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| Visit to Activision
by Missionyard |
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It was a few months ago that I first visited Activision in Santa Monica. The only problem was that when I went it wasn't to check out the latest games and meet all of the cool people who work there. I had been asked to come to Activision the first time
to give my opinion on some upcoming Playstation games. It was a cool trip at the time, there was about 8 of us and we all ate pizza a listened to some future Playstation game ideas. But as I left Activision I noticed two things a door that led to stairs
and an elevator. I thought to myself as I left what went on up there and hoped that some day I would find out.
It was only a few weeks later that Loomer of Area-S was invited to visit Activision from lovely but not as lovely as California, Colorado. I figured that if Activision would allow Loomer to take a little tour and hang out why not me? I only live about 2
5min. away from the Santa Monica HQ in the first place, plus I knew where
it was as I had been there before!! So I emailed Trey Watkins who was going to set me up and show me all of the upcoming Dark Reign goodies, including a preview of Rise of
the Shadow Hand. That never really took place as we always seemed to have conflicts but at the same time I had been working on a site called the Battlezone Center which was first up on a games.nextlevel server. It was at the time the
first or second Battlezone site up, so all of you that think that we are new are wrong. But we need move to a new server and I completely redid the layout of the site two days after the Battlezone demo arrived. Also starting
up at this time was the Battlezone IRC channel on Efnet, it was here that when I was chatting with Mike Arkin that I set up a trip to Activision to check out, the soon to be released and a big hit game, Battlezone. It was Friday night during half-time of the Laker game that I logged on to the net and found a message waiting for me on ICQ about me visiting the HQ on Saturday, which was in fact tomorrow at the time. I of course said that I would be there. So at 1:30 pm PST I left for Activision and was scheduled to stay from 2pm - 4pm. It was pouring down rain at the time and there was quite a bit of traffic getting there but I managed to arrive there just a couple minutes after 2. I walked in through the glass fro nt doors and started to walk over to the receptionists' desk when I noticed that the set of doors to the desk was locked. There was a note on the desk saying that the guard was on duty and would be back in about 15min. Well I waited for a little about 10 min. and still no guard, in the mean while about 10 people had signed in and checked out. Not knowing what Mike looked like and him not knowing what I looked like he had in fact passed by me 2 or 3 times. Then I told him who I was and that I was looking for Mike Arkin and he was in fact Mike so we went upstairs and this is when it really all began. We went up stairs and Mike explained to me what game was developed and worked on where in the building and showed me his office. We then looked around to see if anybody else was actually there as it seemed quite empty to Mike but it was Saturday so I cou ld understand that. The first thing we did was fire up a game of multiplayer. I had never played multiplayer before but had played the demo so I knew the basics to the game and thought for sure that Mike was going to whoop my ass but it was actually pre tty close. Also the machine I was playing on was a PII with Intel's new 3D chip and I have to tell you that the graphics looked awesome. I started the game with the Grizzly and quickly set up a nice little base with a few turrets and some scouts to guar d my scavengers as they collected scrap. Everything was going great and I was actually holding off Mike quite well. The problem came when I decided to make a Day Wrecker and thinking that it would just get dropped off to me like ammo so I could then pic k it up and use it, I had the Day Wrecker land right in front of me. Well let me tell you something, the Day Wrecker doesn't work that way at all, it explodes where you tell it to land and in my misfortune I told it to land right in front of me. Big mis take, who knows how well I would have done against Mike if that hadn't happened but I probably would have eventually lost any ways due to the fact the I didn't know squat about any of the advanced buildings and units. At 3 o'clock the Battlezone chat was held on IRC with the Area-S gang and other Battlezone supporters. I stayed and played a little bit more Battlezone and tried out the Soviet side. The Soviet side is much hard er than the Stars and Stripes and I lost the first level but not after sniping an American pilot and taking his vehicle. That is one of the best things about Battlezone the ability to snip another pilot and steal his vehicle. Another great thing that I noticed while playing as the Soviets is that the voice has an accent but is still easily understood very unlike Red Alert where the Soviets were ver hard to understand. For anyone that is just starting to play Battlezone I hig hly suggest starting the game as the Stars and Stripes as the Soviets are meant for skilled Battlezone players who have completed the training missions and the Stars and Stripes campaign and are looking for a challenge. Before I left Activision I was able to take a look at all of the cool sketches of the units planned for the game. And I have to tell you these units look very cool all sketched out and in person. You can really see the detail put into each of these units . I was also given a beta copy of Battlezone and a draft of the manual so I could post all of that interesting information about the units on my site. With the beta I was able to check out multiplayer for myself on a 56k modem instead of th e fast network used at Activision. Despite what everyone has said I played three games of strategy multiplayer and I don't remember encountering any lag at all. I have heard that the deathmatch mode has more lag but I haven't yet played any deathmatch g ames as I am a diehard RTS fan. And to those of you other RTS fans out there wondering how much strategy is involved in Battlezone all I can say is quite a bit, you would be surprised. I would have to say that Mike is truly an awesome guy a nd I am really happy that I was able to take a tour of Activision with him. I hope that maybe I can someday come over again and check out what the future has in store for Battlezone and other Activision products. Thanks Mike for the great visit! Please excuse any grammar or typos in this story, as I didn't have the time to read through it again. |
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Battlezone is a trademark of Atari/JTS Corporation ©: 1980, 1997 Atari/JTS Corporation. All rights reserved. Licensed by Activision. |