Pangea Software Inc. is set to deliver its hotly anticipated Mac-only 3D action game Nanosaur II: Hatchling in less than two weeks. The company announced today that the game will support stereoscopic rendering using either red-blue anaglyph glasses — included with the game — or LCD shutter glasses.
Nanosaur II: Hatchling is the followup to Pangea’s enormously popular game Nanosaur, which found its way onto the hard drives of original iMacs and was also available as an online download. In the original Nanosaur, you were a bipedal dinosaur genetically engineered by humans in the future. You were sent back in time to the age of the dinosaurs to recover eggs.
In this new installment, you’re a new character — a flying pterosaur — armed to the teeth with new weapons and defensive tools. You navigate massive levels in search of eggs to send forward in time, all the while in danger from deadly creatures from the past, as well as the automated defenses of rebels from your own time. It’s a fast-paced and challenging dinosaur action game.
While Nanosaur uses OpenGL to render 3D graphics in a “normal” video mode, the game is also capable of display 3D graphics in red-blue anaglyph style, making it possible for players to enjoy the game in stereoscopic 3D if they prefer. Pangea is including two sets of 3D glasses in the box. If you’ve got a pair of such glasses from your last trip to the theater to see a 3D movie, you can check out a special Web page with some screenshots that will give you a preview of what this mode is like.
What’s more, Pangea Software has also enabled Nanosaur II to display 3D stereoscopic graphics for users with 3D shutter glasses. Still used by scientists and engineers for 3D modeling work, these glasses tend to be quite expensive and require CRT-based monitors to work properly, but sometimes you can score them cheap from eBay. Pangea has details about how to get them and which models work on their Web site.
March 10th is set as the release date for Nanosaur 2. The download version will be released for US$24.95, while a boxed CD version will ship about 12 days later for $34.95. The company making the red-blue anaglyph glasses for Pangea sells them separately for $5 for two pair, so if you download the game you can still buy the glasses too, if you don’t already have some.
System requirements for Nanosaur II call for Mac OS X v10.2.8 or higher; G4/700MHz or faster; 512MB RAM; Radeon or GeForce2 MX graphics with at least 32MB VRAM.