Kingpin: Life of Crime Ships to Stores

Interplay has shipped Kingpin: Life of Crime, the first-person organized-crime shooter from Xatrix Entertainment, to retail nationwide for Windows 95, 98, and NT. Built on an enhanced Quake II engine, Kingpin drops you into a fictional retro-tech city with a film-noir look, where you follow storylines and subplots, recruit a team of hired bodyguards, and size up each confrontation before everything explodes into all-out warfare. The campaign covers 27 levels across six episodes, and multiplayer supports up to 16 players over an Internet server.

The tech list runs long: 32-bit color, full alpha transparencies, gouraud lighting on characters, motion-captured animation, and AI built on a neural net. The soundtrack comes from Cypress Hill, whose raw sound fits a game about clawing up the criminal ladder about as well as anything could. I’ve been waiting on this one, and my summer just got a lot less law-abiding.