The Week Ending November 22, 1999

Welcome to this week's Gist List.  Please note that due to the release dates of some major holiday games slipping into 2000, our "Big 8 Holiday Games" feature will now appear next Monday.  In its place, we present this week's Gist List:

Baldur's Gate 2

View the Screenshot

Without question, the gaming industry is rife with premature product announcements.  You know the drill:  On the heels of a hot selling game, the publisher will announce a sequel is in development before they've even started to create the next game design.   Well, imagine my surprise last week when Interplay and Bioware announced Baldur's Gate 2 and actually had impressive screenshots to show! Although I'm sure no one was exactly surprised by the announcement, it was nice to see the official unveiling was held until something substantive was available to show.   Based on the initial screenshots, it looks like Baldur's Gate 2 is going to be a worthy successor to the original and feature some stunning visuals.  It's currently scheduled to be released in late 2000.

and The Indy Demo

In this sequence from the demo, Indy can't climb or jump onto this waist-high ledge because he has a lighter in his right hand. One of the world's greatest action heroes can't handle jumping and holding a lighter at the same time?

Yes, I know, yet another mention of Indiana Jones!   Well, I had a chance to play the demo of the game, and unfortunately the news is disappointing.  Although I admit to being impressed with the graphic engine for the game, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine suffers a fatal blow when it comes to control of the character from the third person perspective.   It seems the developers at LucasArts decided to use a detailed animation system for Indy that is aesthetically pleasing, but a nightmare to control.  Players can't combine movements, which means you can rule out using your whip while jumping, or even using your lighter while you crawl up onto a ledge (see accompanying screenshot).  From the looks of it, the game features some great puzzles and environments, but it is unfathomable to me why all this effort would go toward a game that is tedious, if not downright frustrating to control.  Thankfully, the demo ends with an exciting jeep sequence where Indy is required to drive over bridges, running over enemy soldiers in the process.  I find it somewhat ironic that the jeep driving controls are perfect, whereas the main character's controls are so lacking.  However, at the end of the day the jeep sequence is not enough to redeem this game from the curse of poor control, not to mention the frustrating opening puzzle that had me running around a square room for over 45 minutes!

Lara Gets Dumb
Last week news broke in the Register, a British paper, that Eidos is now planning to "dumb down" the U.S. version of Tomb Raider, mostly due to the fact Eidos believes Americans have shorter attention spans than other gamers around the world.  The question that beckons is a simple one: Why?  I think Eidos would be hard-pressed to find empirical evidence of such a fact, and my guess is they decided to take this action because Tomb Raider's sales are lagging.  It's likely that some some gung-ho marketing exec blamed the "hard" puzzles for the lack of sales.  Well, I've got news for you:  Don't blame the puzzles, but rather blame a game series that hasn't evolved since the original game was released in 1996.  I have no doubt that a cutting-edge and innovative Lara Croft game could be a huge hit, but for some reason Eidos and Core Design keep re-hashing the same game engine time and again.

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