Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
Aura, Fate of the Ages …
This is another of those great Adventure Company games. The game is to explore the four worlds and find the artifacts hidden in them. There are many puzzles and challenges in this game, so it will give you lots of interesting play time.
You play as Umang and your assignment is to find the rings of the universe and the artifacts of the four worlds. When these are assembled, you will have untold power and long life. Well, maybe!
You start out in a house that someone obviously occupies, but who is not there now. Here you must collect several things and use them to start up a machine of unknown purpose and function. The end result is to charge the charger so it can be used elsewhere. As you proceed in the game, your notebook adds pages which will help you solve puzzles. The things you collect are kept in your inventory, accessed by right-clicking.
The next step is to obtain the navigational map. This is accomplished by going outside the house, moving into a kind of gazebo and setting several pedestals in the correct direction. You have to figure out which ones go which way, but there was a clue back in the house.
From here, you go to another outside area to get the zodiac triangle. The process is easy, but understanding why it operates the way it does is not. Now, back inside the house.
Here you have to do a number of manipulations to the large machine upstairs. This involves not only the machine itself, but also some dials on the walls and a couple of machines outside the house. When you have completed all that, the navigational map is active.
You open a door and follow the tunnel to the ship, which takes you to Dragast. Your first challenge here is to figure out the bridge puzzle. It involves turning buttons, then pressing them in a certain order. Once done, the bridge swings in one of three directions to give you access to a cavern and two other worlds.
Entering one of these worlds, you enter the main building, solve a puzzle with rotating wheels, enter an underground passage, solve the lock puzzle to release a prisoner, solve another rotating wheel puzzle and enter an area above. Here you must solve a puzzle that is difficult because the pieces you must manipulate are seen both front-ways and in reverse in a mirror. It makes solution tough!
Solving it, though, takes you to an area where you get the tetrahedron, one of the valuable artifacts you need.
Now you go to another world using the 3-way bridge. This is a cavern with several machines along a perilous pathway suspended over a deep crevasse. You won’t fall off, but it’s a bit difficult to follow the right path to activate the mill. Several puzzles are involved.
Next you must solve several more puzzles in order to combine the tetrahedron with a sphere. You get info from a guy, activate a lift, arrange some symbols on pillars, which causes the tetrahedron/sphere combination to occur. Now back to the cavern to combine the tetrahedron/sphere with the sacred rings. May not make a lot of sense, but you have to do it!
Next, the mirror house, access to four other worlds. You set up a teleportation device which give you access to each world in turn. First, in the icy world, you find you must get the grain of life, whatever that is. Back to the mirror house, then to the spirit world, where you find the seven spirit idols and place them in order on the posts in sequence; not easy!
Now you have the grain of life, back to the icy world to take on your next task, changing the grain of life into stardust.
When that’s done, back to the mirror house to enter the children’s world. Here you locate many things, place several of them, get the bird to sing (!) and return to the mirror house to enter the fourth world.
The magical world requires you to solve a few more puzzles. If you do one or two things wrong, you die, but are revived to try again; immortality is refreshing! The end result of successful solves is to obtain the Symbol of the Magical World.
Now, you assemble the artifacts you’ve gathered to get the Assembled Rings.
Finally, you see the successful ending that you have created by collecting the artifacts.
I’ve played a lot of games over the years. This one has two characteristics that make it unique. First, there are more puzzles to be solved than any other games I’ve played. Second, the things you do and the results don’t make a lot of sense. Be that as it may, it is an enjoyable and consuming game.
Playing this game will eat up many of your valuable hours. Some of the puzzles are hard, some are easy, others are in between. There’s something for everyont!
As is usual for the Adventure Company, the graphics are gorgeous. Maneuvering in the game is really easy, since the cursor shows where one may go or not go. I don’t know how the developers create such beautiful scenery, but they do a top notch job.
The only thing that is not perfect is the facial movements of the characters when speaking. That’s not the developers’ fault, but rather a deficiency of today’s graphic capabilities. Soon, we will be able to have realistic movements and speech that is coordinated properly with facial motion.
There is no violence, nudity, drugs or profanity in the game and the ESRB rating shows this. Players can be of any age, but probably only those of teenage and up would understand enough to play this game.
Aura, Fate of the Ages by The Adventure Company adventurecompanygames.com
Price about $20 online
Requires WIN 98SE or better, 800 MHz P3 or better, 64 MB RAM, 2 GB hard disk space, 32 MB video card
ESRB Rating Everyone
QuakeCon 2005 …
Imagine 6000 people playing games on 3500 computers connected with 200 miles of ethernet cable, 24 hours a day for 4 days in areas measuring 150,000 sf! Hard to imagine, isn’t it.
Well, it’s real! QC is held in Dallas, TX in mid-summer and is the largest multiplayer event (LAN party) in the US. 2005 was the tenth year it has been held.
id Software provides several of its very popular software games to be used in individual, group and tournament games. The tournaments are tiered just like major athletic events, the winning players reaping cash awards of $10,000 to $25,000. Real money!
The event is free to all participants and observers. If you want to play games, you bring your own computer and hook it up to the networks. Everyone must use headphones; can you hear the cacophony otherwise?
Several hardware manufacturers also attend in order to show off their latest and greatest gear. nVidia, for example, used their best video cards in demo machines and gave away several to attendees. They also hosted a pizza party for all.
Alienware brought a few of their best gaming machines for the gamers to try out. Intel, of course, touted their chips and computers. Creative Labs had their state-of-the-art sound cards available for listening.
One of the interesting side battles was the Ms. QuakeCon competition for females only. It was dominated by the team of Girlz of Destruction, known as gOd. There was real money at stake here, too, a tasty $30,000 prize money.
QuakeCon quakecon.org
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