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And thus Giants: Citizen Kabuto was born. It may very well be the quirkiest game to grace your Mac in many years. In fact, if the unlikely combination of little guys battling 100-foot giants, along with topless magical women thrown into the mix, as Williams puts it, is your cup of tea, then run, dont walk (or perhaps just go to the Apple Store), to your nearest Mac games seller and say One copy of Giants: Citizen Kabuto, please.
Ready for OS X If youre enjoying the cool Aqua of Mac OS X, youll be thrilled to hear that Giants is exclusive for Mac OS X. Thats right: the games Mac publisher, MacPlay, has made it loud and clear that youll need Apples operating system of the future to enjoy a game thats set somewhere in the distant past. MacPlay is very pleased for the fantastic opportunity to present this award-winning game exclusively to Apples latest operating system, says MacPlay President Mark Cottam. Giants: Citizen Kabutos 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, MacPlays call was a great decision. Youll 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 hadnt 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 Rodins 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. |
This game is no longer available from MacPlay.
Because he wasnt the brightest giant that ever existed, Kabuto didnt 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, wasnt 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 thats 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 giants 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 theyre not very bright; they tend to mindlessly do whatever their leader does. |
Citizen Kabuto? Find out what thats all about on page 2 |