ECTS: 3DO's Lineup Revealed
- August 29, 2002 16:15 PM PST
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The rapidly recovering U.S. publisher divulges a bit more info on The Four Horsemen, the next set of Army Men, and a couple of promising racers.
The annual ECTS show in London might be the biggest games expo in all of Europe, but most console outfits tend to show nothing but previously-unveiled stuff, saving all the big announcements for E3 and other shows. (Things are different over on the PC side, fortunately.) ECTS has just begun, and the first new console stuff has come in from 3DO's booth?which is a funny bit of coincidence, because 3DO's American office came over to show us the same titles on videotape this morning.3DO is making something of an effort to produce more first-tier games every year, raising their budgets and using longer production times. We'll start seeing the results of this new system next year...a shame, then, that we're still stuck in this year. All 3DO's got on tap for the next few months is Cubix Robots for Everyone: Showdown and Army Men: Air Combat for GameCube, a Heroes of Might & Magic 4 expansion for PC, and a budget Army Men compilation for PS one. 2003 should be much more exciting. Army Men-packed, yes, but exciting.
The two brand-new titles announced at ECTS were Jacked and Street Racer Syndicate, both coming to all three major game platforms. Jacked, so far, looks like a combination between Road Rash and Outlaw Golf?it's a motorcycle racer with a healthy focus on combat, letting you use golf clubs and other found weapons to de-ride your opponents and steal their wheels. SRS, on the other hand, is a more sim-ish driver set in the seamy world of underground street racing. You'll get to buy licensed cars and parts as you deck out your ultimate driving machine and challenge other street punks on the streets of Oakland and LA. Both are extremely early and aren't coming out until 2003, but both show promise in their own way, as long as 3DO doesn't get overly ambitious and try to turn both games into Twisted Metal clones. The company also showed the first gameplay footage of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which already features some amazingly detailed environments and demonic enemies.
Over on the Army Men side (you knew we had to get to this eventually), 3DO showed off Sarge's War, a GameCube exclusive that, believe it or not, has a graphic look that reminded us of Medal of Honor and other WWII-themed FPSes. Except for the toy soldiers running around, of course. The new game is a third-person blastathon starring Sarge as he takes on the Tan army after they kill off his entire platoon (including Vicki?snif). The big new feature here is visual damage: you can shoot holes into enemy soldiers, blow off their arms, and otherwise enjoy the sort of plastic carnage you've come to enjoy in Turok and other "grown-up" shooters. (This can happen to Sarge, too, of course, so he'll have to fill up the holes in his body with health packs. Cute, that.)
Although we didn't get to see it, 3DO is also working on the 2004 edition of High Heat MLB for all platforms, along with Heroes of Might & Magic 5 for PC and Army Men: Platoon Commander for every console (including Xbox, their first game on the system). We'll have more info on all this stuff as 3DO hands it to us. It's all still kinda early (The Four Horsemen looked like the best of the bunch so far), but it's obvious that 3DO is at least trying nowadays.
