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A new report at Apolyton describes a forum post from QuickSilver's Rantz Hoseley noting Master of Orion III could be as little as two weeks from being declared gold master. This would be in keeping with Infogrames' target release date of November 26, though it's not entirely clear yet whether MacSoft will be publishing at the same time. Here's a clip from the Apolyton report:

the game is about two weeks out from gold master at this point. Morever, [b]eta tester reaction seems to be pretty good. Lots of good suggestions and ideas that have made it in to help push along the `one more turn` syndrome.

Apolyton's MOO3 Site

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Inside Mac Games has posted a review of the Altec Lansing 2100. Here's a clip from the review:

The Altec Lansing 2100s pack two satellites, each with two 1 in drivers and a subwoofer with two 4 in drivers. Between the satellites and subwoofer, the set sports a frequency response of 40 Hz to 20 kHz combined. Tonal audio tests confirmed the speakers can reproduce audible sound to 30 Hz although not nearly as faithfully as the rated 40 Hz. The speakers pack a 65 db signal to noise ratio, which means white noise can be heard if the speakers are left on in a quiet environment. Fortunately, this won’t be a problem for most gamers. When put in same room my Digital Audio G4 (not even as noisy as the newer G4s), the speaker hiss could only barely be heard only when the volume was turned up really high without any sound or music playing.

IMG Review: Altec Lansing 2100

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Inside Mac Games and MacGameFiles readers can save $40 on the Apple nVidia GeForce4 Titanium video card from MacResQ. The new Apple nVidia GeForce4 4600 Titanium cards are regularly priced at $389.99. to save $40, simply enter coupon code "IMGNV" in the Q-Pon section when ordering online and they will adjust the price to $349.99 when they process your order. You can also use the coupon code when ordering via phone at 1-888-447-3728.

Offer expires 10/31/02.

MacResQ

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Rhem, an adventure game created on the Mac, is now available for sale. This three CD game was created by Knut Müller, a Germany-based developer who worked on the Myst-like adventure game for over four years.

Rhem features of 5000 rendered images and over 15 minutes of QuickTime animation. The game is being touted as a first person adventure game with non-linear gameplay and non-violent story.

A web site called Four Fat Chicks, dedicated to Macintosh adventure games, has posted a review of Rhem as well as an interview with its creator.

To learn more about Rhem, including screenshots, QuickTime movies, and information on how to purchase it, visit the official Rhem web site.

Rhem

Four Fat Chicks Review: Rhem

Four Fat Chicks Interview: Knut Müller

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Little Wing, the makers of the popular pinball simulation, Jinni Zeala, is sponsoring a high score contest. If you purchased Jinni Zeala through the Little Wing Store, then you are eligible to enter the contest.

Entering the contest is fairly straight forward. Simply download the High Score Tool found on the Little Wing web site and run it after you've earned a high score. The program will then generate encrpyted text containing your high score which you'll then need to enter in a web page on the Little Wing web site.

For more information about the contest, head over to the Little Wing web site. A standings page with the current high scores are available on the Little Wing site.

To learn more about Jinni Zeala, check out our review. Jinni Zeala is published in North Amerca by MacPlay.

IMG Review: Jinni Zeala

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Tim Sweeney and Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski of Epic Games were recently featured in an in-depth interview over at PC Gaming site Planet Unreal regarding their latest venture, the recently-released Unreal Tournament 2003.

The lengthy interview touches on a variety of subjects, from the history of the Unreal game franchise, technical changes to the current version of the game's engine, the future of the franchise, and Epic's support for the mod community, including mods the game developers would love to see from their user community:

• Vehicle mods. The Karma physics support in the engine now is incredibly complete and powerful, but all we had time to put in was the little vehicletest map with a hastily-constructed vehicle. With Karma, you can do arbitrarily complex vehicles with independent suspensions like tanks, buggies, tractor-trailers, go-karts, bulldozers, etc.
• An RTS mod. You could have an above-the-world-looking-down view zoomed out similarly to recent 3D RTS games, having both vehicles and foot soldiers. Gameplay could give the player control over how much detail he wants to get into...you could either give orders to your troops, or go into first-person view and micromanage them.

Planet Unreal: UT 2003 Interview

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For those that may have missed them, Spiderweb Software released updates for both Avernum 3 and Geneforge at the end of last week. The updates are minor in scope and can be applied to both registered and unregistered copies.

The patch for Avernum 3 brings it up to version 1.1.1, and contains the following fix:

• Ugly problem which prevented some people from saving the game fixed.

• Geneforge now runs natively on Mac OS X

Spiderweb - Avernum 3 Updates

Spiderweb - Geneforge Updates

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The Mac OS X port of Wouter van Oortmerssen's Linux game engine Cube appears to be making progress, and might be gracing the screens of Mac users soon.

For those who may not have heard of this OpenGL-based engine, Cube is an open-source Linux first person shooter game engine, currently distributed as freeware. Although not designed to compete with the latest offerings from id Software or to beat the visual lushness of the Unreal engine, Cube was originally conceived by van Oortmerssen in an effort to create a small, fast, yet visually interesting game engine:

(I wanted) the absolutely simplest engine structure I could get away with, to have some fun programming, and try out some ideas I had without getting bogged down in writing a complex (graphics) renderer.

Other interesting features built into the game code include "server-thin, client-fat" networking code, which maximizes available bandwith in multiplayer games by reducing the amount of information the main server has to manage. Also of note is the game's automatic detail level manager, which scales the texture's detail level depending on the speed of your processor and graphics card, resulting in consistant frames rates on even the slowest of machines.

Jeremy Bell, project co-ordinator for the University of Michigan's WolverineSoft gaming resource center, is currently heading the conversion project.

Stay tuned to IMG for more details on the status of this project as it develops. Thanks to IMG forum poster 4.pack for the heads up on this project.

Cube Web Page

IMG Forum: New Game Engine CUBE

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For those interested in the progress of guild dynamics in the current closed beta of Wolfpack's MMORPG Shadowbane, another War Report has made its way to the site. Aptly titled "A Traitor at the Gate," this report details a war between guilds over resources due to land encroachment, complete with a man on the inside:

Yet it seems that Feyd had already anticipated that his city and Sanctity would soon be at war, and decided to have his rival’s ruling guild infiltrated. The appointed spy, Zachariah Gettegs, was a long serving and trusted VA member. His mission was to enter the city and study the habits and deployment of the enemy. Zachariah made note of Salvation’s leadership structure, the habits and routines of Sanctity’s forces, and the status of their city’s defensive configuration. During this time there were still sporadic battles between small groups of VA and Salvation forces, but nothing major which could lead to Zachariah’s exposure.

Those interested in learning more about this latest development are encouraged to check out the latest war report, which also contains pictures of key players as well as a 3rd party analysis.

Shadowbane War Journal - A Traitor at the Gate

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