MacGamer has an interview with Tony Barnes and Douglas Hare of The Collective, Simon and Schuster's in-house Mac development team. They are currently working on the Macintosh port of the Star Trek action/adventure game, Deep Space 9: The Fallen. Here, Doug explains why the decision was made to port the game themselves instead of contracting it out:

A lot of folks send their games out to porting houses to get the Mac version made. Why did you decide to keep it in-house?

Doug: We're working from the Mac Unreal Tournament code base which is maintained by the good folks over Westlake so we got a big leg-up with that but as we've modified the UT engine we just felt more comfortable doing it ourselves to ensure that the same dedication and quality given to the PC-product was bestowed upon the Mac version.

In hardware news, MacNN has posted a review of 3dfx' Voodoo4 4500 PCI. Aimed at the casual gamer and graphics professionals, the Voodoo4 garners praise for its great price/performance ratio.

The 3D performance of the Voodoo4 exceeded our expectations and really makes this graphics card an excellent option at its price point for the budget-minded Mac user. Despite an apparent drop in framerates as resolutions increased, the Voodoo4 performed more than adequately with many graphics options turned on at 640 x 480 and 800 x 600.

If you are in the market for a new mouse, MacNN has also posted a roundup of 10 USB optical mice. Ever since Microsoft released it's sleek IntelliMouse Explorer, they have become very popular because of their light weight and pin-point precision. Now, nearly every major peripherals manufacturer has their own incarnation of the optical mouse. Gamers be warned: The cameras used to track movements in optical mice have known to become "confused" if the mouse is flicked extremely fast. Under normal use or high sensivity settings, though, this should not be a problem.

3dfx Drops Voodoo5 MSRP to $229.99

Optical Mouse Roundup at MacNN

Voodoo4 4500 PCI Review at MacNN

The Collective Interview at MacGamer

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