Every day MacCentral brings you headlines and news from the Mac game industry, but there are always stories that don’t make it onto our daily news pages. That’s why we’ve created this retrospective, which we call The Week in Games.
A-OK! The Wings of Mercury 3.0 released
You Are Go! has released a new version of A-OK! The Wings of Mercury, an educational space simulator that puts you in the cramped confines of a Mercury space capsule — the same kind that carried American astronauts into space at the dawn of the Space Age. The simulator features realistic interfaces and modeling and much more.
Glider Pro updated to 3.0.1
Casady & Greene has updated Glider Pro for Mac OS X to version 3.0.1. The new version now includes all of the houses that were in the original Glider Pro, sports the ability to save and load games, and features other minor fixes too. The free update is available for download from the Casady & Greene Web site.
Gorky 17 demo released
e.p.i.c. interactive has released a demo version of Gorky 17, their recently released Mac conversion of an action/adventure game. The game puts you in control of an elite NATO task force which must infiltrate and uncover the secrets of a long-dormant Soviet “secret city” overrun by genetic mutants and horrible monsters created in their laboratories. The demo is about 98MB.
Jinni Zeala pinball game released
A few weeks ago we brought you news that LittleWing — the Japanese developer of classic solid-state-style pinball games for the Mac like Loony Labyrinth and Crystal Caliburn — was readying a new game for release. This week that happened: The company has published a new pinball game for the Mac called Jinni Zeala, which draws its inspiration from fantasy stories like Arabian Nights. You can download a demo of the game from their Web site now, and unlock it by paying the registration fee, which works out to be about US$19 or $20 at current exchange rates.
Lineage gets an update
NCsoft’s massively multiplayer online role playing game Lineage was recently tweaked with bug fixes and feature enhancements, including some specific changes to the Macintosh code. If you’ve already downloaded and installed the huge Lineage client, it should automatically update when you connect. You can try it out free for a month, by the way, and if you don’t want to download the huge software installation on your own connection, you can order a free CD from NCsoft too.
MacMAME 0.59 released
Brad Oliver: By day, mild-mannered Westlake Interactive developer, by night, mad Mac emulation maven. Oliver released a new build of MacMAME, the multi-arcade machine emulator that lets you play thousands of coin-op arcade classics, if you have access to their individual ROM files. The new version, 0.59, is in sync with its Windows counterpart, gains OS X cosmetic fixes, enhancements to its PPC 68020 core, supports HID Manager in OS X (and thus game pads) and more.
Elsewhere on the Web
MacGamer.com this week reviewed Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the new Id Software-developed 3D action game published for the Mac by Aspyr Media. Inside Mac Games was down for maintenance when we checked in with them this morning, but they ran an interesting review of the PowerBook G4/667 as a gaming machine which caught our eye when it ran past week — check it out when they’re back on line. Apple’s Web site posted a preview of No One Lives Forever, a new 3D action game being readied for release by MacPlay. Utterer.com has posted a review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, published by Aspyr.
Closer to home
A huge week for game news on MacCentral: Activision brought word it’ll publish Doom III when Id Software finishes it. No word yet on what’s happening with the Mac rights to the game, though. Westlake Interactive announced that Max Payne is in beta testing. MacSoft expects to ship the game in July. Game developers spoke to MacCentral about what they expect and hope for from WWDC, which kicks off tomorrow. Feral Interactive has released the long-awaited multiplayer patch for Black & White, their Mac conversion of the popular “god” game created by Lionhead and Peter Molyneux. Infogrames unveiled its new kids’ titles that it plans to show off at E3 later this month. The new PowerBook G4/800 could be the best gaming PowerBook yet thanks to its use of ATI’s Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics chip. MacSoft announced that Stronghold went gold master this week and expects it to ship to retailers by the end of the month. Aspyr Media said its conversions of Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and The Sims Hot Date are both at final candidate and should ship soon. A developer working on a Star Trek-themed plug in for Escape Velocity Nova is looking for a UNIX sendmail expert to help with some development issues.