Apple has posted another article in their games section this week with a look at Black & White: Creature Isle. This expansion for the popular god sim Black & White should now be shipping according to the site from Feral Interactive, and it offers many new features for fans of the original. The article details the new missions in the game, as well as the added creatures and characters.

They also list the recommended system requirements:

• Full version of Black & White required to play
  
• Mac OS X or Mac OS 8.6 or higher
  
• 333MHz PowerPC G3 processor
  
• 128MB of RAM
  
• 750MB of free hard disk space
  
• OpenGL compatible 3D graphics card with at least 8 MB of VRAM

Apple Look at Black & White: Creature Isle

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Lionhead Studios (add to watch list)

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

iDevGames, host of the Mac user progamming uDevGame Content, recently released a short postmortem report on one of the contest's winning entries, Black Shades.

I decided to make a bodyguard game. Not just any bodyguard game, but a psychic bodyguard game. I figured it would be morally interesting for anyone who cares (i.e. nobody) because you are killing people in order to try and protect someone, and giving you psychic powers could make it slightly more fun and less frustrating.

Black Shades, named after the sunglasses your character in the game wears, revolves around you protecting a VIP with a small arsenal of weapons and psychic powers from an assortment of assassins. While the guns are fairly standard FPS fare, your psychic powers make the game quite interesting. You can slow down time, use out of body vision to spot potential assassins, or even predict the future to see who is aiming guns at the VIP and how long until they fire their guns. The game, which can be grabbed at the link below, is free.

Black Shades Postmortem

iDevGames (add to watch list)

Download Black Shades

Illwinter has released an OS X demo of another of their strategy titles, Conquest of Elysium II. The game is a multiplayer fantasy title which has been ported to the Mac thanks to the cross-platform SDL libraries upon which it's based. Here's a description from the official web site:

Conquest of Elysium is a fantasy game where you and your friends take control of a powerful warlord or wizard and struggle for total control of the continent. Up to eight players may participate and the computer can control any free players. The game is turn based so you only need one computer to play the game with up to seven friends.

Conquest of Elysium II

Download Conquest of Elysium II OS X Demo

The prodigious designers of Laminar Research unveiled the curtains on their latest product in a string of realistic simulation platforms: Space Combat. The realistic space flight simulator (which may soon be renamed to "X-Plane Space") has already reached version 1.05 within merely a day from its release.

Space Combat puts the player in control of a spaceship (which he or she may choose to design himself/herself or download from the Internet) floating within our solar system. Space Combat abides faithfully to the Laws of Physics, forcing the player to worry about physical concepts he or she may vaguely remember from physics class — concepts such as conservation of momentum, Newtonian laws of gravity, and even the pesky effects of Einstein's Special Relativity.

The game currently is distributed as a demo that does not allow the player to exceed the paltry speed of 100 meters per second. One can opt to purchase a license code for $19.99 to allow unrestricted movement throughout the solar system. As the game becomes more powerful, however, the price will rise.

In holding with the "Combat" part of the name, programmer Austin Meyer intends to release a future version that includes AI-controlled enemy ships that the player can engage in a frictionless, airless environment.

Laminar Research is most known for its extensible and realistic flight simulator, X-Plane, as well as a mech game by the name of Young's Modulus with the same attention to detail and modularity.

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Spiderweb Software, maker of such titles as Exile and Geneforge, has released a games bundle based on their popular title Avernum. It includes all three Avernum games on one CD, and comes bundled with the hint guides along with the character editors for the games. The bundle costs $75.

If you haven't tried out the games of Avernum, you can download all of them for a free trial, and each of the titles can be registered to unlock the full content. The games of Avernum are similar in fashion to Exile, being a 2D, isometric view RPG, and feature you developing a party to travel and adventure your way through a large underground cave system known as Avernum. The sequels boast enhanced or improved features and the ability to travel out of the caves of Avernum.

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Avernum (add to watch list)

Download Avernum

Download Avernum 2

Download Avernum 3

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Ubi Soft recently announced it would be expanding the beta test of their upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online RPG Shadowbane. For anyone out there who is unfamiliar with what Shadowbane is all about, it is a MMORPG with some twists over other such games out there. The countries and factions in the game world are completely player created and driven and Shadowbane allows for large-scale war between player factions.

Here's the official announcement on the expansion of the beta:

The Shadowbane Closed Beta Test is expanding! We will be selecting 750 additional testers from our Shadowbane Beta waiting list over the next three days. We will be selecting roughly 250 testers a day, starting today. These new testers will help Wolfpack Studios and Ubi Soft focus more resources on our new weekly feature character events, as well as overall balancing.

We are extremely excited to allow more of our community the opportunity to help us test this great MMORPG!

Shadowbane Beta Grows

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Wolfpack Studios (add to watch list)

Shadowbane (add to watch list)

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