In Half-Life 2, players can use the Gravity Gun to pick up virtually anything in the environment before shooting that object as a projectile. This complex functionality demonstrates the versatility and fidelity of the sophisticated Havok engine, which simulates Newtonian physics, taking into account mass, gravity, friction, and so on, of each object in the game. GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: First game to feature a Gravity Gun.
Ubisoft’s Requiem: Avenging Angel was the first game to feature bullet time, a feature that slows down time to allow a player to dodge bullets. GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: First to feature bullet time.
GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: first.
In 1993 the Xcom series, from Microprose, created the first multi-level strategy title, with a global war that tied into local battles. GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: first.
In 1991, Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi became the first video game to release a speech pack (Wing Commander II: Speech Accessory Pack).This enabled owners of SoundBlaster sound cards to hear the characters (voiced by professional actors) rather than having to read subtitles.
Atari’s classic shooter, released in 1979, was the first game to allow players to create a personalized top 10 table for that day’s scores. GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: First video game to include a personalized high-score table.
Atari’s 1983 Star Wars arcade game was the first game to feature digitized speech from a movie. The game contained excerpts from the movie Star Wars: A New Hope (the reissued title of the original Star Wars film (USA, 1977)) and would begin a trend of voice clips from movies being used in games.
With a thickness of 1.39 cm (0.55 in) and a 3.6 cm (1.43 in) colour screen, the LG GD910 Watch Phone is the first model in the world that allows video calls. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, USA, the phone includes features such as a touchscreen, voice recognition. MP3 player and Bluetooth. It is currently scheduled to be available to the public sometime in 2009.
The earliest application of the Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL) programming tool, was the original Jak and Daxter game. Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin lead the creation of GOAL which was built using the Allegro CL and Lisp languages and allowed the creation of over 500 types of game object, each with a particular set of complex elements. The smooth animation, beautiful vistas and bright colours are all characteristic of the GOAL engine.
2008’s Star Wars: Force Unleashed is the first game to use both of the ground-breaking Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) technologies. Euphoria is a behavioural simulation engine that ensures the game’s characters move and act in lifelike ways, while DMM is a physics engine that adds an incredible level of realism to a game, including the way that materials break and how grass sways in the wind, for example.