System Requirements

Heroes of Might & Magic IV is scheduled to ship in late November.

IMG First Look: Heroes of Might & Magic IV

3DO (add to watch list)

Contraband Entertainment (add to watch list)

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GameSpy has posted a very revealing look back at the development of Master of Orion III from QuickSilver's Rantz Hoseley. With the game very near to completion, the article almost reads like a postmortem of trials and mistakes made during development. He discusses their initial drive to make the game a complex "galaxy simulator, not a game," and the decision earlier this year to go back and put the fun back into it.

At the beginning of the process, we had about 65 - 80 UI screens depending on your defining criteria. As we head towards "Gold," MOO3 has around 15.

The end result is a game that is much more focused and directed in terms of the player experience. To those who are concerned about "compromised vision," let me give you two examples that underscore MOO3 in the two incarnations. In the first incarnation, one of the programmers' sons came home for a weekend, and played Master of Orion III. This is a guy who is very smart and loves TBS games, and the MOO and Civ series. After playing it, he said to his father that it was completely overwhelming and that we had indeed did what we said we would, but that it really wasn't fun.

Cut forward to about three weeks or so ago when the external beta testers got their copies of the game and started putting it through its paces. Not one of them has said anything even slightly resembling the comment that this is a "dumbed-down" RTS game disguised as a TBS game, or anything of that sort. MOO3 is still very deep, and a serious TBS game, but now it's also comprehensible and fun. This assessment our beta testers seem to agree with.

Master of Orion III Development Diary

MacSoft (add to watch list)

Quicksilver Software (add to watch list)

Master of Orion III (add to watch list)

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Pangea Software today announced that their latest game, Bugdom 2, is eligible for their free scholastic site license offer. Since 1999, Pangea Software has maintained a policy that any school or public library may have a free site license to any of their games so long as they own at least one legitimate copy.

Here's a clip from the press release:

“We don’t believe that schools should be spending education dollars on video games,” said Brian Greenstone, President of Pangea Software, “Therefore, we have always allowed schools to install any of our games onto as many of their Mac’s as they want without charging a penny for a site license.”

Pangea Software is well known for creating family-friendly video games, and according to Greenstone many schools around the world use their games as rewards for students. He continued to say that if there were an effective way to distribute free copies of their games to every school in the country they would do it, but Pangea Software is a very small company and doesn’t have the resources to handle such an undertaking.

IMG Preview: Bugdom 2

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Bugdom 2 (add to watch list)

Pangea's Scholastic License Offer

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IMG's Brad Custer has released a new desktop for your viewing pleasure. This week's installment features Pangea's recently-released action-adventure game, Bugdom 2.

Here's Brad on the latest desktop:

With Bugdom 2 being released recently, the requests for a desktop featuring Skip has been a favorite topic in my email. Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software was kind enough to answer my numerous emails with a great supply of art that allowed me to create this week's desktop. I entitled it "Infestation" and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.

Custer's Desktops

Inside Mac Games is proud to announe the Mac-in-One Virtual Open, an online golf tournament benefiting the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The tournament begins on October 31st and entry fees are $25 for the Championship division and $15 for the Pro Division. All of the money will be donated to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

In addition to the donation, players will need the following to participate in the tournament: a copy of Bold's Links Championship Edition, a copy of Hotline Connect, and an understanding of the Links Golf Community rules.

Players will be eligible for some outstanding prizes. Prizes include the Adobe Web Collection, various flavors of ATI Radeons, Palm Handhelds, titles from Aspyr Media, Destineer Studios, Freeverse, and MacPlay, Kensington mice and more!

Inside Mac Games and Michael Phillips, the tournament's coordinator, would like to thank the companies mentioned for their generous donations.

To sign up for the tournament, head over to the Mac-in-One web site. The first 10 sign-ups get a free Aspyr or MacPlay t-shirt.

Bold (add to watch list)

Links Championship Edition (add to watch list)

Mac In One Virtual Open

Download Hotline Connect

Links Golf Community

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Aleph One, the Marathon open source project, has just updated their web site with a new progress report on the Carbonized version of the game.

According to programmer Woody Zenfell, incompatabilities between OS X and the "classic" Mac OS' networking code are causing slow-downs of the port:

According to the SDL folks, threading is 'broken' under the "classic" Mac OS so the SDL_Thread subsystem is totally unimplemented on that platform. So the high-priority thread blocking on a select() (or the SDL equivalent wrapper) is not an option there.

Reworking the existing AppleTalk code to use IP (via Open Transport, not using SDL_net at all) would be quite an undertaking, I think, and goes against the nice 'common code base' situation we're getting with SDL_net.

Aleph One Carbon Progress Report

Feline Entertainment has released a new OpenGL action title The Belt for the uDevGame 2002 competition. You may recall the company's previous title, Vortex Next Generation was one of the winners of the Independent Games Festival's student competition.

The Belt is a cross-platform (Mac OS 9, OS X, or Windows) action game which pits two players across a chaos filled with asteroids and other dangers. It even features networking via Apple's new Rendezvous technology. Here's a clip from the web site:

The Belt is an arcade game that pits you against another opponent in a battle to the finish. Vaguely reminiscent of old-style games where opposing turrets would fire against the wind to blow each other up, the Belt incorporates more strategy along with senseless destruction and zainy creatures to provide for a unique arcade experience!

The Belt

Solace

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Vortex NG (add to watch list)

Yesterday, ATI announced the Radeon 9500 Pro; a trimmed down, mainstream version of their flagship graphics card, the Radeon 9700 Pro. Priced at just $200, the 9500 Pro is designed to compete with NVIDIA's midrange offerings and fill in the gap between the 9700 Pro and 9000 Pro.

The Radeon 9500 Pro is outfitted with 128 MB of DDR memory, just like it's older brother, but the core and memory frequencies have been lowered to 275 MHz and 540 MHz (effective), respectively. Also, the width of the bus has been halved to 128-bits, which brings the memory bandwith down to 8.8 GB/sec. The 9500 Pro still retains eight rendering pipelines, giving it a massive 2.2 gigapixel per second fillrate.

While no Mac version has been announced, ATI is considering the possibility, as it would also be an attractive midrange graphics card on the Mac. If you would like to see a Mac-branded Radeon 9500 Pro, send feedback to ATI via the link below.

Radeon 9500 Pro Press Release

AnandTech: Radeon 9500 Pro Preview

ATI Customor Feedback

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Shockwave experts Skunk Studios have just released what may very well be the Mac's first 3D virtual bowling alley.

GutterBall allows players access to three different bowling alleys, each decked out in distintcly different styles. Players can pick from a large number of pre-designed bowling balls, or can configure their own balls and skin them to their liking. The game allows players to post their scores on the internet and compare with other players. To add flavour, players can choose from up to four different colour commentators, and the game even features several music tracks from funk artist Ronkat.

Bowling fans can download the full game from Skunk Studios or play an abridge version on the internet on their web site. The full download allows players fifteen games before needing to register. Registration costs $19.95.

Game requirements are low - the readme file, although written for Windows users, calls for any 3D acceleration card, a 333mhz machine, and the latest DirectX drivers, which probably wasn't meant for Mac users. Note, however, that the game does not run in OS X nor in Classic mode, so you'll have to boot in OS 9.2 or earlier in order to play.

Skunk Studio's GutterBall Bowling

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Hardly two weeks after their previous patch, Guild Software has just released another update to their space combat game Vendetta.

Vendetta Test 3.0.8 deals with many issues including bug squashing and gameplay changes:

This release adds a number of rendering and collision detection optimizations that should improve performance. Many bugs and crashes have been fixed, although there are still a few yet remaining.

New features:
A teammate carrying a flag now shows up at a "+" on radar. Added mousewheel support for scrollbars and listboxes under Linux/Win32. Character names now max at 63 characters.

The Vendetta Test is a Deathmatch and Capture The Flag game created using Guild's very own WGAF engine. The game is unique in that rather than running around on foot armed to the teeth with flak cannons and sniper rifles, Vendetta's action takes place in space using a variety of differently-equipped ships. The public Vendetta Test was released to allow the designers the opportunity to watch their engine in action, monitoring and improving issues like networking infrastructure and gameplay design.

If you're interested in participating in the test, you'll need to create an account and download their client software. System requirements are currently listed as any G3 or G4 based Mac equipped with 128 megs of RAM, a 16 MB 3D-accelerated video card, and Mac OS X.

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