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With over 5,000 downloads to date in just a matter days, the free first-person shooter, Enemy Territory, has become popular with Mac gamers. Aspyr's Brad Oliver, who helped in the Mac conversion has posted some interesting details in his blog about Enemy Territory, a popular mod called True Combat: Elite, and about an upcoming Return to Castle Wolfenstein patch.

Here's his blog entry:

A while back (sometime last year, I think) I posted publicly that I'd do the Mac conversion of this one for free if someone could hook me up with the code. Given that ET is free itself, this seemed about the only way to get it to the Mac. As it turns out, my plea didn't fall on deaf ears: Timothee Bessett at id and Dan Hollis (of the ETPro mod team) got in touch with me around mid-to-late December to see if I was still interested, so around mid-to-late January, I was able to finally get going on it. The key to making this work was the release of the 2.60 patch for ET for Win32 and Linux. It gave us the perfect opportunity to get the necessary Mac binaries into the new patch to allow it all to work right.

The timing was kinda bad for me, since I was doing this in my spare time, and pretty much all of my spare time has recently been consumed with a) house hunting, b) house buying and c) house cleaning/painting/repairing in preparation for d) house moving this Saturday. ;-) Ironically, my free time will return to normal here in about two weeks - such is life. ;-) Fortunately, both TTimo and Dan gave a tremendous amount of support to me and the Mac port in general. They both made code fixes and did testing on the Mac version. TTimo also put together the installer, which ended up being a non-trivial task. Ryan Gordon had some interesting things to say about the state of installers on the Mac not so long ago - I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find his quotes. :-)

One notable thing about ET mods: most of them are very PC-specific and will need to be recompiled to work on the Mac. I've already tried to contact the True Combat: Elite guys, since it's apparently a very popular mod. Hopefully we'll see some progress soon.

Aspyr Media

Westlake Interactive

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Brad Oliver's Blog

MGF: Enemy Territory Mac 2.60

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Although computer RPG's have become incredible popular in the last few years, classic paper & pencil RPGs have continued to thrive because of the simple fact that human beings have the ability to improvise. IMG has posted a feature that checks out the dozens of Mac applications available for die-hard RPG gamers.

To check out the article, please follow the link below.

IMG: Mac-Assisted Role-Playing

Dracosoft has released their latest game for the Macintosh, Avalanche Extreme. An addictive arcade/puzzle game, the object of the game is to top an avalanche as it approaches using bombs and combined bonuses.

Here's more from the press release:

Click on three or more matching blocks to destroy portions of the Avalanche. The more blocks destroyed the more points earned. Beware; the Avalanche is quickly gaining speed. Used color bombs to destroy similar colored portions of the Avalanche and black bombs to destroy giant areas. Blizzard items and frozen bombs make Avalanche Extreme more exciting than ever. Add point bonuses and the ability to build them up and you have one super addictive game.

MGF: Avalanche Extreme

Dracosoft

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Macologist has posted the Mac version of Spatial Fear: Prologue, a single-player mod for the original Unreal Tournament. The mod sports original content and an original story-line.

Spatial Fear: Prologue centers around a female science officer sent to help with the deployment of a man-made wormhole device. The successful deployment of the device will complete a complex network of spacial jump-points. But, when you arrive to complete the deployment, it appears that no one is left alive on the ship, and the noises that you are hearing in the distance are not human.

The modification sports the following features:

• Wide range of weapons and items
• Stunning architecture and design
• Atmospheric settings
• Unique and interactive HUD
• Improved AI intelligence
• Intuitive inventory system
• Large number of interactive NPC characters
• Professional voice acting in selected areas
• Ingenious conversation system
• Multiple areas of the ship to explore

Spatial Fear:Prologue v1.2

Epic Games

MacSoft

Westlake Interactive

Unreal Tournament

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Macologist has posted an in-depth article on the performance of Doom 3 on different Macintosh system configurations. The benchmarks cover systems from the highest-end G5 available down to a 500MHz G3 Cube. The article talks about what actually affects the performance of the game and what you can do to make it run better on your system.

The article has this to say about lower frame-rates on low-spec systems:

We have found that Doom 3's playability fares extremely well in the actual game given the timedemo numbers of any chosen setting, and in this sense it's a very good port in contrast to the crawling play of Delta Force BHD on lower-spec systems. In particular, we have found that even if the Doom 3 timedemo mark edges below 20 fps, the quality of play in the actual singleplayer game at that setting is enjoyable, darkly scary, and definitely worth playing for lower-spec Macs, despite the occasional framerate stutters due to scene scripting (but almost never in firefights). Such minor issues are likely easy to overlook for the gamer with an older Mac who is considering buying this game for playability despite acknowledging suboptimal performance-- witness the G4 iMac owners playing Call of Duty.

Doom 3 Introspective: Mac Performance Followup

id Software

Aspyr Media

DOOM 3

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