Having explored the depths of gloomy claustrophobic horror two years before with System Shock, Looking Glass Studios changed tack ambitiously with a game they hoped would kickstart a brighter era after a baffling spate of poor sales. 

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was a windswept, big-world strategic shooter worlds apart from the Boston studio’s cyberpunk masterpiece. 

It quickly attracted a following of its own, particularly among a section of shooter fans weary of narrow level-based dungeon crawling which, since Doom, designers had been nervous about straying too far from.

Against a background of Heinlein-esque militaristic dystopia, the story charted the rise of Nikola ap Io, a space marine of the classic mould, through the ranks of an outfit of interplanetary pirate hunters. 

At the controls of one of three powered suits ranging across scout to heavy classes, Nikola was drop-shipped into 37 missions to fight enemies with an expanding arsenal of satisfying weaponry. Commanding of a squad of up to three fellow soldiers, battles were fought across massive, sumptuously rendered landscapes, ranging from tree lined hills and sandy shores to the barren lunar surface. 

Shining moments came at the start of each mission when Nikola descended through the atmosphere, affording the player time to savour vast draw distances. Those lucky enough to be running a Pentium 100 enjoyed worlds of richly textured terrain and parallax-scrolling skies with incredible depth.

Hiking between waypoints meant combat came often at the head of an unnerving crescendo, allowing time for complex orders and tactics. 

Meticulous planning was usually rewarded with dependable AI from squadmates. Long before Halo’s RTS-inspired revolution began challenging conventions, Terra Nova had already been described as ‘Command and Conquer, up close.’

Just as frequently – and more likely had Nikola not scouted the strength of opposing forces with the remote recon drone – encounters descended into breathless, scrappy dogfights. Luckily, suits came with a gift of superhuman spatial awareness. 

Soldiers of the SFC were using realtime battlefield monitors years before the concept was re-introduced underwhelmingly by GRAW’s crosscom system. Uniquely, Terra Nova allowed the heads-up display to be configured for a 360-degree view, particularly useful during chases or point-defence duty.

The complexity of the interface, along with incidental similarities in the wide-area gameplay, drew first-glance comparisons with Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, which was still selling by the truckload. The comparisons did not bear scrutiny. 

“In terms of gameplay,” Looking Glass Studios founder Paul Neurath said earlier this year, “what is being played today is pretty much the same as what was played a decade ago.”
“My sense is that the game industry tends to be more conservative creatively than other creative media. There can be great reluctance by game publishers to try anything that is actually new, and I think that has held back the development of the industry.”

If the same pioneering spirit motivated him 14 years ago, the roots of Terra Nova’s genre-spanning brilliance can be seen to emerge. 

For its great achievement was in striking a perfect balance between the technical simulation of Mechwarrior 2 and the frenetic arcade action of Doom – at once a thinking man’s Quake and thrill-seeker’s Shattered Steel. 

While a keen tactical mind was essential to defeat the fiendish difficulty of later missions, there were few sweeter experiences than finding yourself suddenly surrounded, jump-jetting 100 feet into the sky, twisting acrobatically mid-air, and deftly delivering a double payload of pulsar to finish off a flat-footed pirate.

Unjustly, the studio’s cursed commercial performance held true and the planned franchise, and eventually Looking Glass itself, evaporated.  Terra Nova’s failure to make a meaningful profit, despite shifting a respectable 100,000 units, was a key factor in the studio’s demise in 2000. 

As with System Shock before it, Terra Nova failed to turn a creative risk into bankable reward. Without no financial incentive, a promised multiplayer patch never appeared, robbing players of the chance to go toe-to-toe in a landscape they so relished just at the moment when big-party multiplayer was gathering pace.

Yet the game opened up the ambition of the FPS genre and cemented the squad-based tactical shooter as a category in its own right. We had to wait another five years for the Master Chief’s debut to experience the same thrill of being out in the open.

Raw video of the visit of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to Thomas Hardye School, Dorchester, on 12 December 2008.

Ordinarily this is highly illegal, but I had a good excuse.

I’m not sure why my resultant article isn’t on the Western Gazette’s brand spankin’ new website.

If all goes to plan I’ll  recieve my N95 8gb within a few days and I plan on bombarding newsdesk with top-quality video straight away. Hopefully I’ll have something mobile-journalism shaped (as opposed to dingledongle shaped) to show off soon.

I used to say the same thing to my mum to no avail. That’s the miracle of Marlboro!

(via contexts)

More mental email.

On Wendesday, September 17, 2008, I invite people around the world to turn off their lights for ten minutes – from 9:50pm to 10:00pm in their local time zone..

Ingles:
Darkness world: On September 17, 2008 from 21:50 to 22:00 hours.
Proposes to delete all lights and if possible all electrical appliances, to our planet can ‘breathe’.
if the answer is massive, energy saving can be brutal.

Only 10 minutes, and see what happens.
Yes, we are 10 minutes in the dark, we light a candle and simply
Be looking at it, we breathe and our planet.
Remember that the union is strength and the Internet can be very power and can
Even do something big.

Moves the news, if you have friends to live in other countries send to them.

The discussions have their own merit, of course:

reply posted on 20-11-2006 @ 05:16 PM by jaguarmike

 

Let me sum up the WHOLE argument. And just to save time, refer to www.infowars.com, ancient Sumerian texts, maybe a little David Icke (but not all, I don’t believe all he says), Stitchen, the bible, and Aaron Russo. All these people’s works have led me to this argument I am about to present.

-Long time ago before Sumeria, a planet collided with Earth.
-The ozone layer of that planet was damaged, and only gold particles (google “gold particles revive solar ozone layer”) could remedy the problem.
-The Annunaki (a reptilian race), far ahead in science, age, and technology, mined Earth fod Gold and created homo sapiens to be workers for the operation. Homo sapiens were a mix between ape and Annunaki.
-Planet was remedied.
-A small battle broke out over what to do with the newly created humans between Annunaki leadership.
-The leadership was equally divided, but at the end the decision was to keep humans as long as Annunaki leaders were kept in power.
-Hyrbids were created that had more alien blood than the rest, and were put into positions of power.
-It is believed that those same power bloodlines rule the world, and most secret socieites that control the globe derive their innate power and sense of power from this whole incident.
-The goal is to create a global police state, so that Earth can be brought back into a group of allied planets.
-This “antichrist” is just a figure head to make the planet a police state.
-RFID chips, or the mark of the beast, are said to be put in all.

Hope this helps

 

reply posted on 20-11-2006 @ 05:25 PM by HighDefinitionFilms

 

If half of what you just said in summary is true,
then a) I am fascinated and b) pretty scared for the future.

But more than anything else, I am inspired…

As a filmmaker, someday I would love to make a movie,
that, like the Matrix, exposes these fundamental facts
of our origins and present global power structure…

What an important- and entertaining- movie that will be.

I’ll be sure to give you a credit, Jaguar…

PS Seriously- whether a movie or a fictionalized book (sort of like DaVinci Code)
it has the makings of a natual page turner… has anyone expressed
these facts already in a book? I would love to read it…

PPS Who here had read- and recommends- BEHOLD A PALE HORSE? Thanx!

From: Mark [mailto:editor@hismailroom.com]
Sent: 17 August 2008 15:01
To: dorch-wey@westgaz.co.uk
Subject: Feedback from Western Gazette web site

Integrity In Journalism!

Those who bow down to editors when it comes to censoring the truth, should be aware of who they are really serving!

http://www.hismailroom.com/htmls/saalm/a.htm

One of the many odd things about the site is that all the text isn’t actually text at all but jpgs of text. It’s not for me to guess why the author decided on that method – maybe, like his tinfoil hat, it’s to stop the Freemasons scanning his or her thoughts.

Other highlights include these pictures:

Lord Enlil, apparently.

“P13” and His Holiness Lord Nannuur, second in line to Anu-Na_ki royal lineage and Grand Architect and Patron of the 33rd Degree of Zion and S.A.A.L.M. (?)

With this post I hope to encourage others to step through the looking glass, as I did. No longer will I be blind to the machinations of S.A.A.L.M. and I can only be embarressed about not “waking up” sooner.

I also recommend the parent website, featuring “the unfolding story of Revelation 12” – including the unforgettable lines:

And they will see the very first wedding, ever in heaven, the wedding of My chosen daughter, Linda Newkirk the Woman of Revelation Twelve, to My Son!

Thereafter Linda Newkirk will begin her work as the Queen of Heaven, my Son’s very own queen; and as such will bear much power in Heaven and in the Earth!

Wheels within wheels within wheels. It’s what they didn’t tell you during Sunday school.

I’ve got no problem with that. It’s always nice to get back to my hometown and the train journey has got a lot less stressful since the end of festival season. Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” makes a very amiable travelling companion also.

One annoyance, however, is missing Adam and Joe’s brilliant show on BBC 6 Music on Saturday mornings from 9.00am – 12 midday.

I once wrote a mental letter to Adam after reading his blog and sensing (almost certainly incorrectly) that he was experiencing career worries.

But all is not lost! Speeding On The Needlebliss is an excellent site (in need of some Search Engine Optimisation – sheesh!) that has an archive of all their past shows, lovingly arranged into edited and unedited versions. I check it every week; the podcast just isn’t enough somehow.

Tomorrow: earth-shattering conspiracy news.