This is where it all begins with the artists and the designers and the creative team.
The artwork then gets digitized and transferred into a computer.
The game then gets tested on a rewritable game cartridge.
And here's where it all ends up on your PC screen.
A hot new game with great graphics, animation, and sound.
Now what makes a great new computer game?
We'll try to find out today as we take a look at the best new PC games
on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
Computer Chronicles
Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by Hewlett Packard.
Working with industry leaders to ensure compatibility across the board and across the network.
HP PCs, you're looking at partnership in a whole new light.
Additional funding is provided by LaserJet printers from Hewlett Packard.
Everything from a new color solution to models designed specifically for small businesses.
HP LaserJet printers, you do your job, we'll do ours.
And the Software Publishers Association.
Hi and welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
I'm Stuart Shafae and with me today is Johnny Wilson, editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World magazine.
You spend all your time playing with games.
I want to ask you first of all, what is your favorite all-time game, Johnny?
I believe it would have to be Sid Meier's Civilization.
Where else can you start from scratch and build your empire and annihilate other people's empires if you need to?
And there's some violence in there too, so you get a chance to sort of beat guys and play war.
Sure, if you're a testosterone-driven guy, you're there.
On this issue of violence and sex and violence in games, some parents are concerned about their kids doing that.
Why are we seeing that so much in computer games?
Well, I think violence is the easiest way to express a life-and-death situation and get the adrenaline pumping.
I think it's inevitable to have conflict there.
And I think sex is there because it expresses relationships in a quick way of telegraphing ultimate concern.
Speaking of sex, now this is a new game that just came out from Interplay called Voyeur.
It's a little bit sexy, but it's basically a great interactive movie, wonderful interactive fiction.
The best approach to keeping the kids out, because I think it says 17 and older,
is you need a PIN number, kind of like you do with an ATM to get in.
So if you can sort of click on the right number, it's meant to keep kids out.
Some people think it'll just keep adults out. The kids will know how to figure that out.
What's happening on the ratings side while we wait for this to boot up?
Well, there's two philosophies.
One gives age-graded ratings from the video game industry and makes the decision for you.
The other tells you how much violence, how much language, and how much sex there is in the product,
and lets you as the consumer or parent make your own decision.
Well, on this one, this is just about to start up, and you can see here from this,
what you do in this game is you kind of peer, kind of rear window meets mist, I think you described, Voyeur.
And there's a couple of crazy things in here, but there's Robert Culp, Grace Zabriskie.
I mean, wonderful actors, wonderful acting.
In fact, Robert Culp won an award for his acting in this movie, CD game, whatever it's called.
It's really a great piece of interactive movie making.
All right, Johnny, today we're going to show you seven great new games that belong on your PC.
One thing that has really made game playing a more exciting experience on a home computer
has been the addition of quality sound effects and music.
The king of game sounds is a guy from Austin, Texas, who they call the Fat Man.
George Singer, also known as the Fat Man, is a musician on a mission to make the music you hear
from your MIDI sound card sound as good as when it was recorded.
Here's to gathering fruit from nature, to living off the land.
I think that we'd have rather eat the sand.
Singer began composing for computer games when the audio quality, as he puts it,
was like ice cream truck music.
After moving to Austin, Texas, he started a group now known as Team Fat
to compose and record high-quality soundtracks for computer games.
The team has produced the soundtracks for over 80 games, including Seventh Guest and Wing Commander.
The Fat Man's concern with sound quality stems from the lack of standards among sound card vendors.
This huge new technology has been based on an incomplete spec.
It's based on this thing called General MIDI, which doesn't have any provision
for how loud one instrument should be compared to another.
It's no fault of their own. These well-meaning computer-peripheral manufacturers
have created a whole slew of cards that sound great when you write for them.
But when I'm writing on my Roland sound canvas,
and everybody else who's writing for games is writing on that,
the music that we send out will sometimes, in fact invariably,
have one instrument that's a little too loud or a little too quiet.
Actually, what we've found is we have entire musical passages that get lost.
To put some order into the sound card chaos,
Sanger started a certification program for manufacturers called Fat Labs.
When the cards pass the Fat Labs tests, they're awarded the Team Fat seal,
a kind of personal insurance that the instruments on the sound card are properly balanced.
The result is musical output that is more true to the original recording.
Once a standard is established, George Sanger sees a new generation of games on the horizon.
We will be composing environments.
People who play the games will actually be creating pieces of music.
They are, the piece that we write is the work of art.
The person who performs it, in a way, participates in the art.
So we're not writing songs, we're not writing music anymore.
We're creating these playgrounds in which someone can come and be a performer.
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Giles Bateman.
♪♪♪
There are many different types of computer games,
education, action adventures, strategy, simulations, and sports.
Let's start with one of the best new educational games.
It's Astronomica from HyperQuest, and here to show it to us is Joni Stewart.
Okay, this is sort of Myst meets Redshift, I think, as you described it.
It's a game, but you also learn stuff while you're doing it.
Yes, exactly. We've taken the subject of astronomy,
and we've married it with games that are fun to learn, but it's an interactive learning process.
Okay, show me.
It's fun. Okay.
It involves a quest for a missing professor, whose top secret project, Astronomica, has been canceled.
And his daughter, Sarah, has come to us to ask for our help in finding her father.
And we break into the SkyQuest complex, which is where we are now,
and we are told that our mission is to reboot all the exhibits in the Exploratorium,
which is where the action takes place.
By rebooting the exhibits, we're playing puzzles,
and there are 27 puzzles that are hidden in and around the Exploratorium.
So we navigate our way through this 3-D environment.
What I'm doing, there are hundreds of screens to make our way through,
and I'm taking us up to the first, well, one of the puzzles.
And this is the control panel for a puzzle.
Exploring planetary pinball.
And each one starts off with an overview.
The sun holds nine planets in the web of its gravity.
So we get a little lesson here, and then we get instructions based on how we're going to,
what's the physics of solving the game?
Exactly.
Okay, so let's play the game.
This little I button here gives you the objective.
Okay, before we solve it, I'm going to take us into this question mark, the help panel.
And here we meet the mentors, and we have Einstein, Galileo, a telescope director, and two grad students.
We also have a fully interactive encyclopedia of astronomy with illustrations here,
but we don't have time for that.
So I'll click on Einstein.
Okay, see what the alphabets are.
An important part of a genius is not to give up.
Okay, don't give up.
Sort of helpful.
Okay, now the object of this game is to shoot a comet and then the outer planets
and then the inner planets into their correct orbits.
So you choose speed and a launch angle and fire.
Oh, we crashed.
That one crashed.
So we have to change speed or angle or both.
We try a different speed, right.
So we solved that puzzle.
Right, well, we solved the first part of it.
But all the games have, all the puzzles have this sort of interactivity.
Build a telescope, launch a probe, plot a course, identify the constellations, create a universe, create a star.
Okay, so this is now the second part of the puzzle where you have to launch the outer planets
and then hit the inner planets.
But I don't think I have time to show it to you.
Okay, that was our new objective.
I'm going to take us out of this puzzle and try and navigate out of the room.
But before you leave any puzzle room, you have to check the wall monitors.
Because if you don't, you can get kicked out of the game by the night watchman.
Okay, so you're sneaking in here to solve these puzzles and he's following you and he can kick you out.
That's no fun.
So what happens here?
So here we either get a message from Sarah or we get to watch the night watchman.
Sarah is the professor's daughter.
Yes.
We've got a real problem.
The cooling system is messed up.
This whole place could blow.
I'm going down to the tunnel to turn it off.
Okay, so that was a clue for later.
All right, that's Astronomica.
Very cool.
Thank you very much.
All right, in the action adventure category of games, Wing Commander has been one of the leading titles for years.
But now Wing Commander 3 has come out and it is a spectacular game.
Mark Day is going to show us how to play it.
First of all, this comes on four CDs.
This has to be one heck of a game.
I have visions of sort of moving discs in and out.
Absolutely not.
It's played similar to playing a laser disc at home.
Once you're done with disc one, you move on to disc two and you do not go back.
So you play through it in a linear fashion.
Okay, now this has really been described as a paradigm shift in games.
This really is an interactive movie, isn't it?
Absolutely.
As a matter of fact, here's an interactive sequence that we're looking at right now.
It's the arrival of Admiral Tolwyn onto the space carrier.
You're involved in an intergalactic struggle with the alien Kilrathi.
And this is demonstrating the interactive nature.
You have both linear storytelling, sort of traditional filmmaking,
as well as giving the player the ability to make a choice.
Well, the legendary colonel.
It's good to see you again.
Thank you, Admiral.
So Mark Hamill.
You have to make a choice.
Exactly.
You can either choose to score points with the album, you know,
somewhat brown-nosed the Admiral, or decide we're all equal.
We'll choose the latter.
And that's going to determine the direction of the plane.
Exactly.
That will determine really your relationship with the other members of your team.
Okay.
So within the game, I'm just going to move on from here.
You can move around the flight carrier victory, moving up to the flight deck.
And we'll just go and get a mission briefing real quickly.
And so what we've done is we've really combined, you know,
the best aspects of traditional filmmaking with interactive.
You see, before every mission, of which there are 50,
you receive a briefing from either Admiral Tolwyn or the captain of the ship.
And this is going to be the brand-new weapon that they've just created to help,
hopefully, ultimately defeat the Kilraffi.
And I'm just going to move right into the mission.
So we can actually get into the shoot-em-up action.
Exactly.
And again, there's the interactive movie, the sort of traditional linear movie,
as well as the fully functional combat flight scenario that's stated here.
So you see Mark getting on, I should say, Colonel Blair, Mark Hamill.
You get him confused sometimes.
And so we're loading up the mission right now.
Exactly.
And fly around, blow up the batteries.
Right.
And here you are.
And so we're leaving the deck of the carrier.
And moving into enemy territory.
Wow.
Absolutely.
Fully remodeled hexagram map polygon graphics.
It's a 3D flight simulator, I should say, space flight simulator.
All right.
Just show us a little bit of the action arcade stuff.
Certainly.
Take it into them.
Moving pretty slow here.
Unfortunately, they're approaching from a little far away.
That's all right.
We'll give you time.
They're not the one that snuck up on you.
Now, how do you manage the kind of speed you need for this arcade action
when you're coming off the CD-ROM?
Well, in this case, it does play off the CD-ROM.
You're given as a player, you're given the option to load more or less of the game
onto your hard drive as two systems needs, as well as the game can be played,
as we're seeing right now, in VGA, or it can also be played, excuse me,
we were watching SVGA, can be played in VGA, which for people of different systems,
and I have just been scared.
No, the expert.
I did not do well.
I turned to talk and I was blown out of space.
That's all right.
It's hard to fight and talk at the same time.
Absolutely.
All right.
Wing Commander 3 looks great.
Thanks a lot, Mark.
You're very welcome.
All right.
So, we've got some full-scale Hollywood productions.
Now, how do they integrate all these movie stars into a computer game?
We're going to show you a few examples from two of the leading interactive game companies,
Rocket Science Games and MechaDeus.
Holly, I'm going to pry your ass.
This is Ned Beatty, a film and television actor,
and now a character in a computer game called Loadstar from Rocket Science.
Loadstar is a science fiction adventure that mixes live action sequences
with digitally painted backdrops, computer graphics with tiny 3D models,
and full-sized mock-ups.
It's an example of a new generation of computer games that mixes the digital with the physical.
Beatty plays a futuristic sheriff and the nymphs of outer space truck driver Tully Bodine,
played by Barry Primus.
The goal is simple, if not obvious.
Players must maneuver the Loadstar craft into a spaceport
to rescue a load of camels stranded on the moon.
Several gigabytes of video clips were compressed and arranged so that no two plays are alike.
The mixture of Hollywood and Silicon Valley leads to some strange but ingenious combinations.
Characters and models are filmed separately, then composited over digital backgrounds.
These create a realistic link to the game's fantastic environment.
Holly, I'm going to pry your ass.
Also counting on movie star magnetism is Daedalus Encounter from MechaDeus.
The characters in this game include some well-known flesh-and-blood actors,
including film star Tia Carrera and Christian Boucher.
The human actors have to stretch their imaginations to the limit
to create the illusion of reality within a digital world.
The game is played through the eyes of a third party called Casey,
who actually is a disembodied brain on the ship.
And he can control a remote control probe that can fly around with the characters as they explore the ship.
And this is the interactivity branching here for the game.
You help the characters at various points.
You have to solve puzzles. You have to go out and find objects.
And help them defeat creatures which are flying around the ship
that are kind of like flying piranha that we call Kren.
Living actors will undeniably add a new dimension of realism to computer games.
Whether they'll add pleasure to the game-playing experience is too early to tell.
For Computer Chronicles, I'm Giles Bateman.
Strategy games are one of my favorite categories.
These are the games that keep you up until 4 o'clock in the morning
because you refuse to quit until you solve the next phase of the game.
One of the best new strategy games is Master of Magic,
and Jim Kalbashaw is here to show it to us.
Jim, what's the point in Master of Magic? What am I trying to do?
In Master of Magic, you take on the role of a wizard competing against up to four other wizards
to try to conquer two different worlds that we have in the game.
Okay, so this is one of the worlds here.
Right. This is the world of Arcanus right here.
It's the mostly Earth-like world.
And right here we can see we've got this city.
We've got a couple cities on our world right here.
These are cities that I control.
And purple here, that's some adversary.
Another wizard that's controlled by other guys, the bad guy.
Yeah, he's moving in on my territory.
What's all those spark things I'm seeing there?
These are magic nodes.
I've already, they give me magic every turn.
I've already conquered these, and so they're showing that, yes, I control these
and each one of these squares has the animation over it.
Okay, so what should we go after now? What should we try to get?
Okay, we have these creature lairs also in the game that contain a great amount of treasure,
but they're guarded by monsters.
So we'll go ahead and move three of my units into this lair and see if we can get some treasure.
This right here is telling me that, yes, we've spotted some hellhounds within this.
Okay, so there's neat stuff you want there, but there's guys defending them.
Exactly.
All right, so what are all the elements in this battle?
Okay, right now we can see that, yes, there were hellhounds in there,
but I didn't happen to mention the fact that there was this nasty demon lord,
this fire elemental, and this lesser demon right here also in there.
Okay, and what are your guys?
These are the three guys that I moved in down here.
These are my two heroes and my great worm.
And what you can do is you can move each one of your guys individually
and determine I'll move this guy up two spaces there.
And I can decide if I wanted this hero right there,
if I decided I want him to choose any number of spells that I happen to learn,
that I happen to have learned at the moment, or if I wanted him to just move or whatever.
So they can cast spells against the bad guys, they can just shoot arrows at the bad guys.
Right, or use their normal weapons or whatever.
So you've got to figure out the strategy of what's right, given the enemies you've got.
Right, if you have archers, you might want to hold them back instead of moving them forward
so the archers use their ranged weapons.
Right now I've just clicked on the auto button, which what that does is that just has the computer control both sides.
It eliminates some of the strategy aspect for some people that don't want to get bogged down
with some of the details of maneuvering each unit individually.
All right, so you won that game.
So I won that game, and in there I got this.
So we got some good stuff.
Right, I got a spell and some chain mail.
This chain mail I have now I can give to any one of the heroes that happen to be in that battle.
You're better armed for another battle.
Right, I'll give it to that guy.
And here I am learning that new spell.
This is some new spell that you got, that's great.
Right, this is the new spell, and here the spell is being added to my spell book.
Now there's a diplomacy part of this, right, too.
I mean, you can make alliances with some of the other bad guys.
Right, like here's the purple guy right here, who's infringing on my territory.
You can go to this screen right there, and this shows me the different wizards that are in the game.
Maybe try to make a deal with them.
Right, here's purple right here, and right now, see, he hates me.
Okay.
He's at war with me.
That's why he's moving into my territory right now.
Make sure you don't get cheated when you make a deal with him.
Right.
All right, Master of Magic, we've got to move on.
Thanks a lot.
Okay, let's go over here and take a look at NASCAR Racing.
Now one of the neat things about computer games is that they let you do things you could never otherwise do,
like drive a souped-up race car in the NASCAR circuit.
Fred Butters is with Papyrus, and they're the guys who make NASCAR Racing.
And this is a pretty cool simulation here.
Show me how you play this.
Okay, NASCAR is a game that lets you experience driving a high-performance race car.
In the main menu here, let me take you into the options, and you can go into the controls.
Most of our users tend to use a joystick or a steering wheel instead of the keyboard.
You can also change the race length from 100 percent, 3- to 4-hour battle, to 50 percent or as low as desired.
Most beginners choose to run with car damage, yellow flags, and pace lap off.
Okay, so the easier mode for you.
Exactly, and as your experience level increases, you can change the weather from a beautiful, sunny, 70-degree day to cold, windy.
Do it in the slush or rain or whatever, okay.
What we'll do is I'll take you into a quick race here, and before you race, you can choose any of these nine tracks, which are replicated.
These are real tracks?
Actually from NASCAR Winston Cup circuits, and we'll go into Atlanta.
But before you practice, qualify, or race, go into the garage to fine-tune your car.
You can change the tires, compound and pressure, how much fuel you carry, the spoilers, suspension, gears.
And a good thing is that beginners have an option of loading any of four pre-installed setups to get them up and running immediately.
Okay, we'll go into a race here, and what you're going to see is not video playback.
It's actually being rendered real-time.
You're actually in a 3D world.
This is really responding to all my movements in the car.
Exactly, so this is the race right here, and we actually have three different views.
We have an inside car view, and we actually have another outside car view.
Now, while you're driving, you can keep track of your standings.
You can see in the lower right-hand corner there, the standings.
I just got a little accident here.
I like the talking here, it's interesting.
Right. Also, you can talk to your pit crew to let your crew know what changes you need to make.
So when you get into the pit, here's what I want, here's what I need.
It'll be done automatically, exactly.
And you can see the clarity of the Super VGA graphics on the machine.
Now, when you're done racing, you can go into a replay mode and watch how the race unfolded from any of our 12-inch camera angles.
Wow, that's pretty cool.
One other last feature I'd like to talk about is our multiplayer.
This has the option of letting our customers call up and dial and race against each other via their modem,
or you can do it with two computers with a direct connection, no modems needed.
But I could race against a guy in another city somewhere.
How fast of a modem do I need?
9600 baud rate.
Wow, pretty cool. Okay, thanks a lot.
All right, now, computer sports simulations are getting so good that it's like watching TV and having control of the players.
Perhaps the best of the category is the new Front Page Sports football from Sierra Online.
Stephen Miles is here to coach us with it.
All right, now, in this game, in Front Page Sports, you can actually be a coach or a player, right?
You can do either end.
Right.
All right, show us a little bit of the game.
All right, the nice thing about Football Pro 95 is it was designed to be attractive to a wide diversity of players.
The novices are able to go in and play in what we call a coach-only mode,
where you're able to just select a particular play.
Let's go ahead and start a game that's already in process.
Now, we can see from the play calling screen here that you're able to select from the playbook any play that you'd like.
In this case, we'll select a pass.
Now, all I have to do in the coach-only mode is to hit the button to actually do the hike,
and from there, the players on the field take over.
All right, so the computer is running the action right now.
Right.
And it tells you what happened.
Now, here we have a description of what happened in the play and the major players that were involved in that.
We're also able to see an instant replay, so that if you want to see that over again, you can do that.
But the nice thing about Front Page Sports Football Pro 95 is that you can really go in and edit the ones that you've done previously.
For instance, this is one where Barry Sanders hit a particularly long run for a touchdown.
Now, we can watch this.
This is an instant replay again of a play that took place before.
Correct.
Here you can see Barry Sanders take the hand off, run around the side, the guy misses his tackle, and he runs in for a touchdown.
For a team, okay.
Now, if you wanted this to look a little more dramatic, you can rewind it back to the beginning,
pull up what we call the cams control, zoom in, and advance it a little ways.
Now, maybe when you're actually getting to the edge and you see this tackle coming over that gets missed,
maybe you'll want to zoom in for dramatic effect.
You can go in and frame by frame, zoom in a little bit, advance a frame, zoom in a little bit more, advance another frame,
and then maybe you want to pivot it around so that you can see a better view of the man missing the tackle.
From there, you can just continue on.
And now, for a little more dramatic effect, when he goes into the end zone,
maybe you want to see the guys that are pursuing.
That's a sky cam looking at him.
Right.
And Barry goes in for the touchdown.
And you can see that again as you've edited it by turning off your cams control, rewinding it, and then watching it again.
And that edit you did before is all there in that replay.
That's correct.
All right.
So this is not just sort of football simulation.
This is TV director simulation, right?
Exactly.
All right.
So if we can get back to the game a minute now, can I play another person using front page sports football?
Yes.
You can play another person.
You can play against the computer.
When you're playing another person, you can either have two joysticks, a joystick and the keyboard.
And sometime in 1995, we expect a version of this to be up on the Imagination Network,
so you'll be able to play against other people that are next door or across the nation.
And in that coach mode where I'm picking the plays, where you're showing me right now, where do those plays come from?
Can I design those plays?
You can.
You have some stock plays that come with the game, and you can also go in and edit those plays from our play editor so you can make them your own.
Okay.
Front page sports football.
That's our look at computer games.
We'd be interested in hearing about your favorite games.
You can get into the act here by talking to us online in the Computers on Television Forum on CompuServe.
The command is go chronicles.
Thanks for joining us.
I'm Stuart Shafae.
See you here next time on the Computer Chronicles.
Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by Hewlett Packard,
developing technology that lets you manage your PC from anywhere on the network, anywhere in the world.
HP PCs.
You're taking a close look at remote management.
Additional funding is provided by LaserJet printers from Hewlett Packard.
Everything from a new color solution to models designed specifically for small businesses.
HP LaserJet printers.
You do your job, we'll do ours.
And the Software Publishers Association.
Video cassette copies of this program are available.
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and information on program topics.
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