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Computer and Video Games has released an interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Frank Pearce about the upcoming The Burning Crusade. The first expansion for the immensely successful World of Warcraft will introduce new playable races, an increased level cap, controllable flying mounts, and an entirely new continent to explore.

CVG: What are the first things players will find themselves doing as soon as they go through the Dark Portal?

Frank Pearce: Well, there'll actually be a number of options available but I think a lot of the players, right through the gate, are going to be doing quests from the respective faction powers in the Hellfire Peninsula. I think a fair number of players are also going to want to head off to the dungeon instances right away. We want to get you right into it.

CVG: What I noticed is that the Alliance hub and the Horde hub are quite close together. Is the idea that it'll be one almighty scrap?

Frank Pearce: I don't know about an almighty scrap, but all the Outland zones are going to be contested territory. And there'll be outdoor PvP objectives, or goals to have outdoor PvP objectives in all those zones. Whether or not we'll hit them all up at once with PvP objectives remains to be seen. But that's our goal.

The outdoor PvP objectives in the zone of Nagrand involve the town of Halaa If you don't control that town, if your faction doesn't control that town then you'll have PvP objectives to kill the guards and whatnot and part of that will involve strafing runs over the town 'on rails' where you'll drop bombs. That should be fun.

Computer and Video Games: Burning Crusade Interview

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A recent Slacker's Guide examined several game emulators available to Mac users. The article covers MacMAME, Sixtyforce, and Richard Bannister's many offerings. The emulators offer a bit of nostalgia for those seeking a trip down gaming's memory lane.

MacMAME by Brad Oliver works to bring back the arcade games of the past like nothing else currently out there. A near-flawless freeware program that recently became a Universal Binary application, MacMAME emulates the hardware settings found in arcade cabinet games. Once installed, the program fully emulates even the interaction. Load the program, insert a coin into the game by pressing "5" on the keyboard, then select the number of players and have at it with the classics of yesteryear.

What was once technical, especially in the early days of hardware emulation, has become easier. Download MacMAME, copy the files where you'd like, then run the program and quit it to create a user data folder for the program. Like other emulation programs, MacMAME is based around the idea of game ROMs, or the code the composes each title. Once downloaded, these files are placed within a ROM folder (Users -->Documents-->MacMAME User Data-->ROMs) and appear in a menu of available games when MacMAME is rebooted again.

The Slacker's Guide: Emulator Roundup

MacMAME

Sixtyforce

Bannister.org Software

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The official Wolfire development blog has been updated with a new Lugaru 2 entry on terrain details.

Dynamic terrain level of detail is working now using a form of patch-based geomipmapping; this means that we can seamlessly render distant terrain at lower level of detail, so polygon count does not increase exponentially as view distance increases. This means that we can make the far clip plane much farther away while maintaining high framerate, so you will be able to see far into the distance.

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