Gamers.com recently paid a trip to Infogrames to see for themselves some of their upcoming titles. Of them, they wrote up previews on a few, including games like, Unreal II: The Awakening, Civilization III: Play The World, and Master of Orion 3. The site has posted an article covering these titles in depth using a "better and worse" system to rate each game's progress.

Here's are excerpts from the article:

Unreal II: The Awakening
The environments for U2 are stunning and unique. One of the 13 worlds, which appeared to be a mix of Aliens and Star Trek's Borg was not only dark, foreboding, and stylish, but had unusually immense scale. Usually relegated to corridors and rooms, the U2 team is keeping this game's interiors expansive and wide-open, with the end result making us feel positively dwarfed. It's a cool feeling to have massive alien structures make players feel like peons. This technique conveys the emotion of the world, which definitely comes across here.

Civilization III: Play the World
Another new addition in the expansion is stack movement. Though the group moves at the rate of the slowest unit, you can now tell entire stacks of units to move together, eliminating repeat orders. Other similar time-savers like auto-bombardment, which commands bombers to repeat the same attack each turn, and rally points help alleviate tedious, unneeded repetition.

Master of Orion 3
One key concept of MOO3 is how you can automate almost everything in the game. One idea that looked pretty cool is a system that allows you to set the AI to kick in whenever certain conditions are met. For example, if a planet experiences unrest, you can have the AI go with a predetermined response. The AI can now handle everything from colonization to ship design to build orders.

Judgement Day: Infogrames' Good and Bad

Unreal II (add to watch list)

Civilization III (add to watch list)

Master of Orion III (add to watch list)

Buy Civilization III

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