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The Macgamestore now has Ankh available as a digital download. Brought to the Mac by Runesoft, ANKH is an award-winning adventure title in which a young man goes on a quest to remove a curse from himself.

The player can expect classical adventure elements, enveloped in a magical 3D world with state-of-the-art graphics that will really take your socks off: there are new details to discover thoughout the game, all of which have been endearingly dveloped and animated. Flags and palm trees waving in the wind and the many other details hidden in the game environment are only one demonstration of the outstanding graphics in Ankh.

Runesoft

ANKH

Macgamestore - Ankh

MGF - Ankh Demo 1.0

Buy ANKH

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Earlier this week, Macologist's own Command & Conquerors Generals guru released mod launchers for three mods for the expansion C&C Generals: Zero Hour. Mod launchers allows easy access to the three mods without moving around files.

After spending countless hours playing with bits of code, resident C&C Generals member super_kev has released mod launchers for three Zero Hour mods (Pro:Gen Director's Cut, Mideast Crisis 1.5, and Shockwave 0.93) as well as updating those mods to include installers as well as launchers. These launchers will make playing Zero Hour mods a pain-free experience, so download and give them a try.

C&C Generals: Zero Hour Mod Launchers

Aspyr Media

Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

Buy Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

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Macologist has posted a new review of Call of Duty 2, the continuation of the World War II themed first person shooter series. The game features both a single player campaign and online multiplayer action. Macologist gave the game a score of 4 out of 5.

From the review:

Multi-player action is where games like Call of Duty 2 shine. Nothing beats being part of a tight knit team as you lay down some smackage on your online opponents. Out of the box though, Call of Duty 2's online experience is a mixed bag. The lack of PunkBuster support basically allows unscrupulous players to use cheats and hacks such as aimbots, plus you'll rarely find any servers to play on. However, Aspyr recently released the long awaited 1.3 patch that fixed all of Call of Duty 2's shortcomings making the online section of this game a much more enjoyable experience. The patch brings a multitude of bug fixes as well as PunkBuster support and a couple of new maps thrown into the mix. Therefore, we highly recommend that you download this update and enjoy the online component as it was meant to be played.

The online experience of Call of Duty 2 is 'almost' perfect since the release of the 1.3 patch, but of course, players may still have some minor annoyances with PunkBuster, but to be honest they exist in most online games. Minor issues aside, this is the last thing you'll be thinking about once your heart is beating in your throat, desperately trying to locate your enemy whilst being the last player on your team.

Macologist: Call of Duty 2 Review

Aspyr Media

Call of Duty 2

Buy Call of Duty 2

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Macworld's Game Room has released another review, this one focusing on Freeverse Software's Big Bang Brain Games. The compilation of six brain teasing puzzle titles includes Echo, Fallacy, NovaSweeper, Reaction, Remembrance, and Sudoku. The Game Room gave Big Bang Brain Games a score of 4 out of 5 mice.

From the review:

These disparate games, which all appear in a single folder but exist as separate applications, do well to talk with one another. Individually, they’ll track your progress—games you’ve won, answers you’ve gotten correct and so forth—creating a percentage tally that shows you your overall “brain usage.” The better you do, the higher the number, so you have an excuse to go back and replay games over and over again.

What’s more, if you have a .Mac account, Big Bang Brain Games features a one-click system for uploading a new Web page to your .Mac homepage that shows how well you’ve done.

Despite the richness of graphics and special effects present here, Big Bang Brain Games runs on a wide variety of systems—it’s a Universal Binary, so it works natively on Intel Macs, operates just fine with the relatively limited graphics capabilities of Mac minis and MacBooks, and only requires a 600MHz or faster processor.

Macworld Game Room: Big Bang Brain Games Review

Freeverse

Big Bang Brain Games

Brazilian based developer Insolita Studios recently released CaveDays for Mac OS X. The 2D action platform game follows the zany adventures of two prehistoric buddies and their friends, and features a humorous storyline unfolding through 30 levels of fun. Players will explore levels filled with dangerous dinosaurs, dive into the pre-historic ocean, savage trough the wild jungle, climb mountains and avoid burning lava balls that emerge from lava reefs.

Here's a list of the game's features:

- 30 levels of fun, including unlockable levels
- 4 full-featured environments: Mountain, Forest, Rolling Hills and Underground
- Innovative gameplay - pick-up objects and throw them wherever you want!
- 100+ goals to complete
- Lots of humorous cutscenes
- Vines, Ladders, Water, Lava, Geysers, Carnivorous Plants, Insects and more!
- Highly detailed pixelart, retro style
- Original soundtrack
- Compelling characters and storyline
- T-Rex included!

- OS X
- Power Mac G4 1GHz
- 512 MB
- VGA card
- Sound card
- 25MB available disk space

CaveDays

Insolita Studios

CNET News has posted an article examining the impact of multicore processors and multiple processors on game design. Since games have to be written from the ground up to get the most from multiple cores it takes time for game makers to adjust to newly released hardware, although some have already released patches to update existing titles.

Over the past year, major game studios such as Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) and Id Software (Quake and Doom) have released patches to make their games multicore-friendly, although WoW players using Microsoft's Windows are still waiting for their patch.

But that's not the same as having designed the game from day 1 with multiple processors or multicore chips in mind, said Ted Pollak, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

"It won't give the same kind of performance, but it's going to help, and it's better than nothing," Pollak said.

According to lists supplied by Intel and AMD, just more than 25 games are available that were designed with multiple-core processors in mind.

CNET News: Game Developers Adapt To Multicore World

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