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A retired wrestler named Maxx Payne has filed a $10 million lawsuit against a group of video game developers for allegedly stealing his persona to create the hit third-person shooter, Max Payne. The suit is against Rockstar Games, 3d Realms, Gathering of Developers, and the original developer, Remedy Entertainment.

Here's what Maxx had to say about the lawsuit:

"I left wrestling to come home to Utah and be with my family and I find myself in the biggest battle of my life — to save my identity," said the ex-fighter, whose real name is Darryl Peterson. "They stole something from me that I'm not going to give up."

The Macintosh version of Max Payne was published by MacSoft. We'll be sure to follow this intruiging story.

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Inside Mac Games has posted a review of Aspyr's SimCity 4, the latest addition to the SimCity franchise. Here's a clip from the review:

The concept is so simple it’s brilliant: build and manage a city from the ground up. The bulk of this civic work will be done in Mayor Mode, but there is also a God Mode and a My Sim mode at your disposal. God Mode allows you to shape the land in your city’s area however you see fit, and My Sim mode allows you to import your Sims from your The Sims game (or a selection of provided Sims if you have none) for a street level look at life in the city. The interface, taking its cues from The Sims, now puts most features in a fold-out lower-left corner control panel and other tools along the left-hand side of the screen. A new and welcome addition to SimCity game play is that of regions which are divided into many plots of land for potential city locations, enabling the players to establish different types of communities on one region map to strike deals and share resources.

IMG Review: SimCity 4

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Developers "tigital" and Taylor Richards (known as "mtr" in the forums) have made significant progress on the Mac OS X port of Descent: FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2, two critically acclaimed space combat simulators originally developed by Volition. A beta of the FreeSpace 2 demo was released to a small group of testers over the weekend and a second beta is currently in testing. In a forum post, Richards discusses some of the remaining issues:

Music/Voices: They don't work at the moment in OSX or Linux but I'm working on the audio decoder as we speak.

3D Positional Audio: This is also something I'm working on and the code is there but strange bugs keep making things sound weird so it's just a matter of me fixing everything and getting it into CVS.

Movies (in full version): Video is working but audio is waiting on me to have time to finish the streaming code.

FPS: To get a FPS counter just add "ShowFPS=1" to the "[Default]" section of the ini file. Because of the way FPS affects video/audio playback speed and menus the FPS will never be above 120 so don't worry if that's as high as it goes.

Joystick Force Feedback: I'm working on this for Linux and have it most of the way working. I did decide to try and get it working for OSX (I think 10.2.3 and above required) as well, though this is last on the list of things to do.

The problem with the music, ambient sounds and briefing voices is that the sounds are MS-ADPCM encoded which isn't directly supported by OpenAL at present. An easy and cross platform method of decoding wasn't found but Ryan Gordon gave us permission to use his ADPCM decoder from SDL_sound. I'm currently integrating this into a decoder for the game which can be used for both normal game sounds and streaming audio (briefing voices). When finished this solution will be contained within the game and not rely on external decoding sources like the Windows version does.

IMG Forum: FreeSpace 2 for OS X

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Can a "bad" game be blamed for a weak showing at the box office? According to Paramount executives, the answer is yes. The Cradle of Life," the second film based on Lara Croft, opened in fourth place at the U.S. box office last weekend with sales totalling $21.7 million, below the opening weekend of 2001's "Tomb Raider."

Despite strong sales, the release of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness has been marred with bad reviews and bugs, which according to some makes the game almost unplayable. Jeremy Heath-Smith, a senior Eidos development executive, resigned days after the game was released.

Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness game has been released on the PC and PlayStation 2. There's no word yet on a Mac version.

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Aspyr has released a trailer of Indiana Jones and the Emporer's Tomb. The movie shows off some of the cool action and adventures Indy faces in this latest Aspyr game. The trailer comes in two sizes: a small 3 MB version and a large 26 MB version.

Here's a bit more info on the latest Indy game:

You're Indiana Jones. Legendary adventurer. Daring rogue. And the most butt-kicking archaeologist the world has ever seen. It's 1935 and this time you must prevent a powerful Chinese artifact from falling into evil hands. This globe-spanning adventure pits you against evil Nazis and the Asian underworld with a mysterious and alluring partner, Mei Ying. It'll take more than just a trusty whip and pistol to avoid deadly traps and navigate through all the dangerous environments. Do you have what it takes to possess the mysterious "Heart of the Dragon?"

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MGF: Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb Trailer

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The IMG Store is lowered its price on MacSoft's Dungeon Siege. The game is available for MacGames CD/IMG Pro subscribers for just $39.95 while non-subscribers can pick it up for $44.95.

The entire world of Dungeon Siege has been created in full, magnificent 3D. Every player, creature, building, tree, and patch of land is a fully three-dimensional object that has been blended together to create an engrossing, lush, and realistic environment for your adventures.

Peering down from a ledge upon your enemies in the valley below, crossing a wooden bridge over a wide chasm, or climbing to the top of a ten story tower, the world of Dungeon Siege has been designed to truly extend in all dimensions, giving you strategic advantages of height and gorgeous views of the world that will keep you moving onwards to see what lies ahead.

For more information, follow the link provided below.

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Jeff Tunnell of GarageGames recently sat down with online gaming publication DailyGame in an exclusive interview, which has been posted on the publication's website. The interview gives readers a closer look at GarageGames, including its history, its present, and beyond. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

DG: So far, you've had some really interesting (and quite fun) titles ship out. What can we expect to see coming from GarageGames?

JT: We have our eye on a number of titles and teams that are working on promising projects. Most of them are in the action arcade genre, like the recently launched Tennis Critters. We are extremely excited about our just-announced addition of PomPom Games Mutant Storm and Space Tripper to our publishing lineup. These are two titles we feel demand to be "discovered" and brought to a wider audience.

As mentioned above, although our titles have had a very wide casual appeal thus far, we have many "core" gamer titles being developed, but have nothing to announce on this yet. Since most indie games are being self funded, the schedules are hard to predict, so keep an eye for announcements in this area.

GarageGames Tells All About Independent Game Publishing

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The folks at Bioware recently posted exciting news to eager users awaiting the release of Neverwinter Nights for Mac. According to a news post on their website, the Mac version of the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired role-playing game went Golden Master on July 25th and was sent out for duplication. The game should be available on store shelves in the coming week.

The Mac version of Neverwinter Nights has gone gold, and will be in stores as early as August 2nd, depending on your store's shipping!

Mac Neverwinter Nights Gone Gold!

IMG Preview: Neverwinter Nights

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