Mechwarrior's Twin Resurrections
Well, triple resurrections, if you also include the upcoming sequel/relaunch. For the purposes of this post though, it's vintage Mechwarring. Not been able to try this myself yet - mainly due to the torturously slow proprietary bitorrent client necessary to download the thing - but there's a whole lot afoot in Mechwarrior land. First, a major new version of a free remake of Mechwarrior 2 made in Blitzbasic. It's called Assault Tech 1: Battletech. Tech tech? Tech. Tech! Apparently, it now looks better than the original, thanks to a revamped DirectX7 engine. Oh, mighty seven. Decide for yourself in the videos below. As an additional ray of robotic rapture, the MW fan/mod site behind AT1:BT, MekTek.net, are also gearing up to re-release the rather splendid Mechwarrior 4, in its DRM-free, modern-Windowsed entirety.
Here's some footage of Assault Tech 1's new version 2.3:
Looks like good, stompy, if slightly murky fun to me. You can grab it by downloading the MTX Bittorrent client/installer thingum, which will also be your means of accessing the MW4 rerelease later. Was super-slow for me, but that seemed to be because it choked my bandwidth by maxing out my upload speed, despite me throttling it in the options. Bah. AT1 came down eventually, however, and it's sat on my desktop ready for a play soon.
In terms of Mechwarrior 4 getting a second chance to shine, turns out we totally missed the announcement of such back in July. We then also missed the update as to its progress in September. We're the best! Here's the most recent statement on the matter:
The unfortunate aspect of all this great news is that all of these new developments could have been ironed out before the announcement but they were not. Our partners felt an initial announcement was necessary and so did we. We plan to release Mechwarrior4 for FREE when developments are completed and considered stable. We are also waiting on legal paper work from lawyers and as anyone out there that has worked in the professional industry knows, something of this magnitude takes time on all fronts. MekTek is not receiving any financial support from the partners regarding this release and obviously no one can quit their daytime job to get the job done faster either. The release has entered beta status and will be delivered to the world very shortly. MekTek is supported through donations from our community and thus far we have received 50% of our goal to cover server infrastructure costs. We hope the community will continue to support us during this very busy time to ensure we have the best possible hardware in place for this release.
Good stuff. Great stuff. Great big giant shooty robot stuff. Keep an eye on updates as these twin Mechwarrior projects here.
And here's one more video, which shows off quite how pretty AT1 can be, but unfortunately includes voice-acting that makes me want to attack someone, anyone, anything. If you don't have any even remotely accomplished voiceguys on hand, chaps, you really shouldn't include quite this much dialogue in your game. Still, can always play it on mute, or perhaps with the 1980s Transformers: The Movie soundtrack in the background.