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ECTS 2000
By Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau ChiefBlueByte Software/Maddox Games:
I stopped by BlueByte Software to discuss Battle Isle: The Andosia War and visit with my old friend Oleg Maddox. His Maddox Game’s IL-2 Sturmovik has been picked up by BlueByte. They are certainly giving it the attention it deserves! I had an opportunity to discuss their plans with Michael Domke, PR Manager and I was impressed. BlueByte is a very unusual distribution company with a large in-house software development group. They created the very successful Settlers series that has been a best seller in Europe since its introduction. Settlers bears a slight similarity to the Sim series with complex economic models and civilization building but diverges into a completely unique game at the first play. The Settlers series is up to version III with an add-on mission disk and a new race disk (Amazons) available. All this is wrapped up in the Settlers III Gold Edition.
The Battle Isle series has also been very successful in Europe. A real time strategy game were you play the head of a faction in a far future civilization on a planet called Chromos. This simulation is a unique combination of real time and turn based strategy in one of the most graphically rich environments I have ever seen.
Oleg Maddox and his team came to ECTS with a brand new build of IL-2 Sturmovik. The graphics are certainly as beautiful as they have ever been. Most all functions were working on the setup screens. Oleg was showing off some beautiful tracks he recorded just for ECTS. Oleg told me that his new version of the mission recorder allowed total control on the Views, Editing of the mission, and the option to jump into the mission at any time. It sounds like the perfect development tool for a series of training missions.
E2Soft:
My final stop of the day was at E2Soft. They are a Korean company just entering the US market. They were showing a real time strategy game named World War II: Europe in Gunfire. I watched one of the programmers demonstrate their new software. It was difficult to be kind. The game runs in a maximum of 640 x 480 resolution. The icons for each vehicle look like something from a feeble arcade game a few years back. The airplanes fly around in little two inch diameter circles, the tanks get stuck on little dots of red (blood) that represent dead soldiers, and the strategy looks about as complex as Wide World Wrestling. Sigh….more work on this one folks.
