The Week in Games

MacCentral brings you fresh game news every day of the week, but there’s still a lot of stuff that we save for our weekly retrospective, the Week in Games. Check this out for some news items you may have missed this past week:

New Majesty quest available

MacPlay’s new real-time strategy game Majesty is a ridiculous amount of fun on its own, but if you’ve already mastered it and you’re looking for some new challenge, check out the official Majesty Web site for details on The Wrath of Krolm, a new quest for Mac users. It’s almost 3MB in size, and can be added to the full commercial release of Majesty.

The Cow Catching Game gets new features

Martin Wengenmayer has updated his Mac OS Public Beta-compatible OpenGL action game, The Cow Catching Game. The new version, 1.1, sports a time bonus for every 500 points collected, the ability to collect bombs and catch cows with energy waves, and the ability to save high scores in the unregistered version.

Oni Key Config Utility available online

The folks at Oni Central have come up with an interesting concept — it’s an online Key Configuration Utility for the game. Oni owners (oniers?) already know that the game is a pain to configure with custom keys, and this little online treasure can help.

Mac DoomLegacy brings Doom II to OpenGL

Calum Robinson is building a Macintosh-compatible version of DoomLegacy, a multiplatform open-source project to bring Id Software’s legendary first person shooter game Doom II. DoomLegacy uses OpenGL, the API used by Apple and other vendors for 3D graphics. The current version is 0.9.3, and the game needs data files from the original commercial release (or the shareware version) to work.

Lance multiplayer RPG now accepting orders

Ryan Joseph of The Alchemist Guild says that they’re now accepting pre-orders for Lance, a multiplayer role-playing game that will be published by Fantasoft when it’s finished.

Brickles Deluxe 1.3.2 released

Ken Winograd has announced the release of Brickles Deluxe 1.3.2, a new version of the shareware brick-bashing game for the Macintosh. The new version sports a fix for a missing 5-point brickle problem.

Elsewhere on the Web

iDevGames.com has posted an article entitled Making Mac Games; the german Web site Macelodeon has interviewed Thomas Steiding, the CEO of Epic Interactive, makers of Mac versions of Earth 2140, Simon the Sorcerer II, Gorky 17 and other titles. Meanwhile the folks at MacGamer have posted video interviews with reps from graphics chip makers ATI and Nvidia; and the folks at Inside Mac Games have posted a report explaining how Mac OS X will affect games.

Closer to home

This week saw no shortage of Macintosh game content posted to MacCentral, either. Infogrames reported this week that its acquisition of Hasbro Interactive is complete; ATI has released a driver update for its PCI Radeon card which fixes multi-monitor problems and improves Quake 3 Arena compatibility; Gathering of Developers released Oni for Mac and PC; Westlake says it’s now work on a new Mac Tomb Raider game and is considering bringing a level editor to Mac, too; TQworld released an unusual new Mac called Tranquility; Id Software’s Graeme Devine discussed new Mac Quake 3 Arena updates; and much more. Please check our home page and news archives for more Mac game-related news.

As always, we encourage you to drop us a line if you have ideas for ways we can improve our games coverage. If you’re a publisher or developer and you’d like us to know about your game, please get in touch also!