Night Vigil

Night Vigil makes sure all your new powers and weapons are adequately cool and ion-haggling. You won't be able to mow down enemies in the same way you will do in most third-person shooters. They'll be accompanied by a robot that responds to your combat actions automatically.

Night Vigil will make sure your fighting experience is as smooth as possible. There are a few buttons that can be used to perform the required actions. As you fight, you'll gain experience, experience points, and if you take damage, you'll get a health boost. The robots will also have some of the game's standard enemy types. For example, I played on a floor and then came face to face with a Cerberus tank. I didn't know that Cerberus had an Achilles' heel, but I'll just say that Cerberus and Argus are both available from the start of the game.

The game is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2000, and I'd like to believe that Eidos wouldn't release another third-person shooter in the same year. For this reason, I want to make sure that I've spent some time with Eidos' Night Vigil to decide what games it should release next. Unfortunately, there were some other games that were released in 2000 that I haven't seen on the PC. I was initially hoping that Night Vigil would be an action game like Fable or Tomb Raider. However, as it turns out, Night Vigil didn't fall on the wrong side of the wagon, and I actually decided to believe that Eidos would follow up on its successes with Doom II. I said, "You get the point, I'm not going to get it." There was no mention of a first-person shooter in Eidos' January-February 2000 lineup for the PC, and so I went to the Eidos offices in Paris to check out a few other games that I'd love to see on the PC.

After seeing a few games that were almost guaranteed to sell well, I wanted to see what would happen with the new Tomb Raider games. As it turned out, Tomb Raider was a highly anticipated game, so the team at Crystal Dynamics couldn't afford to fail, and by the end of the first few days of the game's release, the game had sold 1.1 million copies, and the Tomb Raider developers had sold more than 1 million copies of the game to retailers. So it was a true disappointment that, well, Crystal Dynamics had no hopes of being able to ship the game to the mass market. So the only other problem I could think of was seeing the game being marketed as a game, because Eidos had yet to make an official announcement of Tomb Raider: Revelation, and the only actual announcement of the game was that it would be coming to the Xbox. I remember seeing Tomb Raider: Revelation in theaters at a movie theater before the company really let it go on release, and the fact that people immediately claimed to be really excited about the game helped them forget that Tomb Raider: Revelation was only scheduled for release this year.

The best part of the last month was that Crystal Dynamics had unveiled Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, which is definitely one of the better-looking Tomb Raider games out there. I've played Angel of Darkness for a number of weeks and I have no doubts that the game is going to be one of the more graphically impressive games on the Xbox. If you were a fan of the previous games, you have a lot to look forward to, and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness is probably one of the best-looking games on the Xbox, especially since it uses motion-captured animation rather than previous games' stop-motion film style.

GS: How has the change in development at Crystal Dynamics affected the game?

JB: The development of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness has been really a challenge. We learned a lot from our previous games and received very positive feedback from the gamers.

GS: What are some of the new features in the game that set The Angel of Darkness apart from previous Tomb Raider games?

JB: We've taken a few big steps forward from The Angel of Darkness. The biggest change in the game, which is a big one, is that the graphics have been updated. The textures have been redone and feature a larger color palette. The biggest change is that the game will now take place in the bustling city of Prague, not just the lower-down, lower-down, streets of Croft Manor. This adds a new layer of complexity for the player to explore and adds a completely new level of detail to the game.

GS: How did the team approach The Angel of Darkness?

JB: The development team is completely redone, with entirely new story and new characters. The only significant changes to the gameplay have been the inclusion of more varied environments, the ability to use different weaponry, and the ability to play as the sexy Angel of Darkness.