Game News: Playback

Last week, it was hardware-related news that generated most of the headlines. This week it appeared that news focused on sequels and add-ons for some of the more popular games in computer gaming. Here's our lineup of the must-read news from the week.

Without a doubt, our most popular story with gamers had to be our screenshot-laden Diablo II story. We got the art from Blizzard and it actually forget which ones were exclusive to us, so I made sure that all of the shots got in there by making collages. The creature in the fire has tattoo art written all over it. When I told Blizzard about the tattoo art potential, a spokesperson said that she'd look for it soon. I just want to see Diablo II on my desktop now.

Last week, we asked Age of Empires fans to ask Bruce Shelley, AOE's codesigner from Ensemble Studios, some questions about the company's upcoming sequel Age of Empires II. This week, Shelley came back with his answers. The article presents the questions to Shelley to which he responded with some pretty in-depth answers. If you're looking for some answers on how the next AOE is shaping up, take a look (your question might be there).

Total Annihilation fans got something to be happy about when the folks at Cavedog came by to show off the add-on, The Core Contingency. It should hit shelves at the end of April. GameSpot News also has some great screenshots showing off what to expect.

Steering away from the well-established and already released titles, ASC announced that Grand Theft Auto will be in stores on March 24 (and if you haven't played the demo yet, you really need to get your priorities straight!). This game puts you in a top-down position where you break into cars and/or carjack anything with wheels. You get to crash through cop cars while driving a school bus or speed into innocent pedestrians in a fast sports car. You also get different songs to listen to (on your car radio) for each car - hey, if you don't like country, don't jack a truck.

Early in the week, we got word that Robyn Miller - half of the creative team that created Myst and Riven - had left Cyan Inc. to start his own movie company (sounds like the Chris Roberts Digital Anvil thing, eh?). The split with brother Rand and Cyan appears to be an amicable one and Robyn's new company, Land of Point, already has two projects that it has set to work on. To get more insight into the whole story, we have a slew of stories with information from the brothers and Red Orb, Riven's publisher.

For fellow geeks, Intel announced that its widely known secret chip, Covington, now has a brand name - Celeron. This chip, focused squarely on the consumer market, is the fabled cacheless chip that many in tech circles have been talking about. Without a secondary cache, PCs equipped with a Celeron will fit into the US$800-$1200 range but will not be all that fast. When the first generation of Pentiums first started to become popular, some PC companies axed the secondary cache (L2) (to help cut costs), which made many of the PCs slower than their cache-equipped cousins (this writer was one of the fools who bought a cacheless first-generation Pentium, so this is a known as fact). Although Intel wouldn't answer, it appears that the first chip will be a 266MHz (the Intel spokesperson actually gasped when we asked about the 266MHz, so you can draw your own conclusions).

Desktop aviators got a good dose of Warbirds this week as GameSpot News' own flight sim addict, Alan Dunkin, got the latest screenshots of Interactive Magic's Direct3D upgrade for Warbirds 2.01. In other Warbirds news, the 1998 Warbirds Squadron Tournament pulled together master dogfighters to see who could walk away with the laurels.

Those are the stories that made GameSpot News headlines this week.