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August 6th 2006

(0) Game Expectations

I wouldn’t call myself a gamer, let alone a hardcore gamer. I play games periodically and only recreationally - not professionally. If I do play a game, it’s either Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or America’s Army on the PC and I survive playing demos and PGR3 on the Xbox 360; not really a professional gamer. But, there are two games that I’m really looking forward to that appear to be coming out next year in 2007: Spore and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Spore

Spore has been created by the same man who created the SimCity and The Sims video games. I used to play SimCity quite alot and also used to play the latter on the GameCube every now and then (although the music annoyed me). Even though the first glimpse of the game was back in 2005 at the Game Developers Conference, it’s come a long way since then. Spore is a massivley single-player simulation slash strategy game. There are several phases in the game; these are:

Tide pool phase
Creature phase
Tribal phase
City phase
Civilization phase
Space phase

Basically, you start off as an insignificant amoeba and work your way up through the evolutionary chain. In the creature phase, you get to design your own creatre with an extremely powerful customization tool that allows millions of different combinations so your creature is always unique. I love these sort of games and the screenshots and videos that have been posted make it look even better. The fact that it seems you can go online and live in a universe population by other players make it even better. Also, it’s been said that Spore is to be ported for the Nintendo Wii. If this happens it will really boost sales of the the console and it would certainly make me a very happy man.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Bringing together the gameplay theology of the Wolfenstein series and the graphics and physics of the Quake universe, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks awesome. You fight as the GDF (Global Defense Force) against the Earth invading Strogg and complete a series of objectives working in a team towards a common goal but completing your own individual tasks which are dependant on which class you are. The makers of the game have reworked the game physics with networking in mind because this game is an online-only multiplayer game. Because they’ve designed the game in mind with networking they’ve developed some interesting technologies. One is the ‘Mega Texture’ technology. This technology allows for one huge texture to be applied to the maps so every part of the terrain is different - no tiled textures. Also their ‘Geometric Texture Distribution’ technology automatically adds the small details to maps such as moss on rocks, snow on mountains at certain heights and other things like weathering effects like cracks in rocks near rivers. This makes it a lot more internet friendly and also makes making a map a little bit easier for developers. Yesturday I watched a video about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from QuakeCon 06 that tells you nearly everything you wanted to know about this game. Check out the video and the site. I think I may have to upgrade my computer to play this unless they bring out a console version (obviously not the Wii because the graphics need a lot more power).

Both of these games have had some hype about the on gaming sites. I for one am looking forward to them.