Back to news pages...Well heres a full report on the Computer '98 show. I have stuck pretty tightly to games news as you can find out about all the other stuff elsewhere, however, due to this, it means there isn't that much to report on top of what was in the early report. Here goes anyway....
Probably the biggest news of the show came from Titan, to some it was a surprise, however, there were quite a few that had already known about it for quite a while. What is it your probably asking by now, well, simply that they will be porting Settlers 2 to the Amiga.
Settlers 2 was the very popular PC sequal to Settlers. It was a game that did actually begin development on the Amiga but it very quickly went PC only, a blessing is disguise maybe as the Amiga probably wouldn't have been able to handle it back then. The Amiga port should be virtually identical to the PC version an there may even be some special features for PPC owners, yep thats right, its going to support PPC.
The game will need a minimum of an 040 with AGA to run, faster processors are reccommended. As I mentioned before the game will feature PPC support with there being special features for this version. The game will also support all major GFX cards. Titan are currently aiming at a release date sometime in January next year.
This wasn't it from Titan though as they also had a demo of Claws of the Devil on show, although, this was only an 060 version. I heard that this was actually quite slow, although by final release they hope to have it running at 5-10fps in lowres on an 060. There was no PPC version to be seen sadly, however, I am told that there will be one released on Aminet in 2 weeks. The PPC version should run an about 20fps in 640x480 resolution, and will also feature permedia/Warp3D support. Claws of the Devil will hopefully be released in March next year.
Titan also said that Evils Doom Special Edition will be released very soon, I'm told that this has major improvments over the original, more news on this soon. They also gave a snippett of information regarding Shadow of the Third Moon 2, saying that they had not made there mind up if to release it yet, however, if they do it will be PPC only. They are also in negotiations for more games.
As for clickBOOM, Napalm was not actually at the show (I'm told it should reach Europe for November 1st), however, in the IRC conference they did reveal a few interesting things. First of all it was said that there still may be a port of Quakeworld written for the Amiga, however, other then this there will be no futher development on Quake. They also said that they will have news on further conversions soon and also reveal that they have been in talks with Lucasarts, make of this what you will....
Other games that were on show include Olofight from the Real Ologram, Eat the Whistle from Hurricane Software and a number of games from APC&TCP. Unfortunalty, to my knowledge Phoenix was not actually there in demo form as was promised.
Tales of Tamer was also on display at the show, it has moved on quite a bit from when I last featured it on thes pages. There will hopefully be a first beta of the game sometime in December with the game being released early next year. It will feature PPC support, over 100Mb of GFX and lots more. I will be bringing you more on this game very soon.
Other then that I'm afraid there wasn't much more on show games wise. However, there were a few things that may play an important part in games in the future. One of these was Warp3D, this was being demonstrated at the show although only with a Virge driver (Permedia drivers available very soon). It was being shown running Decent and I'm told that it looked very good with some nice effects. H&P hope to officially release Warp3D early in December.
Also, an item of note is that the BlizzardVision PPC should be out at the start of December and it will come with 8Mb on on-board RAM.
Obviously, the biggest news of the show came from Amiga Inc, they announced there OS partner, QNX to the Amiga hordes. I'm not going to explain the details of this here as they can easily be found elsewhere...