Hands On With Kalisto

French game-publisher Kalisto, most famous for the popular Nightmare Creatures games, revealed some footage of its upcoming games to the Mighty Sam and James Collective, behind closed doors, at this years ECTS in London. Huddled safely in the confines of Midway's booth, Kalisto president Nicolas Gaume personally showed us his upcoming games Off-Road Thunder and (shhh!) Nightmare Creatures 2.

Off-Road Thunder began as an independent product that Midway apparently liked, and which the company asked Kalisto to modify to include in its burgeoning Thunder lineup. That's right, if you thought Hydro Thunder was it, you're wrong. Off-Road Thunder will offer high-speed racing in super-sized monster trucks. Although only a first-person perspective was offered from the video-only display, it was still running in real time off a Dreamcast console, and it looked absolutely stunning. Gaume claims that Kalisto was actively consulted in the development of the Dreamcast hardware, and that's why such fine performance have been extracted from the system, even in its early stages. Simply put, Off-Road Thunder looks brilliant. All manner of roughshod tracks was displayed, from rocky nighttime sequences, to snow-covered drifts. This game, from what was seen, could easily give Sega Rally 2 a run for its money in the graphics department. This game was so impressive that it might make Sega's AM teams sit up and take notice. While a playable burn won't be ready for a few months, what we saw gave us reason to believe that it will be every bit as impressive as Midway's recent offerings, which include NBA Showtime, Ready 2 Rumble, and NFL Blitz 2000.

Its "other" game, Nightmare Creatures 2 for the PlayStation, which is actually being published by Activision, is also looking great. Having been given a newly designed engine, NC2 adds two new characters and a host of improvements, hopefully fixing consumer complaints of the first title. While this was also only shown on video, we can at least say that the two new characters (male and female) look really great, and the gameplay additions seemingly add a more diverse palette of action strategies for the gamer to use. While we won't know for sure until we get a playable rev a few weeks from now, it surely seems as if fans of the first will have more than enough reason to flock to the second. Keep thine eyes peeled for more details starting right here.