As we all know, there are an absolute sh*tload of new FPS (First Person Shooters) coming out soon, and about a month ago my attention was diverted to something called "Shogo" on the Planetquake news page, so I went to have a looksee. Now unlike many of the other shooters coming out, Shogo boasts a brand new engine - the Lithtech engine - which has been described as a cross between the Unreal and Quake2 engines, in that it's pretty like Unreal but you don't need a P2 with hardware acceleration and a squillion megs of ram to play it, like Quake2.Another curious thing is that this game has been seriously under-hyped. Everyone's talking about Half-Life, but this one looks seriously classier in my opinion.... the first major feature you will probably notice is that for half the game you run around in a 30ft Mech wasting other 30ft mechs. Woohoo! Of course, in true Anime style, (Japanese cartoons, anyone remember Robotech?) aforementioned Mechs can transform into vehicles and zip around the city streets and ram each other!Of course, this is nothing without good multiplayer. Yep, it was tested at the last Bastards Beatdown (monthly Planetquake LAN party) where 80 die hard Quakers gave it the run through.... and approved, in fact talking about ditching quake altogether and embracing Shogo as their new multiplayer game of choice. Apparently DM with Mechs gets very heated, with about 2 seconds of firing the bigger guns the whole place is full of smoke, fire and overturned vehicles on the streets. Whether you use the smoke to run and hide or move into a better attacking position is entirely your call.Naturally your not always gonna be in a huge mech but wasting bad guys in person, but in both cases a new feature has been added to DM, rewarding players with good aim (or good ping, grrr). This "critical hit" system works by different damage to different parts of the body, but hitting someone in the head or the groin scores a "critical hit", the target receives massive damage but the shooter is actually rewarded with health! It sounds dumb but apparently it works well in practice.I would like to keep on going and going about this but I've been "told" to keep these things short. I just thought perhaps I would enlighten our little corner of the quaking world with that looks like to be a seriously fun game. For some screenies you can go to PlanetShogo and I believe Voodoo Extreme has a few million posted. I'll probably have another article up on this soon, as soon as something relevant comes to hand.....Omen. |