Sunday brings our weekly The week in games retrospective; it’s a look back at some of the news and info from the Mac game world that we didn’t get a chance to cover the first time around.
City of Light: InterLock resurrected
Denizen Entertainment has announced that it has restarted work on its ambitious role playing game City of Light: InterLock. The game is being developed using the Simple DirectMedia Layer, and will be available for OS X, according to the developer.
GLtron for OS X released
A new version of GLtron, the open source 3D lightcycle arena combat game, is available for Mac OS X. The original game was written by Andreas Umbach and ported to the Mac by Darrell Walisser; “Mickey Megabyte” and “Stewy Pit” are taking credit for the Mac OS X conversion.
Harpoon 3 headed for OS X
Jesse Spears, who has some downtime since he’s finished Escape from Monkey Island for Westlake Interactive, has started Carbonizing Harpoon 3 to enable it to run under Mac OS X. He says he’s making good progress, though by his own admission he still has a way to go. Harpoon 3 is the naval warfare simulator that Spears resurrected some time ago.
King of Dragon Pass 1.6 beta in circulation
A Sharp Software has released a new beta version of its graphical role-playing adventure game, King of Dragon Pass. 1.6b is now available for download from the company’s Web site. King of Dragon Pass brings players to the world of Glorantha, made popular by pen-and-paper games like Hero Wars and RuneQuest.
Kutoka wins awards
Children’s software developer/publisher Kutoka Interactive announced this past week that it won three awards from the Canadian Toy Testing Council. The winners included Mia: The Search for Grandma’s Remedy; Mia: Romaine’s New Hat and Cyber Grannies, three educational and fun game for kids five and older.
Mystery Island II released
Koingo Software has announced the release of Mystery Island II, a graphical adventure game that puts you in the role of a military expert trying to thwart an alien invasion. The company has released a downloadable demo.
Star Conquest comes to GameRanger
Scott Kevill announced this week that his Mac-only (free) online gaming service GameRanger now sports support for Star Conquest. It’s the 67th game to be supported by GameRanger. Star Conquest is a turn-based strategy wargame from Dark Shadow Software Ltd that up to ten players can play.
Vortex: NG to be released on May 18
Feline Entertainment has announced that Vortex Next Generation is now in beta testing and will be released on May 18th. This game was voted the winner of the Independent Game Festival’s Student Showcase. Feline describes it as a cross between Arkanoid and Tempest — it’s a brickbashing game that sports 360 degree rotation and other features, including networking.
Elsewhere on the Web
Insanely Great Mac has posted an interesting flight sim tutorial on using radios to navigate and land using ILS, or the instrument landing system. And now that MacGamer’s DNS problems are sorted out, we can tell you about a funny little feature that Corey Tamás put together called The Ten Types of Gamers (and by the way, that’s a photo of this reporter under “The Journalist” entry). Inside Mac Games has posted a review of Mac OS X from a gamer’s perspective.
Closer to home
By our own admission, this was a somewhat lean week for game news on MacCentral — our attention was focused largely on the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. Still, there were some interesting nuggets along the way. Sound Blaster card Creative posted a quarterly loss of US$101 million this week, due largely to soured investments, according to the company’s report. MacSoft’s parent company Infogrames secured Mac and PC rights to games on the Survivor TV series (though MacSoft points out that no Mac version of such games have yet been announced).
Please keep checking back daily with MacCentral for all the latest news from within and outside of the Mac gaming industry. And if you have products you’d like to see featured or have ideas for ways we can improve our games coverage drop us a line.