| By Don St. John You didn't think the baddies in Independence Day were wasted for good, did you? Of course not. For one thing, there's probably going to be the inevitable movie sequel to Hollywood's No. 1 moneymaker in 1996. Well before that, though--in fact, next month--you'll have a chance to waste those aggressive aliens in Fox Interactive's game version of Independence Day. PC Games recently took a good look at a pre-release version, and you may find that it's a lot of fun. |
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As with Fox's
recent Die Hard Trilogy, the game developers manage to
stay out of their own way, and yours, and deliver an
arcade-style action flyer that's fast and furious the
second you fire it up. In some ways, the game’s
"plot" is preferable to the movie's wooden
backstory--it doesn't bother with one at all. The
monstrous alien ships are perched over the cities of the
world, and it's your job to take them out, period. That's
all you really need to know. Of course, you'll get more information than that; each mission begins by telling you where you are and what your objectives are. Hit start, and you're in--and you'd better be firing the second you enter the game. Often as not, your plane ends up right under the enemy mothership, with alien craft blasting at you from the get-go. We found that weapons management is fairly important: A typical mission might require you to take out the power generators on the enemy mothership, and you'll have only a limited number of missiles with which to do that. Waste those, and your chances of finishing off the mission are essentially toast--and, inevitably, so are you. |
| One thing you should know: We
didn't find this easy. Even though you have command over
your throttle speeds via the pre-set A and Z keys,
grabbing powerups was seriously hard (thus the warning
about weapons management), as was targeting while dodging
the frequent alien bogeys on your tail. You're often
hemmed in by the forcefield on the alien mothership, and
each target is well-guarded by alien craft. ID4 is going
to be a challenge, no doubt about it. One thing that Fox deliberately did, says producer Michael Arkin, was to take the action to cities and areas referred to but not shown in the movie, including Tokyo, Moscow, and the Grand Canyon. "The movie limited those, and we wanted the missions to feel like you were getting the parts you knew were in the movie but didn't see," he says. |
| The controls are
configurable for keyboard or joystick, and they're fairly
simple. The display settings are trickier, though: We
tried ID4 out on a machine with an ATI Rage 3D card, and
the result was a graphical mess. You'll do better with
3Dfx or Rendition-based acceleration boards, according to
Fox; we tried it on a 3Dfx-based Righteous 3D board, and
it looked sweet. Fortunately, the install routine gives
you a setup utility that makes figuring out the options
pretty simple. One warning: On anything less than a P133,
you'll want to limit some of your settings to keep the
game's frame rate at an acceptable level. Another factor
that we found affected frame rate was first-person
cockpit view: We had to cut our display down to
320-by-240 to make that smooth out. At 640-by-480,
though, the rear camera view worked just fine. (Fox is
just full of helpful doo-dads for ID4; the F9 key will
allow you to check your frame rate at any time.) Fox is still smoothing out the last bumps in ID4, and we think the finished version should provide a graphically cool, yet tricky flying experience. And you won't even need a Powerbook--or Jeff Goldblum, thank God--to break the enemy's defenses down.
Developer: Radical Entertainment Publisher: Fox Interactive Platform: Win 95 CD Available: March 11 Suggested retail price: $54.98 |
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