Each week MacCentral brings readers the latest news and headlines from the Mac game business, but there are always a few stories that don’t make it onto our main news pages. That’s why we have this weekly retrospective, called The Week in Games.
Arr! Pirate Ship Combat game released
WinterBorn Software has released Arr!, a new 2D action game that features pirate ships on the high seas. The game is being distributed through Monkey Byte Development’s VendorNation.com and costs US$20 to register.
Championship Manager 4 foreign language demo coming
Feral Interactive has already released the English-language version of Championship Manager 4 in the UK — it’s a Mac conversion of the popular football (soccer) management game for the PC. Feral is gearing up for the May 1st release of CM4 to the rest of Europe with local language support for French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish with the pending release of a multi-language CM4 demo. That new demo version should be out on April 17, 2003, direct from the Feral Web site.
Cube It! updated
Dracosoft has released a new version of Cube It!, the Mondrian-style puzzle action game. Bugs have been fixed and yellow-colored special items have been added, making it possible to clear all yellow blocks in the play area at once. The new update is ready for download.
Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire returns for OS X
Delta Tao is working on a new version of Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire, now compatible with Mac OS X. The new version is actually available for public download, as a free alpha version. It’ll expire in June, but it’ll give you a chance to see what the final product will look like.
Gettysburg goes OS X
By Design Inc. has released an OS X version of its Gettysburg strategy war game. The game features battalion-level conflict involving hundreds of civil war-era units and many other features, and costs $34.95. More details can be found at the Web site.
Master of Orion III data patch released
Quicksilver Software has released a data patch (678K, .ZIP format) for its recent release of Master of Orion III. The patch works with both Mac and Windows versions of the game, and fixes problems with the game’s artificial intelligence.
X-Plane 7.00 now in beta
Laminar Research is currently developing a major new version of their expandable and powerful flight simulator X-Plane. The new version is now OS X only and features myriad performance enhancements, feature additions and improvements. Public beta versions are available for download from the X-Plane Web site.
Elsewhere on the Web
Inside Mac Games has posted a preview of the Radeon 9700 Pro card available as an option with new Power Mac G4s. MacGamer has posted a review of Incoming, a budget-priced part of MacPlay’s Value Series library. Apple’s Games site has posted a trailer for SimCity 4, coming soon from Aspyr Media. Look for M-Audio’s Jason Ivan to be featured on this monday’s forthcoming The Gamesome Mac Web radio show.
Closer to home
MacCentral brought readers news this week of Super GameHouse Solitaire, Volume 2’s release. Pangea Software announced that its forthcoming water puzzle game Enigmo is in beta and is anticipated for release on April 16th. Freeverse Software’s Board Games Deluxe is available for free for .Mac subscribers. Freeverse has also released Virtual Programming Ltd.’s Legion in the US, for $20. United Developers has released its casual 3D maze-navigating game Snowball Run, available through MacPlay. e.p.i.c. interactive has announced plans to bring the game Northland to the Mac later this year. GarageGames and Bravetree Productions plan to release the forthcoming 3D tank combat game ThinkTanks to Mac first, late in April or early in May. BioWare Corp. is still plugging away at the Mac conversion of Neverwinter Nights, according to a recent posting on their Web site. MacPlay will distribute Europa Universalis II in the US for Virtual Programming Ltd. when it’s released later this month.
As always, we encourage you to drop us a line if you have ideas for ways that we can improve our games coverage here on MacCentral, if you have questions we didn’t answer with this week’s roundup, or have Mac games you’d like to see highlighted on these pages.