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Aspyr Media has announced plans to release Command & Conquer Generals Deluxe Edition for the Mac. The collection will include both Command & Conquer Generals and its expansion pack, Zero Hour. C&C Generals allows real time strategy fans to control the forces of the United States, China, or the fictional Global Liberation Army as they battle for dominance. Zero Hour adds a variety of new vehicles, upgrades, and missions.

From Aspyr's website:

Command & Conquer Generals Features:
- Wage real-time war in more ways than ever with a modern and near-future arsenal.
- Command the powerful U.S. forces, the vast Chinese war machine, or the resourceful Global Liberation Army.
- Battle it out in unprecedented detail on full 3D environments.
- All-new units and tactics with maximum destructive capability, including Aurora Strike Bombers, Dragon Tanks, and much more.
- Team up with eight friends or go head to-head in massive online multiplayer battles.

Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour Features:
- Unload on your enemies with an all-new, hi-tech arsenal featuring 30 new units and 20 new upgrades from the Chinese ECM Tank to the United States Spectre Gunship.
- Enlist in the all-new Generals Challenge mode where you match your strategies-and your next-generation arsenal-against 9 enemy AI Generals with unique personalities, tactics, and taunts.
- 15 new missions rattle veteran Generals as they root out a splinter cell in Cairo, steal deadly toxins from a U.S. lab, and more.
- All new weather effects further immerse you in a more realistic combat environment.
-Prepare for multiplayer mayhem with 25 new multiplayer maps!

No release date has been set, but the option to preorder the collection should be available soon. Click on the links below for more information.

Command & Conquer Generals Deluxe Edition

Macworld News: C&C GDE Coming Soon

Aspyr Media

i5works

Buy Command & Conquer: Generals

Macgamestore.com has begun selling GarageGames' TubeTwist as a digital download. It is available for $19.99.

The overall goal of the game is to construct a machine that will guide the professors' famous Macroton devices from their starting positions to a final reactor tube where their energy will be extracted and stored for later use. Over thirty different tubes of various shapes and sizes must be combined to complete the machines including spirals, switches, anti-gravity devices, twisty turns, and precipitous drops.

TubeTwist is a puzzle game fashioned after classics like The Incredible Machine and Mouse Trap. Each experiment has many solutions due to the large variety of tubes which can be used to construct each machine. There is no clock and there is no score - so just sit back and enjoy the mind bending fun that is TubeTwist!

For more on TubeTwist, follow the link below.

Macgamestore: TubeTwist

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Mad Data has updated their demo of NoLimits Rollercoaster to version 1.5.8.

Changes:

• Vertex Engine 1.5 using VertexBufferObjects (VBO)
• Several optimizations for Macs
• Special optimizations for ATI hardware
• Universal Binary for PPC and i386
• A few bug fixes

MacGameFiles:NoLimits Rollercoaster Demo 1.5.8

No Limits Roller Coaster

Mad Data

The freeware Descent 2 game D2X-XL has been updated to version 1.5.128 which adds support for Descent 1 missions.

Updated in this version:

• Fixed many Descent 1 related issues (texturing, sounds, music, briefings, cheats, ship physics)
• Added weapon and equipment HUD overview
• Added a new tracker and a permanent ban feature
• Improved controls configurability (configure each mouse/joystick axis separately)
• Improved automatic level download stability
• Fixed a lot of minor bugs

MacGameFiles:D2X-XL 1.5.128

D2X-XL Homepage

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3DGamers web site has posted the patch notes and beta update for Quake 4 for the PC. There are numerous additions including

• voice chat in multiplayer
• forcemodel option
• a one-minute warning for tournament matches
• fixed pure server autodownloading
• Hyper-Threading Technology support
• smooth stairjumping
• a ton of multiplayer specific fixes which have been requested by the community and discovered during our own gameplay. In short, multiplayer is fixed. ;)

For a complete list of new features, fixes, and changes, please see the ReadMe file following the link below. Hopefully we will see all of these additions trickle down to the Mac version.

3DGamers: Quake 4 1.1b patch notes

Aspyr Media

Buy Quake 4

Peter Cohen from MacWorld posted an excellent article regarding the current situation of sports games on the Mac.

Peter describes the hurdles that Mac publishers face including licensing fees, middleware and market size.

Read Peter's excellent article and see what sports games are already out there for the Mac by following the link below.

MacWorld: Where are all the Sports Games?

MacWorld has just posted a review of Apple's new MacBook Pro as well as some benchmarks.

The slightly wider and thinner evolution of the Powerbook fairs very well. Despite the MacBook using a mobility version of the ATi x1600, it still scores the same frame rate in Unreal Tournament 2004 as the Dual Core 2GHz iMac does (mind you UT2004 is a processor based game so this might not be the same with every game out there). The MacBook Pro has a frame rate 2.5 times greater than that of the PowerBook G4.

Visit the link below to read the results from the first day of lab tests (more results to follow).

MacWorld:MacBook Pro - Day 1

Apple Games has released another feature, this time dealing with computer card games of all sorts. The article includes a brief history of card games, a comprehensive list of games available to Mac users, and some descriptions of games from developers such as Donohoe Digital and GameHouse.

GameHouse’s Hawaiian-themed Aloha Solitaire and Aloha TriPeaks titles offer new twists on traditional solo card games, complete with power-ups, difficulty levels, different types of configurations, and other options. The former combines mahjong and solitaire, challenging you to clear the screen by matching pairs of cards. You select them on the board or from the cards you draw from the stock deck.

In Aloha TriPeaks, you draw a card from the deck and select cards from the board that let you move up or down, regardless of suit. For example, if you draw a five, you can go up to six or down to four and then go up or down again from there.

Apple Games: Card Games Feature

Donohoe Digital

GameHouse

Barefeats a Mac benchmarking website, has posted some interesting notes about testing the Universal Binary of Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

As noted on their Quick Notes page:

We were experimenting with different video settings in Full Screen mode while running our horde warrior around near Camp Narache in Muldore, a combination of action and environment that has proven to stress the graphics processor. We discovered that if you simply access the Multi-sampling drop down menu, log out of the of the realm, and re-enter, the frame rates jump up by 55%. This happens consistently.

It might explain why were were getting a big drop in framerates on the Intel iMac when switching from Windowed to Full Screen mode. The action described above bumps the frame rates back up to what we were expecting to see. This phenom does not occur on PPC Macs.

1. We ran WoW on three different dual processor machines. WoW was using 110% of the 200% available cycles. My guess is that it's handing off some sound processing to the second processor. At any rate, two processors (or dual cores) are better than one.
2. WoW uses as much as 400MB for itself. Total "all processes" memory usage with only WoW running averaged 1.1GB. That means you'll want to have at least 1.25GB of memory if the only thing running is WoW. You'll want 2GB or more if you like to run WoW with other apps.
3. When running in Windowed mode, frame rates were more affected by CPU speed than by graphics processor speed. However, when running in Full Screen mode, the faster GPUs made a significant difference -- especially when running at maximum quality settings and high resolution (1600x1000 or better).
4. Frame rates seemed as affected by the complexity of the surrounding scene as by the amount of activity.
We plan to devote a special page to WoW sharing more performance tips and comparing a wide variety of Mac systems using two or three test scenarios.

Barefeats: Quick Takes

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