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 NVIDIA GeForce 3 graphics rock in this game. |
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By Brad Cook Tim Williams says it was all very simple, really. “It started with a desire to make a great game that we would want to play,” explains the creative director at game developer Planet Moon. “An epic game with unprecedented gameplay and graphics.” |
Ready for OS X
If you’re enjoying the cool Aqua of Mac OS X, you’ll be thrilled to hear that Giants is exclusive for Mac OS X. That’s right: the game’s Mac publisher, MacPlay, has made it loud and clear that you’ll need Apple’s operating system of the future to enjoy a game that’s set somewhere in the distant past.
“MacPlay is very pleased for the fantastic opportunity to present this award-winning game exclusively to Apple’s latest operating system,” says MacPlay President Mark Cottam. “Giants: Citizen Kabuto’s critically acclaimed gameplay will immediately have the Mac gamer hooked.”
According to Omni Group technical lead Tim Wood, who worked with fellow employee Corwin Light-Williams on the conversion to Mac OS X, MacPlay’s call was “a great decision. You’ll want a powerful Mac to play this game, and anyone who has really cool new hardware, like one of the dual 800MHz Power Mac G4s, is very likely to be an adopter of OS X.” For those with iMac or iBook computers, the ability to scale down graphic options in the game will help keep you running smooth.
Adds Omni Group president Wil Shipley: “[Giants] is the first game port ever to take a single-threaded game and rewrite it to be multi-threaded, so that it can take advantage of symmetric multi-processing under Mac OS X.”
In other words: Load Giants on a dual-processor Power Mac running Mac OS X and the gorgeous graphics will make your jaw drop.
Meccaryns rule — got a problem with that?
Battle For The Island
In case you were wondering, comedy hadn’t even entered the picture when Williams and his team first sat down to create an experience that would fulfill the desires of the gamers in all of them. They just had a story to tell, and it went something like this:
Once upon a time, a piece of rock called The Island hurtled through the inky void that is the universe. On The Island sat a giant named Kabuto, a solitary, melancholy figure not unlike Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker, except for the smell and his predilection for violence. He loved his home and guarded it ferociously against the Sea Reapers, an Amazon-like race of tough women who lived in the water.
Because he wasn’t the brightest giant that ever existed, Kabuto didn’t realize that the Reapers were the ones who created him and kept him for protection against intruders. Later, his unbearable loneliness caused him to turn on them and drive them into the sea.
Meanwhile, in another sector of space, five Meccaryns (Meccs for short), Baz, Tel, Reg, Gordon, and Bennett, were out cruising the universe on vacation when a nasty Giant “Gibbon” Fish swallowed their ship and kept it in the depths of its bowels for a few months before expelling it. The Meccs decided to land their smelly, damaged ship on the nearest habitable planet for repairs, and they just so happened to choose The Island.
Sea Reapers in their natural habitat.
The Sea Reapers, without Kabuto to protect them, tried to defend their homeworld against the Meccs, but the intruders possessed enough firepower to destroy the whole planet if they wanted. Kabuto, already in a bad mood because the Reapers wanted their land back, wasn’t happy about the arrival of the Meccs either.
Now Introducing Kabuto Vision
Thus the stage was set for a three-way battle for supremacy of The Island, and that’s where you come in. You choose to control any of the three main races in a single-player game. The Omni Group tells us a multi-player contest (which, of course, can be played on the Internet or over a LAN) will possibly be available through a patch in the future. There are 25 story-driven missions that feature amusing cut scenes and different objectives, depending on which race you choose. The multi-player modes include the ever-popular Capture the Flag and Death Match.
There are also three viewpoints through which you view the action: first-person, third-person (think Oni, or Alice), and “Kabuto-Cam,” which places you inside the giant’s mouth for a rather unique outlook on the game.
A Blend of Genres
While Giants can be thought of as an action game, it also has strategy elements: the Reapers, Meccs, and Kabuto all have their strengths and weaknesses, which can be used to achieve different goals. For example, Kabuto is big and strong, but he relies on creatures called Vimps for food, and the Reapers can summon tornados that will blow away the Vimps and leave Kabuto vulnerable. The Meccs are adept at camouflaging themselves, but they’re not very bright; they tend to mindlessly do whatever their leader does.
