USA Games News 4/5/2007
by Thomas Ward. Introduction Greetings gamers, In this issue of the USA Games News we have some good news for those awaiting Montezuma's Revenge and Raceway as well as some breaking news about STFC. Unfortunately, at this time we don't have any release dates scheduled for any of our projects, and simply put they are ready to be downloaded when they are ready. I've put several hours into these games already, but all to often day to day life interferes with my quality free time to work on these games. So please bare with us as all of us working on these projects have lives outside programming games. Anyway, let's take a good look at what is happening. Montezuma's Revenge Not long ago we announced our desire to make Montezuma's Revenge as close to the original classic game as possible without too many outside changes. For the most part that project has been going well, and is for the most part successful. That said we don't want our readers thinking this version is 100% exactly like the original. There are still some miner changes left in the game which we felt would make the game more interesting or challenging. For example, in the original Montezuma's Revenge game you could not restore your health with potions. If you came into contact with a skull, snake, or spider you lost one of your lives, and that was it. We felt this was slightly too difficult soully based on audio so we decided that potions should remain in the game to make it somewhat easier to beat the levels. In the original game there were actually very few different kinds of traps. you had drop offs, vanishing platforms, burning ropes, forcefields, and of course several monsters. In the end I felt this made the newer audio version slightly boring so while I kept the layout of the levels and basic traps true to the original game as best as possible I took the liberty to add a few extra traps such as walls of fire, pits of lava, rolling boulders, etc to make things interesting and slightly more challenging. I simply added them in to rooms that you have to pass through, and would otherwise be totally empty. On the other hand this version of Montezuma's Revenge is more like the classic game than different. The layouts are very similar to the classic game now, and most of the monsters, keys, gems, swords, etc appear in the proper places according to the map I was given of the levels. Also since I am basing this on the classic game there are allot more monsters per level than previously played against. In level 1 alone there are eight skulls, two snakes, and one spider to avoid or battle to the death. In addition traps include two vanishing platforms, two burning ropes, a wall of fire, and a force field just to give you an idea of the kinds of traps you must avoid to finish the level. for obvious reasons I don't want to discuss later levels, but they get slightly more harder than that, and there are more traps and monsters you must deal with in higher levels. In summary I think Montezuma's Revenge is going to be a great success in bringing the side-scroller genre of game to the audio games community. Super Liam was a great start, but Montezuma's Revenge will go all the way of representing a true side-scroller in all it's glory to this community. As always stay in touch with this list or visit our web site to get the latest news releases. Star Trek: the Final Conflict For us at USA Games development has officially has closed on STFC 1.0, and we are looking at a 2.0 release sometime in 2008 or 2009. However, thanks to some outside help STFC 1.0 may be getting a multilingual version. A few weeks ago we were approached by some interested parties in producing a Portuguese version of STFC 1.0. They will be recording the Portuguese translations for us, and once completed we will test it, pack it, and then make it available to the public when it becomes available. USA Raceway All of us at USA Games know the anticipation and expectations for USA Raceway. Fortunately, we have a little braking news for you racers out there. A few days ago I was searching for some high quality and realistic racing effects, and I managed to find some that where not to expensive to obtain. I've been editing them and dropping them into the USA Raceway audio directory, and the game is really starting to sound good and professionally done. The ccroud ambiance is crystal clear and high quality, the weather effects I have obtained sound extremely good, and the car sounds are very quite realistic. I have three different effects for your racer for low gear, medium, and high gear, start and idle noises, and ssqueeling tires. All which are quite acceptable to me. I've also located some good commentary to put in to the game which will announce things like wrecks, major laps, announcements to slow for pit row, which car is the leader, etc. Bottom line I can't imagine this game getting any better. Now, I would like to write a very special message to all of you who prepaid for Raceway when this game was still under the control of ESP and later Alchemy. I'm about to say this with very good reason as there are some who may have doubts about the quality of the workmanship of Raceway. When James North created Raceway it didn't really have any true Nascar type theme to it, and I took his over all drafts and notes to be more of a generic racing game. I think his game would have been good, but not of the same quality and same direction we are taking Raceway. As it happens as of this date we have scrapped all effects, source, and notes related to the original ESP Raceway game and have decided to write Raceway in our own way. We have decided that Raceway should be based on a pro racing theme with pro racing tracks, rules, scoring, etc. To be like very great Nascar games such as Nascar Thunder without infringing upon to many copyrights as possible. Since Nascar and many track names are copyrighted material we have decided to side step that by calling the company USA Racing, tracks are based on real existing tracks with different names, and the championship cup is the USA Cup. In all other respects this game is pro Nascar without the real names and trade marks being used. So we understand your frustration at the delays on this game, but we think in the end it will all be worth it. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. 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