Dark Basic & Dark Matter Bundle

Its simple-to-use interface allows you to go from command-line programming to game-play testing in one easy function-key press. The 25 in-programme tutorials guide you through all the different elements of the programme, using 45 demos to show you line by line how to make your creation. You will be playing your own first-person shooter or flight simulator in a matter of hours.

The package includes many features to make your games even better, such as the ability to add music and import your own graphics for use within games. Included within the DarkBASIC package is Microsoft's Direct X: this powerful utility handles all the hardware in your PC, such as the graphics card and sound card, allowing you more time to concentrate on creating the game. Also included are tools for making music and animating graphics, so everything that you need to get going is here on the two-disk set.

There are more than 45 demos included on the disk so you can see how some working programmes operate. Also included are 600 textures, 120 sound effects and 900 3-D models to bring your games to life. Games can be saved as single, executable files so you don't need DarkBASIC to run them, allowing you to share them with your friends and give the professionals a good run for their money. --Robert Hyde

DarkMatter Review
Coding 3-D games such as DarkMatter is an art form, creating the graphics for such a game even more so. Unless you happen to be a talented artist it can seriously hamper the look and feel of the finished product, leaving a great concept with a shoddy feel.

DarkMatter aims to fill the artistic void with a large selection of pre-built and pre-skinned 3-D models and hundreds of textures, which can be applied to any user created objects. The ready-built models are provided in .3DS and .X formats ready for import into a wide variety of modelling programs as well as 3-D gaming creation tools like DarkBasic and Blitz Basic 3-D. The overall quality of the models is good, some of the human figures are a little samey and vehicle wheels have some unfortunate corners but as a whole there’s enough here to populate a reasonable 3-D world without anything looking out of place.

The textures are nicely done and with more than 186 megabytes of images to choose from there’s something for all occasions, neatly stored under headings like sci-fi, urban and natural. The whole package is held together by a custom viewer which allows all of the models and textures to be viewed and selected, the interface is a little clunky but it does it job.

As an added bonus, FastTrak have thought to include an enhancement pack for DarkBasic which adds a series of new commands including multi-playerinclude, an enhancement pack for multi-player support. --Chris Russell