Games section

3. Preface

Hi!

It is achieved! You have the AMIGA aktuell international Games section January 1999 in front of your eyes. This month a decision was made, that could be quite important for the existence of the Amiga game market: Village Tronic produces the 3DFX VoodooI add-on for the PicassoIV. With this add-on it will give unbelievable new possibilities of game development. PC ports won't make any mentionable problems any more. This surely is the largest step to the future since the introduction of the PowerPC boards.

The biggest problem of the Amiga game market is, unfortunately, pirate copying. Even if many users can't or don't want it to believe: There are still enough Amiga users, but most of them just pirate copy. This becomes quite clear in the interview with Titan Computer: In Italy 19 copies of The Shadow of the 3rd Moon were sold, but there were more than 100 questions of Shadow of the 3rd Moon users. The game market c a n n o t survive, if this continues. Many of you may ask, why Titan Computer now ports Settlers II and not the 3rd part of the game. The answer is easy: Settlers III is an extremely expensive game, this would be much too risky vor Titan Computer. So they bought the licence for Settlers II, to find out, how many copies can be sold. If no one pirate copies any more, we can expect a port of Settlers III. I ask you to buy the games, you are interested in! This is the only way the Amiga can survive these hard times. If each of you contributes a small part, it is no problem at all. No one wants you to buy largest quantities of games. But one game a month doesn't hurt. So, this had to be said. I got the impulse to this theme during the IRC conference with Titan Computer. It can't bet, that a hit like Shadow of the 3rd Moon is sold that bad. I am always interested in your ideas, meanings and critics.

Reader charts are no longer a part of the games section. There were just 3 people who sent me their Top 10, so it is clearly decided, that the reader charts aren't of big interest. Thank you to these three people, anyway. But I will try to bring some sales charts into the games section.

After getting just positive critics, just one exception, regarding the last games section, I decided to leave the main parts of it as they were. There will be some minor changes with the emulator news as well as with the news in the Aminet columns, but everything else is as it used to be. But the last time I forgot to mention my computer system, which I do now: I test with a A1200 with Blizzard 1240/40 MHz, AGA, 16 MB of Fast RAM, 2 MB of Chip RAM and 8x CD-ROM.

This leaves just to say, what you can read in this edition: An extended review regarding the new Beat 'em up reference OloFight, a preview regarding MaxRally and, of course, the latest game- and emulator news.

Okay, that's it. Have fun with this edition!