Every week MacCentral brings readers headlines from the Mac game industry, but there are always stories we don’t get a chance to bring you. That’s why we have this weekly retrospective called The week in games .
Airburst 1.01 released
Strange Flavour has released an update to their newest shareware arcade game release, Airburst. The new version enables users to change the speed of their bats, and a screen compatibility mode so that the game can be played on monitors that don’t support 800 x 600 mode. A few other internal changes have been made, too.
Ghost Recon poll at Red Storm site
Wanna see the game Ghost Recon come to the Mac? It’s a new game from Red Storm Entertainment, the same folks who developed Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear. They’re hosting a poll on their Web site to find out what platform folks want the game for besides the PC. So far, the Mac leads the pack with about 40 percent of the vote.
MacMAME 0.53 released
Brad Oliver has released a new build of MacMAME, the arcade game emulator for Mac. The new version, 0.53, adopts the new numbering convention used by the PC version. The new build fixes a flicker problem and stays in step with the DOS version; it came only a day after the previous release, which made a number of significant changes.
Maverick Software releases Jiggy!
Maverick Software — the shareware company of Mark and Suellen Adams of Westlake Interactive fame — have released a new game called Jiggy. It’s part tetris, part jigsaw puzzle. It sports multiple levels of difficulty, custom sounds and music, and it’s shareware. A portion of the registration proceeds will be sent to the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, too.
Operation: Phoenix rises from the ashes
Rick Genter recently posted news that his game project, known as AT’41 or Operation: Phoenix, is still alive and well. The project’s original Web service provider tanked recently, which led some to believe the project was dead all together, but Genter said that progress is once again being made. The game is an alternate-reality strategy game with a sci-fi twist, which the developer calls “World War II, with Mechs.”
Pillars of Garendall moves into final candidate testing
Ambrosia Software’s newest role-playing game title, in development with Beenox Studios, is one step closer to completion this week. The parties report that Pillars of Garendall has moved into final candidate testing, the last step before the software is declared golden master and sent to production. It’s a graphical role playing adventure game built using Beenox’s Coldstone engine.
Titus grabs majority stake in Interplay
This is nothing that affects Mac users directly, since Interplay’s Mac brand, MacPlay, is now controlled by United Developers, but as a historical note, it’s of interest. French multimedia company Titus Interactive Group announced last week that they’ve grabbed a majority stake (51.95 percent) of Interplay Entertainment Corp. Interplay is a leading publisher of A-list PC games.
Elsewhere on the Web
Inside Mac Games has posted a review of Tropico, the new strategy game from MacSoft. Writing for Apple’s Games site, Brad Cook has done a preview of Undying, the forthcoming spooky action game from Aspyr. And in his latest MacGamerX column for MacGamer, Rufo Sanchez takes a look at how well Aspyr’s release of American McGee’s Alice works under Mac OS X.
Closer to home
This week on MacCentral, we reported on the gold master status of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, MacPlay’s newest release; gave info about kLoOge.Werks, an online RPG management system for D&D fans; gave a preview of what Mac game publisher Legacy Interactive has planned for Mac fans this fall; reported on graphics chip maker Nvidia’s latest earnings report; and perhaps most significantly talked about ATI’s new Radeon 8500 graphics hardware. There’s more, too — check our news archive page for more details.
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