Games and Apples
It is winter. I have been remiss in writing anything here recently despite there being a fair bit to say. I mean, you can always find something to babble about, but there have actually been some interesting gaming-related news and Mac stuff happening over the past couple of weeks since MacWorld Day.
I’m a huge fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic series of turn-based strategy games. It is an interesting mix of RPG and board game which has gone through a few changes over the years. The last version (#IV) was somewhat weak in that it didn’t have the same fun feel as the previous one, in spite of its introduction of a 3D engine. Not to say it wasn’t fun, but it could have been better. Now, Ubisoft has picked up the title and is working on HOMMV and everything points to something brand new that will hopefully be fun to play.
Details are emerging about some of the new multiplayer games they are including in addition to the old favorites. There’s a new “ghost” mode where you have a disembodied spirit wandering the map while you wait for other players to finish their turns. The Ghost gets more powerful the longer your opponent takes so there’s a good incentive to wrap up turns early and is more interesting than a simple turn timer. The other gametype is an “instant action” type of game where you take an army onto the field and duke it out with another player.
Translation of an interview from a polish game ‘zine here. Also, the developers have just announced an open beta beginning Monday. I am all over that and will check their site with great zest over the weekend and next week. Even better, Inside Mac Games has posted a link to the new Mac HOMMV page as there as a port in (co)development and it will hopefully not lag too far behind the PC version.
Accelerate Your Mac announced that Freespace 2 has been released for OS X as freeware. It’s a 1.5GB download and it takes awhile but it’s there. Supposedly OpenAL is required for this to work.
The Mac Section
This brings us to the Mac portion of this post and there’s plenty to talk about. The new Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros (terrible name) have arrived on the scene as of MacWorld ’06. Intel iMacs are in stores now with ship dates for the MacBooks in mid-February. These are both dual core machines sporting Intel’s formerly-code-named Yonah processors, now called the Core Duo. They are Pentium-M based and both are mounted on a 667MHz front-side bus. This makes them pretty zippy machines, and there have been some independent bench-marks that confirm this. The PowerMac Quad G5 is still the top-of the bunch though and if you need the heavy lifting, that’s what you want.
First generation hardware is often riddled with problems. Not just Apple hardware, all new hardware (though Apple does tend to have a fair share of problems with Revision A parts). Secondly, the software isn’t there yet. Though there have been a lot of announcements of Universal Binaries being released, a number of noticeable omissions are present: Adobe’s CS apps and Microsoft Office(!) spring to mind. I have no doubt they something will materialize on this front, though in the mean-time, users are going to have to run them using the Rosetta emulation layer, and that’s going to be kinda slow. Slower than running them on a similarly-clocked G5 (or in some cases, probably a G4), for instance. If this is where you do your work, you might want to hold off, or stick with a Power chip.
Another issue is the lack of FW800 on the MacBook. This will hopefully be addressed in later releases but for now it makes the MacBook somewhat deficient for pro audio and storage. There may a solution in the form of the ExpressCard slot though but users will have to wait for it. Also, no more S-Video on the case, though you can get one off the DVI port.
Microsoft has stated that they’re going to stop development on Windows Media Player. This is unsurprising and not really disappointing as the app sucks, but it was nice that there was at least some way to deal with Windows Media files in some capacity on the Mac (VLC supports some types of WMV files). Microsoft has gotten behind the Flip4Mac WMV plugin for QuickTime and now that they’ve fixed a bug with QT7.0.4, it works flawlessly. It also provides better playback quality through Quicktime than Windows Media Player ever managed.
Anyway, I look forward to hearing from my friends who raced through the store as soon as it opened, their credit cards nearly burning up from use. I’m sure the machines will be awesome for development and video. Maybe even music!
boolean is listening to: Everything Kills You from the album “Siberia” by Echo & The Bunnymen
Technorati Tags: Apple, Computing, DRM, Entertainment, Games, Hardware, Video
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