Last night on Mac Help Radio, guest Jeff Morgan, CEO of Graphic Simulations, revealed that Black & White: Creature Isle, the expansion pack to Peter Molyneux's long-awaited god-game, is coming to the Mac.

In answer to a listener who asked whether GraphSim would release Creature Isle for the Mac, Morgan declared:

You can count on it.

For more information on Black & White: Creature Isle, see our story on last September's announcement of the PC version (which was just released) and the Creature Isle web site.

In related news, Feral's David Stephen revealed in the IMG Forum yesterday the answer to another much-asked question:

In regard to the multiplayer/online patch - our target date is to release this at the beginning of March.

For more information on Black & White, be sure to read our review at the link below.

IMG News: Black & White Expansion Set Announced

IMG Review: Black & White

Black & White: Creature Isle (add to watch list)

Black & White (add to watch list)

GraphSim (add to watch list)

Mac Help Radio

IMG Forum: Any Black & White news?

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Today IMG has posted a preview of Lineage: The Blood Pledge, the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game from NCsoft. As announced at the recent Macworld Expo, Lineage will start a closed Mac OS X beta test later this week (signups at IMG start tomorrow), followed by a full release in a month or so. The preview goes into detail on what you can look for in Lineage, though interested gamers will be able to try out Lineage free for a month as well.

Here is an excerpt from our preview by Andy Largent:

Lineage is a fairly standard RPG in many aspects. With a direct anime influence from a set of comic books by Ilsook Shin, the game borrows heavily from the Tolkien-ized sphere of medieval fantasy. There are four character classes, each with a male and female counterpart: Knights, Elves, Princes/Princesses, and Wizards. Your character has the similar statistics and attributes with which RPG players are familiar. The isometric 2D view is very analogous to Diablo or Baldur's Gate, and the combat is a straightforward click-to-attack. Monsters drop gold and items, which you can then use to buy better weapons, armor, and spells.

IMG Preview: Lineage: The Blood Pledge

IMG News: Help Beta Test Lineage for Mac

Lineage (add to watch list)

MacGamer has posted an article that gives owners of Apple portable computers a guide to making the most out of your mobile gaming experience. The guide gives gamers tips on how to set up your machine, how to preserve battery life, which games travel best, and more.

Here's a snippet from the article by Corey Tamas:

When I was on a flight to Macworld San Francisco in 2001 I was sitting next to a guy with a Sony Vaio. He spent seven hours trying to install software that enabled him to use his external DVD player. As he did that, Ken Charron and I hooked up our respective powerbooks (a G3 Pismo and Powerbook 2400) via crossover ethernet cable and played about twenty rounds of Marathon multiplayer. As the plane was landing my Vaio-using friend (who was actually a really nice guy) was still staring at a blue screen and had not yet watched so much as one DVD. I couldn't help but feel bad for him, as I had pounded the living tar out of Ken and still had time for a nap.

MacGamer: The Portable Gamer

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Henry Price of MacPlay recently told IMG reader Thord Janson that the company is aiming for a release in the second quarter of this year for Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons over Europe, the long-awaited World War II flight simulator:

We are trying for Q2 2002. I can tell you that it may be earlier than June; we are trying to release it as soon as we can. As far as February I can tell with about 99% accuracy that it will not release in February. We have not seen a Gold candidate yet and even if we got one today that would leave us with absolutely no time for testing.

IMG Preview: Fighter Squadron

Fighter Squadron Information Center

Mac benchmarking site Bare Feats has posted a new chart in its Quick Takes section comparing the potential specs of nVidia's GeForce4 MX graphics card with four other nVidia and ATI offerings.

Since the GeForce4 MX hasn't been officially released, no specs are currently available from nVidia. Bare Feats doesn't mention the source of their GeForce4 MX numbers, but those numbers seem to support the rumors that the GeForce4 MX is less powerful than either the GeForce3 or the Radeon 7500.

Nonetheless, the GeForce4 MX will ship with all but the low-end speed-bumped Power Mac G4s introduced by Apple on Monday, and the GeForce3, which was previously available as a build-to-order option, has disappeared completely from the Apple Store.

Oddly enough, the allegedly more powerful Radeon 7500 is the video card that ships with the 800 MHz Power Mac G4, the new low end of Apple's retail Power Mac line. The one clear advantage of the GeForce4 MX over the Radeon 7500, however, is 64 MB of memory to the ATI card's 32.

Apple has posted benchmarks of its own as well. Apple's chart lists the GeForce4 MX as drawing 115 fps in Quake III at 1024x786 resolution with 32-bit color on a Power Mac G4 Dual 1 GHz.

[Sean Smith contributed to this story.]

Bare Feats: Quick Takes

Apple: Power Mac Graphics

NVIDIA (add to watch list)

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