What happens when you combine a newly created 3D-shooter engine with a love for anime such as Patlabor, Macross, or Neon Genesis Evangelion? The answer is Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Monolith Production's next game. Coverage on Shogo has been a little sparse, but GameSpot recently got hold of an early build. After playing it extensively, we can safely say that Shogo is one of the most underrated action games of recent memory and will probably be a sleeper hit when it comes out this fall.
Shogo will use the game engine to render cutscenes such as this ambush by The Fallen.
Monolith Productions has been tinkering with its new LithTech engine for a while, and Shogo will be the first game to showcase it. Initially, the engine was called the DirectEngine, and the game was being produced in cooperation with Microsoft under the title Riot. To cut the soap opera short, the two companies soon parted ways, Monolith renamed Riot to Shogo, and it's now making this slick, anime-inspired shooter on its own terms.
The lighting effects for the LithTech engine are on par with other 3D engines out there.
The LithTech engine has all the amenities of a good, modern 3D engine; it's got your hardware acceleration, your fancy lighting, and your animated characters. That last bit is particularly important, because like Shiny's engine for Messiah, Shogo will scale down the number of polygons depending on how fast your machine is and how far you are from someone.
Anime allusions, such as this one to Battle Angel Alita, are scattered throughout the game.
If you're standing far from someone, he's only going to be rendered with 50 or so polys.
Get up to his face, the poly count will pump up so you can see the sneer on his lips as he starts to unload his gun on you. The LithTech engine is also intimately tied with DirectX 6.0; it uses both Direct3D and DirectSound to full effect. Of particular note is the use of DirectMusic in the IMA (Interactive Music Architecture) so that you could get music that reacts to what is happening onscreen, much like iMUSE in LucasArts games.
