According to a report on the Wired News website, Mac gamers in Japan will soon see a plethora of new Mac games hit the market, thanks to Apple's longtime competitor Microsoft.

One week before the annual Tokyo Game Show, the Japanese head office of the computer software behemoth announced that it is planning on translating and marketing a whole series of popular Mac games, under the Microsoft Mac Games Collection. The first game released under the new moniker was MacSoft's completely-Japanese version of Halo for Mac.

Although Japan is the Macintosh's second largest market, gaming isn't very popular with the country's Mac fans. While dozens of Mac game titles are available for Japanese consumers in certain circles, most of them are in English, or have very little Japanese localisation features - some menu items may appear in Japanese, but the games are still largely played in English - which doesn't appeal to the Japanese market.

Microsoft's plan is to change all that, by completely translating and localising every aspect of a hand-picked selection of popular titles, then optimizing them to run on most Powerbooks and iBooks. While the company has not divulged which, or how many titles will be released under the new label, Microsoft representatives have indicated that the list of games will grow to a significant amount.

Thanks to IMG reader Chad Wadsworth for the heads up on this story.

Wired News

Microsoft (add to watch list)

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