Sorry about the caps

Previously I noted ‘Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line’ looked an extremely polished demo, with much promise. I was not let down!

The demo features a very short campaign; extremely short for the file size, I thought, but for a demo it does everything required. Graphics, controls, sound and interfaces are all shown off to varying degrees. Gameplay was something I thought the demo lacked, but I believe this was because of the fact only a few missions are included.

Things I noted were:

1. User interface: I was confused. The first screen presents you with four main panels, one of which I thought should have been along the lines of ’start’ or ‘go’: a ‘quick, I want to play now!‘ button. The button I was looking for was named ‘brefing’ to the top. The design of the GUI made me think that briefing was the title of this area, so more thought needs to go into UI design. The labels for some of the standard buttons do not stand out enough, so I found myself searching for the accept button many times.
2. The controls: There should be an ‘I’m a noob, make it easy for me’ option. People download games to have fun, and learning controls certainly is not fun. It’s the FS2 complex style, which while great for advanced players, needs dumbing down early on if people want that. Gently bring in the advanced nature over many missions.
3. Graphics: Fantastic. The game looks and plays great on my modest machine (GF 6600GT, XP2800+, 1280MB) and it was a pleasure to play.
4. Sound: The sound is excellent - those who watch BSG will notice they have included character quirks in briefings and the music is fitting for the game, it could be straight from the series for all I know. One annoyance was the computer generated voices at some points; it was too fast and hard to understand.
5. Missions: We started with a training mission which is the norm for these sort of games, which went down well. The dialogue is good, and stories believable, but I thought the demo too short.

I have not tried the multiplayer aspect, I just do not have the time to look at it. From the singleplayer demo, however, many good points are clear to see. I hope the BtRL team keep up the good work, as they could have a great game in the works here.

Colins’ rating: 9/10

Pros: Stunning graphics, true to the current series, believable storylines and great sound.

Cons: Confusing interface, lack of a training ‘newbie’ control scheme, and not long enough!

Its great to see Urban Terror (UrT) is still going strong. I can remember downloading the first beta they released - and hating it. Downloading the first major release, however, was different and I fell in love. A great example of a true total conversion, moving away from the original game (quake 3), pushing the engine and pulling the talents from the MOD community.

I have not had a game of UrT for a good couple of years now, so as soon as I heard they had released version 4.0, I grabbed it. A new feature for this release is that they have bundled in ioUrbanTerror (based on ioQuake3, and of course the GPL’d source for Quake 3), so players without Quake can play. I chose to install the ioUrbanTerror version as to not fumble around with installing Quake and its Point Release updates again.

One thing I have noticed is that they have packaged the BattlEye anti-cheat engine into ioUrbanTerror. This is a good thing, and from what is being said on the UrT forum many servers are already moving over to ioUrbanTerror from Quake3 and PunkBuster. There seem to be a good number servers online already for it.

So, give it a try. What is there to loose?

For those of you enjoying the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, you will be pleased to know the folks over at Beyond the Red Line have released a demo of the eagerly awaited Freespace 2 total conversion.

It’s free, does not actually require you own Freespace 2 due to its use of an open source port, and from my initial few games looks very polished. After playing it more I may post an in depth review, we will just have to see…

Scotland has a thriving games industry sector with most companies being based in Dundee. For the second year running it was the location for Game in Scotland, a games industry recruitment event run by Interactive Tayside.

Last year I attended the event looking for that jump into the games industry. A month or so later, I had secured a job with a games technology company specialising in one of my main interests. This year I was lucky enough to attend the event in a professional capacity.

The event begins with a free for all. Companies have stalls for showing off products and chatting with attendees. CV’s and demo reels are distributed to companies from those eager to strut their stuff. Something I noticed this year was the amount of animators and artists in attendance. This fits with games now requiring huge amount of assets in these fields as the technology develops; allowing for the intricate detail gamers demand.

I was invited to participate on the panel of two industry question and answer sessions, which were held later in the afternoon. ‘Meet the team’ was the first of these, detailing roles within the industry. One of the questions was how we entered the industry, and I quite happily praised the event - it being my own stepping stone. This was my first public speaking experience, and I was extremely nervous. Hearing my voice over the PA was strange, but as people say confidence grows, yaddy yadda, etc. The second session was on ‘Whats around the corner?’, a discussion on what the future holds for games. A lot of fuss was made over MMORPGs, which I quite honestly don’t care for in the slightest. An interesting point was made about Flash developers being in demand, and that the platform could in fact over the next few years make a leap into the mobile platforms currently dominated by Java.

In all, a great day in Dundee. STV turned up at one point and were filming various areas, but didn’t see anything on the news relating to it (I get the west of Scotland reports). They do have a short piece on their website, however.

Special thanks to Brian Baglow of scottishgames.biz who chaired the second session I was on, and made me laugh with the petition situated at his stand for this particular atrocity.