Introduction

Eeek 3

Ah, the pains of E3. Walking, meetings, more walking and then more meetings. You probably think I'm a whiner. With all those new toys and games out there all I can do is complain about walking around. I guess I am a whiner. Despite the pain, I still managed to have a pretty decent time at E3. Onto the business at hand, I got some tidbits from Eidos that are worth sharing. We looked at couple of their new offerings. The worthy ones seemed to be Anachronox, Deus Ex, Commandos 2 and a little guy known as Startopia.

Anachronox

Developer: Ion Storm
Publisher: Eidos

One of Ion Storm's heavy hitters, Anachronox attempts to push barriers in all directions. You get to play with three (of seven) different characters through the course of the game. Interestingly enough, we were told that the game could be completed in about 40 hours. The built-in mini-games will probably extend the life of this game to around 60 hours.

greeeeeeeen....

Yo

The Anachronox production team has some Hollywood-esque talent. Producer Jake Hughes worked on Starship Troopers and Ed Wood. Another famous name is writer Richard Gaubert; his previous work includes "Dean Quixote" and a short film with Jake Hughes called "Four Jokers."

The game features a heavily modified Quake 2 engine. Facial expressions were pretty darn good in this game. One could see looks of disgust, happiness and other emotions. The eyebrow movement was especially cool. At a certain point in the game one even gets to make the character dance, DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) style.

Booth babe?

Grumpy

The game offers a full occlusion system. This should make for some interesting sensations for those of us with good sound systems or headphones. The level design was taken pretty far in this game. In one level it seemed as if the entire city had been made, not just one street.

FF VII Combat

The combat system is going to be a Final Fantasy VII based system. Unfortunately, the system was not ready in time for the show. Despite this rather mundane combat system, we were told that it features some pretty interesting additions. For example, Players are also allowed to interact with their surroundings during combat.

Talk about hallway!

The beeping and flashing lights!

According to the developers, the game is around 90% complete. Anachronox is scheduled to ship in Fall 2000.