The PC game
industry: Enjoy it
while you can
By Karen Zierler
The announcement in March of
Microsoft’s new wonder—the X-Box—
has been hailed by some as the death knell for
the PC game industry. But
two major publishers are
working hard to keep it
alive. Black Isle Studios
and BioWare Corp have
resurrected the dying
"computer role-playing
game" (CRPG) genre.
In May Black Isle
plans to release
Icewind Dale, based
on stories from
Forgotten Realms
author R. A. Salvator. By
4
*
I
fall, BioWare expects to release Baldur's Gate
2, which incorporates 3D special effects. We’ll
all have to wait for 2001 to see full 3D in the
cooperative
BioWare/Black
Isle production,
Neverwinter
Nights, promot
ed as a true
Dungeon
Master’s dream
(the official site for Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind
Dale and Neverwinter Nights is found at
www.interplay.com/bgate2).
And there were several other new titles
released this spring: Raven shipped its realistic
mercenary shooter Soldier of Fortune
(www.activision.com/games/sof/). Don’t play
this unless you have a tough stomach! Also out
are Heroes of Might & Magic III: Shadow
of Death, with new artifacts, combat terrain
types, 38 new scenarios and a new campaign.
Also out: Thief 2 (www.lglass.com/thief2/),
the sequel to the atmospheric action-adventure
Allegiance; a buggy High Heat Baseball
2001 (http://gamespot.com/sports/hh2001)
and the popular series Might&Magic VIII
(www.sabinsky.com/mm8/).
So, who cares if they’ve predicted doom on
the PC horizon? There is still a PC heyday! •
For additional links to all the
games mentioned in this article,
Jog on to www.steamtunnels.net
'A
Customizing Your
Favorite Video Games
By Nick Montfort
The most gripping games of recent years are in the first
person shooter category—a category created by the id
Software hits Doom and Quake. These games take place in cavernous
environments, corridors of stone or steel. There’s a great pleasure in
racing through these worlds, bucking for a frag in a network game.
But there’s also an exquisite joy to putting such a setting together,
as any designer will testify. And with the
software available today, you don’t have to
be an expert programmer to carve out a
cave of your own.
Just slapping a Doom or Quake level
together, or twiddling around with an exist
ing level, is a cinch—it does, however, take
time and effort to create a truly original
level. Designing a game map with an soft
ware editor is a experience that has lots of
appeal to the hardcore.
Once you've learned to use an editor,
the possibilities are almost endless. One
level-building idea is to model your college.
The University of Texas computer science
department challenged students to create
a Doom wadfile that represents its rather
nightmarish building, Taylor Hall. A rule
quickly had to be added: Don't make the
attacking monsters look like professors!
Worldcraft, by Ben Morris, is a wide
spread favorite for creating Quake levels.
There more than a dozen utilities for exam
ining and editing levels in Doom, Doom II,
Heretic and Hexen are out there. Many
choose Wad Author, the DCK (Doom
Construction Kit) or the DEU (Doom
Editing Utilities). Worldcraft, Wad Author
I
!
I
and DCK are available free- or shareware at
www.stormtroopers.com/ZWR/lbl.htm; DEU is also free at
www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~quinet/games/DEU/DEU-en.html.
Two major toolkits now give players a powerful way to create their
own single-player text adventures. TADS (Text Adventure Design
System: www.tela.bc.ca/tela/tads/) came out first. It was followed by
Inform (www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform.html), which allows program
mers to build story files in the original Infocom format (this is a stodgy
web site that is slow to upload). A college is the setting of one famous
early TADS game, the 1991 Save Princeton, and the excellent 1995
Inform game Christminster takes place at a fictional English college.
Fashioning a text game is tough—both Inform and TADS are true
programming ianguages—but it cer
tainly isn’t impossible. More than
100 homespun adventures were
released last year. •
J