Westwood Games For Mac

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As soon as Westwood announced details of Dune 2000, alarm bells started ringing. Dune 2 was the first decent real-time strategy game, and without any hint of exaggeration has shaped the genre as it stands today. Without it, Total Annihilation might never have been. Imagine that. Sends a shiver down the spine, doesn't it? Let's extend the scenario to the world of first-person shooters: what if Wolfenstein had never happened? It doesn't bear thinking about. Anyway, the thought of a sequel to Dune 2 sent saliva glands into overdrive - until we read later on that Dune 2000 wasn't really a sequel, but rather a Cremake' of the original classic.Now, remakes can either be a good thing or a bad thing. While remakes of films tend to be bigbudget money-rakers with nothing but special effects to sell them, it's the new and improved effects that make games remakes better. The truth is, though, what games publishers call sequels, we call remakes. When they start calling them remakes, you know there's something fishy going on.

The Good. The Bad And The Ugly

For those of you too young or too stoned to remember Dune 2, it was loosely based on the David Lynch film Dune, but without the pseudo-religious overtones. It was a heady mix of resource gathering, building and chaotic destruction to the last man. The resource was the spice melange, the setting was the desert planet Arrakis, and you had a choice of three sides to choose from: the Atreides were the good guys, the Harkonnen the bad, and the Ordos were mysterious, underhand and downright ugly. (Actually they were all pretty ugly, what with everyone sporting a pair of eyebrows even Dennis Healy would be ashamed to display.)

For this 98 remix, the game remains largely unchanged. All Westwood have done is meddle with the missions to make them more balanced, film some FMV and slapped it all into an updated Red Alert box. Consequently we have multiplayer options, hi-res graphics and the ability to group units, rather than having to direct them one at a time as you had to do in the original. The only evidence that this game is new is a few graphical effects like coloured lighting and smoke. Even with these enhancements -and certainly next to TA - Dune 2000 looks a year out of date.Dune 2000s biggest selling point is its simplicity. Against TA or Dark Reign, the limited number of units available make this game easy to get into. While you're there, it's fun in a back-to-basics kinda way. However, playing through the same missions with the same units does little to bring back the fervour with which the original was played; in fact the experience rather soiled the memory. In its favour, the missions played quite well, but there is absolutely nothing new here that isn't in 1001 other real-time strategy games. The novelty of building a new base every mission has long worn away, and the flat, beige terrain soon makes you reach out for something altogether greener.

Here Comes The Sun

Some die-hard Dune fans are bound to find some redeeming features (probably the worms), but those of you who haven't will just wonder what all the fuss was about. Where the first game was ground-breaking, this is just another clone, albeit from the originators. It's obvious that Dune 2000 is at best a stopgap before Tiberian Sun appears; at worst it's an excuse to print money. Westwood may have once been the bosom of creativity, but Tiberian Sun will have to be something special if they want to regain their crown.

The paradox is that from a developer of Westwood's standing, Dune 2000 is substandard. As an updated version of Dune 2 it's fine. If that was Westwood's aim in developing the game, then they have succeeded. But maybe they should have aimed their sights a little bit higher and created a sequel. They've had long enough to do that, after all.

Westwood Shadows is a beautifully rendered puzzle-focused narrative-driven first-person horror adventure where you unravel dark secrets after you’re called out to investigate a mysterious old mansion.

In Westwood Shadows you take on the role of Peter Bennet, a detective who lost his wife and child in a car crash a few years ago. After being sent out to investigate the disappearance of a couple in a large mansion you start to uncover dark secrets about the mansion’s history and a nearby asylum, some of which may link back to your family.

The Pre-Alpha demo of Westwood Shadows takes around 40 minutes to play through and allows you to explore a sizeable chunk of the mansion. The interior of the mansion is beautifully rendered and decadently furnished, but it can feel a little empty at times as there are very few objects that you can actually interact with (it is still in Pre-Alpha though so will hopefully get fleshed out a little).

There’s a nice variety of puzzles on offer, which often actually require you to do a little detective work and figure things out, rather than just combining one object with another. The horror element of the game doesn’t really start to come in until right at the end of the demo, but the narrative is interesting and there are a few discoveries you make during your investigation that are very intriguing.

The full game isn’t due for release until Q4 2020, but even in these early stages of development Westwood Shadows is a very impressive game. The visuals are beautiful, the puzzles are well thought out and you’ll really be hooked when you discover the dark secrets the old mansion is hiding. A tense and cerebral horror adventure well worth checking out.