In its recently released July newsletter Aspyr Media once again offered a glimpse of The Gamerhood, its upcoming service for purchasing and downloading games. The company promises to release more information as the release date draws closer.

The Gamerhood(TM) Features

- Purchase games and download them online
- Play games without physical CD/DVD media
- Check user compatibility by comparing machine's hardware against a
game's minimum system requirements before purchase
- Alert users to current Aspyr projects and new games
- Allow users to register games online
- Alert users to game updates and provide installs for updates
- Provide a user-friendly interface and convenient way to organize
personal gaming catalogue
- Allow parents to restrict game play and online game store material based
on ESRB ratings
- Provide users opportunity to take advantage of special offers

Civilization® IV Mac was a very particular case of new system software
being released after the game had gone final, that led to bugs in the
initial version of the game. In this case an update included several new
components for both sound and graphics, and some caused conflicts with existing games. This caused a range of issues in Civ® 4 that we've been working hard to fix. While in many cases developers have access to
pre-release versions of video card & system updates, it can be a balancing act to decide how much to test with each pre-release seed and how much to concentrate on known stable officially released configurations. When it does happen that a bug crops up in the final release of a new computer or system update, the best we can do is work as quickly as possible on a patch to fix any conflicts.

We've been busily working on a large group of patches that should be
released in July and August. These include a Civilization IV Mac patch to
address performance and sound issues, a Civ 3 Mac patch that adds Universal support for Intel and several bug fixes, Universal Mac versions of Rollercoaster® Tycoon 3, Jedi Knight 2, and Jedi Academy, an update for Tiger Woods® 2005 Mac that fixes a conflict with the latest version of QuickTime, and an update for Call of Duty® 2 Mac to bring it up to the latest PC version 1.3.

Aspyr July Newsletter

Aspyr Media (add to watch list)

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.