Headfirst has gone into Grim Fandango territory here, so, when Simon sees something interesting or fundamental to the plot, he turns his head, raises his eyebrows and looks straight at it.Ī box at the top of the screen then displays A the object or A person that Simon is looking at and gives you appropriate actions to This graphical attention to detail should also improve the effectiveness of the interface. If he's skipping through fields of joy with a big grin on his face, you know that everything is going as planned. If our wannabe wizard is looking a bit worried, you can expect trouble. Simon's realtime gurning antics will also give an indication of what to expect next. Simon will eventually boast over 30 separate expressions including laughter, tears, anger, and total brown trouser fear. But what is surprising is that it looks like developers Headfirst Productions has enough tricks up its sleeve to actually take this fledging genre further than we've ever seen before. It comes as no great surprise then to find the highly successful Simon The Sorcerer series getting the same treatment. Admittedly, some attempts (like Prince of Persia 3D) have fallen a bit flat, but generally most developers deserve a big pat on the back - the new 3D adventure genre is evolving spectacularly. Gone are the 2D backgrounds, in their place new, glorious 3D environments have appeared. The King's Quest, Prince Of Persia and Indiana Jones series of PC adventures have all recently undergone dramatic changes. It's still a long way off - Simon 3D's release date isn't till next year - but it's already looking like one of the favourites in the 3D adventure game race. Multiple solutions don't just mean that the same puzzle can be solved in slightly different ways, but that most puzzles actually have different outcomes depending on your actions. There will also be at least four different endings, all reliant on the way you solve the game's puzzles. "That's what adventures need more than anything, that attention to detail, the polish to give them a real bloody atmosphere that drags you into the game and makes you feel like you're part of the environment, that it's really happening." This Is The End "It's all necessary for creating a good atmosphere," explains Simon. Simon 3D has a fully active world to explore, rather than static locations that are only used when you walk into them. What we get is a 3D engine that manages to make even games like Unreal look bland. The 3D engine is extremely impressive, enabling masses of texturing detail, and they've even managed to avoid the standard 3Dfx 'close-up blurring' syndrome. Simon 3D certainly looks like a game of tomorrow. We have to aim for the future and hope that it's caught up by the time we get there." "We don't have the resources of LucasArts," says Simon Woodroffe, Simon 3D's Creative Director and Mike's brother, "where you can get a game out in nine months and then switch styles again. Not that they have any delusions of grandeur. Still, the result is a new Simon The Sorcerer adventure that looks stunning, and a company that is now extremely positive about their future. "It was a bit of an emotional day when I broke the news to the team," admits Mike Woodroffe, Adventuresoft's Managing Director. Consequently the game was scrapped and work started again on a spanking new 3D version, using the Prince Of Persia 3 engine. Having spent almost a million pounds and finished more than 70 per cent of the artwork and design for Simon The Sorcerer 3, it came as a bit of a shock to realise they couldn't find a publisher interested in 2D adventure games. Having admitted making mistakes with The Feeble Files, they next realised they'd misjudged the direction adventure games were heading. Adventuresoft have learned their lessons the hard way.
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