Welcome to Through the Looking Glass

IGN has posted a not-so-good (ratings wise) review of Mad Docs' Jane's Attack Squadron, the game that originated at Looking Glass, cancelled by EA after LG closed shop, and picked up by Mad Doc (and being published by Xicat). Unfortunately, the reviewer, the reknowned journalist, Tom Chick, wasn't impressed with the final product; although he mentions some real good points to the game, the overall rating was disappointing. Here's a snip:

The instant action is good for pitting different types of airplanes against each other, but otherwise it's not very flexible. The multiplayer support is one of the most underdone parts of this game. It offers only deathmatches without AI controlled planes. There's no way to fly bombing missions and no way to get larger dogfights going, since it crashes regularly and is unreliable in terms of getting more than three or four players together.

As a fighter sim, Attack Squadron has some nice features. The padlock system, which includes an inset window that shows you the aircraft you're tracking, is intuitive and informative. There's an option to use a target lead indicator that makes shooting down enemy aircraft much easier. Some hardcore flight simmers might regard this as a sort of cheat, but it's an appropriate way to simulate the gunnery training that most of us armchair pilots haven't had. The instrument panels on the aircraft are almost entirely superfluous, which is good since many of them are dark and difficult to read.

However, things get better. Shadowcat, a great moderator and respected gamer over on our forums, has written a post in this thread about JAS and the things people are doing (writing patches, mods, etc) to make it better as it seems to have been rushed out the door.

So basically, I highly recommend you check out the review, but also check out Shadowcat's post as it brings up some great points as to why JAS doesn't seem as bad as Tom stated in his review. It's just a shame to see publishers (Xicat, in this case) rush games out the door. We've all seen it before and unfortunately, this trend is bound to continue.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you don't get your hopes down on JAS. :) Oh, and a big thanks to Chris Ruse sending this in to us.

This is some cool news. It appears that MIT (Massechusetts Institute of Technology), the university that a lot of Looking Glass-alum attended, is holding a "bootcamp" of sorts for game design. Not only that, but Doug Church and Warren Spector will be instructing!

It's a week long, running from July 7 thru July 12. I've looked through the site, and it looks very thorough and the workshop definitely should be interesting to say the least.

Check out the site here. A big thanks to Jeffrey Somers for the info!

Dalai has dropped us a note to let us know that the Thievery UT team has a new domain name. You can now find all your latest Thievery news over at www.thieveryut.com. In addition to some spiffy new graphics in the design of the page, there is now quite an extensive description of the features that Thievery UT will have.

Looking good guys! Thanks Dalai!

Like it says on the box: HomeLan Fed has an interview with Raphael Colantninio, CEP of Arkane Studios.

Question: What would a news item like this be, without a snippet?

"HomeLAN - Some people are comparing the game to Looking Glass's classic Ultima Underworld. How do you feel about such comparisons?

Raphael Colantonio - Thrilled and honored: as cool as it is to be compared to such a fantastic game, it is also very hard to bear, and we know that gamers and journalists will judge us comparing us to what they would expect from an Underworld 2002, and that put a lot of pressure on us :-O"

Answer: Shorter and duller.

Yep, the game lots and lots of people have been waiting for has gone gold and will hit stores the first week of May. Check out Morrowind.TTLG.Com for the full scoop.

Thanks!

Calling it "one hell of a rip-roaring old fashioned good time on your PC", ZenGamer has posted up a review of Freedom Force that's worth a read. Another quote for you snippet junkies: "it has atmosphere out the wazoo and manages to stay fun almost the entire way through"

Omega taffed in to leave word of some interesting articles that just went up at the Ion Storm Daily Informant. Among other things, there's a piece by Randy Smith on stealth gameplay and why it works in Thief, Witchboy talks about level design, and Heather Kelley talks about maintaining team communication. All these are powerpoint slides, which you can see through HTML or as a powerpoint download.

And, no surprise, it's another glowing review, calling it "a superhero game that gets everything right".

Thanks to Nuno Martins for point us in the direction of a very interesting article that Joystick101.org put up. As you may or may not know, the Game Developers Conference was held in California a week or two ago; since the GDC is a conference for game developers only, it's just a bunch of game development workshops that people go to in order to learn about different aspects of game design an development. One of these "workshops" was a game criticism 'duel' of sorts between two game design masterminds, LG's very own Doug Church and Warren Spector, of Thief and Deus Ex fame. Basically, Warren deconstructed Thief and Doug did the same for Deus Ex, and what you got was some pretty interesting discussion. Here's a bit from the article:

Narrative and Control of the Narration: Neither game has significant control:
Doug: The narrative of thief was in the cutscenes. Deus Ex combines in into the game, but neither game has significant control, so why did you integrate it?

Warren: A lot of it was my frustration with Thief. I produced it for years and it (the narrative) was so minimal, that I got frustrated with it. Thief was constraining in gameplay. What we wanted to do was bring together a variety of things. We wanted to bring out some action, some stealth and role-play. Inventory management, object manipulation, and conversations. We wanted to include conventional role play conversation into Deus Ex.

Doug: But the player can't impact the narrative..

Warren: The conversations talk to you about the world, and that propels you through the narrative.

Be sure to check out the rest. Thanks!

The System Shock Hack Project has been updated to version 0.29!

The current manifestation includes more-or-less complete support for System Shock cyberspace. 0.2.9 builds on 0.2.8d by adding depth cueing, proper colouring for objects and softs/logs, plus sorting of objects and architecture.

You can grab this release here

If you dont know what TSSHP is then read this quote from their website:

The basic idea is to reverse-engineer and then re-engineer System Shock. Why? Well, partly to preserve the legacy of the great Looking Glass studios. Partly to bring a classic game up to date. But mainly because we think it's tremendous fun.

Some fine work here, keep it up guys! :)