News

The Bitmap Brothers announced their next game. It would be a top down arcade game with role playing elements where the player took control of one of six characters. It was very much a multiplayer game, and the AI had been designed so that they computer would fill in for any unused players. The graphical style was fresh and quite unique and the game would become known as one of the first examples of Steampunk. The game was, of course, "The Chaos Engine".

Russian puzzle games seemed to be all the rage and Infogrammes had gotten the rights to publish Dimitri Paskhov's "Colors". Would this be the next Tetris? (no).

Amiga owners would finally get a game based on "The Simpsons" - the only catch being that it would first be released as part of an Amiga computer bundle, with the title not seeing a full release until Christmas.

Cinemaware - one of the early darlings of Amiga game development - had run into trouble and their future thrown in doubt. When news arrived that Bob Jacob (founder of Cinemaware) had started a new company, the writing was on the wall. The games that were still in development were to see a release, though, as Mirrorsoft had bought the rights to the company name.

System 3 delayed the release of its next two games - "The Last Ninja 3" and "Myth" - until September.

Progress on Ocean's forthcoming "Terminator 2" game was set back as the artist (Kevin Bulmer) had his house broken into and all his computer gear + disks nicked. Thankfully Ocean had wisely been doing backups and only a few days work was lost.

The Adventurers Club had closed, but three of the original team had formed The Adventure and Strategy Club.

Features

• What would the ideal joystick look like? The One surveyed various devs (Sensible Software, Mike Singleton, Eric Matthews, Jez San, John Twiddy, Mark McCubbin and Glynn Williams) for their input.
• Fergus McGovern was the first person interviewed in a new series called "My Ideal Compilation." Fergus' picks? "Sonic the Hedgehog", "Tetris", any Mario game, "Dropzone", "Impossible Mission", "Knightlore".
• The One ventured to Origins offices in Texas to check out "Strike Commander" - the new game from Chris Roberts - which was being hailed as an "entirely new form of entertainment." For me the most interesting aspect of the game is that Martin Galway was the audio director. There was also a mention of "Ultima Underworlds". Neither game was ever planned for the Amiga.
• With the news that Atari had binned plans for its Panther console, The One got to have a go on a dev kit to see what would have been. The decision to pull the plug came quite late, with some software houses (Psygnosis etc) already having games for it in development.
• Kids TV show "Knightmare" was back for a fifth series, and The One had a look behind the scenes. A rather crap game based on the show had been previously released for 8bit machines, but now Mindscape were readying what was hoped to be a better outing for the Amiga.

Notable Previews

• The One visited The Sales Curve office to check out what new titles they were busy preparing, namely "Rodland", "Final Blow", "Big Run", "Double Dragon 3" and "Indy Heat".
• "Utopia" - Gremlin
• Part three of the dev diary for "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" that ATD were developing. Rather oddly this was a totally different game from the highly regarded adventure game that came a year later which was done inhouse at LucasArts.
• The second and final part of a dev diary/preview for Core Design's "Thunderhawk".

Notable Reviews

• "Cruise for a Corpse" Delphine - 92% "In all, if you fancy trying your hand at a real brain-taxer, Cruise is your game."
• "Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker" Archer MacLean/Virgin - 95% "Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker is remarkable in any number of ways - it's a brilliant piece of programming, and an eminently playable simulation to boot."