Descent, Dark Forces and Heretic

Following the success of 3D action adventure DOOM ( I or II), both id and Interplay release new offerings.

id released Heretic, a game written in co-operation with Raven Software, who are renowned for their spectacular graphics. The game has a nice magic/dungeons and dragons type feel to it, with some lovely animated monsters and entertaining humourous touches. Definitely for someone who wants more of the planar action of DOOM.

Lucasfilm released Dark Forces. This is another game using the DOOM engine, based on the immensly popular Star Wars films. It again has some really nice graphics, particularly of animated Storm Troopers. However its major flaw is the strange absence of any networking support. Weird.

Interplay went one further and released Descent. Descent is awesome. Descent kicks DOOMs ass. In fairness to id, they were first out with DOOM, and are working on what is expected to be the mother of all games, Quake.

However, Descent is definitely the game of the moment. Dazzling 3D action with full 3-dimensional movement, Descent is sure to confuse, confound and utterly amaze all gamers. Even the 3D map takes a while to grasp. Network support is a definite improvement over DOOM, with 8 player games, themes, the ability to join in and leave games on the fly. If you have not seen Descent, get a copy now!


OS/2 Warp!

With the news that Microsoft's Windows 95 is delayed until at least August, it seems that IBM have a very valuable head-start over them, having released a stable version of their new operating system, OS/2 Warp. OS/2 originally started life as a joint venture between Microsoft and IBM but the two parted company somewhere along the line and IBM continued to produce OS/2, Microsoft to produce MS-Windows. Unlike the brain-damage of MS-Windows, OS/2 did actually support true-multitasking of processes. At this stage of proceedings, it has a track history as a stable operating system, with many more years of coding and debugging having gone into it than its rival Windows '95.

IBM claim that Warp will run on a system with 4MB of Ram, although like most other 32-bit operating systems for the PC these days, 8Mb is really a practical lower limit.

Reaction to Warp has seemed to be pretty positive in general. The user interface has been fine-tuned and improved, and navigating your way around it makes sense. It does not confuse, as Windows '95 does - and it does not have this irritating inferior NeXTStep rip-off look to it.

IBM have event put together a Web Browser specially customized to take full advantage of the OS/2 32-bit API.

Industry opinion seems to be that Windows '95 has already won the Operating Systems race. This is quite an amazing situation considering the product has not even been released yet, and the fact that it has no track-history of stability. It all comes down to the big Microsoft monster I suppose.

With the performance of OS/2 Warp, its availability NOW, and the powerful commercial backing (something Linux lacks) and support of IBM, it may give Microsoft more of a challenge than they expect.

All Microsoft-haters out there - lets hope so!

Incidentally, I read recently that Bill Gates was the first person to break the hacker-ethic and charge people for software (his Altair Basic). I'll bet RMS would like to get his hands on him :-)