February

25

Maybe you've heard of it maybe not. Anyhow, a while back the toy company Hasbro, bought Microprose to strenghten their electronic games production. Specially within the strategy genre. Gilman Louie, the founder of Spectrum Holobyte, which bought/merged with Microprose, is now the Chief Creative Officer of Hasbro.

Imagine having a Gill Man running the X-COM development..
This is scary stuff! :)

In an interview with PC.IGN Louie talks about the future of Hasbro, Microprose, online gaming, X-COM and other titles. Also Microprose's director of marketing, Tom Nichols, is in this interview.

Here is perhaps the most interesting part of the interview for us X-COM fans,

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TW: What about the X-Com series? There were the turn-based games that everyone was addicted to and then Apocalypse came out and although it got great reviews, I think there are a lot of people who still miss the old turn-base series. Interceptor was a great game, too, but are the plans to continue to broaden the license or to go back to the original designs and try something else?

GL: I think there are two threads. I think you'll see kind of a tactical Doom style game, which allows you to do squad-based tactics in the X-Com universe. I think that would be very cool, but I also think there is a big push in two of our studios to just go back to the original X-Com. With a nicer technology and graphics, but let's get back in and do the original strategy game. X-Com is one of those brands in which every title has been good, but each title was something less than the title before, and I think the UFO title, the original X-Com: UFO Defense, had a magic to it. It was a perfectly balanced game.
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So these games he's talking about is Alliance and Genesis.. Although I agree that X-COM: Ufo Defense the original, was a great game, I hope they do not bring back the Turned Based gameplay, because I'd much rather have an improved Real Time system, than be counting action points!

Let's get down to buisness shall we!

As you might have noticed, I've edited some parts of the layout on this page, to make it.. well.. better functioning. It's just minor tweaks here and there.

I think my site now looks well in both 800*600 as in 1024*768 Perhaps even better in the latter. I don't know how many of you that use 1024*768 or up.. but I guess when people move from a 15" to a 17" monitor, they go for better resolution and leave the 800*600 behind.

The Latest X-COM News:

Again it's Detonate that gets info from Dave Ellis. This is quite AMAZING.. look at this:

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News Flash... Dave Ellis conversation update, re Genesis... "The characters will be at least as large as they were in UFO and Terror, and the reason we are going to true 3D is so that we can have AWESOME lighting and other effects. (Glad you got that 3D card? :)..." " ...We've already had our initial meeting with the sound department and discussed the kinds of things we want in Genesis. We're on track..."
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At least as large... hmm I don't hope they make em` too darn big :)

Moving on: Rumour has it that X-COM: Alliance has been pushed to 3rd or 4th quarter.

Although I have not played Unreal myself, (which Alliance`s game engine is based on) I've recently been playing Half-Life. And if Alliance has anything near these graphics, I'll be more than thrilled. Half-Life really upped my attention for this game genre.

Later..