By Jim Rossignol on May 27th, 2011 at 3:12 pm.
Futuremark Games Studio, whose last outing was the well-received by largely unplayed Shattered Horizon, have announced that they are making three new MYSTERY games. They tell us: “you can tag this under PC, XBLA and iOS. We will leave it to your readers to guess which platforms apply to each game (there are only 343 possible combinations).”
Hmm! Let’s see whether we can guess from the trailer, which is below. (I think it’s actually pretty obvious.)
27/05/2011 at 15:22 DrazharLn says:
It’s a trick question: they’re all Amiga exclusives.
27/05/2011 at 17:33 rivalin says:
I was actually worried they had moved into console games when I saw the headline.
Anyway, space shooters; F**K YEAH!
Also, if Futuremark ever does do a console version of their games they should be hunted down and killed.
27/05/2011 at 15:24 LimEJET says:
If they can retain the fun they managed to squeeze into Shattered Horizon, this might be good.
27/05/2011 at 15:25 Xocrates says:
So, I don’t think they even pretended to disguise the last one as anything other than a sequel/spin-off of Shattered Horizon with spaceships.
I’m interested. I just hope they have bots from day 1 this time.
27/05/2011 at 15:39 Calneon says:
Shattered Horizon was fantastic, so I’m still excited for it.
27/05/2011 at 15:53 Zyrxil says:
Actually, it looks to be a playable version of Test3/New Calico from 3dmark 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RulQXJ-Qohw
27/05/2011 at 15:59 frenz0rz says:
My first thought upon watching the clip –
OH GOD YES.
27/05/2011 at 16:53 Xocrates says:
@Zyrxil: While it seems fairly probable that that is the case, the use of Shattered Horizon music in that section suggests a tie-in (i.e. it’s probably both).
27/05/2011 at 15:25 CMaster says:
PC, iOS, PC + 360.
27/05/2011 at 15:25 Tom OBedlam says:
Is there a player base for shattered horizon still? I couldn’t play it when i released because of crappy hardware.
27/05/2011 at 15:32 DiGi says:
Yes, all 20 players are still playing… :-) OK, no jokes. There are still few servers with 20+ players, but half of them are bots.
27/05/2011 at 15:29 pupsikaso says:
If they are going to be silly again and insist that you can only play their games if you have vista or higher, than it will be largely unplayed just like shattered horizons.
Also, I see only two games in the trailer?
27/05/2011 at 15:32 jon_hill987 says:
If you can afford to upgrade to a modern graphics card you can afford to upgrade to a modern operating system. There are good reasons why they can’t make the game work on XP.
27/05/2011 at 15:34 pupsikaso says:
None.
But there are good reasons why many people stay on XP.
27/05/2011 at 15:40 Rii says:
71% of Steam users are using Vista/7 according to the latest survey data. I doubt that FutureMark considers it an issue in this day and age.
27/05/2011 at 15:51 RvLeshrac says:
@pupsikaso
No, no there aren’t. If you have modern hardware, Win7 is:
-Faster
-More stable
-More compatible
-x64 that works (finally).
There are a total of two reasons to not use Win7, neither of which should apply to a gaming machine:
1) Ancient software that was never written properly in the first place
2) Insufficient resources/old hardware.
27/05/2011 at 16:28 LionsPhil says:
Hurr, and also durr. “Oh, they couldn’t possibly support XP for technical reasons”—apparently pretty much every other developer is pulling miracles in having a DX9 backend, then?
27/05/2011 at 16:37 Rii says:
Why anyone would expect Futuremark of all devs to opt for the lowest common denominator is beyond me. You might as well expect Ferrari to produce budget cars.
27/05/2011 at 16:38 Bhazor says:
Reply to LionsPhil
Shattered Horizon was built around a DirectX 10 rendering engine they used for their benchmark software. So yeah.
27/05/2011 at 15:33 brulleks says:
343 combinations? What?
I think I must be missing something here. Three products over three possible platforms = 6 combinations: 1,2,3. 1,3,2. 2,1,3. 2,3,1. 3,1,2. 3,2,1.
(Argh. Must… resist… Dusty Bin… reference).
27/05/2011 at 15:36 CMaster says:
Presumably each game can be for one, two or even three platforms.
27/05/2011 at 15:38 4026 says:
Some, more or fewer of them might be multiplatform. And some might not be released on any platform. So you might have:
{1, 2, 3}
{123, 2, 23}
{1, 2, 123}
{123, -, -}
etc…
EDIT: Ninja’d.
27/05/2011 at 15:55 brulleks says:
Ah, I see. I think I must have read ‘guess which platforms apply to each game’ as ‘guess which platform applies to each game’.
28/05/2011 at 01:57 Wunce says:
Lets first take into consideration a single game. The order of platforms doesn’t matter so its a simple reading of pascals triangle to get 1,3,3,1. We assume that the game exists on a single platform, so we disregard the last one (which represents no platforms for the game).
So we have 7 different possibilies for each game, and 3 games. So we have 7^3 = 343 different combinations. So the maths is all good!
27/05/2011 at 15:34 banski83 says:
The space one looks good, I’m interested already.
28/05/2011 at 00:07 arccos says:
(whispers) *space! spaaaaaaace!*
Where’s the beta for that space shooter? I’m still over here trying to get every drop of goodness I can from the Freespace 2 Source Code Project. Hasn’t been a whole lot on the “epic space shooter” since then.
28/05/2011 at 10:17 Armante says:
Space Shooter. WANT!
28/05/2011 at 10:31 Cinek says:
YES! I demand some DX10/11 space shooter making XP-based computer burn only by playing trailers on You Tube!!!!
Futuremark – please, don’t screw the space sim. Make it a quality product outclassing all the current generation of console-leveled games.
Sadly though – so far on this clip it didn’t look like anything DX11, but it’s too early to say. Equally good this could be console game plaid with gamepad… we’ll see. Hope I won’t be disappointed and this shall be awesome PC game, not just thing leveled down to XboX crap with limited space, limited sizes, limited graphics. >_<
27/05/2011 at 15:34 Kaira- says:
So, are the UFOs at the beginning one game? Because otherwise I can spot only two.
27/05/2011 at 16:47 Chaz says:
Well thats better than me then as the obvious space shooter at the end was the only thing I was able to discern as being a game.
27/05/2011 at 15:49 Basilicus says:
None of you is excited enough for SHATTERED HORIZONS WITH SPACESHIPS!!!
27/05/2011 at 16:18 Lilliput King says:
Man, I’m pretty excited.
edit: SH was full of smart stuff gameplay wise that it’ll never get credit for now, which makes me hella sad. Still, that game and their continued support towards it make me pretty confident they’ve got a bright future as long as they keep going.
27/05/2011 at 17:32 DrGonzo says:
I’m far more excited about the black and white spaceships. The last space battle looked so generic it bored me half to death, and this is from someone who loved Shattered Horizon.
27/05/2011 at 15:50 jonfitt says:
I could go for a dumb-as-nuts excellent looking space game I think. The flying in and out of the superstructure was particularly cool looking.
It looked like it could be on XBLA though.
Let’s also hope it has a SP component.
27/05/2011 at 15:55 tikey says:
The part with the ships flying inside some structure made me recall Homeworld, the cutscene of the taiidan attack.
27/05/2011 at 16:19 Joshua says:
Its a trick question. They are actually all multiplatform :P.
27/05/2011 at 16:34 Atic Atac says:
Shattered Horizon was terrible. It scaled horribly to anything else but super high-specs and the promising premise ended up as boring choke points.
I regretted my purchase immensely.
Having said that the spaceshooter at the end of the trailer shows promise. Wasn’t there a very cool dogfighting spaceship game as well that had a cool trailer 1 or 2 years ago. Anyone know what that was called and what happened to it?
27/05/2011 at 16:43 mbp says:
Well the expanding cartoon cat is obviously on the PC because that is the only kind of game that gets released on the PC these days.
The photo realistic-space ship game is probably a Wii exclusive because Futuremark are trying to show off their unbelievable graphics programming skills.
Meanwhile the 1950′s spaceships game is being released on the Xbox360 in a clever attempt to win over the Call of Shooty crowd.
How did I do?
28/05/2011 at 01:37 Matt says:
F
27/05/2011 at 16:51 Danny252 says:
Shattered Horizon? Wasn’t that the game which didn’t support 1280×1024 “because everyone uses widescreen”? Ah, I’ll expect their future releases to be similarly narrowminded as well, then.
27/05/2011 at 17:22 Skystrider says:
Space combat simulator? I’d hit it.
27/05/2011 at 17:29 BathroomCitizen says:
Wowwowwow, color me interested with the spacefighter game! Gaming needs more of that!
Now, Hawken, are you still around?! We need mechas too!
27/05/2011 at 17:38 QSpec says:
A small part of me will always resent the PC gaming community for Shattered Horizons. That game was fun as hell, and now in order to play it I have to shoot AI… AI!!! Bastards…
27/05/2011 at 21:08 Navagon says:
Coolness! If those are to be MP games though, I hope they have the good sense to add bots from the outset this time. No sense in getting a multiplayer game that you know is going to be dead in no time at all.
27/05/2011 at 21:12 MythArcana says:
I don’t see any auto-aiming, checkpoints, or cartoon characters advising me in the video, so that must be for PC then. But…there are too many games out there to worry about console ports. X Rebirth is coming in November and that’s all the official PC space simulation I need right there.
27/05/2011 at 21:31 hocevar says:
Shattered Horizon deserved more attention, it is one of the best FPS of this gen.
30/05/2011 at 09:28 Henke says:
Let’s not go overboard here. Shattered Horizon was unique and a lot of fun. For about a week. Dunno what it was about it but it just didn’t stay fun for very long for me. Not even the new weapons managed to get me back into the game for more than a few rounds.
I am glad to see FM developing new titles though and I consider myself lucky that those 3 platforms happen to be the 3 ones in my posession atm.
28/05/2011 at 02:19 wazups2x says:
Shattered had a a great original idea but the gameplay was just very fun. I can’t wait to give this new game a try.
29/05/2011 at 11:57 My2CENTS says:
Bought Shattered Horizon and to be honest i expected more, bad support, small number of updates (even though the game itself looks like a WIP), so i crossed Futuremark as a game developer, they are just too good at benching, but benching is not gaming.
30/05/2011 at 09:30 Henke says:
Small number of updates? They released additional levels and a bunch of new guns for it! SH certainly got more free updates than 90% of games out there.
29/05/2011 at 19:21 Eclipse says:
Shattered Horizon was awesome and fresh, let’s hope for the best