Clueless In Gameland

Bad week, bad games. A roundup of the games you should keep far, far away from.

King Quake: Get out of the way, player 1

Player 1: ....

Quake_dude: I don't like your skins, player 1!

Player 1: ....

BOOM!

Player 1: Good work, u two!

Rather appreciative words to tell those who have just blasted your guts all over level 1. Player 1 is yours truly, and the weird psychoes who have just murdered me in cold blood are from somewhere on the other side of the world, and at least one name has a certain Yankee twang to it. And what was responsible for the gruesome end was modem lag.

 

But this isnt my fault, and

on a good day I could teach these men / kids at the other end a thing or two. Empty boast as it could be verified only if I had access

to an ISDN line. Over a 28.8 Kbps modem, if you attempt to

connect to a Quake server across the world, you are toast. And then some.

But I dont want to talk about on-line gaming and modem lags here. That was an act of desperation after scrounging the game demo sites on the Net for something worth writing about. Nothing good at gamepower.com, gamelan.com and half a dozen gaming webzines.

It seems there no quality games coming out these days. Still, hours of FTPing got me a few the gaming mags said were quality gaming shareware. But after playing them for a few hours each, I am beginning to wonder...

Shadow Warrier: Offspring of the great Yankee dude, Duke Nukem 3D. If there has ever been a true challenger to Quake, it was Duke Nukem. True, it didnt have a real 3D engine, but the story is so full of itself you begin to like it. But in the next version of any game, you expect improvements. Better scenery, greater action, more intelligent opponents... Shadow Warrier was nothing but Duke with slightly different lighting and scenery.

Some things are plain outrageous in MDK, an MMX game we had reviewed here earlier, the characters had amazing life-like movements. And body texture, to boot. The level of pixellation in Shadow Warrier is apalling, as are the fiddlesome controls. Not many of the gamers are equipped with the latest gaming devices, and keyboard play is still very popular. Shadow Warrier is as bad as Duke Nukem was with player controls Duke was fine in its heyday, but the same quality three years after Quake set new standards is simply unacceptable.

The Alien Trilogy: Ive been a fan of the Alien film series, and can still stand a lot of the 80s corny SF movies. It takes some amazing levels of deterioration to make such a drooling fan of the genre criticise this one, but here we go. Gameplay? Thumbs down. Resolution? At around 320X360, bad. What many game developers havent realised is that the 386 era is over, and you can actually have better resolution