Picture the chaos of the last hour of the last day of Summer CES. Six hundred thousand people packed into an empty aircraft hangar waiting for the bell to ring so they could go get a beer. It was under these circumstances that I managed to get a look at Interplay's PC products, and I'm glad that I did. Despite the surroundings, the Interplay booth was peaceful and serene, rather like the calm eye at the center of a hurricane.

	Several of Interplay's designers were on hand to show off their creations. This was cool. Somehow, it's always more exciting to hear about a game from someone who knows and cares about it a great deal. Particularly interesting titles on their way from Interplay include Stonekeep, their long-awaited fantasy RPG; Kingdom: The Far Reaches, an adventure game featuring digitized, hand-drawn animation for PC CD ROM and 3DO; the enhanced CD versions of SimAnt and SimEarth; Voyeur, the PC CD port of the controversial CD-i title; Bridge Deluxe II, which will include better AI than the original, as well as a comprehensive tutorial and digitized video of Omar Sharif; and Dungeon Master II: Skullkeep, the sequel to the classic CRPG which pioneered the point and click interface as we know it.

	Among the titles Interplay was especially proud of was Descent. This first-person shooter puts you in the cockpit of a vehicle sent to eliminate the threat of alien invasion in a mining colony on Pluto. You've got to wipe out the aliens before they reach the Earth. Descent is unique among games of this genre in that it lets you rotate your view in any direction - not just left and right, but up, down, sideways, inside and out.

	Then there's Cyberia. The gang from Irvine was so thrilled to be announcing this title that they threw a party, complete with glow sticks and a wet bar, and invited everyone in Chicago to come to it. Not a whole lot of the game was working at the show, but what worked looked superb. This adventure game, in which you race to recover a doomsday device before it falls into the wrong hands, is being completely rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations using Wavefront. It is also being scored by well-known pop musician Thomas Dolby.

	Cyberia is organized into scenes, much like a movie. It is reminiscent of Rebel Assault, in that the gameplay varies from scene to scene. Of the two working scenes Interplay brought to the show, one featured a third-person view of the lead character walking around, while the other was a shooting sequence where you are flying a fightercraft along a fixed path which does not change and must shoot down enemy planes before they nail you.

	Nearing completion by the time of the show was Star Reach. This engaging space strategy/action game features simpe resource management and planetary conquest. Use your minerals to build ships, to go out and conquer more planets to get more minerals. Games are organized around scenarios, which are designed to require a much smaller investment of time than most strategy games. Star Reach includes several scenarios, and the designers hope to release a scenario editor as freeware a month or so after the initial shipping of the game.