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e-mail to: Evan Morris (aka "E.Phoenix")

Refuse From the Matrix

Now that the Winter CES has come and gone I am left with a bit of an empty feeling. The WCES, for as long as I can remember, has been a show where game developers have rolled out most of the softs that would be appearing within the next eight months. With the creation of E3, that all changed; within a couple of months after the innagural E3 show last May, the amount of game developers that usually show at WCES began to rapidly decline into almost nothing. I wish I could pack my page with commentary on all the cool softs that will be coming out within the first two quarters of 1996, but I can't, because next to none were shown. Well, even though I can only mention a few games, I am very excited about the information I did get.

Psygnosis or Sony Psygnosis or Sony interactive or whatever the hell everyone is calling them now (hey they'll always be Psygnosis in my mind) was the coolest thing at the show (actually off-site at Bally's). After we had talked with them for a while, I broke out my "how well did Flink do on the Genesis" and "if the CD32 version of Lemmings was the same code as the CDTV (boy, Commodore sure is unlucky) does that count as a separate platform?" (this was after they told us that Lemmings had been ported to some insane number of platfroms and no one in the company could name all of them off the top of their heads).

This led to my final question, and one I have been waiting patiently for the answer to for well over three years: "were you guys really developing a Blade Runner game?" I had seen a video of a CG demo of a city scene a few years back and wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not (Blade Runner was the greatest sci-fi flick ever made). They said yes, and that they had lost the bid for developing it and that one of the reasons negotiations took so long is because so many people own a percentage of the rights to it. But, not all lost contracts have a bad ending because they told us that G-Police (an upcoming game for the Playstation) is based on a completely refined engine that was developed for BR. I can't wait. I have seen a stack of pix from it and it looks incredible. I have also seen the demo that was shown at E3 and although Psygnosis says that it will be much improved, it looked incredible then. They also told us of a game in development called Tenka (yep, that billboard in WipeOut), but it is very early and very hard to describe.

Fox Interactive was also at the show and although The Tick was probably the absolute worst game ever made for the SNES, it seems that they have wised up and are working with good developers. Fox Interactive is working with Rebellion (yep, those guys who coded AvP on the Jag) and Alien Vs. Predator is on Fox's list of releases. Now, I put 2 and 2 together, so I expect to see Rebellion coding the PS version (hopefully my addition is correct and I won't come up with 13).

Well, it seems odd to me that all of a sudden I am seeing various Sega Master System games referenced everywhere (notably Maze Hunter 3-D and Golvellius). For those of you who don't know about these games, Golvellius was a game that came out ages ago for the lackluster SMS. Golvellius was sort of a Zelda knock-off, but had slicker graphics and had a really strange dungeon level system (I'll break this one out and write a review). Maze Hunter was a game for the incredible and short lived SegaScope 3-D goggles. It featured top-down Gauntlet style gameplay and incredible 3-D (the game was kind of boring, but the effects were cool).

That's it for my time, but, in the mean time go see Screamers (yes, the ads were horrible) and skip 12 Monkeys. It's time for the Phoenix to break out Zillion.

-Evan

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