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Giants

The Specs

This is one of those games that's been a perennial favorite at E3 for three or four years. Giants is an action/real time strategy combo with base building and resource management. Your resources are sheep-like beasts called Vimps and tiny men called Smarties. The twist is that each of the game's three races -- the magical mermaid-like Sea Reapers, the jet-pack-wearing armed Meccaryns who fight in packs, and the fearsome Kabuto -- all use the resources differently. It's a sort of Starcraft approach where each side has unique gameplay mechanics. It's no surprise that Giants developer Planet Moon consists of former Shiny employees -- the game's artwork seems to be characterized by the same quirky sensibility that helped make Shiny's Sacrifice as good as it is.

The Speculation

Mark's Comments: Development on this game was started by an obscure sergeant in Hannibal's army. Just a few weeks before it was scheduled to go gold, an elephant sat on the sergeant and put the game severely behind schedule and forced the sergeant to take a raincheck on the whole march through the Alps thing. Now centuries later, it may finally be ready for release. Or it may not. Who knows? Sometimes the hype for a game peaks too early, which was about 18 months ago for this game.

Tom's Comments: A big guy named Kabuto makes a lot of noise and smashes stuff. He also has babies and eats living things. And you get to play him. I'm sold, stale hype and all! Peter Molyneux's Black & What?