Red Alert 2
Westwood Studios has just given the US games magazines a demo of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. This takes up the story a few years after the original left off, with the Soviets invading America. The game's new units go some way beyond the usual tanks and planes. The allies have dolphins that can shake enemy units to pieces with their "sonic attack", while the russkies can deploy mind-controlled giant squid capable of dragging allied ships to the bottom of the ocean.
Fighting now takes place in "real" places such as downtown Washington, where Soviet tanks attack a fortified White House. (Units can now occupy and defend buildings.) Other battles can be fought in Chicago, New York City, the Florida Keys and Pearl Harbor.
Gamers who bought Red Alert: Tiberian Sun, mistakenly thinking it was supposed to be a sequel, have until November at the earliest to decide if they should forgive Westwood and shell out for the real thing.
GeForce2
At least three graphics card manufacturers will launch boards using the new Nvidia GeForce 2 graphics chip to enhance PC gaming. Early runners are Creative Labs with the 3D Blaster Annihilator 2, France's Guillemot with the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS, and Germany's ELSA with the Gladiac. Incidentally, the new chip is the GeForce2 GTS (for GigaTexel Shading), not the GPS (for GigaPixel Shading) as pre-announced here last week. "Texels" are "textured pixels", apparently.
Meanwhile, 3dfx, which once dominated the market with Voodoo cards, plans to fight back with FSAA or Full Scene Anti-Aliasing. This will offer better-looking graphics even with games not written to make use of it.
Will Pokémon catch on?
The British games business has yet to feel the full impact of the Pokémon craze, if the US charts are a guide. Pokémon titles provided four of the top 10 console games in the US in the year's first quarter, according to independent research from PC Data.
The two best-sellers were Pokémon Stadium, released in March for the Nintendo 64, followed by Pokémon Yellow: Pikachu Edition for the Game Boy. Neither title was released in time to make the UK's top 10 in the first quarter, on ChartTrack figures (see below).
Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue were in the top 10 lists in both the US and the UK. Other console best sellers in the US included WWF Smackdown, Gran Turismo 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Syphon Filter 2, all for the PlayStation, and Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast.
In the US, the success of the Pokémon series made the Game Boy the quarter's leading games console format with 34.1% of a market worth $1.2 bn, PC Data reports. The Sony PlayStation was pushed into second place with only 28.4% of the market. The Nintendo 64 (18.7%) squeaked in just ahead of the Sega Dreamcast (17.5%).
