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Aspyr Media has released its January Mac newsletter, which covers the current status of Star Wars: Empire at War and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked. Empire should be ready to ship sometime this month and Soaked is in the final stages of testing and approvals. The newsletter also details the reasons behind the decision to make Empire at War Aspyr's first Intel Mac only title.

Our work on Empire at War is finishing up, in preparation for the game shipping in February. This is the first Mac game we have developed that is Intel-only, and the decision to not support PowerPC Macs was a difficult one. The complexity of bringing a totally new game engine to OS X meant there was plenty of work just getting the game up and running on the Mac, and adding the extra work of supporting PowerPC as well would have pushed the game release off several months. The other wrinkle to Empire at War is that it is likely a PowerPC version would not be able to play multiplayer against Intel Macs, due to slight differences in floating point calculations between the two types of CPUs. Having a Universal Mac version of the game that didn't allow multiplayer between all Macs would be confusing at best. Because we were focusing solely on the Intel version of the game, we did take care to ensure it would run on all Intel Macs, including those with the Intel integrated graphics chips, like the MacBook.

Aspyr January Newsletter

Aspyr Media

Star Wars: Empire at War

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked!

Buy Star Wars: Empire at War

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