After a few rather uneventful years, this autumn is a very hot season for PC gamers, with some very long awaited (and hyped!) first-person shooters coming out or having come out. The multiplayer folks will get their share with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Unreal Tournament 3 and Team Fortress 2, but I don’t care about them. I play singleplayer games only, so BioShock, Crysis and the rest of Valve’s Orange Box (namely Portal and the complete Half-Life 2 saga, including Episode One and Episode Two) are much more interesting to me. I purchased The Orange Box and played the demo versions of BioShock and Crysis, and unfortunately, I have to say that I’m not as happy as I expected to be.
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Believe it or not, 3DRealms is about to release a game Really Soon Now. And I don’t mean the kind of »RSN« they kept telling us for the last ten years – this time, they have released a demo of the game!
Of course, I don’t mean Duke Nukem Forever (DNF). I’m talking about Prey, the other vapourware product of 3DRealms. It’s been in the works since 1995 (two years before DNF was first mentioned!) and it’s finally finished. While development of this title was not as twisted as DNF’s, it’s nevertheless interesting. The project used a very, very ambitious graphics engine that generated stunning images back then. In 1999, development stopped for some reason, and in 2002 the lead programmer died. Development was then assigned to the external company Human Head Studios, who kept true to at least parts of the storyline.
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In the last few days and weeks, it was rather hard to escape one »important« news: Tomb Raider: Legend, the seventh installment of the legendary Tomb Raider computer games series, is finally there. All the news media praised the game for its great graphics, story, controls … whatever. Finally there is a worthy successor for the venerable parts 1-5, after Core Design did most of its job wrong in part 6.

I decided to give all this hype a reality check (a playable demo of the first level is available). Read more …

During my school time and in the first years of university, I used to play computer games about as often as I did programming. But with the age came the seriousness – if I do play today, it’s mostly one of the classic games I fell in love with years ago. The only exception is the tiny amount of about two single-player 3D shooters per year, not only because I like the genre but I also want to see how the graphics improve over the time. So it’s not surprising that there are almost exclusively »triple A« titles on my agenda: Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. are the titles I played over the last two years. You may have noticed that one important game is missing: Far Cry. I always wanted to play it, but I didn’t have a decent graphics card back than and hence, I somehow missed it when it came out. Now I do have a strong enough PC and last month, I finally found – by accident – a low-price re-release version in an electronics store. However, I didn’t (and still don’t) have much time to play, but yesterday, I decided that if I don’t have time, I have to take it.
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