Indiana Jones returns to the small screen possibly years before he'll return to the big one. by Vaughn Smith

May 12, 2006 - Believe it or not, Indiana Jones has been starring in video games for almost 25 years now. While some of them haven't been "all that and a bag of chips" as the wannabe cool people say, the last Indiana Jones game released on Xbox and developed by The Collective (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was definitely the best of the lot. Featuring a good whack of platforming, exploration and action, The Emperor's Tomb got more right than it did wrong, and that's about the most you can ask from a video game.

Unveiled at E3 the next iteration of Indiana Jones, currently untitled, will once again be an original adventure and therefore will not be based on the [presumably] upcoming movie. What makes this next adventure so exciting for Indy and gaming fans, is what Lucas Arts calls the Euphoria engine, upon which the foundation of the game is built upon.

Euphoria is an environmental awareness system created for the AI in the game. This will allow a myriad of actions for each situation and even if replayed, you most likely won't see the same sequence replayed in an identical fashion. You might shoot a balcony and watch as three enemies fall to their demise, while two attempt to grab on. A reply of that scenario may not even involve the balcony crumbling beneath their feet....or perhaps none of them are unable to grab on. The idea is that none of these events or actions are pre-scripted, like you'd experience in a game such as Half-Life, where an event is triggered at the same place each time you replay the game.

Lucas Arts is also incorporating a third party "digital molecular matter" system, which is said to simulate a wide range of materials in a very realistic manner, but we're unsure of what that will mean for this particular adventure or how it will be implemented within the game environment.

We can tell you that the storyline takes place in 1939, approximately one year after the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We also know that George Lucas himself is involved in some minute aspect of the story. No word on whether Spielberg's on board, but we highly doubt it.

We'll have more info in the coming months.

By Vaughn Smith
CCC Site Director