OS/2 Gaming News - by Colin Hildinger

hile it was a bit of a slow month for OS/2 gaming news, I did manage to find a few interesting tidbits:

Entrepreneur Tournament

This month all the stir in the OS/2 gaming community has centered around Entrepreneur, Stardock's new real-time strategy game. Stardock has announced at their Stardock.net web site that they will be holding an Entrepreneur tournament on November 21. I look forward to finding a bevy of Entrepreneur players on-line that day and getting together some games with eight human players. The way the tournament will work is that the high scores will be erased at the beginning of the day and all day on the 21st people will play games at Stardock.net. The high scores will be saved at the end of the day and the top scorers will win prizes. The first place prize is your choice of any two Stardock products and the second and third place prizes are any one product. It will be required that all games have at least two human players and that no more than $5 million in starting money be used.

Also, expect an update for Entrepreneur to ship in the next month. The update will contain some improvements to the graphics, bug fixes, and much harder AIs. The current AIs cheat; that after a certain point in the game they begin to receive free money. In the v1.1 release this should not be necessary, as Brad is putting in a lot of time trying to make the AIs as smart as possible.

Hopkins: FBI

In a surprise announcement (for most of you, but not me), PolyEx announced the upcoming release of a new game called Hopkins: FBI. Going for a truly cross-platform market, they've developed the game for OS/2, BeOS, MacOS, and Rhapsody for Intel and PPC and I believe they're porting the Wordup Graphics Toolkit to all of these platforms to assist users of the toolkit in developing true cross-platform games. Hopkins will be an adventure game with hand drawn and scanned animation done by a well known cartoonist. I believe the game was originally a French language release and is being ported and translated to English by PolyEx. The web page says the game will be ready for Christmas release, so it looks like it could be a good Christmas for OS/2 gamers.

Stellar Frontier Beta .80

Also from Stardock.net is news that the next beta version of Stellar Frontier (v0.80) will contain a Stardock.net interface called "the Nexus" which will allow you to see all the available Stellar Frontier star systems that you can warp to. In my opinion any on-line game should include an interface like this and I'm glad to hear that Stardock is going all out.

Handy for OS/2 a No-Go

The author of Handy has not released his source code and has dropped the project so it's looking like Darrell Spice, Jr. won't be porting the Atari Lynx emulator after all. He will, however, be taking over development of an NES simulator under OS/2 in the coming months, so expect to be able to play Zelda and Mario in OS/2 soon.

Colin Hildinger is an Aerospace Engineering senior at Oklahoma State University and has been using OS/2 for the last 3 years. In addition to being the Games Editor for OS/2 e-Zine!, he maintains The Ultimate OS/2 Gaming Page and the AWE32 and OS/2 Page in his "spare" time.