One Giant beast, 5 space cockneys and one semi-naked woman all fighting each other for the same island. Sounds like the story for some skin flick/action movie hybrid on acid but this is in fact the very basic premise behind Giants, a game currently being developed by Planet Moon. And believe it or not the game is actually shaping up to be rather good.
The engine currently being developed for Giants is known as the AMMITYVILLE Engine and in creating it Planet Moon is taking a slightly different approach to the current crop of first person engines. For one thing it has been designed from the ground up as an outdoors engine, with landscapes stretching for miles. The engine also includes now almost standard features such as Level of Detail rendering, 3DNow & PIII support, D3D and Glide as well as DirectSound3D, EAX, A3D. So they aren't exactly skimping on the features, except in one respect - the engine will include no colored lighting. Instead the artists are actually drawing lighting straight onto the textures therefore reducing the load on the CPU. It remains to be seen how well this works, but if the recent screenshots are anything to go by colored lighting or no this game is graphically very pretty indeed.
Also, there is of course much more to the aforementioned characters. The Sea Reapers are a race of sea faring beautiful blue nymphets. In the game you control a Sea Reaper known as Delphi who is capable of creating massive devastation through her control of the elements. A recent video showed a colossal tornado ripping through the island and picking up the occasional enemy as it went. The space cockneys are known as Meccaryns, and there are 5 of them - Baz, Tel, Gordon, Reg and Bennett. Control of the Meccaryns involves taking over one of them with the rest being controlled by team AI. And finally there is Kabuto - a gargantuan beast capable of wreaking devastation that can also be found gazing pensively at the sky now and again.
Clearly this is not your usual run of the mill game, and this is largely because of the team behind it. Planet Moon was formed by various members of Shiny, most of who worked on the surreal yet immensely enjoyable MDK. With Giants it looks like they are taking the insanity present in that previous title to a new level, but thankfully the same appears to apply for gameplay and graphics with gorgeous vistas and a promised intriguing action/strategy amalgamation. Watch for Giants in the third Quarter of this year.
Developed By: Planet Moon
Published By: Interplay
3D Card Support: Yes
Multiplayer Support: Yes
Web Site: http://www.planetmoon.com
E.T.A: Q3 99