We’ve fallen a few issues behind when it comes to our NextGen magazine recaps, compared to where we’re at in Nintendo Power magazine. It’s time to try to catch up some.
Cover: Our cover for this issue is the new face of graphic adventure games, featuring King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity.
Industry Interview: We have an interview with John Romero of the recently formed Ion Storm this time. We have a description of how John got into the industry and helped start Id software. He basically gives “creative differences” as the main reason for his departure, combined with his own ambition. He also throws some shade at GT Interactive (who is currently the publisher for Epic Megagames, and with it the Unreal engine).
There’s also some discussion of Ion Storm’s big three upcoming games – an untitled RTS, the JRPG-inspired RPG Anachronox, and Daikatana.
News: Tokyo Game Show 1997 has come & gone. Nintendo was not there (they’re saving their first-party stuff for Space World). For Sony, the centerpiece of their booth was PaRappa the Rapper. Capcom has Resident Evil 2, along with a port of the first game in the series for the Saturn. We do have a few N64 games from Konami – Ganbare Goemon 5 and Castlevania 64. Then, with Squaresoft, they had Final Fantasy Tactics and SaGa Frontier.
Also, the first GameWorks arcade opened in Seattle. The ASI Arcade show has also happened, with Konami unveiling its new arcade board. Sega is also backing the new Heat online gaming matchmaking service.
Game Prices: We have an article on where the money goes for video game prices. We get a breakdown of a PC game with no licensing fees involved and a discussion of development costs – including royalty fees for third-party libraries. Plus, again, digital distribution is not really a Thing That Exists yet.
The State of Play: We get another rundown of the current state of the platforms, and what the future may hold.
The N64: The N64 has some serious graphical potential. It also has hardware that is showing to be hard to develop for, with a slot of hope being put in the N64DD.
The PlayStation: The PS1 has a strong start, and a bunch of solid titles, but the hardware is no longer cutting edge.
The Saturn: The Saturn has a bunch of potential secrets that could be pulled out of the architecture, but there are issues with Sega communicating the information to developers to find these secrets, to the point that the recommendation that developers share among themselves is to not use Sega’s libraries and build their own engine from scratch.
Matsushita M2:
Alphas (Previews): First off is the game featured on the cover – King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity. This is Sierra On-Line’s first 3D adventure game. This includes an interview with Roberta Williams & Mark Seibert about the design philosophy behind designing adventure games in 3D vs. 2D.
There’s also a preview of the first SpecOps game, which is aiming to be the first first-person tactical simulator. Possibly the bigger preview of this issue is for the Heat service from Sega – expanding on some of the material that is covered in the News section.
Finals (Review): Three N64 games in this issue. Two of the three are soccer games – FIFA 64 and J-League Perfect Striker. J-League has considerably better scores, citing Konami’s stronger controls and animations. On the first-party development front we have Mario Kart 64 from Nintendo, which gets 3 out of 5 stars, but the magazine’s reviewer describes it as being “Nothing more than a great 16-bit game in 64-bit clothing.”
On the Playstation, Genki – the creator of the Kileak series – has another claustrophobic first-person shooter that puts you in a mech with BRAHMA Force: The Assault On Beltlogger 9, which they consider a marked improvement on the Kileak series. We have a couple really solid sports & racing games, whether it’s Sony’s own NBA Shoot-Out ’97, and Rally Cross, and Konami’s Goal Storm ’97. There are also some real stinkers, like The Crow: City of Angels and K-1: The Arena Fighters. Rounding things out on the PS1 front is one more Sony title – Twisted Metal 2, which fixes a bunch of the first game’s engine problems.
The Saturn has another port of a Sega arcade racing game, with Manx TT. There’s also Assault Suit Leynos 2, which I suspect might be included in the version of the game titled Assault Suit Leynos on Steam.
The PC has a pretty good FMV adventure game with Realms of the Haunting and the action game Ecstatica 2 (which I can’t be sure how it plays from the screenshots). There’s also a science fiction turn-based strategy game with M.A.X.
Letters: There’s a really good letter from Jeff Vavasour of Digital Eclips speculating on how the emulation in the Namco Museum collections work. We also have a letter taking publishers to task for providing accommodation options for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
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