Feeling Japanese
ne of the biggest problems with the crush of real-time strategy games that have followed Westwood's Command & Conquer is play balance. Too often, when designers create fantastic weapons, they make one unit too powerful and undermine the challenge of the game.
That's not an issue for Shogun: In a bow to the latest trend in gaming - historical accuracy - all units are modeled after real weapons and troops that existed in feudal Japan. Up to eight networked players attempt to become the supreme military ruler of the nation, fighting battles amid beautiful 3-D scenes. Up to 5,000 troops, each with individual AI, can participate in skirmishes. Armchair generals take note: Developer Creative Assembly has done its homework.
Release: spring. Electronic Arts: +1 (650) 571 7171.
Talk of the Town
The promise of Aplio's new Internet telephone had me itching to burn up the lines with calls to my friends back in Atlanta. The company assures me that with Aplio/ Phone 2.0, I'll be able to call cities all over the US without the headache of getting two sets of special software or hardware.
By buying just one Aplio/Phone and gateway access I get a rate of about 5 cents per minute, even if I'm calling to the US from abroad, which would have saved me some serious guilders when I lived in Amsterdam.
While other Internet telephony systems require a PC, the sleek Aplio box has all the hardware to connect to my ISP, enabling me to use either its built-in speakerphone or the telephone handset. The audio quality still doesn't quite rival that of a normal call, but the company has improved clarity and reduced voice delay to a tolerable minimum.
Release: January. Aplio: (888) 642 7546, www.aplio.com.
SGI Gets Personal
The idea that Silicon Graphics would make a computer for Windows NT is almost heresy - like Mercedes making a moped. SGI is best known for its top-of-the-line $60,000 Unix workstations that create big-screen f/x and massive engineering projects. For its first personal workstations, the SG 540 and the SG 320, the company has traded its powerful RISC processors for Intel Pentium chips and Unix for Microsoft's NT software.
Priced under $6,000, the workstations have engineers, industrial designers, and filmmakers drooling. "NT is great for me," says Fred Bould, a product-designer friend who uses CAD software. "My eyes glaze over whenever I hear about new Unix products, because they're out of my reach as a one-person operation." But he wonders how SGI's new machines will stand out among fast NT stations: "My Tri-Star works just fine."
SGI, however, has brought much of the quality and power of its high-end systems to the workstation. The company engineered its own professional graphics chipset for NT, allowing for top 3-D rendering and a snappy responsiveness. The foundation is also fast: The 320 model can be outfitted with two Pentium II chips and a gig of RAM, while its big brother, the 540, can handle up to four Pentium II Xeon chips and 2 Gbytes of memory. And someone has finally built an NT machine that has plenty of bandwidth on the I/O, meaning you can, for example, pull in two streams of uncompressed video at the same time.
So how will the new blue workhorse perform? "Their 3-D card is what's important," says Todd Mueller, who produces MTV's on-air promos and is a big fan of Intergraph's NT machines. "SGI has always made the best of the best, though. It's certainly a compelling idea."
Release: winter. Silicon Graphics: (800) 800 7441, www.sgi.com.
STREET CRED
Now You're Cooking
Grand Unified Remote Theory
Pocket Pix
Hidden Agenda
Living Up to the Legend
Machine Man
The World at Your Fingertips
The Wrath of Goddess
Music
Just Outta Beta
ReadMe
MAXpowr, MINprice
Hack Dreams
Rules, Schmules - It's Thought-Provoking
Service by Andrette
From Gear to Eternity
Contributors
