Episode 37 3 08

IMG Podcast 3-16-2008

Space Pig Available For Macs

baKno has announced the release of SpacePig, a cartoon style 3D game for the Mac. Players control the space pig character as he travels around the moon, running, jumping, flying and picking up coins and diamonds and getting mutilated by falling meteors and spikes.
True Space Pigs

Fable: The Lost Chapters

Feral has announce their upcoming March 31st release of Fable: The Lost Chapters. According to Feral, the game is different than the usual RPG fare. In Fable, "every choice and action determines what you become. Your skills, appearance and even your morality all change in real time based on every little thing you do."

System Requirements
Processor: 1.6GHz
RAM: 512MB
Graphics: 64MB
Mac OS: 10.4.8
Hard Disk: 3GB
Drive: DVD
Input: Mouse

hopefully well see a demo (and Black & White 2) some time soon.

This game does not support GMA graphics cards with shared RAM.

NWN 2 ships

in late Feb, NWN 2 shipped from Aspyr to retailers across the globe!

2.0Ghz intel minimum and a X1600 or higher, again no GMA support.

there have been some complaints about performance on the IMG forums, so check it out to see how other people are finding things.

Speaking of on-board graphics....
Macworld's Peter Cohen recently opined on the subject and makes the point that the game developers he's spoken to are clamoring for an upgrade to the MacBook so it will open up that part of the Mac market. Apple has sold around 5.7 million laptops since January 2007 and the MacBook has to be a significant portion of that. So far, the MacBook has been excluded by the System Requirements of a lot of recent titles.

MB and MBP updates

The MBs and MBPs got updated in late February to include the latest Penryn processors (2.4Ghz, 2.5Ghz and 2.6Ghz BTO in MBPs), and in the case of the MBPs, double the VRAM. Also bigger HDDs. Oh, and the same multitouch trackpad as seen on the MBA.
Little more than a slight speed bump, but theres plenty of work being done to compare the latest machines with the mid-late 2007 machines on the IMG forums in collaboration with Barefeats.com to see just how big a jump this really is. At the moment, for gaming, it appears that its not that much.

iPhone SDK Gaming News

Up until the release of the iPhone SDK, gaming on the iPhone has been limited to web-based apps. About 41 minutes into Apple's March 6th event, the video reveals a what may be a revolution for handheld gaming. This may be huge and several game developers have expressed great enthusiasm for the new market:
Glenda Adams, director of development for Aspyr Media, a guest of this show on a couple of occasions, was quoted by Macworld "This is the coolest thing I've seen in game development in 15 years, except maybe for the Nintendo Wii".
Other developers have also expressed excitement including Brian Greenstone of Pangea and Bruce Morrison of Freeverse. Freeverse even posted a page that shows some potential gaming fare for the iPhone public.

also jumping on the bandwagon are EA, with Spore, Id, presumably with Quake (i suspect it could handle Quake 3 nicely), Gameloft, and any of the other 100,000 people/companies that have downloaded the SDK… In fact, its so many people that Apple have started turning people down.

were not talking about this one

Aspyr releases The Sims:something or other 5…

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.