Plus, we’re always looking for talented people, so who knows....''/Shawn Elliott BF2 Combats world map tracks the Tour’s week-to-week progress. 0 HOOAH! Tour of Duty’s Army Ranger School is so tough, not a single candidate has actually passed the course. Headmaster Rock says his philosophy is simple: “In the field of battle you don’t have time to think, you just react. Adapt as fast as possible, stay flexible with your tactics — ^that’s how you win, and that’s what I’m trying to teach these guys.’’ The real-life ex-Ranger’s curriculum often involves creating strategy from operations orders. “For example," Rock says, “a squad leader knows that the enemy strength is four tanks, his target is three clicks away, and that he has Black Hawk support. It’s up to him to relegate his resources and act accord- ingly. Just like in real life, you get a bunch of guys with a bunch of egos, but they all need to work together— if just one guy messes up, then they’re all out of the course.’’ Sir, yes, sirl Custom-made maps Include updates of BFf942 mod Desert Combat fevorftes. 32 • COMPOTER GAMING WORLD One wants to Free His People <§) RADAR QIUEROinv ABOUT BF2 COMBAT: THE BATTLEFIELD 2 TOUR OF DUTY Ten-hutI It’s time to wage your online war in a mature, cheater-free environment with BF2 Combat Battlefield 2 Tour of Duty. BF2 Combat is not a lad- der or a league; it’s a virtual war featuring divisions hierarchically structured like the real deal, multiple 10-hour-long battles every week, and a boatload of features you won't find anywhere else. If you’re already a member of an existing clan, you can join and play in the same unit. Report for duty at www. bf2combat.net today./ FlUE [51 BRAND FRIZES: BATTLEFIELD 2 DREAM PACKAGE Including; ► NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT® videocard » Zboard ® and Battlefield 2 keyset r Battlefield 2; Special Forces game y One-year BF2 Combat: The Battlefield 2 Tour of Duty ™ subscription j HOW TO ENTER ' Go to http://tourofduty.cgwgaming.com and submit this code: J4NKMONK3YS. For full contest legal rules, restric- T tions, and details, visit.. ^ Pass \ htlp://tourofduty. "'.W cgwgaming.com. BF2 com THE BRTTLEFIELD 2 TOU Wage the ultimate online war! Planet Combat and Computer Gaming World are stuffing five stockings with swank Battlefield 2 gear. Five iucky winners wiii receive the foiiowing: NVIDIA. BATTI.EFIF.I.D2 -JtfCOMUflT 34 5 COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Runs great on Blood and Gore Intense Violence Nudity THE OTHER TO DOMINATE THEM EMBRACE YOUR CURSED SOUL AND UNLEASH THE DEADLY DACCERTAIL AS THE DARK PRINCE. SEIZE THE REINS OF A CHARIOT AND BATTLE THROUGH THE OPEN-ENDED CITY OF BABYLON. CRAFT YOUR KIllINC STYLE WITH STEALTHY SPEED KILLS AND CREATIVE FREE-FORM FIGHTING. THE T\YO THRONES’ BECOME A MASTER WARRIOR with the lightning performance of an Intel® Pentium® Processor Extreme Edition @) RADAR HITmRN PUBLISHER: Eidos/SCi DEVELOPER: 10 Interactive GENRE' Stealth-Action RELEASE DATE: April 2006 AGENT 47 IS MORE THAN JUST A number; he’s one of the world's best assassins. Too bad he has such a checkered past. No, we don’t mean all the cruel and unusual killings; we're talk- ing about the performance of his previous games. Hitman: Codename 47 ambitiously lets you attempt assassinations in a relatively open world but is seriously buggy. Its sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, solves most of these issues, offering one fantastic experi- ence. Hitman: Conffacfs...not so much. Which brings us to Hitman: mood Money, in which our favorite bald-headed, bar-code- tattooed killer performs hits while dealing with a rival agency. As in the rest of the series, you’ll be globe-trotting, as we did in the demo: One minute, we were In Sin City, where 47 had to infiltrate a hotel and leave a suitcase bomb, and the next we were jetting to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. From what we saw, developer 10 Interactive has learned from previous mistakes and is refining the gameplay experience. Close- quarters combat will be vastly improved: You can shove, head-butt, disarrn, and even use someone as a human shield. Don't run around hcilf-cocked, though: Blood Money’s real attraction is letting you think of more interesting ways to assassinate targets while making your kills look accidents. Your on-the-job performance ties into the game’s new notoriety system, which provides ■ incentives for being stealthy. After each mis- sion, newspapers report the incident, and depending on how many people spotted you, increasingly accurate police sketches may make the news — and make your life consid- erably harder as you work on your next hit. /Darren Gladstone 36 ■ COMPUTER GAMING WORLD CGW.IURCOW 37 FULL EPECTRUm U/RRRIOR TEN HRmmERS Producer Will Stahl sounds off PUBUbKLIv THQ DEVEI.OPPH Pandemic Studios GENRE: Tactical Action RELEASE DATE Winter 2006 FOR ALL THE SHOOTING, ARMY- authentic Infantry-tactics sim Full Spectrum Warrior isn’t a shooter. Your finger never touches the trigger, and yet you set up cover fire with one squad while bounding into flanking position with a second; instead of shoving around game pieces from a gener^’s-eye view, you're in the middle of it with your men. If the catch that slapped chevrons on the thing is simpie, so is its one serious snafu: Combat is so scripted that subaSQuent playthroughs hold no surprises. F SI^se quel Ten Hammers, storming shelveadtaKirinter, hopes to right any and atUerongs. \AM grill producer Will Staiy on ttt^^ffirntattack./Shawn Elliott CGW: What did the first Full Spectrum Warrior accomplish? Will Stahl: We proved that people are open to alternative control mechanisms and mechanics if presented in an approachable and highly polished package. And FSW was new and original. If you look at the common features among high-profile games in the military genre— or any genre for that matter- FSW had a very high probability of failure. We’re proud of its success. withheld deeper command elements because we felt learning the basics was overwhelming enough. With Ten Hammers, we're opening things up and demonstrating how the inter- face we’ve developed can be expanded for a much deeper and much faster experience. CGW: Some argued that, in creating an educational tool for soldiers, you ended up with a game that was more about doctrine than gameplay.... WS: I would agree with that in some respects, but doctrine is what the Army is all about. We stuck to the basics and strived to give you a window, with real insight, into the reality of commanding modern soldiers in urban combat. CGW: Full Spectrum Warrior took place in a fictional geopolitical hot spot. Where does Ten Hammers happen? WS: Ten Hammers takes place some six months after the events of the first game. As the country we created, Zekistan, transitions to peace, a northern province sees an oppor- tunity to splinter off and become a separate nation. The ensuing tension culminates in the city of Khardiman, where separatists seize the city and take control of a major bridge. The Tien Hamir, or “Ten Hammers," Bridge is the only bridge that connects the north of the country to the south, making it tactically significant. Wanting to quell the uprising before it spreads throughout the country, a U.N. Coalition force of U.S. and British troops enters the city to enforce the peace and secure the bridge. CGW: How does head-to-head work? WS: Each side has an objective to com- plete, and each mission's story ties in to the solo campaign. Coalition forces are more organized and have tremendous firepower — they're the sledgehammer, but they’re bound by the rules of engagement. Furthermore, they can only sustain a few causalities, and they cannot cause a great deal of col- lateral damage or civilian death. Insurgents, on the other hand, lack the organization and firepower of Coalition players but have superior numbers and aren’t bound by any rules of warfare— they’re the hornet's nest. Additionally, insurgents can turn civilians against the Coalition. That's where it starts. CGW: Brothers in Arms paired first-person play with FSHrs suppress-and-assault sys- tem. Has Gearbox’s game influenced Ten CGW: How else is Ten Hammers evolving the series? WS: Gameplay Is faster paced. We’ve updat- ed enemy A.I. to create a much more random and dynamic system, which means that the same mission will play differently each time you load it. We've also added new tools and commands, most notably mechanized unit support. Bradley Fighting Vehicles— com- pletely scripted before— are entirely under your control now./ Hammers in turn? WS: We always assumed that someone would take FSW's elements and incorporate them Into a standard shooter— it seemed like a no-brainer even to us during development. But the franchise is not about being the hero — it’s about commanding heroes. We left so much on the table when we finished the first game that we couldn’t wait to start the next installment. For instance, we deliberately 38 > COMPLfTER GAMING WORLD Things have never looked better for the series _ ■ A. -TeamXbox.com , Language Violence The deadliest hotspots: urban, ‘ mnimtam anri iiinola Intuitive squad control over each operative Go global with all-new co-op online play Inthe war on terror, the battlefield is global and only one special ops sguad can protect the world’s ft^dom. It's up to you to lead this elite group through deadly missions against an enemy fueled by hatred! PlayStation^E G/IM£ flFTERmfITH HRLF-LIFE 2: PUBUSHER: Valve Software DEVELOPER; Valve Software GENRE: Shooter RELEASE DATE: February/March 2006 DON’T CALL HALF-LIFE 2: Aftermath (Episode #1 in an ongo* ing series of what writer/director Marc Laidlaw calls “core canon” sequels) shovelware, even if it's just one-third as long as HL2 and is going from develop- ment to your desktop in a fraction of the time the original game took. According to Valve rep Doug Lombardi, the forward-thinking developer's goals for the game are threefold; "1) Extend Half-Life 2's story and answer questions about what's happened to everyone and everything since your battle with Dr. Breen. 2) introduce new artificial intelligence and graphics technology. HL2 came close to the type of character interaction we wanted to achieve, and Aftermath is an opportunity to take that further. Plus, it's letting us lever- age high dynamic range lighting [introduced in the recently released Lost Coast level), along with a few new tech features. 3} Establish the notion of a game 'epi- sode.' Where expansion packs are known entities, we're hoping Aftermath will help create a new product category that offers high production values in a shorter experi- ence and for a much lower price.” As for additional details— for example, how exactly City 17 has changed since scientist stud Gordon Freeman liberated it from otherworldly oppressors— Valve remains all winks, nods, and “wait and sees.” Laidlaw does, however, drop two teasers: “[Good guy) Dr, Kleiner has taken over Dr. Breen's broadcast systems. And as for [heroine] Alyx's new abilities, do the words ‘studied with ninjas' mean anything to you?'’/Shawn Elliott 40 : COMPUTER GAMING WORLD PFTERmRTH RADAR# CGW.IURCOM 41 THinK vou Know Kinc Konc? THinKjfliqiiih. BRlH!!HinS-IKH«l«S, VOU CROUCH lU | THfCKET OF lUUi^lE UIUES. TiUEnly vnrds diuayj|'R({ hungry U-Rex rnges through the irnEs, hunting fnt^'ihls' dlnnur. Vnu grnsp frunticnlly fnr ynur gun only to |lnd it Empty. SuddEnly, nn impnssibly hugE npO SEnds Me U-Reh sprnuiling nnd n titnnir strugglE Erupts: Ul^linnilE tn ihull Isinnd - nnd thn unforgsttohlE world of PotElr Inihsnn's King Knng: Thn OfficinI Cnmn of thn IflouiE. ADVLiinSEMLNl ■/ Some of Skull Island s na^est predate were created exclusively for^e^game: King Kong first stormed the siluer screen in 1933, nstnnishi audiences uiith a pouierful story and groundbrenhing specini effects. Peter Jnchson's current re- imugining promises to do no iess, bringing the periinus uiorid of Shuii isiond to iife os only Jochson con. Jochson - and fumed gome designer lllichel Kncei, thot is. “[Ancel] makes you so involved in the game as a player that you actually become emotionally attached to the characters that you're playing with.” - Peter Jackson PETER JRCKSOn BEEHn DRERmmE UP IDERSforaKmg Kong computer game as soon as he started on the movie. An avid gamer, he wanted to create a game that was both deeper and more immersive than the film, and that packed at least as much technical wow. By forming an extraordinarily close partnership with renowned game designer Michel Ancel, Jackson accomplished that and more. BRERIHinE LIFE mTO fl lEEERD Fortunately, your enemies aren’t the only intelligent creatures on Skull Island, Your fellow explorers will protect you, suggest solutions to problems, and generally react as real humans would, n mnssiUE step foruiord: mnouoTions in immERSion Every technical decision has been made with an eye to immersing the player in the world of the game. As you move through the jungle of Skull Island, blades of grass rustle around your legs. Sunlight patterns shift subtly; creatures stir in the distance, Wrth a strong chipset - especially one supporting Hyper-Threading Technology' - the game’s seemingly infinite layers of lighting Jackson and Ancel set out to create a game that looks and feels as convincing as the "real" world captured on film. To achieve this, their development team used every trick in the book - plus a few that aren’t. Most remarkable, perhaps, is their use of inverse kinematics, which adds frightening realism to the behavior of Skull Island’s predators. This technique varies and synchronizes the animations used for each type of creature, depending on the creature's Al. For example, if you’re detected by a V-Rex, you'll see it turn its eyes and head directly toward you, lunging over rocks and smashing through the jungle in a convincing attempt to make you its dinner. The creatures' animations are triggered by a sophisticated Al system that governs the behavior of Skull Island's many species. Some species attack alone, while others use clever pursuit tactics to attack in groups. This “food chain" effect is especially unnerving when you run the game on a multi threaded processor like the Intel* Pentium' processor Extreme Edition. Having two processing cores with Hyper- Threading Technology lets you run four threads simultaneously, giving your PC stronger multitasking capability and making the Al that much more lifelike. Kong’s third-person play becomes available at key moments. When the camera pulls back to reveal Kong’s mighty perspective, you feel a rush of freedom and power. Delivered from the harried perspective of Jack, you inherit swift movements, powerful battle attacks, and the gratifying ability to smash, Uirow and scale the objects arourrd you. But playing Kong isn't just a walk in the park. Confronted by multiple enemies with varied attack patterns, you’ll have to fight hard to defeat huge V-Rexes and outsmart swarms of smaller predators. The alternating gameplay between Jack and Kong not only intensifies the emotions inherent in the story, it also presents you with new challenges just when you want them most. Played on a top^iotch system based on the Intel Pentium processor Extreme Edition, the stunningly detailed graphics, ultra-realistic game physics and advanced artificial intelligence provide a superior game experience that is nothing short of unforgettable. H filters, 2D sprites, and meteorological effects don’t just make the jungle look incredible. They bring it to life. Unlike most games, the scripted events run off the in-game engine, so you can look around and move as they unfold. The absence of a heads-up display makes the action feel more immediate. Instead of monitoring a health bar, you know that your character is weakening when your vision blurs and turns red. The game also offers experiences that don’t appear in the movie. Creatures that Jackson couldn’t fit into the film fill the jungle. Multiple pathways offer you a different experience every time you play, so that you’ll never have to play the same game twice. The difficulty level also scales fluidly according to your performance, growing more challenging as you improve. This multkhreaded design is optimized on a dual-core processor like the Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition, offering an intensely cinematic game experience. pinvinc lumi power: heroes ereht hrd srirli Perhaps most impressive is the range of emotions evoked by the alternating gameplay. By inviting you to play as both Jack Driscoll and Kong, the game delivers a dramatic shift in perspective and power. As Jack, you are constantly outnumbered and overpowered by predators that are bigger, stronger and faster than you. To heighten the sense of fear and danger. Jack’s role is played in first-person. You have to advance through a dense and deadly jungle, never knowing what's behind the next tree. Armed only with the weapons you can carry, you’ll never win just by fighting. You’ll need other strategies to stay alive, such as tricking predators into battling each other and using the environment to set traps. BLflDETONED ELRD5T0NED ’ Senior editor Darren Gladstone’s monthly rant r, ■ W ENTERACTIVE FIRST CONTACTED me with this pitch: "How would you like to create and play your own FPS games without knowing how to model in 3D or understanding a single line of code?" That’s perfect for a dumbass like me! So, of course, I was willing to spend an afternoon tooling around with its new FPS Creator. Don’t have false expec- tations here. Nobody will be constructing the next Half-Life with FPS Creator. You can try your hand at making a single-player adventure, but you are limited to the packed-in textures. The initial kit comes loaded with sci-fi- and WWIl-themed sets and props, because, as everyone knows, it's not a real FPS unless you’re killing aliens, Nazis, or alien Nazis. One can only assume the developer — and the community — will even- tually release additional asset packs. My goal for the day was to create the ultimate multiplayer arena map. I wound up with CGlV's Dance ofDeath'^^. Unfortunately, my little project had a rocky start. The original plan was to re-create the CGW offices, map the faces of our staff onto models, assign each an attribute CAN YOU DO IT? ^ Y«Si ye“ c*"' *"“* P™*** ■bly b»ltef th*n 0»rr»n. Tti» fPS Creator demo on tho disc. Also, cheek In at lUP.eom to down- loed CO»r» Oeneo of OeoWi-ll you can do atl the basic work, such dropping down props and weapons and creating rooms that have no exitsi Yayi Once you drop stuff into the environment, you can go into the reai nitty-gritty details of any object on the map. (Ryan's the stealth ninja, Jeff is the camper/ sniper... you get the idea), and then kick ass. Trouble was, that wasn’t going to happen in under five hours. What I settled on Instead was an asinine mishmash of rooms slapped next to each other in a hellish cubist nightmare — high- tech zombie labs next to World War II cor- ridors, a Nazi watchtower, French country houses, elevators, stairs leading nowhere, and an oh-so-tempting arsenal room with no way out. Once you get over the learning hump. It’s actually pretty easy to paint levels up to spec. Based off a simple grid system, the program lets you easily drill down to see all the details (though the camera control while doing this could be a little more forgiving). FPS Creator has an in-game physics engine, lighlmapping, and even a half- decent proprietary graphics engine. You just have to remember to keep your expecta- tions low — Quake //-level low, if even that. Other limitations: The arena maps can sup- port only eight players, and many of the bigger weapons of mass destruction (rocket launchers and the like) are disabled in mul- tiplay. Still, it’s hard to complain, given that I’m able to make my own game in under five hours for S50 bucks. After you’re done designing comes the cool part: Via the Build Game option, you can create a self-executable file and folder with all the assets. Now anyone can play your map! OK, so I won’t be winning any designer awards with this version, but look for a patch after the game's release. Darren Gladstone Gof a bone to pick with Gladstone? E-mal him at Darren_Gladstone@2iffdavis.com. CEW'S DRNCE OF DEATH The unofficial review Good lord! This game wasn’t created, it was excreted. Let’s not beleaguer the point by trying to make sense of mashing Nazis, zombies, robots, and aiiens into the same fragfest. The level design screams “M.C. Escher meets Charles Manson.” Basically, you'd have more fun putting starved ferrets in a feedbag and strapping it to your crotch. 1 It’s still better than Postal 2. | 1 COMPUTER ICAMINC ■ WORLD VERDICT CONSOLE CORNER WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE REST OF THE GAMING WORLD As the great poet/sage Dee Snider once said, "I wanna rockl” Amen, brother, so do we all. Guitar Heroes arrived in the office and a three-day jam session ensued. Think Karaoke Revolution, but with a plastic guitar. We know, it sounds goofy, but the first time you rip through "I Wanna Be Sedated” or 29 other licensed tracks, you finally get to tap into your inner Angus Young. (The game also has 30 original tracks from unsigned bands and buddies of the developers.) This could very well be one of the best drinking/party games to date. Besides, you've been prac- ticing air guitar since you were a kid— it’s time to step on stage. /Darren Gladstone EUITRR HERO CP52) ENTER A WORLOpF VI5UAIWEL0CITY ' V This is it. The new Radeon® X1800 series hands you the visual and performance possibilities you only dreamed of from a PC graphics processor. It has been designed with a radically new ultra-threaded core 3D architecture and with Shader Model 3.0, unleashing the most mind-blowing gaming effects. What’s more, the X1800 introduces ATI’s revolutionary Avivo™, our new reference for video and display perfection. Think you can handle it all? Go to ati.com/newradeon today to see our entire new line-up of products, including our CrossFire” compatible cards, for the ultimate multi-GPU solution, O 2005, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. ATI, Avivo. CrossFire and Radeon are trademarks and/oi registered trademarks at ATI Technologies Inc. a t i . c o m ISRADAR :| BUPREmE COmmRNDER How do you move forward after making Total Annihilationy one of the industry’s most revered real-time strategy games? If you’re TA designer Chris Taylor, that's an easy one: Start a new company, build up the successful Dungeon Siege franchise, and ink a movie deal with, maligned director Uwe Boll (though we still can’t sort out that last one). But now that Taylor's scratched his a.Ction-RPG itch, he’s devoting a little more love to his favor- ite genre in the form of Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander. What sets this spiritual successor to Total Annihilation apart from every other RTS out there? See for yourself. /Ryan Scott tupreme |RE R0CK-PRPER-5CI550RB FORfllULfl FORKED BREfiT„BflCK UUHEN WE ONLV RD 4.?’PmHZ PCS." -CHRIS TflVLOR, CRERTIUE DIRECTOR RT EflS POWERED EflnflES 48 - COMPUTER GAMING WORLD supreihe commRNDER radar @ supREmflcy ROCK, PAPER, EXPLOSIONS Taylor says size matters: “When designing [a game], I like to ask myself: Is the genre in a particular groove because of design vision or because of technological restriction? I think the answer to this question, when considering scope and scale [in] RTS games, is the latter.” With Supreme Commander, Taylor hopes to clear those technological hurdles, so expect to see units of truly massive pro- portions. These battleships provide a good indication of what you can look forward to — and we hear some units extend several full Most RTS titles traditionally employ a system of checks and bal- ances: Cavalry kills infantry, infantry kills archers, and archers kill cavalry — or some variation thereof. Here, all bets are off. “I believe .back when we the rock-paper-scissors formula worked great, only had 4.77MHz PCs," Taylor muses. “Today, we have billions of cycles of computer horsepower at our disposal, and it's time to put that power to work. The idea [with Supreme Commander] is that a unit’s power, speed, maneuverability, armor, and such are [valued] in direct correlation to its cost.” in Taylor’s eyes, most modem strategy games amount to little more than resource races, in which the commander with the larg- est number of units usually comes out on top; "TTie strategy game genre.has largely been light on strategy and heavy on tactics; I have often joked [that] it should be called the RTT genre, [i] want to make players think twice before blindly walking through the tech tree with a 'can’t lose’ sequence of build operations.” He promises a differ- ent situation this time around, with circumstances that force more strategic thinking and less hoarding troops en masse. One early example: new radar and sonar mechanics. “An aircraft that shows up on radar remains unidentified until a visual is obtained, after which [it stays] identified as long as it's inside radar-covered areas.” While radar tracks aerial units, such as this wing of fighters, sonar works much the same way for naval units. “We call this part of the game the ‘Intelligence War,'” Taylor explains. "It strongly introduces players to the concept of [gathering] intelligence on opponents and underscores the importance of knowing the opponent’s posi- tion, strengths, and weaknesses before formulating a strategy and [investing in] the appropriate units and systems.” CGW.1URCOM • 49 S RADAR mRVHEm I still bear the scar that Statesman gave me that day, when he beat me with his Nerf bat. Text the game's keyword to 82174 or download directly from the Get Games category on your Verizon Wireless mobile phone! * Standard SMS and data charges apply ^ Iwiii t'loni-.VH c^^o□s T(Heafiv KEYWORD: VZ2 POOL KEYWORD: 'JTi KEYWORD: VZ4 KEYWORD: VZ5 KEYWORD: VZe veri onwireless UNIVERSAL V K WTHFMPF www.gameloft.com e 2005 GamelotL All Rights Reserved. Gamelolt. the Gamelofl logo, Asphalt: Urban GT and Midnight Pool are trademark ol Gamelott In the US and/or other countries. Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Sam Fisher, [the Soldier Icon], and the Ubisott logo ate CBdcmartuolUbisoft Entertainment In the US and/or other countries. All manirfactnrers. cars, motorbikes, names, brands and associated Imagery featured In Asphatt: Urban GT mobile game are trademarks and/or copyrighted materials of their tespective owners.UnIversal Studios’ King Kong moirte © Universal Studios. Licensed by Universal Studios licensing LLLP. A Hole to Parents; Please consult wwv/.lllmratings.com lor Inlormalion regarding movie ratings in making viewing ctxhces for childten. Biottieis in Arms Earned In Blood Mobile Game © 2005 GametofL All rights reserved. Published by Gamelott under license Irom Ubisoft EnlertalnmenL Brothers in Arms Earned m Blood Is a trademark ot Geatboi Soltwaro and Is used under license. Gearbox Software and the Gearbox logo are registered trademarks ol Gearbox Software, LLC. Cop^ghl 2005 Cellco Paitnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, All tights reserved. All other trademarks, logos and CHRISTOPHER LIVINGSTON, CREATOR ■■ of send-up comic Concerned; The Half- Life and Death of Gordon Frohman, admits that his HL2 funny pages aren’t the first. It's just that the others aren’t as endear- ingly rough around the edges. "Some of ’em — Apostasy, for example — you could literally slap on a comic-book rack and sell," Livingston says. "To set myself apart, I needed to do something drastic, like avoid writing any story line whatsoever. I mean. Valve already wrote one — why not take my character and put him in the same situations that they came up with? Plus, I have no design or layout skills, and I can barely use Photoshop. So I think that's what 1 try to accomplish: a comic strip with a com- pletely unoriginal story line; a boring, repeti- tive layout; and an utter lack of eye-catching effects. And, while I don't like to toot my own horn, I think I've succeeded.” Livingston, whose strips skewer shooter con- ventions from combustible barrels to Counter- Strike gibberish, says his ideas stem from "spe- cific aspects of games that stick in my head. And I think every gamer stops suspending his or her disbelief at some point and says, ‘Hey, how come I can carry a menagerie of guns, a missile launcher, a crossbow, and grenades, and somehow still swim and climb ladders?”' When asked if he feels limited by Garry's Mod, the character- and prop-posing tool that he creates with, Livingston assures us it’s not an issue: “I’m sort of confining myself to mod- els that actually appear in Half-Life 2, but I’m sure if I needed a Frohman in a dress or leder- hosen, someone has already made one, is making one, or would make one if I asked nicely. And for the record, I do not need a Frohman in lederhosen." [NOW, WHERE DO YOU WANT OKAY'^^ HERE'S MY 9MM AND ^ MAGNUMi ^ DROP YOUR WEAPONS! "BUT R1G>HT THEN [ G»OT KILLED BY SOME NOOB WITH AN SS-i. OMfii H4X» WOULD LOVE TO CONTINUE OUR CONVERSATION NEXT ROUND! LOLOL^ i "SAW YOU IN CS^OFFICE MAP. YOU: hostagjE, male, standing* i MOTIONLESS iN CONFERENCE I ROOAL ME: COUNTER-TERRORISTi WITH STEYR AUS, KEVL-AR. I HIT I ^ GiOOD IN ^ / THE "MISSED 1 CONNECTIONS" ’ SECTION OF THE I COUNTER-STRIKE, k PERSONALS? A ^ LET'S TAKE ^ ^^A LOOK.^^fl 52 ‘COMPUTER GAMING WORLD PUBLIC nccEBS RAI)AR@> i 9 ' i®*- »o»e '•"Bth,* your -» lo eBw?n7’“"'*>’» ""•/•eej about enemy forces.” ** 600(1 maps are built with options in mind— take some time to analyze the surrounding structures and niix up your game plan. It’s a geheral tactic and goes for any map, but many players stick to the same path and as a result they get fragged again and again.”/ simple by plotting it out on paper. The chal> lenge was laying out a city that looked prac- tical yet still supported a purposeful and fun ^ game flow— I had to keep ^ings;balanced by creating a kind of circularity with multiple ways to assault each flag; and an equal number of methods to defend them. And that holds especially true for the mosque area: As the first checkpoint between theiMEC forces and the USMC, It Had to facilitate fier<:e large-, medium-, and small-scale fighting. , MU^T-TI^I TACTICS FRQM KARliLliNP :2?S|MA|CER: I “Use the boathouse north of the bridges and west of the MEC mountain base, as it offers an additional, stealthy route aisross the river.! Conie atlt during the MEC fush! into the city and you’ll capture a key flag far behind the hot zones.” “Karkand 2's rooftops are an asset to both armies and offer vantage points over enemy bases. Get high, and you can . BATTLEnELD 2 RENDS WANT MORf urban 'maps — somevvhat smaller ih~ scale so that infantry is never far from a firefight, and writh loads of alley- ways and rooftops to level the field for the trooper fending off .tanks. Mapmaker Jaret Illingworth has just the thing with Strike at ' Karkand 2, “sequel” to the fan-favorite offi- cial map and available on our demo disc. “I set out to create a new city north of the - original Karkand,” Illingworth says. “As with Rooftops rock: Get to high ground. then alert any squadmates on the ground all the other levels I’ve designed, I started EOOF TROUPE CGW: Speaking of episode six, where'd you find vocalists willing to croon about World of WarCrsft’s “instanced farming runs”? ^ LOCKED IN A NOT-SO-DEADLY DUEL, Internet numbskull Jeremy and ninja ^ Teh_Masterer swing keyboards like sam- urai swords, and, later, resort to pantomiming WASD inputs in a form of kung fu parody. No, these warriors aren’t fighting online — they're face-to-face in episode four of Web show Pure Pwnage. Another gag — think of the series as a gamers’ version of Mad TV — pokes fun at hot- to-trot World of WarCraft players with an adult contemporary ditty (a la Aladdin's "A Whole New World"). We chat with Pure Pwnage’s Jeremy and Kyle (they'd rather not tell us their last names) about what comes next. CGW: What are your day jobs? Kyle: I'm still In school, so I suppose that Pure Pwnage is my day job. I am graduat- ing film school soon, though, and it's nice to already have work making the movies that I like to make. Jeremy: LOL. That’s a good one. CGW: Do you know people like your char- acters in real life, or are you extrapolat- ing from what you see in-game? Kyle: Yeah, we pretty much are our charac- ters. Some of the stuff in the show is made up, but most of it's about our lives. Jeremy: Characters extrapolating. ..what? You mean, "Do I really pwn that much?" No doubt. CGW: Using “Console Style” seemed like sheer foolishness on the Teh.Masterer’s part during his duel in episode four. Was he desperate at that point or what? Jeremy: That was a dream I had. Kyle remade it for the show. Don’t underestimate the power of Console Style, though— keyboards can only accomplish so much. CGW: Which episode would you say has proved the most popular so far? Kyle: Based on ratings and comments, it seems like most people enjoyed episodes four and six. The stuff with FPS Doug is also popu- lar with FPS fans. Kyle: I know the singers from school. They had no idea what they were even saying. ..which is why they’re laughing at the end. CGW: So what’s next for the series? Kyle: We're hard at work making episode nine. which we'll screen in advance at a Toronto the- ater. In total, we're planning for three seasons. The first will end after episode 1 2, at which point we’ll release a DVD along with the much- requested Pure Pwnage soundtrack. (We get a lot of mail asking for the name of this or that song from various episodes, but what most people don't realize is that all of our music is original material.) Cnee the show is done, we want to make Pure Pwnage; The Movie. CGW: So this is something you see your- selves profiting from? Kyle: We're selling enough T-shirts to be able to buy some better production equipment, so expect increased quality in the next episode. And with the way our audience is growing. I'm sure we’ll be able to go full-time with things in the near future. CGW: Last Q: How’s your hate mail? Jeremy: NOObs whine. It’s what they do. , THINK OF PURE PUUNREE HS FI 'GflmERB' VERSION OF HIRD TU. ^ The Pure Pwnage posse. CGW.1URC0M ■ 53 9 RADAR SIOO 100 BUCKS IT’S BURNING A HOLE IN YOUR POCKET. GO SPEND IT I TOY Playmobil Security Check-in $13 AMAZON.COM We live in a dangerous world these days, and the sooner kids know about it and become as paranoid as the rest of us, the better. What better way to introduce them to a culture of fear and high surveillance than with a toy airport security set? That's right, you too can thrill to the adventures of overworked airport staff that make you throw out dangerous nail clippers. The set isn’t entirely realistic: our tiny plastic pals don't have to remove their shoes or belts and aren't hassled for their Zippo lighters. What’s next, a Playmobil Abu-Ghraib interrogation play set? DANCER noOM 0:0 ■ MUSIC Danger Doom: The Mouse and the Mask $12 AMAZON.COM Dangermouse. MF Doom. Combine these two devi- ous hip-hop madmen and you have a musical master plan for world domination. The Mouse and the Mask, their collaborative CD, is an amazing blend of DM’s well-crafted sound- scapes and Doom’s obsession with superhero- ics. Other rappers, including Ghostface Killah, also show up to save the day, but you want the best selling point? Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim line-up inspires the disc, and the disc includes skits and character voiceovers from some of the more popular shows, including Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Buy it for the music, stay for the weirdness. I BOOK t Smartbomb $16 AMAZON.COM Freelance journalists Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby's new book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution, is an interesting look at the people inside the business. What could have devolved into a “gee-whiz” look at how people are actually earning good money by making and playing games is instead a smart behind-the-scenes look at the game industry, from trade shows to LAN tournaments, that includes interviews with high-profile guys like Cliffy B and real, live gamers like you. It's a good book for folks who still think that videogames are just child's play. Undeclared: The Complete - f Series I $37 AMAZON.COM Judd Apatow can't catch a ? Fii'st, he puts together the incredibly funny NBC Tr'-'r- series Freaks and Geeks. The critics rightly loved it, but nobody watched. Next came Undeclared. Hands-down one of the funnier shows in years. Undeclared chronicles the lives of college freshmen at the University of North Eastern California. And what a first year they had. Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Fred Willard, Ben Stiller — heck, even Ted Nugent made appearances on this show. So what did Fox do with this promising new series? Cancelled it, of course. ■ MAGAZINE Make $10 AMAZON.COM What the heck are we doing promoting another magazine? Friends, Make is a magazine like no other. It’s a do-it- yourselfer’s bible that is well written and extremely hardcore. Want a short list of some of the things covered in past issues? Here we go: podcasting, modding your car, building robots, constructing your own speakers from the ground up, building a rail gun (campers beware!), and turning your old VCR into a cat feeder. We're not kidding about that last one. As you can gather, this a rag by geeks, for geeks. Grab a copy of the quarterly pub and revel In the hardcore nerdiness for yourself. ■ MUSIC Neil Diamond: 1 2 Songs $11 AMAZON.COM Neil Diamond has always been cool. It’s you who ^ failed to recognize it. The fact is, Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes and all the rest of those newbie poseurs can make CDs for the next two decades, and they’ll never write a song as cool as ‘'Cherry, Cherry.” Now, thanks to ubergod producer Rick Rubin, Neil Diamond is "officially" cool. Doing the same thing that he did for Johnny Cash, Rick Rubin strips Neil Diamond down to his essence — getting rid of all the schlock — so we can hear him for the great singer and songwriter that he is. Jump on the bandwagon now and pretend that you always liked him. But IPod usei? beware: This has Sony's lame protection on it. PIPELINE Save some money for these upcoming games DECEMBER 2005 PUBLISHER Hammer & Sickle 2K Games L.A. Rush Midway Prince of Persia; Tlie TWo Thrones Ubisoft JANUARY 2006 25 (0 Life Eidos Hitman: Blood Money Eidos Jaws Unleashed Majesco Just Cause Eidos Scarface: The World is Yours VU Games FEBRUARY 2006 The Apprentice VU Games Battleground Europe; World War II Online Tri Synergy Commandos Strike Force Eidos Company of Heroes THQ Curious George Namco Drcamlall: The Longest Journey Funcom Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach Atari The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Bethesda Softworks Fear & Respect Midway Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords 2K Games Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Ubisoft The Godfather Electronic Arts Hcllgale: London Namco Heroes of Might and Magic V Ubisoft The Lord of the Rings Online Turbine Origin of the Species Tri Synergy Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War Midway S.TALK.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl THQ Snow 2K Games Star Wars Empire at War LucasArts Stargate SG-1: The Alliance Namco Tabula Rasa NCsoft Team Fortress 2: Brotlierhood of Arms Valve Software Tomb Raider Legend Eidos MARCH 2006 | Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth 2K Games Enemy In Sight Atari Mage Knight: Apocalypse Namco Prey 2K Games 54 > COMPUTER GAMING VVORLD Blood Language Violence 0ptlnil7.8d for the PO with enhanced graphics,^ unnerving AI, and classic, pulse-poundlngj close-quarter battles. Featuring new cutting-edge technology like motion sensors, surveillance PDAs and 42 customizable weapons. Tom C lanc y ’S 3 ykXluyUj Blood and Gore Intense Violence Strong Language Developed By Published By AcIiVisioN. XBOX 360 VUAKl In a war for Earth's survival, against an unrelenting enemy - the only way to defeat them , is to become one of them . ' Cp Battle outdoors using tanks and walkers Fight with tfie support of an elite squad CJ Annihilate the alien enemy with an arsenal of ’ hl-tech weaponry Cp Compete online in fast action, arena-style multiplayer Vuaki;4 VlJAKlii ViiAKi; 4 THE INVASION ©RADAR BRmES FOR KIDS PLBLiSHFf-S THO PRICE: S19.99 RATED: E PUBLISHER: THQ PRICE: S19.99 RATED; E10f PUBLISHER: EA PRICE- S29.99 RATED E10+ LITTLE HELPER i#^op|iit^ guide for harried eives by Carrie Shepherd PC gaming Is your obsession, so here’s one more excuse to to the store: your children. Just don’t think that it’s as ( Bbilpie as grabbing the first box you see In their age range. MBri d M jg m ymie aisie is a perilous place, laced with an yriyjjjj fra l^^ and huge blunders. To make l^utipU^B^^l^iF^'are some-of the latest gems for the little Hjjj|BB|^^^nmmr^^;,W^ther. they’ve been naughty or nice, Kids help the Bratz gals — known for their Angelina Jolie-like lips and rock star attire — start up their own fashion magazine. Love it or hate it, this is the stuff of tween-giti dreams. So brace yourself: The “fun” rebellious years are almost upon you. They’ll love: High cool factor You’ll love: Music that’s actually sorts hip Reason to regIft: Short skirts and tight pants For: Diminutive fashionistas Disney’s Chicken Little continues the film's story line in a 3D game packed with 21 levels of nonstop action. They’ll love: Gadgets including slingshots, cannons, soda bottle rockets, and yo-yos You’ll love: Don Knotts as the mayor Reason to regIft: Hefty system requirements (Pentium 4 1.4GHz processor, 64MB DirectX 9-compatible videocard) might bring the kids to your PC instead of the hand-me-down you gave them For: Bouncin’-off-die-wall types Another fantasy-fulfiller, Goblet of Fire is all about using teamwork-working with friends or A.I. characters— to produce powerful spelts, good for moving obstacles and defeating dugbogs, Death Eaters, and Hungarian homtail dragons. They’ll love: Using the Accio summoning charm to grab rewards You’ll love: That it's cheaper than seeing the Harry Poffer movie every day during winter break Reason to regift: Incites offspring to run around yelling, “Wingardium leviosa!" For: Would-be wizards PUBUSHER: Midway PRICE: $29.99 RATED; E CREflTUREa UlLLflEE The Norns from Creatures are back in an open-ended game targeted to grade-school- ers. Kids hatch and raise these virtual life forms; each Norn makes its own decisions and learns from its experiences. Village has 15 environments with weather and seasons; activities range from baking a cake to flying through CloudLand in a sky boat. They'll love: Experimenting with breeding You’ll love: Being able to put off getting a dog Reason to regift: Norns have to be trained— and they don't ahvays listen For: Future Dr. Frankensteins it's not exactly The Movies for little girls, but My Scene Goes Hollywood indulges the mov- iemaking aspiration, allowing kids to step into the pumps of the My Scene girls (that's the au curreint version of Barbie for you noobs] — Barbie, Delancey, Chelsea, Madison, cind Nolee — as they help finish a script, design sets, pick music and sound effects, make movie posters, and (naturally) design costumes and . do makeovers for the big screen. They’ll love: Combination of do-it-all Barbie writh Hollywood dreams You’ll love: That it inspires creativity Reason to regift: Reinforces girly stereotypes For: Sofia Coppola wannabes The three Eds from the Cartoon Network bring a dose of wackiness to this frenzied action game. Kids use the abilities of each Ed on the fly and perform special multi-Ed formations like the Trampol-Edd, Tower of Eddy, and Batter- Ed. As they complete scam objectives, like selling snow cones to neighborhood kids, they'll open up new areas of the game. They’ll love: Smashing stuff with their head when playing as Ed You’ll love: Brainy Edd's good example Reason to regift: El Mongo Stink Bombl Fon The class crack-up Back from the '80s, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now invading PCs with their dimpled (yet creepily oversized) faces and positive attitudes. Where’s My Pony is a genuine adventure game for the preschool set, with fetch quests and puzzles that negate a passive sit-and-watch experience: Kids have to figure out how to open latches and remove trees from paths to get their pony back to its owner. They’ll love: E^qiloring and completing goals You’ll love: Its utter placidity Reason to regift: Characters are a little too reminiscent of the time Uncle Mvin pulled a stocking over his face. Scary! Fon Your own baby CGW-1URCCM <59 ©) RADAR : QFimEE FOR KIDE NEmO: LERRNINE WITH NEITIO FUBUSHER; THQ PRICE: S19.99 RATED' E The littlest giftees on your list will love these sea-themed activities that reinforce kindergar- ten skills like color, shape, pattern, number, and letter Identification. They’ll love: Bright colors and familiar characters You’ll love: That it’s so easy to use, you won't need to supervise Reason to regift: Nemo is so 2003 For: Little Poindexters FUBUSHER- Buena Vieta Games PRICE: S39.99 RATED T PUBLISHER: Buena Vista Games PRICE: 519.99 RATED- E THE INCREDIBLEE: RISE OF THE UNDERITIINER Picking up right after where the movie leaves j off, Frozone and Mr. Incredible are out to get j the evil Underminer. The more villains they I defeat, the better their powers become. This - fun little beat-em-up game is something you probably will enjoy playing with them. They’ll love: Freezing enemies and building ice bridges as Frozone You’ll love: Continuing the action from the movie without having to watch the DVD for the millionth time Reason to regift: The kids won't let you join the game For: Superheroic half-pints PUBUSHER: Kutoka PRICE: S1! RATED; Ages 5-7 [no ESRB rs BPONEEBOB EQURREPRNTSj LIEHTS. CRmERR. PRNT5I As kids help SpongeBob scour Bikini Bottom for actors and props for a special episode of The New Adventures of Mermaidman and Bamacleboy, they Indulge in minigames like checkers and rounding up jellyfish. They’ll love: Assigning roles and props for the show You'll love: The clever humor, which in the right frame of mind can be as fun as a lava lamp Reason to regIft: Games might be too low-tech for more sophisticated kids For: Sponge aficionados The Qme has come to end that darned 1 00- enchanted winter in Narnia once and for all. To do it, kids will need to take on the persona of one of the Pevensie children: Peter, Susan, Edmund, or Lucy. Each Pevensie has unique skills, but as a team they can defeat even the most formidable Minotaurs and Cyclops. To that end, two kids can play together on the same PC using the keyboard, or with a USB gamepad or joystick. They’ll love: Plenty of action in 15 levels, incor- porating 30 clips from tire movie You’ll love: That it forces kids to cooperate for once Reason to regift: Kids decide to use their newfound cooperation skills against you . For Bookworms-turned-gamers DISNEV'S CINDERELLR DOLLHOUSE 2 Every little girl starts off with this pipe dream of being a little princess. So what better way to prepare them for a life of royalty than with Cinderella Dollhouse 27 Kids plan and prepare for Cinderella’s special events, making flower arrangements, decorating cakes and royal rooms, and learning princess etiquette. So, all you members of the royal family reading our magazine, go out and grab this game. It'll feel just like a sim game of your lives! They'll love; Actually printing their own invitations You’ll love: Disney-quality animation Reason to reglft: Daughter starts saying, “lt!s a good thing” For: Divas in training PU8USHER: THQ R^ICE; S19.99 RATHD; E DIDI & DITTO FIRST ERRDE THE WOLF KING As beavers Didi and Ditto, kids must save their land from the evil Wolf King using math, science, literacy, creativity, and problem-solving skills. They’ll love: Collecting flags and medallions as they outsmart the wolf You’ll love: Curriculum disguised as fun Reason to regift: Kids see through your scheme of making them learn while gaming For: Smarty-pants first-graders 60 > CDMPLJTER (5AMINr? WORI i THY WILL BE DONE - FASTER AND BETTER The difference is clear as black and white. You need ATI's new Radeon' X1800 series designed with a radically new 3D architecture and Shader Model 3.0, to experience mind-blowing gaming effects and full graphics performance. To find out more about the entire new line-up of Radeon products, including ATI's CrossFire'" multi-GPU solutions and Avivo'“ for video and display perfection, go to ati.com/newradeon today! 02005 ATI Tschnologiss Inc. All righu ressiveO. ATI, RADEOM, CiossFre ami Avivo eia liadairiaiVs anctlor regislered tradamaiks of ATITochnologiasInc. Black fiVVliite 20 2001-2005 Lionhead Slndrcs Lmded. All il raserved. Uonhaed.lha Lionhaad logo. Black & While and the Black &Whilo Logo aieuadomarksor legisli trademarks of LiontieadSliidias Limited in the US and/or other counlrias. Black & White’ is a Lionheed'Stu brand. Electronic Arts, EA and the EA logo era trademarks orreglstaiad trademarks of Elacltonic Arts Inc. in U.S. end/or other countries. Piiblished end distributed by Electronic Arts. EA'" Is an Electronic Arts'" brand. ONLINE EVOLUTION and dwarves? 1^ POP QUIZ TIME: MASSIVELY MULTI- player online games evolved from (A) ^ multiuser dungeons {MUDs), (B) pen-and- paper RPGs, (C) Cheeto crumbs, or (D) all of the above. If you guessed answer D you are correct, except maybe for the Cheeto crumb part. Today’s MMOs are direct descendents of the MUDs of the late ’70s and ’80s, in which groups of players joined online bulletin boards to share in text-based fantasy adventures. But the MUDs, in turn, drew their primary inspira- tion from pen-and-paper fantasy RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published way back in 1974. Those tabletop RPGs clearly inform today’s online dragon slaying— so much so, in fact, that almost every successful MMO to date has been set in a fantasy-RPG setting. We’ve played as Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot is set firmly in a traditional, femiiiar high-fantasy MMO world. elves, fairies, and dwarves in Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, and, of course. World of WarCraft. Are we really that happy to hang out with ores all the time? Apparently, yes. According to mmogchart.com, an MMO research site mn by Bruce Sterling Woodcock, fantasy-based RPGs account for approximately 85 percent of the market share of all current MMO players. Aside from the recent exception of City of Heroes (which lets us swap out our leather elven tights for spandex superhero tights), most games that don’t let us brandish +3 battleaxes of dorkdom and slay mightye beastes have fallen over like level 1 rats. Even franchises that previously seemed like licenses to print money have disap- pointed: Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Sims alt fell far short of expectations with their MMOs. At the same time, online fantasy-themed games continue to garner players. While WOWs 4 million subscribers puts the game in a cat- egory of its own, there are also hundreds of thousands of gamers packing the servers in Final Fantasy XI, EverQuest and its sequel, and other games. NERD COMFORT FOOD So why are we interested only In slaying drag- ons? Ryan Seabury, fiie design director for NCsoft's upcoming Auto Assault, theorizes, “Fantasy isn’t necessarily ‘cooler’ than other settings, but it is more comfortable for a lot of people, both in development and as a gamer. Fantasy settings provide a sort of automatic comfort level for a character-based game. Everyone knows what ores, elves, wam'ors, and wizards are supposed to be and do, so you can quickly get the setting and get right into the game. You usually have a nice polarized conflict between good and evil in traditional fantasy settings, which is a nice escape from the gray scales of reality. Contrast that to more abstract present or futuristic settings, where you might have to explain the game world and the expect- ed roles a little more to begin with.” EverQuest II senior producer Scott Hartsman seconds this. “There are strong archetypes in fantasy,” he explains. “Many people (whether they’d admit it as adults or not!) already have a sense of what makes for a consistent fan- tasy world. If I told an average person who is inexperienced with MMOs that I was making a fantasy world where dwarves were 1 0 feet tall and dragons were timid little creatures that lived in little holes in the wall and only came out at night to scavenge for cheese, they could pick that out as dead wrong before I got to the end of the sentence. "With a traditional fantasy setting, a lot of the ‘work’ of having to clearly communicate a con- sistent environment is already done and waiting inside people’s heads, ripe for buiiding new content and gsuneplay knowledge right on top of the player’s preexisting familiarity, knowledge, and, therefore, fondness for the world.” Another factor in the popularity of the genre is the type of player likely to spend time and money oniine. Michael Pachter, a gaming-indus- try analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, says, “I don’t think that other genres lend ONLINE EUOLUTION RADAR @i themselves to the immersive experience that will keep a player paying a monthly fee for a long period of time. There's only so far you can go in Battlefield before it gets old. Ditto sports. The point is that fantasy is for hardcore 30-plus- hour-per-week players, while the other genres are somewhat more casual.” Companies need those hardcore players if they want to succeed, because hardcore players are the ones willing to keep paying the monthly subscription. EA Games learned this the hard way with a couple of its thwarted attempts at entering the MMO space. Motor City Online, which was essentially an offshoot of the popular Need for Speed racing fran- chise, was shut down after only two years. And The Sims Online, while still active, has dropped, according to mmogchart.com, from a peak subscriber base of just over 1 00,000 to less than 30,000 — nowhere near what anyone expected from the best-selling gaming fran- chise of all time. In both those cases, the game designs themselves might have been at least part of the problem. But the bigger and tougher question is whether the games would have gar- nered sizeable audiences even if the gameplay had been perfect. ELVES, ELVES, AND MORE ELVES For some gamemakers, the question is not even worth asking. With the millions of dol- lars in development costs for MMOs, it makes good financial sense for developers to want to stick with what has worked. And that’s why you’ve got a new slew of games — Dungeons & City of Heroes is the big non- fantasy MMO success story. STRR WRRS. THE ITIRTRIK AND THE SIITIS ALL FELL FAA SHORT OF EHPECTATI0N5. Dragons Online, Warhammer Online, Vanguard, The Lord of the Rings Online — that aren’t break- ing any barriers in terms of their settings. CThis isn’t a judgment against these games, by the way— just an observation on their content.) Thomas Tenezas, the producer for SOE's groundbreaking PlanetSide, doesn’t think this is a good thing. “I think that most developers have held back a little when it comes to using unconventional methods," he says. “You’ve got to have a lot of balls to come out and try some- thing new that many people have thought about but never had the guts to try. Let's face it, with If you see any elves on the road In NCsoffs upcoming Atito Assault, nm them over. CGW.1UP.COM <63 ©RADAR ONLINE EVOLUTION long development cycles and a ton of money to make a game, not too many people are going to go against the grain.” Mike O'Brien, the head of ArenaNet's Guild Wars design team, thinks that game companies are only hurting themselves by sticking with what’s been proven. "I do think there's more of a market for unique MMO styles than most publishers realize,” he says. "I know that other publishers are looking closely at the successes of City of Heroes and Guild Wars and are draw- ing lessons from them. I hope they draw the right lessons. The right lesson is, 'Playem are really hungry for something new and will strongly sup- port innovative new games.' The wrong lesson is, ‘Hey, a game about comic-book heroes was successful! Let’s clone it!’” Similarly, while the huge success of World of WarCraft Is inevitably going to lead to a bunch of copycat designs and further convince pub- lishers that they should jump on the fantasy bandwagon, the real lessons the game provides have to do with gameplay mechanics and user friendliness, not the fact that WOW is another game with dwarves. “Game-design-wise, WOWs success proves in a very strong way what I had hoped for years was true,” says Auto Assault’s Seabury, “which is that fun games are what people really want. I’ve often felt the first-generation MMOGs were built by sadomasochists, despite their success. There were so many punishing, tedious systems and mechanics that made those first games great for someone, for example, who might enjoy peeling their fingernals backward very slowly, just to say they could do iL” enothephsth* \' Semtetw talk ‘ Hey everyone! You hoving a jood time at my backyard bosh? how you doin’? whatEVA^ The Sims Online was supposed to be the breakthrough MMO. But players stayed away In droves. im STILL UUniTINE FOR fTlV WESTERN ITimO SO I CRN PLRV COWBOVS RND INDIRNS online; -THOmflB TERRfiZRB, PRODUCER OF SOE'S PLRNETSIDE KEEP HOPE ALIVE OK, so if we agree that developers shouldn't be making World of CloneCraft, what should they be doing? David “Zeb” Cook, senior designer at Cryptic Studios, thinks that companies can look at the past and use it to move fon,vard. “MMOs are moving out of their adolescent stage,” he explains. "There is a body of experience that we can now draw on to move MMOs into the next phase. There is more knowledge about how people actually play these games, which is big because now games can be better shaped to the needs of the player instead of forcing the player to adapt to the game. One of the great things about City of Heroes was that it broke out of the traditional 'kill the rat' low-level grind and got you into playing and being a hero Immedi- ately. People like that.” In terms of genre, developers need to not be discouraged by past failures, which, as we’ve "We have lots of shared cultural mythos that games could be based on,” says ArenaNet’s O’Brien. "The pyramids of ancient Egypt, the Greek gods and Mount Olympus, Hades, pirates and swashbuckling, ninjas and samurai, comic-book heroes, the Wild West, the first explorations into deep Africa, World Wars I and It. Some settings are more suited than others to supporting what game designers are often look- ing for: larger-than-life heroes, magical or super- natural abilities, and a good variety of different character classes, appearances, and abilities." The proliferation of broadband, which has cut down on lag issues, and the success of multiplayer online shooters like Battlefield 2 also point the way toward the future. “Technically, BF2 could qualify as an MMOG,” says Erik Krebs, lead designer of The Matrix Online. “It has a lot of people playing simul- taneously, and if you are playing on ranked servers, there is a sense of persistence. I play cew «AYS... ^ - It isn’t all elves and dwarves. Big I ‘ props go to Sony Online’s PlanetSide ^ ^ for paving the way, years ahead 4k of its time, for upcoming “MMOFPS” games like Webzen’s Hwdey. And NCsoft . is currently making a great reputa- tion for itself by breaking away from the fantasy ghetto with the City of Heroes/Villains games and the upcoming MMO i car-combat game AufoAssai/fr. Linden Lab K is doing ail kinds of weird genre-bending * things in Second Life {www.secondlife.com), a combination MMO, bulletin board, auction ^ site, and virtual land grab. And, yaaaaii We couldn’t be more excited for Flying Lab's upcoming Pirates of the Burning Sea, the MMO that will finally let us shiver our timbere in the online world. said, may have had less to do with games not being fantasy-based than with them being poorly designed. Similarly, ig developers need to embrace the etSide genre they're working in com- j pletely, rather than just make, ” say, World of WarCraft in space, [jsoft “Surely science fiction is cooler than fantasy!” says Reynir Hardarson, creative director at CCP (Eve Online). “A 1 .1 -gigaton MMO dreadnought in flames is undenl- ably cool. But because of the success of fantasy-based MMOs, ^ developers have been trying to stretch that model to fit their sci-fi games. Why would anyone We {Q p|gy g ggj.fl ggipe that is ^ ® in essence an EverOuest clone ' with robots instead of dragons? mbere In that case, we would rather just play EQ. Dancing aliens just don't spell sci-fi.” regularly and find the game very exciting. I would probably pay a reasonable monthly fee to play on ranked EA-hosted servers." (See our story on page 30.) Krebs continues, “Up to now there hasn't been an MMOG which has grabbed the attention of the same masses that play Half-Ufe, Quake, Unreal, and Doom to convince them to pay a monthly fee. We came close with PlanetSide, and we have a great dedicated group that plays, but there is a lot more we could explore with the FPS genre. It’s clear the RPG genre has been covered pretty adequately in the MMO space at this point. It is time for developers to start creating games that use other genres or create entirely new genres. The market is ready for new games that innovate instead of replicate." “The world is our oyster,” says Terrazas. “I'm still waiting for my Western MMO to play cowboys and Indians — if anyone is listening out there.” We are. And we agree./Ryan ScotL Kristen Salvatore, Jeff Green, Dana Jongewaard 64 XCOMPLITER GAMING WORLD MICHAEL MADSEN MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ KRISTANNA LOKEN OiLLY MEXTLOAF MATT GERALDINE WILL UDO - DAVIS CHAPLIN SANDERSON KJER ZANE ADAY IlIiillB Miifflffl illiis EiiWIl HillSMil 11 lili lilWllBiHiKltf “TSliEii"'! logins JiiKyis I'TiUJiiyiiiiiJ AMDZ^ Turionf^ MOBILE TECHNOLOGY ■ NVIDIA' nForce’“4 SLI Chipset MB with Dual I6X PCI Express ■Genuine Windows' XP Home Edition w/ SP 2 ■Microsoft’ Works 8.0 •Corsair 1024MB PC3200 DDR400 Memory • 200CB 7200RPM SMB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive • 16X PCI Express NVIDIA' GeForce"* 6600 256MB DDR w/TV OulPowcred byXmdia ■ LG I6X DVD+-RW Drive & LG 16X DVD-ROM •NVIDIA' nForce 4 7.1 3-D Surround Sound ■ eooWatt Subwoofer System •Logitech Deluxe 104 Keyboard > Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse •Nzxt' X-Nemesis Tower Case 42SWatt w/MOD "See Through Windows" ' Free First Year On Site Service plus 24/7 Tech Support ’ Upgrade to Sicuro RW670XL s.l Crazy Lighting ' Speakers System for S139 •Free 802.1 1G Wireless PCI Network Adaptor ■NVIDIA' nForce’‘‘4 SU Chipset MB with Dual I6X PCI Express • Genuine Windows' XP Home Edition w/ SP 2 •Miaosoft* Works 8.0 ■ Corsair 1024MB PC320O 0DR400 Memory -200GB 7200RPM SMB Cache Seriai ATA1S0 Hard Drive • (2) NVIDIA' Ceforee’" 6aoo XT 256MB DDRS Powered by Xmdia, Up to 2x the performance of a single graphics card solution • LG I6X DVD+-RW Drive & LG 16X DVD-ROM • NVIDIA' nForce 4 7.1 3-D Surround Sound ' GOOWatt Subwoofer System ' Logitech Deluxe 104 Keyboard ' Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse > Turbo X-Cruiser Case 420Watt with See Through Windows ’6 Cool Custom Colors to Choose From ' Free First Year On Site Service plus 24/7 Tech Support •Free 802.11C Wireless PCI Network Adaptor • NVIDIA' nForce''‘4 SLI Chipset MB with Dual I6X PCI Express • Genuine Windows’ XP Professional X64 64Bit OS ■Microsoft' Works 8.0 • Corsair 2048MB P0200 DDR400 Memory •250CB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATAISO Hard Drive • I6X PCI Express NVIDIA' GeForce"* 6800 CS 256MB ODR3 Powered by Xmdia ■ LG 16X DVD+-RW Drive; LG 16X DVD-ROM • NVIDIA' nForce 4 7.1 3-D Surround Sound ■ Creative Cambridge Inspire P7800 7.1 Surround Sound System ’ 17" ViewSonic VA7I2P XIreme SMS Gaming LCD Display ’ Logitech Deluxe 104 Keyboard ’ Microsoft* Optical Intelli Explorer Mouse •Aluminum X-Navigator Server Tower Case 420Watt w/ MOD "See Through Windows" ' Free First Vear On Site Service plus 24/7 Tech Support • Free 802.1 1 C Wireless PCI Network Adaptor AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 4800 -f Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 4400+ Processor AMD Athlon’" G4 X2 4200+ Processor AMD Athlon’" 64 X2 3800+ Processor AMD Aililon’" 64 3500+ Processor AMD Athlon’" 64 3200+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 3000+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 4400+ Processor AMD Athlon"* 64 X2 4200+ Processor AMD Athlon’" 64 X2 3800+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 4000+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 3800+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 3500+ Processor AMD Athlon"" 64 3200+ Processor AMD Athlon' AMD Athlon’ AMO Athlon’ AMD Athlon’ AMD Athlon' AMDfl AthionX2 ■NVIDIA' nForce’"4 SLI Chipset MB with Dual I6X PCI Express ■ Genuine Windows' XP Home Edition w/ SP 2 ■Miaosoft' Works 8.0 • Corsair 512MB PC3200 DDR400 Memory • leOGB 72aORPM SMB Cache Serial ATA1S0 Hard Drive ■ (2) NVIDIA’ Geforce’" 6600 256MB DDRS, 16X PCI Express w/ TV-Out Powered by Xmdia, Up to 2x the performance of a single graphics card solution ■LG I6X DVD+-RW Drive ■NVIDIA' nForce'“4 7.1 3-D Surround Sound ■ 600Walt Subwoofer System ■Logitech Deluxe 104 Keyboard ’ Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse 'Nzxt' X-Nemesis Tower Case42SWatt w/MOD "See Through Windows" ' Free First Year Oii-Site Service plus 24/7 Tech Support AMD Athlon’" 64 FX-57 Processor AMD Athlon’" 64 X2 4600+ Processor AMD Aililon'" 64 X2 4400+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 4200+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 3800+ Processor AMD Athlon'" 64 3500+ Processor AMO Athlon'” 64 3200+ Processor FIT f' ' AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology •AMD PowerNow! 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CA 91706 Tel; (626)813-7730 > Fax: (626)813-3810 Technical Support (877)876-4965 AMD Athlon’" 64 3000+ Processor S 609 Hour: Mon-Fri 8:30A.M. - 6:00P.M. Sat 9;30A.M. - 3;00P.M. uticc t>r □hlfSJItton. ' I phOtDQt.ip QURKE PUBLISHER: Activislon DEVELOPER: Splash Damage GENRE: Multiplayer FPS RELEASE DA1E: “When it's ready. L TEBRITOBV-V 68 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD gURKE COVER STORY 7) E WORLDS A former mod squad hits the big time as developer of I Activision’s newest WMD — V-, ^ Enemy Territory: Quake Wars BY DARREN GUDSTONE m The Btrogg Icarus antigravity packs hover just off the ground and allow for small Jumps>>-perfect for stealth missions. EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT ENEMY TERRITORY; QUAKE WARS ^ EARTH, 2065; AFTER YEARS OF SEARCHING THE STARS, we are finally contacted by a sentient extraterrestrial spe- ^ cies, the strogg. Half men, half machines, they definitely don’t come in peace. Crap. England, today: Thirty minutes outside London in the town of Bromley, 25 people plot mankind’s untimely eradication. Just look for the one-floor office with the nice cars parked in front. Inside, K Paul “Locki" Wedgwood and the rest of the Splash Damage team L,. are hard at work on Enemy Temfory^ Quake Wars. Wedgwood, the burgeoning company’s managing dlrectorjind game designer, goes out of his way to first apologetically “wam”lhat'evecy,screen- shoUygu see littering the next.few pages is based off a pre-aipha • build of {Re game. Friend, the.oniy thing you have to apologize for is teasing us. Even' at this poirit, Quake Wars’ graphics look amaz- ing. then again, one expects a degree of graphical slickness from the Doom 3 engine. Hold on. Enemy Territory, a game that promises m^sive out- '' door battles, massive maps, and a massive attention to detail uses the same engine that created Doom 3? But there are no ***' . claustrophobic corridor crawls with the lights out. No monster closets. This is a far cry from id Softwarete demonic FPS. What’s amazing— beyond the technology that’s pushing Enemy Territory well past the constraints of the original game engine and the multi- player combat (we’ll get to all that soon enough) — is that this sci-fi 2 Battlefield 2 killer is Splash Damage's first true commercial release. ' DEVELOPER’S TERRITORY. Wedgwood and company already know what people vyant. After ^ all, they worked with id Software’s Kevin Cloud and Robert Duffy to create Return to Castle Wo/fer7sraB: Erteniy Territory. The totally free stand-alone multiplayer game *hich is on this month’s disc) has garnered awards worldwide. “Two and a half years after its release and [RTCW.ET] is still one of the more popular multiplayer games online," Wedgwood humbly submits. Splash Damage worked with Cloud on his plan, the basis for the first Enemy Territory. Rather than create a sports-arena- like multiplayer experience, as in Quake III: Arena or the Unreal Tournament games, they wanted to re-create war — ^two teams, in the field, accomplishing mission-based objectives (kind of like Team Fortress, the game Wedgwood loved and helped port over into Quake: Team Fortress as a modder). The first implementation would be an expansion for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. But early on, even while In the middle of developing RTCW:ET, Wedgwood and Cloud were talking about the future. "Enemy Territory is a new intellectual property that we want to take to different universes,” says Cloud. Does this mean there will be a UAC-versus-demons spin on ET in the future? "Anything’s possible," he laughs, “but we can only handle one thing at a time! We're obviously focusing on getting this game out the door first.” Basing this Ehemy.Territory game in the Quake universe, though, is the obvious choice. “We loved the idea of the conventional Earth military combat versus this kind of invading alien race with high technology and still preserving balanced gameplay. Ultimately," recalls Wedgwood, "we wanted to do something more than create a fight that amounted to little more than two sides equally equipped but wearing different hats." And they have. > THE W9IR Room A breakdown of the battlefield COURSES OF ACTION Every map, according to Wedgwood, will have all sorts of escape routes. ''Every piece of geometry in the game,” he says, “is potential cover or a potential jump.” The asphalt roads are best suited for big vehicles like the mobile command center, which can get stuck in the mud. There are off-track areas like dirt roads for every other wheeled vehicle. Small trenches offer soldiers safe passage to creep through on foot. Each map will even have routes made to benefit specific vehicles — like a ramp at the end of a pier, letting you jump a river Evel Knievel style. PLAN OF ATTACK If you played Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or UT2004’s Onslaught mode, you're familiar with the idea of controlling the flow of battle, instead of cluelessly scrambling all over, both sides get steered to the action. This illustration shows one map in progress. DEPLOYMENT of the cooler elements incorporated ^nto the battle is that everyone can call - in class-specific backup. An engineer, for example, can order up a mobile radar dish to spot enemies. Just look for some steady ground (shaded in green] and wait for the supply drop. Someone blew up your ride? You can do the equivalent of calling AAA to airlift a replacement to you in the field. Then there are the really cool classes, like the field commander, which can call in air and artillery strikes while sighting enemies. The one thing you don’t need to deal with: gathering resources. THE FRONT LINE The average outdoor game map will be huge — roughly one square mile huge, if not bigger. The goal is to optimize the size and hit Cloud and Wedgwood's teamplay sweet spot: 24 to 32 players. "That's best for great teamplay while pursuing each mission’s military objectives as part of an overriding campaign. That said, we will not hard-lock the player limit, and as with Wolfenstein: Enemy 'Territory, we’re sure people may choose to run larger servers (many ran 64-player counts) for a different player experience,’’ says Wedgwood. For the sake of our demo, I rode shotgun on sorties through the Canyon map and a work-in-progress temperate region. There's obviously more in store for the game’s initial release: arctic war- fare, desert and jungle fighting, even urban combat. COVER STORY QURKE ^ I MISSION PUSSIBLK Interesting fact: According to Jeff Morris, a producer at Epic Games, a surprisingly large number of people prefer to play Unreal Tournament 2004 offline against bots. ETQW will have none of that. The team has no plans for bots or an offline mode, save for maybe some basic training. The general design philosophy is to make people experience the game online, as part of a team. But what about those poor, defenseless newbies who have no clue about what to do next? "World of WarCraft does a fan- tastic job of teaching people how to play without them feel- ing like it,’’ says Wedgwood. Hence, the solo mission system will help ease people into the game. The host server sees what's happening ail across the game and gives each player class-specific objectives that they can accept. These minimis- sions help teach the nuances of each player class in the game, while helping the greater cause ultiplayer firefight. ACE OF BASES Home is where the heart is. And where your command center is. And your fac- tory. Besides being a spawn point, the command center allows you to change your class while in the field. Factories are self-explanatory. Protect both these important facilities with your life. The dreaded strogg facilities remain shrouded in mystery since the artists haven’t finished texturing their headquarters. CGW.1URC0M ■ 71 ■S’ COVER STORY I c«..niasie of what Splash * hs»s wrought, check ■ 1 Damage has wwg. \ out this month’s ovw # ' We’ve packed in the full / game, VYoItensfein: / Enemy Tetrifoo^ ✓ 1 ^^ From playing Quake 4, we already know how the story ends. We take the fight to ^ the strogg homeworld. How did it get so bad? Enemy Territory: Quake Wars serves as a chronicle of the war’s early years. Each of the 12 maps expected to ship with the game will in some small way tell a story. Think of each as a significant battle — like Pearl Harbor- or D-Day-themed missions in |ust about every World War II shooter. You'll even see nods to the future. In one mission, for example, you could be trying to raid a lab to stop the development of the hyperblaster. There will be multiple missions taking place on some maps at different times of day. The objectives of a night raid into a strogg camp will be very dif- ferent from those of a daytime assault. Enou^'talk, time to fight. Wedgwood launches the game and selects the Global Defense Force. The Canyon map is a very basic one, but its primary purpose is for play- balancing. The objective: The GDP needs to destroy an underground structure the strogg have captured. To do this, the humans need to construct a bridge. Next, they need to escort and deploy a mobile command center to the center of the level. After setting up field sup- port (radar dishes, artillery, and the tike), they need to press the attack. This particu- lar map is broken up into four territories, by objectives, and when looking at an overview map, players will clearly be able to see which parts belong to your team and where you’re needed most. THERE’S NO “I” IN TEAM, BUT THERE’S AN “M” AND “E” One overriding theme in the battlefield makes Enemy Territory stand apart even from Battlefield 2: Cooperative teamwork is more important than simply following orders. How that Is executed in-game is what makes things interesting. Now, in a multiplayer shooter like BF2, the commander calls all the shots. Whether it’s directing people, requesting an AWAC for radar, or calling in air strikes, he’s the boss. In Enemy Territory, everybody plays a role. Sure, players can operate on their own, but it serves everyone best to meet the team’s goals. In fact, throughout our conversation Wedgwood continually refers to the roles that need to be 72 COMPLTTER GAMING WORLD COVER STORY’S’ 4 The transforming strogg Goliath tank is one of Wedgwood’s favorite vehicles. Check out its transformation from concept art to in-game menace. W -4 ^^COOPERRTIUE TEnmUJORK 15 fTlORE IfTlPOR- iT’frTfiNT THAN BimPLV FOLLOWING ORDERS. filled: offense, midfield, and defense. No, he's not referring to "proper" football (which he never really watches); he's basing this upon his experiences playing lots of Quake: Team Fortress. Take the engineer setting up base defenses. Besides being able to repair vehicles and place mines, he can call in a radar dish. Pulling out his trusty deployment tool, he surveys the area. Then, as in any RTS, a grid shows you where you can deploy a unit. Upon calling In the request, a cargo chopper is sent out from the factory and air-drops the radar at the desig- nated location. The radar then animates, opens up, and is ready for action. But this is no RTS. There are no resources to sweat, save having to wait some time before you can call in another missile launcher or vehicle. After all, you don’t want to have 10 Titan-class three-person tanks come rumbling into the strogg base in the first five minutes of play. In fact, Wedgwood is almost obsessive about making sure this game is properly bal- anced. A QA team is already hammering the game around the clock to make certain there’s a rock-paper-scissors balance in effect. “There will be advantages to being on foot,” he says in an effort to assure that this won't turn into a vehicle contest. Wedgwood has also cautioned that nothing is set in stone at this point: “There are more units in development for both teams, and some existing ones may still be cut” DRIVE OFFENSIVELY Teamwork is especiatly important when you hit the road, and passengers vinll do a whole lot more than just ride shotgun. In most games, one person mans the turret while another player simply drives. Here, there’s more thought being put into it from the start. Let’s take the Badger (what Schwarzenegger’s Hummer will probably look like in 50 years). If you hop in by yourself, you steer and have limited > CGW.1UP-COM '73 S 3O ^ A 'l w ^ ? T * < Tcl < ^ Of JOUJB s OCCO’C 3 Ib.SS n. 3 B 3d3 ii i?l| g O a: O n < cxs n w u gUFIKE ■S! COVER STORY That’s the motto of the game, really: The team wants to get people In quickly and not punish them for being newbies. Many games offer an offline mode to teach the ropes or, at the very ieast, the abiiity to add bots. Not here — both go against the entire teamplay phiiosophy at Splash Damage. They considered devoting time to bots in the past, but with such a small squad of deveiopers, they want to focus on maps and balancing, not teaching bots how to play every class and role. So how do you teach those les- sons to newcomers? Give them some in-the- fieid training with solo missions. “The whole point of the soio mission,” says Wedgwood, “is to teach people how to play the game and help them contribute to the takes the turret, giving him a fuil 360-degree shot at stroggs. Player three, sitting in the passenger seat, has a command consoiethat aiiows him to designate targets and make it easier for everyone to focus their aim. “The vehicles in this game aren't meant to feel like buses," says Cloud. “They are an extension of your character." Wedgwood, of course, quickly points out that these vehicles are not final and a lot of tinkering will still be done. However, there are many advantages to build- ing near-futuristic vehicies. Nameiy, you can down and crash after takeoff (you can thank them iater, Ryan). Since you shouidn't be pun- ished just for getting off the ground, you'li find an inteiligent learning curve buiit into vehicles. Once hitting a certain altitude, you get more control over the Anansi attack chopper. Angle of descent and speed will allow you to make straf- ing runs and puil off stunts, but if you stop your forward movement and descend, you can easiiy land. With VTOL rockets and helicopter rotors, it's a fairly nimble craft that, by Wedgwood's logic, is easy to learn but difficult to master. BET PEOPLE IN THE BPiTlE QUICKLV PND DON'T PUNISH THEm FOR BEING NEWBIES. 76 COMPUTER GAMING WORLD team while doing it.” Let’s say your ranger is scouting ahead and places a radar. An enemy cannon is located. The game server identifies targets of opportunity, and the nearest solider with the means to destroy K will see a minimis- sion pop up in the comer of his HUD. Upon accepting it, the player's given a new objective and a waypoint appears leading him to the last known location of his target. Of course, once the means of spotting enemy forces is gone (if, say, a radar dish gets blasted), the player just has to do a little more recon work. Similarly, a paramedic in the field gets alerted to nearby fallen comrades. Alternatively, your fire-team leader can issue basic context-sensitive commands. Move your crosshair over a fallen comrade and hit a but- ton — you're requesting someone to revive him. Look at an enemy position, and hitting that same button will t6ll allies to take that target ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? Through completing objectives or performing above and beyond the call of duty, you gain experience. And, as senior game designer Ed Stern jokes, “Experience is rewarded with more complexity.” For instance, as you per- form more cunning stunts during the course of battle, you gain the ability to perform even more intricate maneuvers In vehicles. The team is still toying with how to implement the reward system, be it additional skills or items, but one thing they want to avoid is what winds up happening in games like COVER STORY 'F A solider^ LAW rocket— the great equalizer. Battlefield 2. Uber-pL4y3r has been play- ing BF2 since launch, is a top scorer on the ranking system, and has unlocked all these extra weapons. What chance does some first timer have against him? Little to none. Yes, Splash Damage wants some sort of achievement-based ranking system, so you can see where you stand with your team members in the rankings, but the idea of persistent experience can be a problem. It’s solution: the experience gained is limited to the campaign played. A typical campaign will consist of three maps. Any experience earned then will let you level up over the course of the fight, but once you start over, you reset the clock and you're once again playing on a level field./ GGW.IUP.COM 77 gURKE ANIMATIONS Thank artist Frankie Hobbins, who got all trussed up in a Lycra motion- capture suit; because of him you’ll see some incredible animations throughout ETQW. There are different stances, and the physical demeanors of the two species just look different. You can spot it from a distance: GDF forces use proper combat stances, while the strogg swagger in menac- ingly like the Terminator. Even more important is that you can see what characters are doing. For those who look carefully, the game conveys lots of information. Soldiers reach for weapons and swap gear on their out- fits, and you can see in third person if someone is reloading. HIGH TECH Talk nerdy to me Wedgwood submits, “It's amazing being able to get help from the likes of [id Software’s] John Carmack and Robert Duffy,” but ^ Cloud gives much of the credit back to the Splash Damage team. ‘‘They are being way too humble about what’s being done in-house," he adds, “They have some amazingly talented people working on this game.” In fact, when Carmack heard what Splash Damage was hoping to accomplish (everything you see below, plus being able to optimize network code for 24 to 32 players online), he reportedly said, “That’s impossible!’’ Apparently, it's not. PHYSICS In this game, everything— be it a hovering desecrator strogg tank or the lumbering mobile command center— has unique properties. Try parking the mobile command center on too steep an angle and it’ll roll downhill. You’ll be able to shoot individual tires off vehicles. The environment itself reacts as well. Cars kick up gravel. River currents can carry debris downstream. At different key map points, you’ll be able to get creative and create rockslides for makeshift roadblocks. Wedgwood gives an example of when a QA tester loaded a Husky ATV (it was just added to the game that morning) with C4 and rolled it down a hill into enemy ter- ritory. When the stroggs gathered to check it out— BOOM! Bodies were flying everywhere. Lesson learned: Everything’s fair game. MEGATEXTURES This must be a big deal. Why else would they call it “mega”? Imagine if you could paint down a texture, and without any addi- tional coding, it tells the game everything it needs to know about that surface — for example, that dirt behaves a certain way and has distinct physical properties (it'll slow down vehicles, sound a cer- tain way when tires crunch on it, and create debris when shot). The payoff is that you can create a less-detailed model and paint it with a more-detailed texture. This means that huge maps won’t bring your PC to a screeching halt. POSTPROCESSING Who needs HDR? It makes for a really pretty light show, but damn, those effects become a major resource hog. Splash Damage’s technology allows it to get HDR-llke results at a lower CPU cost than real HDR. Realistic sunlight and reflections are all here, and the tint, contrast, saturation, and bloom effects are all controllable. The bonus is that the developers can use this engine to change the mood of the game — maybe desaturate the light for some rainy day blues. Stacking more effects on that tech allows for other very cool postprocessing effects in-game. Try zooming in. For the GDF, you’ll see lens distortion around a scope’s edges. The strogg have a video feed that slightly pixelates when you move./ DETAILS An amazing amount of thought is going into the game world. The char- acters themselves convey information even when you aren’t. You can tell which class each character is without having an icon hovering over him. If that engineer is out of mines, you see an empty spot on his pack. Is the strogg meditek a quart low on stroyent? You can see the juice sloshing around in his backpack. Then you need to look at the environment. A scal- ing level-of-detail shader, affectionately called the Stuff System, populates the area with objects in an area of relevance. Close up you’ll see buildings or debris, and at a distance the amount of tex- ture detail gradually fades. But even from high up, you’ll see news- papers littering a street. 78 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD The story of'Navy Field" was based on ihcWWIl which is considered to be one ol the most unforgettable and largest wars of the 20th century. As you can toll by the title, "Navy Field" is the story of naval battles during WWIf. In “Navy Field", players can lake command of historical ships such as the Yamato and Musashi, US New Jersey, US Missouri, U.K Princess of Wales, and the German Bismarck. As well as providing these historically well known ships and images, “Navy Field" also allows the opportunity for players to experience such vivid moments of WWII naval battles in individual battles with up to 128 simultaneous players. If you wish lo be a hero; join "Navy Field" today! 1 i;:..::. 1 ^^ git |. . , i: ^ r% _ L_ — ^:c3RSr?r You can play with others or play with yourself Matrix Online $44.95 Single-player Gary Grigsby's World At War ♦ # ♦ i ^ m V 9 ^ 9 m Dungeon Siege 2 $48.95 ♦ * Silent Hunter 3 $39.95 www.chipsbits.com EVERY GENRE • ALL PLATFORMS • BOARDGAMES • HARDWARE • HINT BOOKS HARD-TO-FIND GAMES INCLUDING STRATEGY & SIMS PEN & PAPER SPECIAL OFFERS & BARGAINS • PHONE OPERATORS AVAILABLE • PROFESSIONAL SERVICE SINCE 1989 PO Box 234, Dept. 11410, 2520 VT Rte. 100N, Rochester, VT 05767 • INT'L 802.767.3033 • FAX 802.767.1124 • US 800.699.GAME (4263) TRIGGER HRPPV? You should be — because this montti’s Reviews section is all about the big bang, baby! Call of ^ Duty 2? Boom! Quake 4? Pop! F.E.AR.7 Wham! Star Wars Battlefront 117 Pa-pow! Sniper Elite and Total Overdose7 VWiiz and bang, respectively. It’s a bonanza of bullets — and for the most part, we have a lot of good things to say. In fact, we’ve said a lot of good things about a lot of games during the last 1 0 or so months, and as we begin gearing up for the imminent Game of the Year awards discussions (relax, the awards are still a few issues away), we realize we’re going to have quite a task on our hands singling out the very best games. In , fact, since we still have a bit of time before we cast our votes, how about some help? Send an e-mail to cgwletters@zlffdavis.com witii your top three choices for the 2005 Game of the Year, and one recommendation for Coaster of the Year. Just don’t start hating on us later if our choices don’t match yours— we’re sensitive and it makes us cry.^9 REVIEW S TANDARDS Our review policy is simple: We review only final, gold, released'to<retail code, no betas or “near-final, reviewable” builds. We don’t review patches, with the notable exception of those for online games like MMOs that autoupdate as a standard part of their operation. We do I this so we are reviewing exactly what you, the consumer, are buying. All games are rated on a simple five-star scale. One-star games are utter garbage, three-star games should appeal to die- hard fans of the genre, and the rare five-star game is an instant classic. Only the best games — receiving four and a half stars or better — are award- ed a I Editors' Choice. INSIDE Civilization IV Say good-bye to your social life. The Movies Coming soon: CGW — The Movie. [® REVIEWS XIUILIZRT In the beginning... I raSLISKER: 2K Games DEVELOPER: Firaxis Games GENRE Strat« oii.BSR B RATING: E104 REQUIRED: 1.2GHz CPU, 2SeMB RAM, 1.7GB hard drive space ndOOM—lilBCD I.SGH 2 CPU, 612MB RAM, 128MB videocard hUllELAVER. Internet, LAN, hotseat, P8EM (2-12 players) “...THE EARTH WAS WITHOUT FORM, AND void.” So says Leonard “Mr. Spook" Nimoy in his quintessentially emotionless narration in Civilization IV each time you start a new game. And then the map generator finishes filling in that void— and you take your first steps into an ancient world that threatens to leave you sleep deprived for days. Civilization — the brainchild of legendary game designer Sid Meier— has stood, for 1 4 years now, as one of the best and most addictive turn-based strategy series ever to grace a PC screen. Trying to improve such a venerable series is a tall order, but Civ 4 brings a host of top-notch addHIons to the fore. From the Stone Age to the Space Age, you now get a lot more options to help you build your empire. So, yes, FIraxis has done it again. Civ 3 junkies should quickly key in on the overhauled government system, which now gets divided into five civic subcategories. ITiese civic mechanics allow for a mind-boggling matrix of possibilities In regard to how you run your king- dom, which include adopting siavery, allowing a free-market economy, or enforcing a state religion. Although the new religious system feels overem- phasized at times. It adds some great facets to gameplay, ranging from gaUiering information via espionage undertaken by spies to using fierce troops who zealously fight to defend holy shrines. And therein lies the crown jewel of Civ 4: the new combat mechanics. Instead of providing straight attack/defense values for your units, the game relies on a deeper RPG-style experience system. Your units can specialize and improve in all sorts of tasks as they level up, such as the amount of collateral damage they inflict and bonuses they receive when fighting In specific environmental conditions. This system conveys a real sense of attachment to your units; you'll definitely feel a tug at the heartstrings when you lose your favorite swordsman unit that had become especially adept at raiding cities, or your marines who spent count- less battles training to become the best veteran jungle fighters in the world. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE All of these civic and strategic enhancements are clinched together by a brand-new layered 3D world environment. Where in previous Civ games, each tile on the map contained only one specific catego- ry of terrain, the various topography types in Civ 4 can overlap: You'll find forested hills In the plains, loamy grassland valleys, and numerous combina- tions in between. The map generator uses a more tightly variegated mix of tiles, which Initially feels Inferior to Civ 3's more geologically accurate map output, but ends up working very well with the new terrain overlapping physics in terms of balance. As an added visual touch, you can now zoom out to view the world map as an actual globe — provided your civilization possesses the technological apti- tude to understand that the Earth is round. A lot of other staple Civ features find themselves simplified... for better or worse. Resistance against a hostile invasion now just shuts down a city the V^THEREIN LIES THE CROWN JEWEL OF ^^CIU 4 THE NEW COmBRT fTlECHRNICS. 82 > COMPUTH1 GAMING V/ORLD means promotion time! ^ As always, constructing a great wonder brings you huge gameplay bonuses. way that civil disorder used to in Civ 3, and unhap- py citizens become deadbeats who up and refuse to work. Oddly, you can actually just ignore both of these situations without any serious economic setbacks. Civ 3's unpopular mechanics for gov- ernmental corruption and waste get replaced with an upkeep fee, and a city's numeric health rating thankfully eliminates the need to manually deal with pollution. The rationale behind most of these simplifica- tions revolves around allewating tedium and lessening the overall barrier to entry, but for every minor Civ 3 quirk that the game addresses, a new and equally minor quirk manifests Itself. Civ 4 Isn’t necessarily a better (or worse) game than its predecessor— it’s just different. Whether you favor one over the other boils down to a simple case of personal preference. TECH SUPPORT A few of Crv 4's quirks might be a little harder to swallow. The option to abandon an unwanted city no longer exists, and the logic behind the tech tree seems less salient and more arbitrary — although this doesn’t detract too much from the gameplay. A few technical oversights also sour the experience; gamers with ATI videocards should prepare for some stability issues and occasional crashes. Civ 4 fatally responds to Alt- Tabs, too, which gets frustrating when you need to multitask or take a break. Oh, and your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you: In some boxed cop- ies, the install disc is the one you need to play the game— not the erroneously labeled play disc. Hopefully, these gaffes have been corrected by the time you read this. Like a good game of chess, Civ 4 teaches you a thing or two about strategy, but also so much more. It acts as a wonderful history lesson, and the wealth of information in the game's comprehensive Civilopedia makes learning fun. If you harbor any Interest in strategy games and want something with more depth than the average mindless RTS, you would do well to immerse yourself in Civilization IV and let it soak in. It might steal away hours of your time, but it's one of the rare games that can genuinely enrich your life while doing so./Matthew Chase B|01>ENB0RI)KR« I Civ 3 faKered badly with its Play the World iij^ I multiplayerexpanaon. Happily, Cfv4offer5 I multiplayer support right out of the box, ' * which includes options to hook up via , GameSpy, direct IP connection, and LAN..'. ]] i along with good old-fashioned hotseat and I PBEM play. The GameSpy interface setugp^ makes it a chore to select an active gamSU though once you start pla^ng, everything^! works just fine. The other modes suit Civ 4's gameplay style best, and it^ nice to have T 4 , the option to play with friends — even if they i I do get potato chip grease on your keyboard - during their turns in the hotseat 1 A great update to a classic PC game. | CO/WPUTER CAMiniC WORLD VERDICT i i i i / . CGW.IURCOM <83 • watch THREE trailers FROM MOVIES! 4 Nice overhead view— but it would be nicer PREVIEWS Lightsl Camera! Aggrav-actlon! Why are all my leading ladles drinking? Because each endured three rounds of plastic surgery before I’d even consider casting her. Jl.have ai veiwipainful itcH..^- ^ Subtitles and audio are easily added in postproduction. I PUBUSHEFI Activision DEVELOPER: Llonhead Studios OENRE: Business Sim/Strategy ESRB RATING; T REQUIRED: 800MHz CPU, 2S6IVIB RAM, 2.4QB hard drive space RECOMMENDED: 3.00Hz CPU, 512MB RAM, 12eMB videocard MULTIPLAYER: None ^ WE ALL HAVE THAT SUPERNERDY friend who can rant forever about all the inconsistencies and blasphemy in the Lord of the Rings movies. Why is he so well infomied? Because he spends all day watching the extend- ed editions while wearing a Frodo costume and a special collector's edition replica ring. All that ire masks a deep affection— so think of me as that guy as I pick at The Movies like it's a week-old scab. I'll say it loud and clean The Movies is one of the most addictive and enjoyable games you’ll play this year, full of stuff to do and packed full of rewards as you live out your Tinseltown fantasy. But it could have been so much better. THE GREAT DICTATOR The premise; You take the reigns of a classic Hollywood studio, guiding it from the genesis of the movie industry to the present day. You get two modes— a pure sandbox mode and a story mode that doles out rewards for accomplishments like creating powerful stars and laying out your stu- dio well. It's pretty hard not to enjoy the steady stream of new sets, costumes, and talent. But it’s almost too much — as great as it is to zoom in and ogle the action, the constant demands of your studio and stars frequently play out as simple harassment. This game deserves to be savored, yet you find yourself constantly hounded to create more staff, handle your stars' needs and S/ms-style relationships, maintain your buildings, and more. The game desperately needs an option to let you play at a slower pace. TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES It could also use a more realistic staffing engine. When you have S5 million in the bank, you shouldn’t be prevented from shooting a movie due to a lack of extras — but The Movies walks that exact line of logic. Ridiculous, consider- ing you can get real-life extras to work for tuna sandwiches. But all manpower is finite here, right down to the janitors and handymen — of which you rarely have enough. If you have the money, shouldn't you be able to hire as you please? The tools come up somewhat lacking, too. So much goes on at any given time that it really calls to attention the lack of meaningful fitters. Why can’t i separate actors from directors? Why isn't there a hotkey to cycle through the talent? Why can’t I access the build menu from the overhead map? Why can’t I see a star's abilities on the sal- ary screen? Why can’t I queue up build orders while the game is paused? Why can't I divide the bazillion costumes in a way that doesn’t force me to click through each one to find what I want? I’ve got about three notebook pages full of niggles and annoyances, including one bug that irrevocably stops production on a movie, though your money continues to drain. But every bitter littie jot on those pages is a love letter in disguise, a glowing compliment just dying to be given. I’m just hoping for a patch or expansion to help make The Movies love me back — because in spite of its flaws, I can't get enough of it. /Robert Coffey Won't win an Oscar — 1 nomination. 3ut it deserves a COMPt/TER CAMUUC WORLD VERDICT irkiir.: I One of The Movies’ true joys: : the option to create your own custom movies. Using sliders in the scene-creation stage lets you direct the tone of the per- formances, change the lighting, I and more. And once you finish I your masterpiece, you can play it back— and it invariably looks better than you imagined. That’s ' movie magic for ya. m I BIRTH OF A Nin iHN 84 > COWPLTTER GAMING WORLD $ 1269 } C5-6C3C3 Order Toll Free S88. 462, 3899 Inlol* 1945 Chipsol MB w/ I6K PCI-Expie» Coisoir 1024MB D0R2-667 Momoiy Serlal-ATA 1 60GB 72O0RPM Hard Drtva 16x Doubis layer DVDzR/xRW Ociva ATI Radeon'** XBOOGTO 25eMB B-Channsl Surround 3D Prsmium Sound lO/lOD/IOOO MBps Einernel LAN loglloch MulTlmedld Keyboord & Optical Mouse MlcrosoB* Windows* XP Homo Edition FREE WIroloss B02.1 1g S4MBp5 FRE^E J-Voor 24/7 /-Core Oetoe S 1299 Inter Ponllum* D 840 Processor (2X1MB 12 Cocno. 3.2 GhZ. 800 Mltz FSB) S 1 529 Technology S 1195 Technology S 1335 $599j $ 1125 i=»C3W@l=l OFRSyVM SC3CDS AMOn Athlon FX S i <= =>«=: - NVIDIA* nFofceT“4-SLl Chip Dual PCI-Express MB - Mlcrosotl Windows' XP Home EOlllon ~ IBuypower* Hlnfo Ooming Cate wllh CPU liquid Cooling Syslom - Corsair )024M6 DOR4O0 Momorv - Serlal-ATA 250GB 7200RPM Hard Drive -• 16x Double Layer DVD±R/±RW Drive - 16X DVD-ROM Drive - 2X NVIDIA* OeForce'** 780007 PCI Express 25eMB Video Cords - SLI Enabled ~ 8 Channel Surround 3D Premium Sound - Croalive Inspire 6 Channel Surround Sound Speakers - 10/100/1000 MBps Elhernel LAN - Logitec Mullimodia Office Keyboard; Opcilal Mouse - Free Wireless 802. 1 1g 54MBps Nolwork Adapior - Free 1 -Year 24/7 l-Care Deluxe Technical Supporl -t- On-SIto Service ' upgrade to Sicuro RW-670XL 5.1 Crazy Lighting Speaker System Add SI 89 S 2559 $ 2075 $ 1945 $ 1829 S 1779 S 1669 $ 1635 o;ann“sn-iofsi g I B3T-rai_iorM AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-57 Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4600-1- Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4400-1- Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4200-1- Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 4000-1- Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 3700-1- Processor 3500-1- Processor - 15.4” Wide Screen 16:10 WXGA TFT LCD 1280x800 Display -- AMD* Turlon'“ 64 Mobile Technology - AMD PowerNowl Technology - HyperTransport Tochnology - EhancGd Virus Protection Technology -Mlcrosotr’ Windows* XP Home Edition -Mobile ATI* Radeon'*' X700 128MB DDR Video - 1024MB DDR-400 Memory - Rcmovoblo 8x DVDiR/iRW / CD-RW Drive -60GB 5400RPM Ullro-ATAIOO Hard Drive - lO/lOOMb Einornol LAN & 56K Modom - Wireless 802.1 1g 54MBps Mlnl-PCI Network -4x USB 2.0 & lx Flrowlro IEEE-1394 Ports; 3-in-1 Build-In Media Card Reader -Free l-Yoor /-Core Deluxe 24/7 Phone Support - High Petlormance Li-Ion Battery - Free Deluxe Carrying Case - 15.4" Wide Scroon16:10 WXGA TFT LCD 1280x800 Display - AMD* Mobile Athlon'*' 64 Processor with HyperTransport Technology - Microsoft* Windows* XP Home Edition - Mobile ATI* Radeon'*' 9700 PRO 128MB DDR Video - 51 2MB DDR-400 Memory - Removable 8x DVDarR/iRW / CD-RW Drive - 40GB 5400RPM Ullra-ATAl 00 Hord Drive - 1 0/1 00Mb Eihotnot LAN & 56K Modem -Wireless 802.11g 54MBps Mlnl-PCI Network - 3x USB 2.0 & lx Flrowlro IEEE-1394 Ports -3>ln-1 Build-In Medio Card Reader - Free 1 -Yeor l-Care Deluxe 24/7 Phone Supporl - Choice ot 6 Exclusive Reflective Colors - High Performance Ll-fon Battery - Free Deluxe Carrying Case AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology MT-40 Processor S 1389 AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology MT-37 Processor $ 1349 AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology MT-34 Processor S 1309 AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology MT-30 Processor S 1269 Mobile AMD Athlon'”^ 64 4000 -h Processor S 1309 Mobile AMD Athlon™ 64 3700 -f Processor $ 1 1 99 Mobile AMD Athlon^“ 64 3400-1- Processor $ 1 1 39 Mobile AMD Athlon™ 64 3200-f Processor S 1079 Mobile AMD Athlon™ 64 3000-t- Processor $ 1059 M Order Toll Free SS3. 462. 3399 proe^j ic»n Pi Pife f Pr r«^j v/hUe€!> pecon $ 979 f^JR NOW S-HIrPS TO OANAOA! E •ThO AMD: Atl1lpn.T*^ X2 ciMOUepr# prpc^sor ^npPieB ^veruPD^'t^* cJp m0rp; ln ipPP.i*ifTie pq CtpUverlnp Pxp^'ptj^pnPV mulUrt<%liHln0'.pppaPIUtles pnp loprpppp^^gljprmphpp mePip. [ing progrpm^ runs the Pppi!PPtlPh,t?iupUAVifpnt' to wori^en. The AMD Athlpn'>rw >^4 Pual'por@0TPppsspr brings paroUel prpppssing tP tn1g^,ps4<tpp ind cao ivm creaBO computing porfprmPnco by $ 1339 AMD Alhlon™ 64 3500+ ProcoBsor S 1339 AMD Alhlon'“ 64 3700+ Procossor S 1369 AMD A1hlon'“ 64 4000+ PtOCOSSor S 1479 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Processor S 1549 AMD Athlon'" 64 X2 4400+ Processor S 1659 AMD Athlon’" 64 FX-57 Processor S 2279 srfJssrMSSS'o, FREE Wireless B02.110 54MBps Network Aflootor 10 RW3B0X1. 2.1 rs Add S75 WVy/W.iBUYROWER. COM !®RKVIEVlfS foimer United States is i independent territories. BHnTTERED UNION A different kind of Civil War reenactment ^ WHAT WOULD A MODERN-DAY CIVIL War look like? Shattered Union offers one ^ potential scenario: a war-tom United States splintered into seven factionalized territories, which find themselves at odds in the wake of nuclear disaster and severe political turmoil. This alternate history setting entertains.. .as long as you can stomach the fact that it comes packaged as a hex-based war game. Not that I have anything against hex maps— in fact, I found Shattered Union to be quite acces- sible, unlike many of the hardcore historical sim- ulators that get churned out by publishers like Batt1efront.com and Matrix Games. The stream- lined gameplay works well: After choosing your faction (go California Commonwealth!), you can attack adjacent regions on the U.S. map, deploying various infantry, armored vehicles, and air support to your chosen battlefield. Each unit may move and fire at nearby targets onoe per turn; combat resolves by way of quick back- and-forth firefights where terrain, unit statistics, and an underlying rock-paper-scissors dynamic determine the outcome. It’s simple, functional, and devoid of overabundant minutiae. The primary goal as you trade blows with CPU-controlled territories revolves around capturing control points scattered throughout the field. Once you conquer a particular region of the former United States, it falls in line with your growing empire, giving you an increased cash flow and a better political reputation — provided you don’t cause too much collateral damage in the process. You’ll actually spend quite a bit of time defending your own territory since the competing territories have their own domination plans... which makes the scatter- shot A.I. a little unfortunate, as the CPU tends to make some boneheaded tactical decisions. But that’s what multiplayer exists for, and Shattered Union gives you the opportunity to strategize against a friend via online or hotseat play. Stalwart armchair generals may look at it as “war-gaming lite,” but for the rest of us. Shattered Union makes the genre a little more approachable./Ryan Scott 1 A war game for casual gamers. | COMPUTER GAIMfAIC t/VORLD VKRDICr irkiri± NHL ER5T5IDE HOCKEV mRNREER 2005 Back in the manager’s chair I aggiRu Pfl' Seg a n uTR' Sports interactive GENRE: Management Sim LiHj haiinG' E ngQuctED zaSMHz ^ LAST YEAR’S HIGHLY DETAILED HOCKEY management sim gets some new polish, ^ just in time for the resurrection of the NHL. With a roster full of upgrades, enhance- ments, and new features, NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 turns your quest for Lord Stanley’s Cup into another addiction. Instead of featuring conventional on-the-ice action, EHM finds you running a professional hockey franchise from the ground up, using real NHL details and statistics (updated for the 2005-2006 season). As the general manager, you must form suitable strategies for team mar- keting, player acquisitions, roster management, and in-game tactics — all in the name of making your team a winning one. Building a victorious franchise can be unnerving at times — EHM has no shortage of options to choose from, and with just a slight slip, the board of directors may hand you your walking papers. FLYERS FANATIC REBORN The most important update here: expanded team control. Since real-life team managers always have their eyes peeled for hot young prospects, scouting plays a more prominent role in this year’s game. Assigning scouts to search for talent from other teams and world- wide leagues increases your options for putting together your own winning club. Knowing the scoop on high-profile players and up-and-com- ing studs facilitates making advantageous roster chcinges, and the upgraded database of player statistical analysis handily assists you in the decision-making process by offering a clearer picture of player performance. The new bio The new tactical view gives budding GMs a better way to control the action. screens also offer plenty of details on individual players’ performances. In addition, new tactical options allow the genera! manager to form strat- egies based on several different styles of play, which really helped my Flyers' big attackers out- man the smaller Lightning defenders inside the crease for an easy victory. Don't be fooled by the meager system requirements — NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2005 offers amazing depth of play for even the most discriminating hockey fans. /Raphael LIberatore 1 A good tune-up for hockey fanatics. COMPUTER CAMUUC WORLD VERDICT irkirk-'z 88 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD F eel the jaw dropping power of the AMD Athlon” 64- FX processor, designed to mahe all your games play hyper fast, super high res and totally immersiue. &uilt Exclusively for You ► AMD Athlon" 64 FX -57 Procoswr Channel DbR4bo'{viemoiy | | ! j'"^! ^ Nt/IDIA" GeForce"' 70OOCTX PCI Expres$ with ► SOOO B Serial ATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive ► 16x Dual Layer DVD«^/-RW Drive: I 6 x DVD-ROM ^ LEXA Gaming Cate with Liquid Cooling System AMDS! ERRTH 2160 2,160 ways not to excite you ^ EARTTH 2160 WANTS TO BE LOVED. It has those pixel-shaded puppy-dog ^ eyes, that sexy "festooned with futur- istic research technologies" strut, and with four warring interstellar factions, it might as well be crowing, "Eat this, StarCraft.” It would be unjustified doing so, however, because it frankly exemplifies how to overdo just about everything. Like its stackable Tinkertoy-esque bases. Earth 2160 presents a chaotic caboodle of ideas slapped onto a cheesy bore of a story. Did you miss Earth 2140 and 21507 Crib notes: Earth goes bye-bye, and mankind goes wee- wee-wee all the way to Mars — where, 1 0 years later, everyone fights for primo real estate. 2160 looks like it got dipped in copper and polished with Brasso, thainks be to Pixel Shader 3.0 sup- port. That's the good. The bad: 2160’a four campaigns (one for each faction) are rainy-day dull. Walk the hero, nurse the base (on water, metal, or silicon), defend some crash survivors, whack the alien invad- ers.. .we’ve done it how many times now? Couple this with dreary stretches during which you rush enemy bases, whittle down their defenses, run out of soldier fodder, and repeat a dozen times. Emphasis on the “whittle” — attacking key structures worits about as effectively as carving marble with a pocketknife. These trends might be best summed up as feature creep. Customize units, research a zil- lion howzits and whatzits that each nudge you forward millimeters, then spend hours positioned outside enemy bases, lobbing missiles and checking your watch. Skinnish online and things gets a teensy bit more exciting...or try out the generically nsuned aliens faction, which relies on self-replication in lieu of tradition^ resource gathering — a healthy thumb in a mess of sore ones, if an Earth 2170 ever surfaces, hopefully developer Reality Pump wakes up and smells the humdrum./Matt Peckham The lighting and particle effects look amazing— without strangling midrange systems. I StarCraft, sans that pesky “fun” thing. COMPUTER CAMUUC WORLD VERDICT (!) REVIEWS -Tl *■ I thought this one would be a cinch, but apparently they waten>roofed the damned battle droids. ^ The new space combat mode puts you In the pilots seat of numerous classic Star tVars vehicles. | 5TPR U;RR5 BRTTLEFRONT We sense something — a presence we’ve not felt since... PUBLISHER: LucasArte DEVELOPER: Pandemic GENRE: Shooter ESRB RATING: T REQUIRED: 1.5GHz CPU, i RAM, 4.SGB hard drive space RECOMMENDED: Broadband Internet connection, gamepad MULTIPLAYER: Internet, LAN {2*64 players) ^ GEORGE LUCAS SUCKS. THE GUY writes three of the worst scripts ever, ^ completely destroys my favorite childhood mythos, and makes me swear that I won’t get fooled again. And then his company releases Star kVars BaWefront //...and damn if I don’t start whistling ‘The Imperial March” all over again. STAY ON TARGET Unlike the prequel trilogy, BaWefront II improves upon its predecessor in virtually every way. Not only does It sport slicker graphics, improved bot A.I., and larger player limits, but it also brings home more new features than Cher after a visit to the plastic surgeon. First among these; the film-inspired single-player campaign, which follows Sfar Wars Episodes II through V from the perspective of a clone soldier. Want the stormtrooper’s-eye view of Princess Leia's capture above Tatooine? How about flying a TIE bomber to take down General Grievous' flag- ship? BaWefront II has you covered. And if you earn enough points (for accomplishing mission objectives or just good ol' killin’), you can even take control of legendary Star Wars luminaries like Han Solo or Darth Maul. And yes, I did just say “flying a TIE bomber.” BaWefront ll’s fully fledged space combat mode might be the coolest new addition — though you may want to pick up a quality joystick or gamepad to get the most out of it. We're talking dozens of TIEs, X-wings, and other classic Sfar Wars spacecraft whizzing in and out among massive star destroyers and Coreltian Corvettes; beam cannons illuminating the inky vacuum of space; and fevered cries of “I can’t shake him!” issued from your wussy- ass wingmen. It may be a sad commentary, but BaWefront II stands as one of this year’s best PC space sims...and it’s an FPS. EXECUTE ORDER 66! And a damned good FPS, at that. The Force is strong here, supporting up to 64 players in a variety of game modes including capture the flag, conquest (ttiink BaWeHeld 1942), the aforementioned space combat mode, and a revamped Galactic Conquest mode that overiays a board game-like strategic element onto the action. Even the modes rehashed from the first BaWefront come packed with bantha-loads of new weapons, classes, and vehicles. The dark side rears its ugly head in only a few minor technical areas: Some of the maps, particularly the lush Yavin 4 and Felucia, suf- fer from heavy lag, and the game occasionally locks up or crashes outright during bigger confrontations. But overall, as a thrice-burned Sfar Wars fan. I'm pleasantly surprised by this game’s quality. Ironically, it debuted on the same day as the Episode III DVO; by compari- son, BaWefront II makes you wish Mr. Lucas had let the game designers have a crack at his screenplays, too./Eric Neigher . WA ( tyrj J \ SWB2 \ TRAILER! AI.\VAYS TWO, THERE ARE What’s up with Star Wars and the number 2? Many fans recognize The Empire Strikes Back (the second film of the original trilogy) as the best in the series — but Star Wars-based games also seem to improve uncannily the second time around. BaWefront [3.5 stars, CGW #246] vs. BaWefront II [4 stars, CGW #258] Dark Forces [4 stars, CGW #130] vs. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II [4.5 stars, CGW #161] Rogue Squadron [8/10, EGM #115] vs. Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader [8/10, EGM #149] X-Wing [predates CGWs rating system] vs. TIE Fighter [5 stars, CGW #123] Knights of the Old Republic [5 stars, CGW #235] vs. Knights of the Old Republic II; The Sith Lords [4.5 stars. CGW #250] (OK, so there's always one exception) BRTTLEFRONT II BTfiNDB flB ONE OF THIB VERR'B BEBT PC BPRCE BlfTlB.RND IT'B RN FPB. 92 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Visitwww.esrb.org (or updated rating information. {S ' STRATICS BLST OF' C‘5 2005 AWARFJS Bi;ST OF SHOW - WINNF.K CHF.ST G.VMFPI ,\Y-K11HNFR UP) IGN BEST PHRS15TF-:NT WORI.F:) game - E') 2005 y/ "WM Ws NOT TO I.IKFV Till; WIST OF Till; IIFST AT THIS YRAK'S BIG SHOW.' MMORIJG.COM; BEST OF SHOW - E'J 2005 iSK-l T CAN HONFSTI.Y SAY THIS WAS THF MOST INTFKFSTING AND FI.IN MMOG ISAWATF.TTHISYFAK." GAMESIJOT 2005 E3 EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD?] Bt-ST MASSlVni.Y MlllTIPl.AYliK ONI.INI- GAHI’. HNAI.IST JOIN THE BETA AT 'WWW.DDO.COM ®REV'II:WS PBL|S«R: Activision DEVELOPER Infinity Ward GENRE: Shooter ESRB RATING: T REQUIRED: 1.4GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 4QB hard drive space, broadband IntemeF'', Ejection for online play RECOMMENDED: 3.2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 256MB vldeocard MULTlPLAf^ER Internet, LAN (2'32 players) WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THE horrors of World War II would evolve into comfort food, the gaming equivalent of Mom’s made-from-scratch mac 'n' cheese — a safe, predictable, and satisfying induigence that might not challenge your senses but pleases them nonetheless? Not me, that’s for sure. But Call of Duty 2 offers the same gratifying predictability as homemade meatloaf on a rainy afternoon. THE LATEST GOOD WAR As with said meatloaf or mac ’n’ cheese, every- one knows what the typical VtfWII shooter tastes like and what to expect. Sure enough, COD2 hits all the obligatory notes— the clear the bunkers missions, the hold the line levels, the armor escort missions, the sniper levels, the clear out the village sorties, a few moments manning a tank, and so on. Most any war movie or WWII shooter cliche that you can think of shows up here, as big and as reliably exciting as the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan (a day finally given the Call of Duty treatment, focusing on the role of the Army Rangers). You'd expect that such conventions, so close to lapsing into overfamiliarity, might be destined to fall — but they succeed here precisely because of their familiarity, and because developer Infinity Ward delivers the goods at a consistently high level of quality. COD2 comes equipped with some of the best graphics of the year: The character models and animations look terrific and lifelike, the weather effects add variety and texture to every mission, each level showcases a new and realistically bombed-out feast for the eyes, top-notch voice acting gives A.t. squad- ^ ^5URE ENOUBH, C0D2 HITS ALL THE ^ fr’OBLIGflTORV NOTES. mates some much-appreciated personality, and the sound design brings the chaos of war to thundering life. Even the enemies — so commonly reduced to little more than interchangeable tar- gets — exert a little more life here, often literally: Fatally wounded Germans frequently try to tire a few final shots from their weapons before you dispatch them once and for all. BROTHERS IN ARMS Like the first game, COD2 features a trio of campaigns to play through: British, Russian, and American. Unlike its predecessor, though, you don’t have to play through them In a set order; instead, campaigns unlock as you play, giving you some (limited) say in how you play through them. That (limited) say extends to the missions in the game as well— you’ll fre- quently have several objectives to accomplish in a level, and the game leaves the completion order entirely up to you. The CPU-controlled soldiers fighting at your side receive a beefy boost in their A.I., making 94 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD REVIEWS® Just as good as— and a lot like — the first Call of Duty. ^ The fashion-forward British army — so dashing in their shorts! ! [ Duty’s compass was a ! \ ■ nice little tool, here it I I evolves into something ■' * vital, in levels with mul- ■ tiple mission goals, the game places your objectives around the perimeter of the compass, allowing you to plan a path of attack white also subtly informing you how much you have left to do. The green arrowheads represent your ' fellow soldiers — helpful for not only keeping you close to your group, but also blatantiy pointing you in the right direction during those times when the correct path becomes less than clear. Friendly tanks are represent- ed as well during escort missions. Finally, ! the actual directional points on the com- pass help out a lot during firefights, since your squadmates love to shout things like, “Infantry to the southwest! Second floor!” The compass helps you to quickly aim in the right direction — no mean feat, given the chaotic, often smoky circumstances. them much more effective. They’ll still con- stantly die all around you, encouraging you to take point and deliver most of the actual killing shots, since your allies excel primarily in pro- viding cover. But this help doesn't go unappreci- ated, because the enemies get their own A.I. upgrades, constantly flanking and pinning you down. As heavily scripted as these sorts of games tend to be, COD2 feels more organic than most, thanks to the cunning of its foes — foes unafraid to fall back and take better defensive positions if the situation suggests it. cessfully advancing upon an enemy position. You'll frequently find yourself ducking for protec- tion behind every tree stump, dead cow, and blasted Jeep, as enemy defenses get so brutal that you have to leapfrog from rock to tractor to wall just to get close to them. More important, the respite granted by proper cover also happens to be the only thing that heals damage. With no health power-ups what- soever, the game keeps you alive by forcing you into sustained periods of health-replenishing safety. This admittedly radical conceit works fantastically by eliminating the need to manage medkits and making health recovery an actual part of the relentless action. Everything in Call of Duty 2 feels similarly pol- ished and well thought out, including the solid if uninspired multiplayer mode. It all amounts to a brief — but entertaining — ride. Like a good meatloaf, it expertly scratches that comfort food itch, leaving you well-satisfied until the craving hits you again, months later — just in time for the inevitable expansion. /Robert Coffey COVER ME The ferociousness and smarts of the game’s enemies encourage the heavy use of two of COD2's new features: smoke grenades and cover. Cover is absolutely crucial, since the game consistently challenges you to negotiate wide-open killing zones, while the strategic use of smoke grenades often makes the difference between getting torn apart in crossfire and suc- CGW.1URCOM <95 pUsyTHEf-EAB- L multipuweb jk DEMO! ji TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY Despite being branded with Nvidia's logo, F.E.A.R. works better with the competi- tiort's cards. Case in point: The game auto- detects medium settings on a GeForce 7800 GTX-powered PC, while autode- tecting maximum settings on another machine with the same specs and ATI’s older Radeon 9800 XT. No word yet from Monolith, as of this writing, on whether we can expect a patch. PUBLISHER: Vivendi Universal Games DEVELOPER Monolith Productions GENRE: Shooter ESRB RATING; M REQUIRED: 1.7GHz CPU, 51 2MB RAM, SGB hard drive space RECOMMENDED: 3.56Hz CPU, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9.0-compatlbIe videocard [multiplayer internet, LAN (2-16 players) ^ THIS MUCH YOU KNOW: THE GHOST- busters of F.E.A.R. — First Encounter ^ Assault and Recon — step in when the gov- ernment's baloney department goes bad. So far, fine. It's when man-eating commander Paxton Fette] and his psychically controlled flunkies come into play that it gets really goofy. After that, it’s every X-Files mystery imaginable — fluoridated water, pyrokinesis, poltergeists, and weird science. F.E.A.R.'s hooey isn’t the prob- lem; smart money never banks on Nebula- worthy narrative in a first-person shooter anyway. It’s that the thriller's story is really no more than a blip of microprose stretched and stretched by hours and hours of rat-a-tat-tat. Still, F.E.A.R. scares. The giggling, every- where and nowhere at once; the naughty girl ripped right out of The Ring who crosses the ceiling and your thoughts with every creak- ing this or that; the fire and smoke where the walls once were — half of it’s hallucinatory, and all the spookier because it happens anytime, anywhere. After that, though, recycled incidents reappear at intervals, and F.E.A.R. tires itself out with treadmill scare tactics. One bleeding wall is unnerving, two will upset the lily-liv- ered — beyond that, it's business as usual. And yet, when you aren’t spooked, when you quit wondering why what’s happening is happen- ing and you see that atmosphere here stops at “office park after-hours," F.E.A.R. is still one of the year's top single-player shooters. SUREFIRE SHOOTING Siow-mo shoot-outs (shortiiand for your faster- than-human reflexes) sound like more of the same, but tiie difference is in the details; the shower of sparks from ricocheting shots or tiie guy who crashes through a cabinet, sending boxes and bottles flying when a shotgun blast sweeps him off his feet Every bullet is an oppor- tunity; to pulverize plaster and splinter boards, to crack glass and gouge concrete in fat chunks. F.E.A.R.’s firefights are the best in the biz. Period. Call the clock-tampering thing a cnjtch; F.E.A.R.'s troopers try so hard, you almost hate not fighting fair. For instance, they work together in teams to outflank you. They search for cover and overturn objects to create it when they can’t find it All of it is stuff we've seen otiier shooters claim credit for without really getting it right. Here, it means that someone fires wildly and falls back when he t^es a flesh wound, that he relocates the second you stop looking, and that he under- stands that he’s got a shotgun, you’re reloading a rifle, and that it's in his interest to get in and close the gap. And that right there is enough to put F.E.AR. in with the few FPS titles worth tackling a second or third time to see how tiie same parts play out with fresh tactics. /Shawn Elliott Here's why F.EJiR.'s multiplayer modes^ matter: the same reduce-it-all-to-rubbte gamepiay and that better-than-bullet-time slow-mo. Where slow-mo is concerned, I it’s a matter of either one side activating it at tiie other’s expense in team-on-team matches, or a lone gunman fending off the group with the reflex-padding power- , up until someone swipes it from him. Otherwise, the online stuff here is exactly , what you'd expect: competitive firefights in the familiar deathmatch and CTF fla- vors. Unfortunately, the spawn system is broken, as dudes often reappear in specif- ic spots after dying. In otiier words, blast away — the fish are already in the barret. F.E.RRS TROOPERS TRV 50 HARD, VOU RLmOST HRTE NOT FIGHTING FAIR. 1 Not so spooky, oh so super. | COMPUTER CAMUUC WORLD VERDICT irkirk.:: One warrior. Two Souls. KEYWORD: PRINCE Text the game's keyword to 82174 or download directly from the game's category on your mobile phone! • Standard SMS and data charges apply KEYWORD: BIA KEYWORD: BOWL KEYWORD: KONG y®N!8/-/7- POOL feg — ■ • KEYWORD: POOL KEYWORD: A2 www.gameloft.com and Iho Gcaibox logo arc registered trademarks ol GcartWK SoUwarc. LLC. All otlier trademarks, logos and copyrights arc property ot their respective owners. €>0©O£@ Thts “spicy move” is muy catiente. Hence the explosion, I guess. With this loco move, you become a bullet-spewing tornado. TOTRL 0UERD05E R EUNSLINEERB TRLE IN mEXICO Grande theft auto PUBLISHER. Eidos Interactive DEVELC^ER: Deadline Games GENRE: Action ESR8 RATIFY: M REQUIRED: 1.6QHz CPU, 2S6M8 RAM, 360MB hard drive space RECOMMENDED: 2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 2GB hard drive space MULTIPLAYER: None ^SOMEWHERE IN THE OFFICES OF publisher Eidos Interactive, the concept of Total Overdose takes form.... Developer Dude: I want this game to play like a Robert Rodriguez movie! Marketing Guy: Great ideal Spy Kids raked in huge profits at the box office! DD: I was actually picturing Desperado, but with open-ended Grand Theft >tufo-style gameplay. MG: Even better! That gangster stuff is hot. Let's sign a hip-hop mariachi soundtrack and get it done. DD: First, we take Max Payne's buliet-time effects and add a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-ish combo system. The hero can perform a slow- motion dive out of a car, bounce off a wali, spring back into the air, and shoot an oil drum — incinerating a group of enemies for big points. We can even include some really over-the-top "loco” moves. What do you think? MG: Interesting. ..and I do like the on-foot con- trols. We have salsa-flavored environments and slick moves, but what else? How's the story shaping up? DD: I'm thinking something tongue-in-cheek. I mean, who walks around with machine-gun guitar cases? MG: I think gamers are gonna eat up the mind- less action. However, if you ask me, we need more over-the-top story elements — more crass, edgy stuff to pull In that lucrative Junior-high teen crowd. DD: Like what? MG: Throw in some “Burrito Blast" and "Gringo Frenzy" combo moves. Or how about some insult-laden dialogue like, "How is it your hair's greasier than the food?" No need for subtlety here, my friend. DD: If you don't think people will get it, we can always redo the script. We just need extra time to fix some small bugs, brush up some textures, and polish the physics before shipping the game. Right now, the characters look blocky and cars practically glide down the road. MG: No chance! We can always patch it later. DD: Sigh. /Darren Gladstone 1 A cheese-filled jalapefio of action. | COMPUTER GAAfflUC WORLD VKRDICT A A A- ^ DEBPERRDO. BUT WITH OPEN- -ENDED ERRND THEFT RUTO- ^ 5TVLE EflfTlEPLflV. ^ The physics can get a Ifttle goo^r— shrapnel occasionally defies the laws of gravity. ^ Who needs a skateboard when you can pull I off sick combos with guns? Double wall-walk Mill] ' ^ No, your eyes don’t deceive you: That’s one mean midget gangsta over there on the right. 98 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Coming Soon. . . GAMEVIDEOS.OOM See the latest game trailers, video strategies, features and much more at www.gamevideos.com Part of the 1 UP.com netrwork I PUBUSHER: Actlvisfon DEVELOPER Raven and id Software GENRE; Shooter ESRB RATING: M REQUIRED: 2GHz CPU, S12MB RAM, 2.8GB hard drive space, DirectX 9.0c-compatible videocard RECOMMENDED: 128MB videocard, Internet connection MULTIPLAYER: internet, LAN (2-32 players) [REVIEWS ^ The world’s scariest dry-cleaning shop. IF CIVILIZATION IV IS THE GAMING equivalent of a bowl of Wheaties— good and good for you!— then Quake 4 is like a big, tooth-decaying bowl of Cap’n Crunch, with maybe an extra helping of sugar and a dough- nut on top. You know you should not like this stuff. You know you can do a lot better. And yet, despite the damage you know it must be doing to your insides, and to your moral fiber, you keep on shoveling it down anyway, because it's just so damn good. Such is the case with Quake 4, id Software’s latest entry in its blockbuster shooter series, which offers nothing particularly new or innovative, and yet still manages to entertain because sometimes retro and dumb and obvious Is exactly what we want— especially when it's done as slickly and professionally as it is here. Certainly first-person shooters have come a long way since id unleashed the first Quake on the world back in 1996. At the time, running and gunning was all we needed, especially when delivered in a 3D environment as astounding as the original game's. Quake was the cutting edge at the time — nothing came close — and for years "Quake killer” was the moniker applied to any game that even dared to compete. Now, of course, in the posUHalf-Ufe world, with shooters taking the genre into all sorts of innovative directions, you could argue that the world doesn’t really need Quake anymore. We have the deep multiplayer brilliance of Battlefield 2, the brutally wicked A.I. of F.E.A.R. (see review, page 96), and the squad-based sophistication of Brothers in Arms. So, seriously, do we really need to pick up our shotguns and trundle down dark corridors after the strogg — again? WE COULD BE HEROES My answer is a qualified yes. For Quake 4, id Software hired longtime companion Raven Software {Heretic, Hexen, Elite Force) to design a single-player campaign, and this move definitely paid off. Single player presents a back-to-basics thrill ride of a game that. In its simplicity, will appeal far beyond the hardcore shooter crowd, with well-paced levels, a good story, a few genu- inely creepy moments, and — as usual — some of the best graphics in all of PC gaming. Tougher and more Innovative games are out there, for sure. But Quake 4— big, loud, and beautiful — does exactly what it was meant to do. Picking up the pfotline from Quake II (1999's Quake III: Arena was multiplayer only), Quake 4 puts you back on the planet Stroggos in the 21 St century, where Earth wages a desper- ate counterattack against the evil cybernetic strogg, who — like most evil space aliens — seek to conquer our humble planet. You play as generic Marine beefcake Matthew Kane, a square-jawed hero with the magical ability to carry multiple guns at once and switch instan- taneously between them even while crawling through sewer pipes. It's strictly old-school stuff. Level after level, you twist and turn through the labyrinthine strogg base — aided sometimes by NPC allies, but most oftentimes solo — gunning down hordes of mon- sters and encountering the occasional puzzle or two on the way to the next boss. Within this lim- ited format, however, Raven gets it right, with fran- tic mayhem broken up by suspenseful moments of quiet and a uniformly satisfying collection of ^ ^BOmETIfTlES WE JU5T WANT CON RIR AND A GARBAGE ^ ^CRN FULL OF POPCORN. THRT'5 WHAT QURKE 4 IS, 4An Si Breaks ne ground, but good old- school stuff with amazing graphics. REVIEWS 0 1 The horrific “stroggification” cut-scene. ^ Hi guys. I'm going to circle-strafe around you and kill you now. It’ll just be a sec, OK? You think your life is hard? Check out this guy: captured by the strogg, butchered, hooked up some kind of machine, still alive. 3tH you do ts play PC games. So stop complaining. Oddly enough, the aspect of Quake 4 to get the shortest shrift is what used to be the hallmark of the series: multiplayer. While Quake III: Arena is multiplayer only, here it appears almost as an afterthought, or even a different game (where are the vehicles from the single-player game?). Some of the Quake III maps simply get rehashed in the Doom 3 engine. And while diose maps are awesome — and admittedly still fun to play in their new incarnations — well, we’ve seen 'em already. Add to that the rather criminal lack of bots (not that any Quake game has ever had them, but come on, it% 2005) and the complete absence of any new gameplay modes, and you get the feeling that the designers either ran out of time or were just lazy. Straight-up deathmatching never gets old, and these Quake maps are as good as it gets — but still, given that this series used to live and die by its multiplayer strengths, it's hard not to feel disappointed. weapons — many of which get upgraded as the game proceeds — to help you get the job done. Unlike F.EA.R., however, the enemy A.I. here is slow (to be generous), and anyone with even rudimentary circle-strafing abilities can have most of the moronic strogg confused and help- less (and then dead) in seconds. Only when the game throws dozens of enemies at you at once does it reaily get chaiienging — and even then it doesn’t come close to the challenges posed by F.E.A.R. And Raven’s attempts to expand the basic gameplay with a few scenes of vehicular combat, while admirable, enjoy only mild suc- cess, coming off more like chapters in an arcade rail-shooter from eight years ago than anything a modem shooter should have. see what's coming next {F.E.A.R. looks plain and sterile in comparison). The graphics also add to the game’s overall gruesomeness— Qua/ce 4’s creepier than Doom 3. The now-notorious “stroggification" cut- scene, in which you watch as your body falls under a gruesome butcher's knife, is one of the single most disturbing scenes I've ever seen in a game, and the mangled and tortured bod- ies attached to walls, hanging from hooks, and spewing out of machines as you make your way through the game give Quake 4 more of an emo- tional impact than anyone has a right to expect. You see this stuff and want those strogg dead. WHAM BAM THANK YOU MA’AM It's easy enough to dis Quake 4 for what it doesn't have, especially with so many other more sophisticated shooters out there. But one doesn't need to apologize for it, either, because it's a fast, solid ride from beginning to end — kind of like going to the movies. Though we may get a more satisfying intellectual experience and feeling of seif-worth watching the latest existen- tial French romance, at times, we just want Con Air and a garbage can full of popcorn. That's what Quake 4 is. And I mean that in the nicest possible way./Jeff Green OH YOU PRETTY THINGS But what it may lack in challenge. Quake 4 gives back in atmosphere and looks, thanks to id's Doom 3 engine. No, eye candy is not a sub- stitute for gameplay, by any means, but here, almost every single room is a wonder to behold, with stunning displays of light and shadow and painstaking structural detail — and it adds up. I'm no graphics whore, even remotely, yet the craft that went into creating this world is amaz- ing and does keep you moving forward, just to CGW.IURCOM <101 ® REVIEWS LINE OF RTTfiCK Your monthly guide to hardcore war-gaming PUBLISHER BATTLEFRONT.COM revealed some welcome news this month: The company announced plans for the Hunting Tank Software-developed Combat Mission Campaigns, an add-on for Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin that finally allows players to place their CM games in an operational context. In typical CM fashion, the game’s inter- face stilt consists of a simple map for you to move your units across. The new fog-of-war mechanic simulates your units' ability to per- form reconnaissance and communicate with headquarters in a timely fashion through the use of runners, direct or point-to-point radio contact, and couriers on motorcycles and half-tracks. Campaigns also keeps track of the operational situation and does all the work of choosing maps and allocating forces when encounters occur, with the option to autoresolve combat if you wish it to do so. Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Operation Mars (the failed 1 942 Soviet counterattack west of Moscow), Third Kharkov, Kursk, and Berlin make up the campaigns planned for this release. And best of all, It Includes an option to play via PBEM. Bad news on the Angio-German War front, though: Schwerpunkt Games’ companion game to Russo-German War arrived late, hence the lack of a proper review— so expect some coverage in next month's column. /Bruce Geryk (For more war-gaming geekery, visit Bruce at grognards. 1UP.com) rS 15 0131 ^ Combat Mission Campaigns brings more detail to your Barbarossa to Berlin games. 102 COMPUTER GAMING WORLD PUBUSHER Ubisoft DEVELOPER: IR Gurus Interactive GENRE: Action ESRB RATING: T REQUiBED: 1.40Hz CPU, 256MB RAM, S20MB hard drive space, DirectX 9.0-compatible videocard RECOMMENDED: 2GHz CPU, 512MB RAM MULTIPLAYER' Internet, LAN (2-S players) ^ ENTER BILLY CROWE, A YOUNG AIR Force pilot stationed at Pearl Harbor on ^ December 7, 1 941 . Caught in the mid- dle of a surprise attack, fighting swarms of Japanese fighters and bombers, he watches in helpless horror as the battleship Arizona explodes and sinks, taking over 1 ,000 men down with it— including his brother. That's the shoot-em-up lifted above the average by a wealth of style, a dollop of story, and an unrelenting sense of "the fate of the world is on my shoulders" tension. it also radiates a heavy sense of style. In a consistent attempt to keep you in the mood of the era, the game presents your options via WWII posters, and the campaign unfolds by way of a voiceover, stylized snap- shots, and a touch of intrigue. While Heroes includes five historical missions and an instant-action mode, the heart of the game lies in the main campaign, and much of the rest of the content is made available as unlockable features earned in the campaign. These items include plane upgrades and new aircraft (a total of 36 fighters, level bomb- ers, torpedo bombers, and dive bombers). You can select arcade or professional flight modes, but frankly, little difference exists between the two: ITiis is a yank-and-bank shooter. You’ll face scores of enemy aircraft, strafe dozens of ground targets, attack fleets of ships, and more. Just don’t expect a smooth flight, as Heroes may be too tough for some casual gamers. You often find yourself frantically trying to shoot down a sky full of bogies that swarm around you like starving mosquitoes in the middle of a swamp — and the mission sud- denly ends because the enemy killed a cer- tain number of friendly assets. Nevertheless, the addictive gameplay is a sign of quality; even after you curse the game for how unfair its missions are, the variety and afrnosphere still compel you to hit Restart and give it just one more try./ Jeff Lackey 1^ TU5T DON'T ^ EXPECT fl ^ SmOOTH FLIGHT. ^ With unlimited ammo, you can Just hammer | the trigger until the enemy goes down. ^ The rear gunner on some bombers provides | a nasty surprise. Great for joystick jockeys who like their games tough and frantic. CAMiniC VERDICT irkiri.::: Turn Your Enemies into Memories, THE ULTIMATE ADVAIVTAGE IN FIRST PERSON, STRATEGY AND ROLE PLAYING GAMES iflREVIEVl^® RRE DOLL KUNE FU Kung faux I PUeUSHER. Valve Softvvare OB/ELOPER: Mark Healey GENRSAction ESRB RATING: None REQUIRED: SOOMHz CPU, ^ 1 1 256MB R/UM, Internet connection, Steam REeCKTIMENDED: t.SGHz CPU, S12MB RAM, DirectX 9.0-compaUble 1 1 videocard UULTieLAVER: Internet, LAN (2-4 players) I CHOP-SOCKY NECESSITIES: AN OPEN interfaces go, this one’s both good and bad, field, able-bodied actors, and a folio of ^ zam pows to make pretend punches hit harder. Rag Doll Kung Fu, a low-fi labor of love from Lionhead Studios’ Mark Healey and available via Valve’s Steam service for a cheap S14.99, manages all three and more — namely, thrift shop costumes and screwy subtitles (e.g.. "Do not flick the testicles of an ape, as an angry tabs on yourself is tough enough, let alone ape will pummel your face in”). And that’s just in pretzel-bending into a stamina-boosting lotus the live-action shorts that play between battles. Kung Fu’s playable parts are good for giggles, too. See your disciple as a string- less string puppet (hence “rag doll”) and your mouse as the marionette controls that make him dance (that’s the "kung fu”). As game stance while ducking baddies. Dialing down the speed setting (via the options menu) helps, but that also slows the audio effects and every- thing else along with the action. Eh, everything except for those crack-up cut-scenes. /Shawn Elliott Online play weapons apler features power-ups and { ity. j intuitive and tricky. Just drag and drop one foot in front of the other to get from place to place, put an arm or leg in the path of an Incoming limb to parry, and take hold of a hand and guide it to a mushroom on the ground to charge chi. Here's the thing, though: The cam- era pans and zooms as it pleases, so keeping ^ Kung Fa's mouseplay causes carpal tunnel. Try tai chi. Play it — if o presentatio niy for the Buddha-blessed n and bonkers idea. COMPUTER CAM fllfC WORLD VERDICT ★★★r'rrc Be quick or be dead. That's the simple choice you have in the world of digital combat. So come prepared. Arm yourself with the new Pro Gamer Command Unit and let your enemies feel your wrath. Utilize quick and better access to game controls. Command totally advanced programming options. MULTICOLORED BACKLIT LASER ETCHED KEYS. FUOYAajUSTABLfMJMBAHEA^^ COMFORT and CONTROL. 20 BUTTONS, 3 MODES and UP To 144 COMMANDS. CUSHIONED KEYS, EASY REACH FUNCTION BUTTONS. And everything else your digital heart requires to bring an end to all you face. WWW. saitekusa .com The sea, check. Admire the lifelike lighting at your own peril. HRLF-LIFE 2: THEL05T FIRST: THE ALL-NEW HALF-LIFE 2 LEVEL, Lost Coast, is free. Second: Ratlier than run the focus group routine, Valve is using the level to give its entire fan base a voice. If we like its lifelike lighting and interactive commentary mode {and we do), the company will implement the features in forthcoming releases (and it is). Turn the behind-the-scenes stuff off and Lost Coast is shorter than short— a lickety-split run through postcard-pretty tide pools, up cliffs, and into a church turned Combine out- post. Stop to worship the sun through stained glass, solve a single puzzle, blast baddies, and voilk Valve just packed more atmosphere into a tiny snippet than most shooters muster, period. Keep the commentary on, and you’re looking at a few more informative minutes. Stiff-sounding show-and-tell wouldn’t matter much elsewhere, but this comes from the folks who made pheromones fearsome and robots our friends — and what they have to say is so interesting and insightful that cuing the next bobbing caption becomes incentive enough to stay tuned. And when full-of-ideas-but-never- full-of-himself director Gabe Newell offers his e-mail addmss and asks for our feedback, right away we know what to request: Give HL2 the treatment, too, please. Shawn Elliott More, please. COMPt/TER CAMiniC WORLD vERUiirr L k 1 i 1 SSiv GOLF? I^^OOKING FOR A REALISTIC (SmE OF golf? This isn't it.. .at least, not quite yet. But what Golf? does have on realistic simulators like Tiger Woods PGA Tour is an undeniably unique sense of style. Don’t expect anything fancy here: The visuals consist of simple polygons, static black-and-white back- grounds, a robotic player avatar, and an equally strange-looking caddie. But these graphical sensibilities suit the game’s clearly experimen- tal nature — which quickly becomes apparent through Go/f?'s quirky gameplay elements. After scouting out the hole, picking an appro- priate club, and choosing a prime spot from which to tee off, you whack the ball across the field by dragging your mouse back and forth in a fluid motion. Between strokes you can ride around in a golf cart that comes equipped with over-the-top physics and speed-enhanc- ing “rocket sauce” or roam the course from the viewpoint of your oddball caddie, who serves no functional role whatsoever. The current beta version (which supports up to four players via LAN) doesn’t account for factors such as wind or advanced swinging techniques and features only nine holes, so you'll blow through it pretty quickly. The four-man design team labels Golf? (currently in public beta) as “something we eventually hope to charge you for,” which may mean a more fully featured product is yet to come. Ryan Scott That weird boxy dude back there Is actually your trusty caddie. A fun little experiment. COMPUTER CAMiniC WORLD yERPicr 104 COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Good for Potter addicts, but bad con- trols bog it down. /lEWS® HRRRV POTTiB RND ^ THE EOBLET OiiFIRE Warning: Casual Potter fans will be towed ^ Up to three players can work together to cast spells and solve puzzles. PUBLISHER: Electronic Arts DEVELOPER: Electronic Arts UK GStlBE: Action ESRB RATING: ElOf REQUIRED: 1.2GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 1.2GB hard drive space RECOMMENDED. GamepadV^LTlPLAyER: Hotseat (2-3 players) Why? One big reason: The keyboard controls really bug me. EA made Goblet for consoles as well as PCs, and the action-adventure gameplay doesn’t work so well on a keyboard. Maneuvering and spellcasting get annoying and confusing, especially if you've played previous Potter PC games. Unless you enjoy frustration, definitely read the manual before starting. At least the graphics look great, so you get a nice view while bumbling around as Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Since you can control only one of these three characters at a time, the CPU fills in for the other two. You'll definitely need all three of ’em, though; everyone pitches in to cast spells and solve puzzles that one wizard can’t do solo. But sometimes the other two characters just get in the way thanks to the dumb A.i. it’s a good thing that you can play the game with two friends on the same PC instead. Overall, I enjoyed Gob/ef...once I under- stood how the spells and the controls func- tioned. It’s worth playing if you want a moder- ately easy game; I’d recommend it to grade- school kids who like the books. So what are you waiting for? Dragons, magic, puzzles, and horrible controls await! /Sarah Jaisser Green, 6th grade WHEN I FIRST HEARD I WAS REVIEW- ing the new Harry Potter game, I was ^ ecstatic — almost as excited as my dad, editor-in-chief Jeff Green, is when he gets a manicure. [You’re grounded — Ed.] But then I wondered. ..how the heck do you make a good game out of a 734-page book? Answer: chop everything out except the main points and make minigames out of everything. These range from exploring Hogwarts to sur- viving a dragon chase to fighting the sinister Voldemort. Harry Potter addicts should be happy— but since Goblet cuts out so much, I. wouldn’t recommend it for first-time Potter players. AT LEAST THE ERAPHICB LOOK GREAT, 50 VOU GET A NICE UIEUU OIHILE BUfTlBLING AROUND RB HRRRV, RON, OR HERfTlIONE. ST90 ST290 www.saitekusa.Gom i Imagine a flight control stick that soars above your expectations. One that takes your flying experience to an entirely new level. To gain the upper hand in the sky there is only one thing you need: a Cyborg Evo. Discover what remarkable handling and technology are all about. Take off in luxurious comfort with ergonomically designed grips that provide hours of stress free flying time. Then turn your attention to the incredible performance and brilliant functions that each model offers. For the moment you take off with an Evo. you’ll understand what makes each one superior both on the ground and in the sky. ® REVIEWS Nothing brightens up another gloomy night oni the island better than a good bonfire. Q ^ B B B ^ Arrange these letters to spell out the correct phrase and uncover a secret grotto. ^ AS THE WEATHER SETTLES INTO WINTER gloom, the time is perfect for brewing ^ some tea, throwing a blanket across your lap, and snuggling up to a warm PC with an adventure game. Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None suits the mood perfectly. Despite a few off notes, such as zombielike character movement and occasional scripting problems, ATTWN offers up a satisfying murder mystery. A stormy backdrop sets the tone, as the RGRTHR CHRISTIE RND THEN THERE WERE NONE Mu^d... 30..^,. I LLiUiSn? The Adventure Company AWE Games Adventure ESRB 850MH2 CPU. 256MB RAM, 1.508 hard drive space 1.8GHz CPU, 512MB RAM MrimPi AV<-B. None mysterious U.N. Owen entices 1 0 strangers to attend a meeting on Shipwreck Island. These individuals soon learn, via a recording played by the unsuspecting butler, that Owen believes them all guilty of murder— and wants justice. Soon after these accused guests arrive, one turns up dead — and it becomes apparent that this U.N. Owen— “unknown,” as one guest cleverly figures out— plans to snuff out their lives, one by one. The game follows the plot of Christie's novel but adds a new player-controlled character Patrick Nan^cott, a ferryman who becomes stranded with the others when his boat wrecks. Both Owen’s identity and the story line undergo some tweaking, so those familiar with Christie's book can still enjoy the mystery. THINKING CAP NEEDED Quick reflexes take a backseat to patience and brainpower here; figuring out how to combine and use inventory objects can be rewarding, if at times ultrachalienging. However, the game’s linear track creates problems; for example, if you decide to cut through the kitchen to reach the dining room early on, Narracott tells a character he’s sorry for the loss of his wife...before learning of her death. Characters also tend to stand around inanimately when you’re not interacting with them, and you get the usual slew of arcane adventure-game puzzles. Still, clever mysteries and a classic ’30s-era setting far outweigh the drawbacks of stiff animations and linearity problems. Unlike the book, ATTWN forces you to figure stuff out to progress — making it ideal for true armchair sleuths./CarrIe Shepherd A tad creaky, but pepped up with plenty of spine-tingling and head- scratching action. 02231 CAMiniC Lfiu; a ORDER: CRimiNRL NTENT Criminally broken I nenSHEP! Legacy Interactive Legacy Interactive Adventure CSR&mrwG M ^ IN LAWS ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, you play Detective Robert Goren, tasked with solving four interconnected mur- ders. To this end, you must collect evidence, interview witnesses, and interrogate suspects. However, rather than using his investigative skills to close these cases. Detective Goren’s time would be better spent trying to deduce why Legacy Interactive released such a buggy, crash-prone game. Criminal Intent gets off to a good enough start; each case presents an interesting story and re-creates familiar aspects of the TV series, but the game quickly becomes repetitive and frustrating. Even straightforward tasks suffer unnecessary complications — in one case, you cannot search a victim's home until you find his keys, go to his office, and then Interview a coworker to find out where said victim lived. What ever happened to simply checking the victim’s ID? WHO KILLED THIS GAME? In lieu of actual logic, you get the occasional logic minigame. Though working through a slid- ing puzzle may seem like an odd task during a murder investigation, I wasn't bothered by these adventure game conventions, as they broke up the otherwise repetitive gameplay. What did bother me, though: system-wide bugs, which range from the entertaining (my character did a jumping jack each time he left his office) to the annoying (pathfinding issues) to the aggravating (frequent desktop crashes). Because of these problems, I was unable to actually complete any of the cases presented to me. Law & Order could easily be fashioned into an engaging adventure game franchise. But with ER and now Criminal Intent, developer Legacy Interactive seems intent on creating shoddy products that bank on a TV series’ popularity for some quick sales before the negative word of mouth spreads. /Tom Edwards ^ Detective Goren can switch from good cop to bad cop In mid-conversation — something his interrogation subjects seem wholly oblivious to. Solve this mystery: Why does the game keep crashing? 1 Guilty as charged. | COMPUTER CAMUUC WORLD VERDICT 106 >COMPUTER GAMING WORLD REWIND HKVII-WS® What should you play today? Names in blue indicate Editors’ Choice games Act of War Direct Action June 05 ■Mrtrtrf! Fable: The Lost Chapters Nov 05 ★tWrinV irkirtrii Aerial Strike June 05 Fantastic 4 FlatOut Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone Baseball Mogul 2006 Freedom Force The 3rd Reich June 05 Gary Grigsby's World at War Battlefield 2 Black & White 2 Grand Theft Auto: Blitzkrieg 2 BloodRayne 2 Guild Wars July/Aug 05 Bone: Out From Boneville Dec 05 Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood Hearts of Iron II Heritage of Kings: The Settlers Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 Close Combat: First to Fight Indigo Prophecy Knights of Honor Codename: Panzers— Phase TWo Legacy: Dark Shadows Combat: Task Force 121 Lego Star Wars Cossacks It: Napoleonic Wars Crown of Glory: Europe the Age of Napoleon MVP Baseball 2005 Dangerous Waters June 05 ■kiririHr Diplomacy June 05 Obscure Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil July/Aug 05 Down in Flames Dragonshard Psychonauts Dragoon Psychotoxic DRIV3R Raging Tiger Dungeon Lords Restricted Area Dungeon Siege II Elite Warriors: Vietnam Empire Earth II Age of Empires III The Sims 2: Nightlife GRIDE BRIDE Rome: Total War — Barbarian Invasion Dec 05 RYL: Path of the Emperor Oct 05 ***** Second Sight July/Aug 05 **iH,-* Serious Sam II Dec 05 ****1.- Silent Hunter III June 05 ***** The Sims 2: Nightlife Dec 05 ****** The Sims 2: University May 05 ****■'■- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory June 05 ***** Star Wars KOTOR II: The Sith Lords April 05 ****'■■ Star Wars Republic Commando May 05 ***** Stronghold 2 Sept 05 ***** Supremacy July/Aug 05 ***■>* SWAT 4 June 05 ***** T-72: Balkans on Fire! Oct 05 ***** Tin Soldiers: Julius Caesar Sept 05 **THr* Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 Dec 05 ****f: TrackMania Sunrise Sept 05 ***** Vendetta Online May 05 ***** Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War— Winter Assault Dec 05 WInSPMBT Nov 05 ***.',* World Championship July/Aug 05 ***** World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International July/Aug 05 »***;- Advent Rising Age of Empires III Sept 05 kkirtTk July/Aug 05 kirkir^ Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory Sept 05 ★★★** April 05 -kkkiri; May 05 Sept 05 July/Aug 05 kl t ' UiiU July/Aug 05 ★<:*** July/Aug 05 InHnWr July/Aug 05 April 05 **'Jr£rv‘r July/Aug 05 kkiriii! April 05 Lost Admiral Returns May 05 Imperial Glory Sept 05 kkirUft July/Aug 05 **★*:'.• April 05 July/Aug 05 NASCAR SimRacIng May 05 kkkk.'r Playboy: The Mansion April 05 iWrtV.'rfr Project: Snowblind Jiily/Aug 05 kkki-'r Return to Mysterious April 05 kirkk'T Island Juiy/Aug 05 * A * July/Aug 05 ****.': Need for Speed Underground 2 April 05 July/Aug 05 kkir'n'.- July/Aug 05 iHrvWrJi- April 05 CGW.lURCOM ■ 107 ISSUE 258 TECH BECAUSE ONLY PHISH- LOVIN’ HIPPIES NEED FRESH AIR AND SUN FALCON NORTHWEST HAS BEEN SHIPPING high-end gaming systems for almost as ^ long as Computer Gaming World has been in print. Over the years, the company has remained focused on delivering maximum gaming performance, though not without a cost. While Falcon Northwest does offer a budget system, its Mach V systems have long been the company’s flagship. The latest Mach V gaming rig keeps the flame alive. Just about every aspect of gaming is addressed here: a fast CPU. low-latency memory, twin BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC graphics cards in SLI mode, and dual Maxtor 300GB hard drives set up as a RAID 0 array. About the only item that’s not maxed out is the soundcard, which is the "entry level” version of Creative Labs’ new X-Fi line. While it lacks the X-RAM of the pricier X-Fi variants, it's still a premium soundcard by any other measure. BtRD OF PREY The heart of the system is the overciocked revision E Athlon 64 FX-57, built on AMD’s 90nm manu- facturing process. AMD ships the FX-57 unlocked, which means that users and OEMs can overclock the CPU if they have a cooling system and moth- erboard capable of handling it. The motherboard is the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, which has the voltage regulators to handle an overclocked FX-57. The motherboard can also handle running the Corsair XMS Pro memory modules at slightly tweaked voltages, which means they can be set to very low latencies — CAS 2-2-2-5 in this case. The Mach V could have been overclocked sim- ply by increasing the CPU clock multiplier by a full notch, but Falcon instead chose to increase it by a half increment (from I4x to 14.5x) while also increasing the memory clock to 207MHz from the default 200MHz. This means the CPU still runs at 3.0GHz (14.5 times 207MHz). but with better memory bandwidth, which helps when it comes to gaming. And that’s what this system is all about. The FX-57 stays cool at 3,0GHz due to the Sanyo Denki liquid-cooling system. While it’s a liquid cooler, it’s completely sealed and guaranteed for seven years. If the CPU is the heart of the system, the soul is the matched BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC graph- ics cards. BFG clocks these babies higher than the default clock, running the core at 460MHz (versus 430MHz) and the memory at 1 .3GHz DDR (versus the 1.2GH2 DDR standard). The two PCI Express cards run in SLI mode and deliver prodigious framerates at 1600x1200. They even deliver good framerates if you have one of those spiffy — and oh-so-pricey — widescreen displays 1 08 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD E% REVIEW Lowered Expectations ATI's budget X1 300 Pro gives a bum deal. REVIEV/ Calling the Audible Logitech^ newest speakers go wireless. that offer 1920x1200 resolution. A pair of Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives in RAID 0 mode handles the storage chores. (You can get them configured in RAID 1 mode if you prefer redundant data security over sheer performance.) Falcon also supplies a pair of optical drives — one dedicated DVD-ROM drive, plus a DVD burner for backup or creating your own movies. The front of the Mach V’s case features a cutout of the company’s logo, which glows blue behind the cutout. When we opened up the box, the cables inside were neatly dressed, and we could easily access all the hardware. One of the slicker aspects of the liquid-cooler design is how it's mounted. The small pump assembly is mounted in the top of the case and doesn’t block access to any of the internals of the system. Since the radi- ator fan is also mounted in the top of the case, you won’t want to piie up game boxes or other items over the exhaust fan. One big advantage of the liquid cooling, though, is that the system runs quieter than an equivalent air-cooled system. BIG MONEY The big downside is that this will set you back a cool S5,245, including the deeper Icon case need- ed to handle the sealed liquid-cooling unit. That’s not cheap, so the next question is: How does it perform? The answer: like a champ. Note that we ran all our benchmarks at 4x full-screen antialias- ing and 8x anisotropic filtering, except the Shader Mark 3.0 version of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (its SMS version won’t do FSAA). We got some pretty stunning numbers as a result. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, in particular, can crush even some high-end graphics cards, so running at 75fps is great. We also tested the system In an Intensive LAN gaming session, and the whole affair ran smoothly, with no glitches or crashes, even when we had it overclocked. !f you want to spend even more money. Falcon Northwest offers glossy, car-finish-quality paint jobs — and even custom graphics and special- ized window and lighting treatments. Be pre- pared to be amazed at the final price, however. On the other hand, you can also buy a system without liquid cooling for about $250 less, which will drop It below that magical five grand num- ber. (But if you’re spending this much anyway, why skimp?) Note, finally, that all these prices are just for the system — no monitor, keyboard, or speakers included. But your five grand will keep you gaming at least until the post-Windows Vista games start shipping. By then, all of us will be upgrading. /Loyd Case MachV S5245 About tite only thing that keeps us from calling this a perfect sy^em is the high price. Makina Sense of 3D Gamecauge Lite Each system goes through an exhaustive series of benchmark tests in order to assess overall performance and raw speed values. Benchmarking consists of both the industry’s undisputed reference synthetic benchmark utility, 3DMark05. along with CGW’s own real-world game benchmarking suite, 3D GameGauge Lite. 3DGG Lite consists of a brilliant collection of A-list action games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Far Cry, and Painkiller. 3DGG Lite video configurations are set at 1280x1024 resolution with 2x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering enabled, except for Halo, which gets no benefit from either tech- nique. Results are then tabulated and posted as a raw geomean score for your reference. ^ Such neat cabling! If only our office desks were organized this well. ^ VOUR FIVE ERRND WILL KEEP VOU ERfTl- ^ ING RT LERST UNTIL THE POST-WINDOWS ^ UlSTR ERfllES STRRT SHIPPING. E5T mfiCH U WORST MACH V ^ BEST li'i HOW OUR GRAPH WORKS We graph a product's benchmark scores to demonstrate how it compares to the scores of other products we’ve renewed in the last six months. During that time, the lowest 3D GameGauge Lite score we’ve seen is 40; as of now, the highest is 111.7. CGW.1URCOM < 109 S\TECH 3.0 path, and then rt was only about equally as fast, not faster. ATI finally started to show a teeny tiny bit of muscle in Serious Sam II, where it was noticeably faster than the less-expensive 6600 with DDR2 memory. Unfortunately, it was also quite a bit slower than the other Si 50 cards. It ran Call of Duty 2 fairly well compared to rts competition in the same price range, although you’d want to turn down the graphics options below what we used in order to make the game smooth and playable. In F.E.A.R., Monolith’s new hardware-crushing shooter, the XI 300 Pro stacked up reasonably well with 2x AA and 4x AF enabled but fell behind without it and wasn't playable with these game settings at all. The vastly improved performance of the 6600 GT might be a glitch; F.E.A.R. will give a warning if you push the texture resolution past medium with a 128MB card, but we ignored the warning and ran it anyway. It's possible that the game will simply force a lower resolution in such a case. AVOID IT The Radeon XI 300 Pro is a huge letdown. Because low-cost graphics cards sell in big num- bers, it’s important they deliver ever-increasing performance; in order for 3D software to move forward, the cards in this price range need to make big leaps. In some ways, the X1 300 is a step backward. Previous-generation cards like the GeForce 6600 GT with 128MB and the Radeon X700 Pro with 256MB are now down to a similar SI 50 price point and are faster in almost all situ- ations, usually by a very healthy margin. Nvidia's new low-cost card, the GeForce 6600 with DDR2, trades off performance wins with the XI 300 Pro. It's faster in some games, slower in others, but we can call it a tie overall. There’s just one sticking point: The promised price of GeForce 6600 cards with DDR2 is $30 to S50 less than the X1300 Pro’s at launch. This is the kind of performance we’d except out of Si 00 cards, and we'd be impressed with it in a $69 card. No way is it worth SI 50. Point the blame at the lack of pixel pipelines. No matter how much ATI has improved the usage efficiency, the card still has only four pixel pipes, which is half what the competition offers. If the price of this card drops to the sub-$100 range, it would be worth picking up. Priced at SI 50, it's just outclassed by clearly superior cards that have fallen in price over time. ATI’s only hope is to drive down the cost of this card and get the Radeon XI 600 cards on the market at reduced prices to fill the SI 50 space./Jason Cross ^ LAST MONTH, WE EXAMINED ATI'S high-performance Radeon XI 800 cards and ^ noted that ATI was actually launching an entire family of graphics cards to be priced from S99 to S549, This month, we look at whether the XI 300 Pro, which at S150 is at the upper end of the price scale for a budget card, is the right choice for people without tons of spare cash. In short — it isn't. THE COMPETITION At a suggested price of Si 49, the XI 300 Pro has three cards as its main competition. The first is ATI’s own X700 Pro, a previous-generation 256MB card that has dropped in price from its original S199 starting point. Nvidia price drops have also pushed the GeForce 1 28MB 6600 GT to the Si 50 range. Most important, Nvidia has launched a new version of the GeForce 6600 featuring higher clock speeds and DDR2 memory; it should appear in the S99 to $1 29 price range. We compared these three cards to the XI 300 Pro, using our favored battery of tests; 3DMark05, Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, the Call of Duty 2 demo. Serious Sam II, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and FEAR. UNDERPERFORMER Overall, testing didn’t go so well for the XI 300. To begin with, its 3DMark05 results don't paint the card in the most positive light. The XI 300 is a little bit faster than the DDR2 version of the GeForce 6600, but then again, it's $30 to S50 more expen- sive, too. When compared with other $1 50 cards, it falls behind. The situation didn't improve much when it came to real-world game performance. In Half- Life 2 and Doom 3, ATI's new card ran about as fast as a GeForce 6600 with DDR2 memory but was significantly slower than the other two SI 50 cards. It's no real surprise that Nvidia took the prize in Doom 3, given that Nvidia hardware is optimized to run the Doom 3 engine well, but the Radeon XI 300 Pro was the slowest of the lot, and significantly slower than the X700 Pro. As for Far Cry and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory... \et's just say we started to see a pat- tern. The X1300 was slower than all the other cards in its price range. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory can run in a Shader Model 1 .1 mode that's compatible with all modern videocards or a Shader Model 3.0 mode available only to Nvidia cards. The latter allows the use of some limited high dynamic range (HDR) effects. We ran the benchmark in both SM 1 .1 mode and SM 3.0 with HDR. Antialiasing Is incompatible with HDR rendering on Nvidia's hardware, so we ran our two test resolutions with and without anisotropic filtering to keep a level playing field. We used an SM 2.0 path for the Radeon X700 Pro since that card does not support SM 3.0. The only time the Radeon XI 300 Pro started to look good was when we stacked it up against a less-expensive GeForce 6600 DDR2 running the Shader Model ^ WHAT IT BOILS DOWN TO IB THAT 5150 IS IT WAV TOO mUCH FOR THIS CARD. LOW PRICE LOW PERFOROIRNCE With ATI’s budget Radeon offering, you get what you pay for ■| Radeon XI 300 Pro 8150 If you have S150 to spend on a videocard, there’s absolutely no reason to pick this one. It doesn’t make up in features what it clear* ly lacks in performance. VERDICT ★★★ 1 1 0 > COMPtnER GAMING WORLD TECH\ UUOOFER UUITHOUT WIRES Logitech unfetters the satellites, but it’ll cost ya ^ANYONE WHO’S PLAYED A GAME IN TRUE ^™5.1 surround knows there’s no going back — ^ 5.1 (or greater) is simply the way games are meant to be heard. But our PCs are often stuffed into a corner or against a wall, so there's no good place behind you to put a pair of satellites. And if you can solve that problem, there’s the issue of how to run a pair of speaker wires to the sats. Logitech’s new high-end wireless 5.1 system isn’t cheap, but it does solve the wiring problem while offering plenty of power. In truth, you can’t really call the rear speakers “wireless,” since each one needs to be plugged into an AC outlet, but since they operate on a wireless signal from the decoder, they don’t require speaker wires. They’re meant to be used within 28 feet of the decoder unit, so they aren’t designed to fill a large room. Though they oper- ate on the popular 2.4GH2 band, we experienced zero interference from other equipment. The Z-5450S are like other high-end PC speakers and include a powered subwoofer with an integrated amplifier, a control module/ decoder unit, and five satellites. The system’s total output is 315 watts RMS, which is more than enough for a PC or small living room setup. The subwoofer cranks out 116 watts, the front satellites 38 watts, the center 42 watts, and the wireless rear speakers 40.5 watts. The decoder has three 1/8-inch stereo jack inputs, a coaxial digital input, and two optical inputs, plus an extra 1/8-inch stereo line input jack and headphone output jack. So, how does the system sound? Fantastic. At peak volumes, the speakers lose precision, but the system has no problem getting plenty loud before it gets to that point. Our one com- plaint: the default level of the subwoofer. The bass is overdriven, adding a iow rumble to a lot of content that shouldn’t have it and making the low end in bass-heavy music swallow the rest of the sound. For gamers who want rear speakers without speaker wires, the Z-5450 Digital Is a great choice. It won’t match a good home theater sys- tem's ability to fill a large living room, but it deliv- ers the goods for a PC or console gamer who isn’t trying to play in a 30-foot-by-30-foot space. The biggest downside is the price — 500 bones is a lot to shell out for a multimedia PC system. Logitech’s own Z-5500 Digital is $100 cheaper and offers 500 watts of power and equivalent decoder functions. It’s a much better buy if string- ing wires to your rear speakers doesn't bother you. /Jason Cross ^ FOR BfimERS WHO UURNT RERR SPERK- ^ ERB WITHOUT THE HRBSLE OF BPERKER WIRES, THE Z-S^SO IB R ERERT CHOICE. PURSUE A Associate of Science & Bachelor of Science Degree Programs Real World Education school of ^ Computer Animation ^ Digital Media ^ Entertainment Business ^ Game Design & Development Recording Arts Show Production & Touring 800 . 226.7625 fullsail.com 3300 University Boulevard Winter Park, FL 32792 Financial aid available to those who qualify Job placeman! assistaitca Accredited College. ACCSCT i-]IIUFullSBl.lnc.Anhd<>i<M't>a ni>Ia<Bc'Fun Sj,l."FiiilSaJ Rt.it W«ld CGW.IURCOM <111 s\tk:i:h of actions, providing, in effect, 54 available functions in whatever application you're using. Besides having to remember what ail the mac- ros do, the only other foreseeable issue might be the unusual sensation of having keys off to the left where one would expect the Escape, Tab, or Caps Lock keys. It's hard to recommend the G15 unequivocally if you’re mostly into shooters and action games— there's just not a lot here for you outside of a sturdy USB keyboard with a couple USB ports on the back. Those games simply don't have a lot that you really need to record macros for, but MMO gamers will find the simple macro-builders to be a godsend. For those paying monthly World of WarCraft fees, S80 is a drop in the bucket. /Jason Cross 1^ LOGITECH’S NEW G1 5 IS HARDLY THE first keyboard on the market targeted ^ at gamers. Logitech enters into a space already occupied by products like PD Scientiftc's Wolf Claw (reviewed last month) and even more esoteric keyboard replacements like the Ergodex DX1 (see below). The G1 5, in contrast, takes a mostly traditional approach with a couple nice innovations. At first glance, the G1 5 looks like your standard keyboard, with a traditional layout, full comple- ment of function keys, and numeric keypad, plus two USB ports in back. It has good tactile feedback, as well — it feels better than most multi- media boards we've tested. The G1 5 starts veering off the beaten path, however, with some nonstandard additions. The keyboard features gentle, adjustable blue backlighting for gaming in the dark, while up top is a large Mute button and a handy switch that toggles the keyboard between "standard” and "gaming” modes. What's the difference? Simple: Gaming mode disables the Windows key. That's it. The G15's main attractions are the flip-up LCD screen at the top center and a series of 18 “G” keys to the left of the keyboard for programming macros. The LCD readout can be programmed to display macro and game mode informa- tion, among other functions, though it actually doesn't do much more than tell time out of the box. The 18 easily programmable G keys are accompanied by Ml, M2, and M3 buttons that switch the G keys through three different “sets" ^ VFOR THOSE PflVINE mONTHLV FEES ^^FOR WOW. SeO IS NOTHING. TfiKE CONTROL Logitech’s keyboard doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it just makes it slicker Logitech G5 Keyboard S80 no Siam dunk, but most MMO fiends will benefit here. VERDICT RLL KEVED UP The 21 St century keyboard is more than just fully programmable its 11-inch-by-9-inch “DX1 Pad.” The concept is simple: You begin with 25 DX1 keys, place as many of them as you want on the DX1 Pad in any layout you wish, and use the included software to assign func- tions to each one. Designed as an alternative to the standard QWERTY keyboard setup, the DX1 Input System really lets you personalize the way you interface with your PC. With the easy-to-use software, you can assign each key its own macro, which can perform a variety of functions; a single key command (“Q"), a multi- key command ("Hello World," a list of actions), a text-block command (inserting any length of text), or program/file/URL commands. Each key com- municates with the DX1 Pad wirelessly and sticks to the pad firmly through an adhesive that can be easily removed with a simple twisting motion. ^ IMAGINE THAT DURING A FIT OF GAMING rage, you threw your keyboard against the ^ wall, then clumsily picked up the keys and proceeded to arrange them exactly as you’d like on a tray near the computer. Enter the DX1 Input System, a USB peripheral designed for users to arrange (and rearrange) an assortment of programmable keys anywhere on ^ THE DHI INPUT BVGTEfTl RERLLV LETS YOU 2 PERSONRLIZE THE UUflV YOU INTERRCT ^ WITH YOUR PC, The macros are handy and convenient, but the biggest plus is the way the DX1 can ease your comfort level if you spend long hours at the computer. For instance, I have big hands, and the WASD setup is too confining for me. After an hour or so in that same position, my hand starts to hurt. With the DX1, though. I can assemble a WASD-like setup but with the keys spread out more, giving my hand a chance to rest comfortably on the keys in a more natural position. It’s a great concept. Just keep in mind that at $150, it's still really just an accessory to go alongside your keyboard rather than a complete replacement. (The fact that it features only 25 keys is your first clue.) But those into program- ming macros and creative nerds who like the idea of building a custom layout should check it out. It's a slick piece of technology./Jeremy Atkinson 1 1 2 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD www.widowpc.com^ Onling'C^pon Code ($50 i^^Q^jpV0106 I Dual AMD CPU and ' Dual Core combo IWILL Motherboard Dual nVidia BFG DC 7800 GTX inSLI Support for up to 8 displays Up to 8GB Crucial Ballistic DDR500RAM Seagate 147GB 15,000 RPM Cheetah 16)( Double Layer DVD Burner with LightScribe^*^ Creative X-Fi Elite Pro 8 Channel Surround Sound Hyundai 10"8ms LCD,4O0GB HO and more available online... Available from $3,390 — '' — ^ — ; TiTj ; AMD FX57 or Dual Core X2 4800+ ! ' Asus Deluxe Motherboard i Dual nVidia BFG DC 7800 GTX j in SLl ' Support for up to 8 displays Up to 4GB Crucial Ballistic DOR500RAM Seagate 147GB 15,000 RPM Cheetah 16x Double Layer OVD Burner with LightScribe'^'^ Creative Audigy 4 8 Channel Surround Sound Hyundai 19”8ms LCD, 400GB HD, liquid cooling and more available online... Available from $2,979 AMDAtiiIonFX57or • Dual Core X2 4800+ 17"Widescreen 1920x1200 ClearView Display NVIDIA 7800 GTX 256MB or ATI X800 PE 256MB Up to 2GB Apacer DDR RAM Up to 240GB Hard Drive Space 8x Double Layer DVD Burner with LightScribe^” TVTuner,GB LAN, modem, MP3 player. 802.11 and more available online... Available from $3,946 Intel Pentium M 780 226GHz 2MB L2 Cache 17”Widescreen 1920x1200 ClearView Display NVIDIA 7800 GTX 256MB Up to 2GB Apacer DDR2 RAM 120G85400 RPM or 100GB 7200 RPM HDD 8x Double Layer DVD Burner wth LightScribe^” TVTuner, GB LAN, modem, 802.11, Deluxe Case and more available online... Available from $2,395 Ask how we custom assemble your desktop in 7 - 1 0 days and laptops in 24 hours. widowpc 3 year parts and lobar warranty standard on every desktop Toll-free, 24-7 American tech support for as long os you own your WidowPC system Ptices,CDniiguration$ and availability may cbange wilhoul nolice. Taxes (if ony] and shipping charges are not shown. WidowPC cannot be held responsible lor errors in photography or typography. WidowPC and WidowPC spider logo are trademarks of WidowPC, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. %TiCH EktbhheIegh WOULD A GEFORCE 6800 GT 256MB CARD be a significant upgrade from an ATI 9800 Pro with 128MB? I’m limited to an AGP card, can’t afford a 7800 GT anyway, and won't have the money until December. I’m planning to play AOE3, F.E.A.R., Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and Call of Duty 2. Steven Scott You have the right idea, Steven, because each of those games you’re eyebatling requires some serious horsepower to look its absolute best. The short answer is yes, a 6800 GT would be a substantial upgrade. You'll be moving to a card with 16 pixel pipes, more vertex engines, and double the memory. Of course, as the newer top-end boards start coming down in price, you might have some better news by December: You may be able to afford a 6800 Ultra card. I'm having trouble playing Battlefield 1942. 1 have an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processor and an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200 graphics card. When I play a local game with bots, it’s all laggy and choppy. However, the card plays games like Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2 just fine. Could it be my old SyncMaster 753DF monitor? Dylan McDonald It's not your monitor that's causing the problem here, it’s the CPU. The second you load a small army into Battlefield 1942, your computer is going to start screaming, “MEDIC!” Think about it. The game is run- ning with a lot of bots scrambling around onscreen at once. Coupled with the large maps, that can be a real drag on an older CPU like yours. So why do other games work fine? Well, Counter-Strike (usually) isn't running any bots at all, and when it does, they aren't nearly as numerous. As for Half-Life 2’s A.I., it’s good, but you never have to deal with more than a dozen or so enemies running around a level at any given time. Is PCI Express compatible with PCI-X? Could I plug a PCI-X SCSI controller into a PCIe motherboard slot? I believe PCie is compatible with PCI devices, and it’s my understanding that the PCI-X architecture is not vastly differ- ent from PCI’s, but 1 need a definitive answer before I commit to some purchases. Ryan Easton Sorry, it’s a no-go. PCI Express is command compatible with PCI, but it won’t work, because they aren’t electrically compat- ible. PCI Express uses serial, point-to-point signaling to carry data. You can bundle multiple PCie lanes together to make wider slots, such as the PCie x16 slots for graph- ics. However, the slots are not mechani- cally or electrically compatible with PCI-X. PCI-X is an extension of 32-bit PCI, offering 64-bit wide slots that can run at double the clock rate of PCI. Look on the bright side, Ryan: Since you aren’t buying a PCI-X SCSI controller, you have a little extra spending money to get F.E.A.R. I have a Dell XPS Series 4 with the Nvidia 6800 PCI Express card. Do you know if the new Nvidia 7800 GTX will work in this PC, and is it a good investment to make if I’m a big fan of first-person shooters? Mark Brown Yes, a GeForce 7800 GTX card will work in your Dell system, and obviously, it will be able to handle more than your current graphics card, but there is one key bit of information that you didn't pass along. What kind of CPU lurks inside the case? It’s hard to say whether you’ll see vastly improved performance. Some first-person shooters may be CPU bound on slower processors, but most see some benefit from a faster graphics card. I have a Dell 8200 with a P4 2.5GHz, S12MB RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9700. I’ve been fine with most games, but when I play F.E.A.R., the game is very choppy. I've tried installing new drivers, but it's still very jumpy. Do I need a new graphics card? Jim McPherson Ah, F.E.A.R., it’s both a great game and a slayer of lower-end systems. Hate to say it, Jim, but it may be time for you to step up to a completely new computer. OK, so that’s probably not an option because, really, who's got the money for a whole rig when there are so many great games coming out? What would help a great deal, though, is adding another 512MB of RAM, assuming you can afford the pricey Rambus memory that the 8200 uses. After the memory upgrade, replacing the 9700 with something more modern, like the X8S0 XT, will help. If you can’t do any of that, your last option is the unthinkable: turning down the graphics detail and run- ning at a lower resolution! Got questions? Serd them to Tech_Medics®i:if(davis. com 1 1 4 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD Uote for the best games of 2005 in these categories; 2005 Game of the Vear Adventure Innovation Shooter Action Fighting Racing Sports Online/Multiplayer Hardware RPG Strategy Voting ends 12/31/05. Winners wiii be announced in January UP .com http://bestoF2005. 1 up.com » TOM vs. BRUCE PUBUSH€R: Microsoft DEVELOPER: Ensemble GB^: Real-time strategy It’s a whole new world AFTER LOGGING IN SOME INDIVIDUAL time with Age of Empires III, Bruce and Tom were ready to take on one another on New World soil. Tom will play his ISth-level Ottoman city, the Holy City, and Bruce wiil piay his 10th- level Russian city, Sankt Peterburg. The location is New England, which has a coast with a few iand- ing places, a trade route running north to south down the middle of the map, and two Iroquois settlements to the north. Tom starts on the west side; Bruce starts on the east side. BRUCE: Age of Empires III has this cool non- collectible card game feature: You build a deck of noncollectible cards to augment your abilities through periodic shipments from your “home city." Because this game is ali about settier manage- ment and because I'm not so good at optimizing individual tree-chopping protocols, I have a couple of resource cards in there, including one that gives ^ Don’t you hate it when the hussars drop by without caliing first? ^ Tom's minutemen live up to their name by staying aiive for just about a minute. me 600 food. I also have some lOth-ievel cards that give me Scottish Highlanders and Finnish Hackapells, I have no idea what they do, but i assume that since you don’t get them until you’re 10th levei, they’re good. Notice Tom's built-in cheat of playing as a city that’s eight levels better than mine. TOM: I think Bruce feels a little better when I explain that the alternative to my 1 8th-levei Ottoman city is my 28th-ievel German city, with its four tailor-made decks: a naval deck, a settler wagon boom deck, a mercenary/gold production deck, and a turtling deck. In the first several minutes of the game, my explorer, Aladdin Chick, manages to get sweet potatoes, skunk pelts, trapped beavers, concord grapes, marigolds, an Iroquois tomahawk warrior, and a Cherokee rifleman. Bruce gets something cailed chokecherry trees. Tom’s carpentry (and strategy) skills are called into question as Bruce's zany soldiers go through Tom’s wall instead of around it. BRUCE: One of the many things I don’t do well in multiplayer matches is manage my explorer, whom I was smart and savvy enough not to name after myself. Getting extra resources early on in games like this is important when you’re trying to avoid getting steamrollered by the Tom Chick machine. But that means I have to click on things while simultaneously thinking about other things, and i’m much better at doing that when the game is paused. Unfortunately, you're allowed only 15 pauses in multiplayer, and there is no way to change that. TOM; We're iess than seven minutes into the game, and Bruce has already paused six times, i suspect it’s part of some psychoiogical warfare scheme he's cooked up, because every time the words “The Game Has Been Paused By Bruce” flash across the middle of my screen, i forget what I’m doing. I'm an RTS guy who gets into that real- 116 >CX)MPJTER GAMING WORLD TWO GAMERS ENTEFTONE GAMER WINS > Bruce Geryk When he's not writing about nerdy war games, Bruce Geryk spends his days putting a hard- earned medical degree to good use. > Tom Chick In addition to being one of the videogame industry's most pro- life freelance journalists, Tom also runs the popular website QuarterToThree.com. time Zen zone. Bruce, on the other hand, plays every RTS like it's Civ 4. BRUCE: There is an art to rushing that totally eludes me. Go in too soon and you don't have enough rushers to do the job. Wait too long and it’s no longer a rush because your opponent has had time to build defenses. Tom almost always manages to get advance units out to harass me before I can even get situated, so my strategy this time is to use cheap Russian strelets to force Tom to defend his settlers instead of messing with mine. TOM: The Ottomans — whom I’ll call the Turks because it makes them sound less like furni- ture — don’t pay for their settlers, who are spit out for free at a slow, steady rate. This means the Turks are easier to play as but are also more brittle. They have a hard time replacing lost set- tlers, and they have to build a mosque to research settler technologies like millet system, Abbasid market, Koprulu viziers, and Galata tower district, all of which sound like something George Lucas thought up for his crappy movies. So while I'm busy researching Naboo moisture vaporators, Aladdin Chick and his party (consisting of his dog Mario and his Iroquois and Cherokee companions) run afoul of 20 strelets heading toward my base. I have yet to build a single military unit. When did Bruce get aggressive enough to rush me? In short, who taught him the correct way to play the oh-so- pun-worthy Russians? BRUCE: The word “strelets" literally means "shooter." That’s right, it's singular; the plural of "strelets" is “streltsy." If I lose this game, I plan to blame Ensemble's linguistically (and pause-ally) challenged game designers. Building 1 0 strelets at a time looks really impressive until you find out that they do half the damage of musketeers and have only two-thirds of the hit points. Still, they’re really cheap, so they're the perfect rush unit. For those of you who don’t play RTS games 24/7 as Tom does, know that when I call them “the perfect rush unit," I do not mean that they are a great Canadian art-rock band. TOM: I retreat my settlers into the town center and call out my minutemen, a one-time defense force that quickly dies as 10 more strelets bring up the rear behind the initial 20. Next to die are my Iroquois, then my explorer, and then the three hussars I hastily trained, one of whom is gunned down before he even reaches the battle. After that, my dog dies. That's right: Bruce Geryk killed my dog. But after that, fortunately, Bruce gets spooked by how quickly my town center picks off his strelets; he pulls back after losing half of them. BRUCE: I pull back to bring in five cossacks. Cossacks are actually not unique to Russia. In fact, the most famous cossacks in history were the Ukrainian (Zaporozhiye) cossacks, and there Tom’s Iroquois mantlets launch a brief diversion. > were Polish and Tatar cossacks as well. But what- ever — the designers couldn’t even spell “streltsy." TOM: Just as I sound the all-clear bell. Bruce is back with a mix of strelets and cossacks. I get five janissaries out by using a card. Janissaries are named after Janice, the goddess of having your ass saved at the last moment. I put them in hand- to-hand mode, and their scimitars cut down three of Bruce’s cossacks while the town center contin- ues to pick off strelets. I beat him into a stalemate and quickly get everyone baok to work. Aladdin Chiok gets himself up, dusts himself off, and heads north with a few hussars to grab trading posts and maybe a native settlement. I'm going to need all the help I oan get; plus, it should be clear of Russians up there, since I doubt Bruce has had the time or resources to expand. BRUCE: I really like the trading post deal in this game. Generating experience for having a goofy-looking wagon ride by your buildings so that you can use cards to bring dudes into the game is pretty cool. Knowing Tom, he’s already got a bunch of these. TOM: I've obtained the two northernmost trading posts, and my two outpost wagons just showed up from the Holy City. I leave one at my base and send another up north to cover my trading posts. Then my hussars mosey south to see how much of the trade route I can seize. I run into a lone Russian settler building a trading post. Having been unable to do much in the way of actually attacking yet, I happily slaughter her and commence tearing down the partially completed building. BRUCE: Typical Tom— instead of letting me concentrate on destroying his buildings, he has to mess with my settlers and stuff. TOM: Fortunately, I've got fishing boats out and about, and they’re unmolested because strelets can’t swim. My boats have been bringing in food, the only uninterrupted resource I've enjoyed. To ^ Tom's settlers take matters — and muskets — into their own hands. make sure my fishermen remain unmolested, I use a card to enlist the Sea Rampart, a Turkish galley, from my home city. I send her along the coast and she njns into Bruce’s dock and blows it up. The waters off New England will be minel No cod or recreational sailing for Brucel BRUCE: Not only do I have to micromanage all my settlers and try to rush Tom. but 1 also have to worry about all kinds of naval maneuvers. I hate naval elements in RTS games because they don't scale well and are rarely well integrated. 1 was going to say that the naval element in Age of Empires III is actually pretty well done, but Tom is kicking my ass with it, so instead, I hate it. TOM: Bruce has just hit the Fortress Age, which explains why he hasn't been attacking me: he was saving up the resources to age up. I've taken advantage of the lull to build a wall across his main approach so he'll have to come around from the north, past my defensive outposts and the Iroquois village where I'm marshalling defenders. I’m using the wood I won't need for a naval arms race to call in some Iroquois. And since 1 expect another attack, I use the Colonial Militia card, which gives my town centers a second round of powerful conscripted minutemen. BRUCE: Tom’s hastily built Maginot > ^ FOR THOSE OF VOU UUHO DON'T PLRV RTS ERITIES Bd/F RS TOm DOES, ^ KNOW THRT WHEN I CRLL STRELETS THE PERFECT RUSH UNIT," I DO ^ NOT fTlERN THRT THEY RRE R ERERT CRNRDIRN RRT-ROCK BRND. CGW.IURCOM <117 ;»TOK vs. BRUCE ^ When wo say this party is a barn burner, we are not kidding. We are sorry for making a bad joke, though. ^ Who knew the Lipizzaner Staiiions made the trip to the New Worid? > Line doesn't hold me up for too long. After all, I have Hackapells, whatever they are. I also have my fearsome Scottish Highlanders with their 63(1) ranged attack, which is more than three times the power of a musketeer's. TOM: I guess it didn’t occur to me that Bruce would attempt to come through the wall. Who on earth just goes through a wall? You see a wall and your reaction is to go around, right? Bruce must be wired weird. BRUCE: Tom must have been hoping his wall would obviate the need for defending himself with actual soldiers, which is what happens when you learn military lessons from the French. I do man- age to kill a few meandering janissaries. TOM: While waiting on my defenders to come back from the north where Bruce was supposed to have gone around the wall (seriously, who tries to come through a wall without at least bringing in some artillery first?), I use a card that gives me five Abus guns. These things are carried by some poor schmuck who drew the short straw and therefore gets to cart around a gun so ginor- mous that to fire it, you have to prop it up on a 1 6th-century bipod. “Abus" is the Turkish word for "something that hits you as hard as a Greyhound bus," which is what these guns do to enemy infantry. Unfortunately, Bruce rudely attacks my Abus guns with cavalry, BRUCE: This is my big chance to cripple Tom. After taking out a defensive outpost and a few defenders, I basically have the run of the place. There are a bunch of juicy building targets around but not that many settlers. Settlers are everything in this game. Where are his settlers? TOM: Fortunately, Bruce takes his time throw- ing Molotov cocktails at my stables instead of pushing further west, where I’ve got upward of 20 settlers gathering wood and coin. This gives me some time to trickle In defenses from the north, which does little more than distract him. But I manage to save up enough coin to pay for a two- pronged last-ditch defensive effort: my improved colonial militia and a mercenary card for 11 Barbary corsairs at my town center. Meanwhile, a handful of Iroquois mantlets — native siege units hiding behind big wooden shields — advance on his trading post. BRUCE: Tom has recruited a swarm of shirtless pirates? Well, they're no match for Hackapells, in any event. Is that all of Tom’s defense? Where are his settlers? He’s fiddling around near my trading post, but even an RTS-challenged guy like me knows that when you're blowing up a guy's base, you don't stop because someone is bothering your beaver-pelt collectors. TOM: Those were the worst pirates I've ever seen. I've lost them all, along with my tomahawks, hussars, and janissaries. He’s destroyed my town center with grenadiers and shot my Iroquois man- tlets with his musketeers. I'm all but finished if he finds my settlers. BRUCE: Ah, so Tom has a bunch of settlers hanging out gathering wood. Well, OK then. TOM: My settlers retreat to the coast, where they hastily build a stable and then start shoot- ing back. Once some hussars start coming in, they start playing rock to the scissors of Bruce’s infantry. It’s been a grueling battle of attrition that I'm winning for a couple of reasons: 1) Although Bruce has pretty much destroyed my base, he’s left most of my settlers untouched, so they’ve continued to work while the battle rages, and 2) my defenders don’t have as far to travel as his reinforcements. So I've managed to age up. Aladdin Chick has headed north to build a second town center. BRUCE: You get only one fort in this game, and I'm going to use mine to guard my trading post and the blockhouse that I'm using to keep the pressure on Tom's base. This should keep him from getting behind the force that’s cur- rently messing up his base. But he keeps training defenders by running his settlers off and then building stables and barracks just out of my line of sight. TOM: Bruce is bringing out oprichniks, which are quickly knocking down my buildings. I'm sav- ing up for my Manchu mercenary card, which will put an end to that. BRUCE: The oprichnina was Ivan the Terrible’s combination reign of terror and land grab, in which he dispossessed landowners of their property and then killed them. This complicated real-life backstory is the reason “oprichniks" (basi- cally Ivan’s secret police) are good against settlers and buildings. TOM: My Manchu have arrived! These 10 Chinese cavalry archers handily slaughter twice as many oprichniks, then a handful of musketeers and a slew of strelets. I lose one Manchu in the process. BRUCE: WTF are these things? Chinese dudes? Who researched this idea? I don't mind a little historical implausibility when it's my Scots and Russians driving the Ottoman Empire off the New England coast, because then, I’m winning. I’m even OK with shirtless pirates. But invincible Chinese warrior hacker guys? It's simply too much. TOM: I've got a second base up to the north now. I’ve got nearly 50 villages and my economy is healthy despite the drubbing 1 took. My Manchu are riding down a few cossacks and keeping Bruce off my back, and my explorer finds a Russian plantation. I work my way around the north, easily skirting Bruce’s fort. My Manchu are accompanied by a force of 16 elite Iroquois toma- hawks, the maximum allowed for controlling both native settlements. I fall on the plantation, slaugh- ter the settlers, and drive back a force of muske- teers and Strelets, As I'm pressing forward toward the rest of his villagers, Bruce surrenders. BRUCE: I’ve beaten Tom only once in a con- ventional real-time strategy game (Warlords Battlecry III), so I’m not too surprised that I lost this one. My biggest mistake was not making a point of going after his settlers. If you were to look at the settler graph, you'd see that I slowed Tom down but never really knocked him out. I have a lot of plateaus where I’m not building any settlers, and in this game, you always have to be building settlers. I’m going to go ahead and blame this on the limited pause function./ FINAL SCORE: The Story Has Been Paused by Bruce. ^ I LURS GOING TO BfiV THRT THE NRURL ELEfTlENT IN REE OF EfTIPIRES S III IS RCTURLLV PRETTY WELL DONE. BUT TOm IS KICKING mV RSS ^ WITH IT, SO INSTERD, I HRTE IT. 1 18 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD BRUCE RND TOm And their parents said it would never last! ^ FOUR ^^RS?! YES, WHILE WE CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT OURSELVES, THIS ISSUE marks the foui^year anniversary of the Tom vs. Bruce column, which began as a rather earnest set of strategy tips but has (d)evolved Into regular accounts of us beating up on each other. In celebration of everyone's preoccupation with udio’s win- ning the war (and by “everyone,” we mean “Tom”), here’s a look at some of our favorite battles, along with the latest overall tally. “I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code." JANUARY 2002: We kick off the series by showing the other three people who bought Rails Across America how to conduct a stock raid. Tom wins by uniting Mexico. OCTOBER 2002: In Age of Wonders II, “The Chronicles of the War of Tom and Bruce" do hereby record the defeat of Bruce’s "tor- nado-flung wizard." In short, Bruce isn’t in Kansas anymore. NOVEMBER 2002: Bruce beats Tom in two out of three Magic: The Gathering games by using a green animal deck. Cries Tom: “First squirrels, then elephants. What is this, Zoo Tycoon?" JANUARY 2003: Bruce wins two out of three matches of Medieval: Total War. In the final game, Bruce as Italy beats Tom as England, thus ruining England’s chance to con- quer a country with better cuisine. JUNE 2003: Bruce and Tom enlist the guys behind Old Man Murray (www.oldmanmurray. com) to play The Sims Online. One of them wins by peeing on himself. SEPTEMBER 2003: Tom's RTS dominance shows clearly In his Rise of Nations win, In which he surgically nukes Bruce into cultural irrelevancy. NOVEMBER 2003: Tom hasn’t played a war game since he kept a Rock of Seagulls cas- sette tape in his car. It is thus no surprise that Bruce wins the Korsun Pocket match. FEBRUARY 2004: Bruce’s Cthulhu mon- sters emerge from the sea to give Tom a beating in Dominions II: The Ascension Wars. Bruce also manages to spell Cthulhu correctly, several times. Cthulhu f’tagn! APRIL 2004: In the virtual collectible card game Star Chamber, Tom recounts how to re-create a great naval battle at home: “Take an egg to represent Bruce’s fleet. Now go outside and find a brick wall to represent my fleet. Then throw the egg at the brick wall.” Somehow, Bruce still wins two out of the three games played. JULY 2004: Tom’s dwarven fisherman teams up with Bruce's elfin priest in the World of WarCraft beta. Says Bruce: “In the movies, dwarves are supposed to be comic relief, so I ask Tom to tell me a joke. All he can come up with is something about two gnomes and a farmer’s pig. We can’t print the punch line here, but I now know that dwarves aren’t very funny." AUGUST 2004: It’s a Rise of Nations rematch, using the Thrones & Patriots expan- sion. Tom’s Iroquois beat Bruce's Americans, move them onto reservations, and then allow them to open casinos. NOVEMBER 2004: On the eve of the actual election, Tom and Bruce re-create themselves as candidates in The Political Machine. The Chick/ Edwards Democratic ticket barely beats out the Geryk/Cheney Republican ticket, but Bruce manages to win California. “California, since you have betrayed me,” Tom says in his victory speech, "I present you as a gift to Mexico.” MARCH 2005: Sid Meier’s Pirates! inspires Tom to write his own sea chantey. Bmce takes one look at the dancing minigame and cedes the whole match. OCTOBER 2005; Bruce wins the Battlefield 2 match. Actually, Bruce’s bots win the Battlefield 2 match by covering for him while he makes a sandwich. BV THE NUmBERB TOTAL WINS: Tom 19, Bruci b16 TOM’S BEST GENRE: Real strategy (1 0 wins, 4 losses) •time BRUCE'S BEST GENRE: Turn- based strategy (10 wins, 3 losses) CGW.1URCOM<i1d Inforreticn Seciriy: Higher Degree of Geek. Master of Science in Technology. Experience accelerated and customizable programs that will ignite the vision that burns in your dreams. You’re already in the game. Now, prepare to join technology's elite, www.uat.edu/graduate or 800-658-5744 * THE LATEST AND CREATE W PC DEMOS Oh, the bounty to be had on this month’s DVD. Create your own shooter with the FPS Creator program we’ve thoughtfully provided, and take some time to check out unique demos like Oolf? and Darw/n/a— because it’s good to try new things, y’know? 2K OAMES ' * - J. ' ' CIVILlZAnON ANONYMOUS (ONSEFrn COVER POSTER CIVILIZATION IV CONFUCT GLOBAL TERROR ACTIVISION CALL OF DUTY 2 QUAKE IV THE MOVIES ATI TECHNOLOQIES, INC. ATI - R520 .DEMO, 12-13.26A-26B DEMO, 56-57 DEMO, 6-7 BLOOD RNE BLOOD RAYNE CREATIVE LABS X-FI SOUND CARD CYBERPOWER SYS1BMS CYBERPOWER PC DELL HOME SYSTEMS FULL SAIL REAL WORLD EDUCATION EDUCATION OAMELOFT KING KONG MOBILE PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE TWO THRONES . OAMESWAP Chuzzles have escaped into the real world. Oh, the humanity! Make revisionist history by fighting impor* tant battles from World War II with this massively multiplayer tactical war demo. Eat your way to the top of the food chain on your way to unseating the vicious Shark King. CHIPS & BITS . We’d be bummed if this real-time strat- egy game ended up becoming one of those tragically overlooked gems. We’re giving you the demo so you'll see how cool it is. IBUVPOWER I BUY POWER-AMO I BUYPOWER-AEONCRAFT . Bust your way through the crazy levels of Atlantis and harness the power of Poseidon. ; BUYPOWER-INTEL. INTEL CORP. HONOR. COURAGE. THE RIGHT PROCESSOR.. INTEL GAMING 33,35 MIDWAY OAMES, INC. RISE & FALL NCSOFT CORP. NCSOFT SAITEK INDUSTRIES LTD, INC. Curious indeed! Mah-jongg solitaire + word-building exercises = the ultimate word-puzzle game. Go figure. Have you finished this month's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars cover story? Well, after you do, you can check out Splash Damage’s first entry in this franchise, and maybe have some ice cream if you’re good. ECLIPSE KEYBOARD. MOUSELOOK GAMEPAD . SD ENTERNET NAVY FIELD SQUARE ENIX U.S.A., I Damn those crazy cosmic bugs! Help Professor Fizzwizzle use gadgets to solve puzzles. GALACTIC CIVILIZATION 2. TURBINE OAMES DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ONLINE UBISOFT ENTERTAINMENT RAINBOW SIX LOCKDOWN UNIVERSITY OF ADVANCINQ COMPUTER TECH UNIVERSITY OF ADVANCING COMPUTER TECH . . . . WIDOWPC WIOOWPC WIZARDS OP THE COAST MAGIC: RAVNICA Save lost civilian ships, earn tons of cash, buy powerful upgrades, and smash alien scum into oblivion. Six simulated months of managerial experience, at your fingertips. Space combat, playable Jedi, and a gal- axy far, far away. Check out the trailer! Check out mapmaker Jaret Illingworth's unofficial sequel to the fan-favorite Battlefield 2 map Strike at Karkand. These trailers from Peter Molyneux’s studio simulator give you a taste of life in the director’s chair. DONT miss OUTl UPGRADE VOUR SUBSCRIP- TION TODflV 0V CALLING aaO«S?-445Q Upload your files for FREE at any time: ' i ^PT£D space Uli'^LIMiTED uploads downloads PIMLil^^lTED bandwidth MQ' file size restrictions Give the public access to ; V u>[v A i i. of your files! www.filefront.com Check it out! SCORCHED EARTH BECAUSE WE HAVE THE EXTR/l PAGE RRE you THERE EODP ITS fTIE ROBERT When your PC dies, does it go to heaven? It better not ^ LIKE EUERV BflBV BUNNV RRBBIT I ^ HflUE TRIED TO TEfiCH TO SUJim, mV COmPUTERB HRUE DIED HIDE0U5LV. WHEN I WAS A LAD. MY DARLING MOTHER HAD A LITTLE saying: “Do that again and I'll smother you in your sleep." This little pearl of parenting did wonders for improving my vodka and Pall Mall retrieval times, and though it didn't quell the grumbling in my stomach, it certainly silenced the grumbling escaping my lips. Sadly, no amount of similar caring works on a computer. Tender entreaties, outright threats, and physical violence won’t either. You’d think that repeatedly striking that $3,000 doorstop dominating your desktop with a wireless key- board until the keyboard shatters and scatters every Function key around the room would do the trick, but trust me on this, it doesn’t. You can't throttle it into submission with a mouse cord either. Dealing with a PC has invalidated every lesson learned at my mother's knee except one: Everything dies (though my beloved mater was fond of appending “And you might be next” to this life lesson). You know why they call them computer terminals? Because they’re inherently terminal. They die. At the most inconvenient times and in the worst ways imaginable. Horrible, ugly, profan- ity-inducing violence-triggering deaths. And unlike you and me, they do take it with them, every document, save game, music file, and downloaded Internet, uh, art film passing blithely into the great beyond clutched in their awful silicon claws. Frankly, I think they enjoy it. I know mine did. I heard it laughing. Malicious, mocking bastard. I gave it my heart, it gave me angina. All I wanted was a little fun. And some rudimentary utility. I naively expected my PC to behave like other tools in the house, to perform as expected when expected and meeting expectations the same way my hammer and toaster (when used separately — believe you me, I learned that lesson) did. 1 wanted to turn it on and have it work. That’s it. I should have known better. Like every baby bunny rabbit 1 have tried to teach to swim, my computers, each and every one, have died hideously after a sad, tortured existence. But this last one took it to a new Lifetime movie-of-the-week level. First off, it never worked quite right, but who, I reasoned, among us does? That was my first mistake, anthropomorphizing this slab of steel and melted sand into something sentient, a fellow traveler on life’s highway, forgiving its flaws as I felt sure it forgave mine. But that occasional sputter became a chronic stutter, which became a pronounced limp, which became a desperate need for an iron lung, and within a few months I was doing more work than it was. I certainly wasn't playing games much anymore — I was playing triage. As things kept locking up and crashing. I'd futilely struggle, sidestep, and cheat my way past the problems because a simple reboot was anything but. Powering down my briefly golden child meant a prolonged boot sequence of 30 minutes— if I was lucky and it powered back up at all. And it went downhill from there, with new symptoms, brief recover- ies, vicious relapses, and so on until finally it needed a transplant. A drastic step to be sure, but after confirming the diagnosis with well-qualified second opinions, I swapped out the motherboard and it roared back to life. I beamed, as proud and happy as that time I replaced a drifter’s chest wall with stapled-on skirt steak. A week later it was abruptly and irredeemably dead. And so was the PC. It’s that false sense of triumph and hope, like a hobo's seemingly animated jig that only later you realize was a ghoulish fit of last-gasp agony, that makes the inevitable demise just that much crueler. Do you want to know the real reason you keep hearing that PC gaming is dying? Because the PCs keep dying, that's why. I have about five hundred and a half zillion consoles In my house and they work just fine. I stick a game in, it loads, and I play it. And in the rare instance my GBA or PS2 stops working, the answer is simple: It's broken, just like my toasterfied hammer. It's not because I have a bad module of RAM, or the hard drive has a corrupt partition, or the power supply isn't powerful enough, or the drivers conflict with cosmic winds, or 1 need to reset the CMOS and maybe wipe the hard drives and do a complete Windows reinstall in some excruciating and per- verted version of “being safe," it's just broken, and all I need do is buy a new one or invoke my warranty. That’s it, no exploratory surgery and costly experiments. You know, I have a typewriter in my garage that works perfectly fine. I have board games and playing cards and an imagination and actual physical activity and awkward social interaction to fill my leisure time. And apparently, there are these things called “stores” that not only will let me buy the same things I get from Amazon.com, but will let me take them home right when I pay for them instead of mailing them to me days later. We don’t really need computers, and in fact, our lives would be immeasurably better and less stressful if we simply stopped trusting them and investing so much of our hearts and time in them. It’s time to cut the (power) cord. I should have my new PC by Monday. I’m sure it’ll be different this time./ Robert Coffey 1 22 > COMPUTER GAMING WC«LD IjTjvr 1 1 1 ■> - 1 lil Ji GAME SWAPi auctions for gamers by gamers • www.gameswapzone.com PlayStation ■ P$2 ■ Xbox ■ PSP ■ GameCube ■ N-Gage ■ Game Boy ■ PC Games ■ DVDs ■ and more • Create your own store • Featured product listings • Rating system • Buik uploading Runs great on Violence S Suggestive Themes nefiRLa lOf.ioij E cosTume cusTonrfUmTOfi opTions BUILD mflSSIJSSejRDPmESSES Room B9 Room PflRTRKgjn HEISTS, RBDUCTlOlSl^'ilD OTHER . EUiL missions BECQME INFAMOUS WITH INTEL'TECHNOLOOYI ' sunrifnoOi AR^E^ EOfnfnRnD ^ euirmThidns and 11)8 tnlBl InSde Playad'Lngg araretisieiedtradeniarLsancl/wiradefliarfcsoINVtDIACt'paraticiiilnttaUniied Slalat and other »QSCiYt>ticSld<tia5.lnc.andNClriUraciivt,lnc.AllRiDlitaRiseiveil Cliy o'Vlllaini and aDatsoolatad logos and di»9di are badamarkasrragliniadtradoniaiiiaolCfyptcSiudiuandNCsofiEorpotaijon. NCsoR. Die NerlDckingNC Logo, and all associaudNCnlt logos and designsaiatradamarlis or registered itadamarksoINCsoflCorDoration. CrvsticSluiSosISBiiBdamaikolCiVDticStud'OB. Inc. PenOum. Ini ' radtndeniarSSollnisICoiporaiionor.ltssubsIdiariesIntheUmieilSiatesandoitiercoiinirias. NVIDIA, ilie NVIDIA logo, CdForcaand'The Way li'sMaaniiol All Older registered (rademorts or iradamatis are oropetryol diei' resgecirve OMws