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Filed under: Gaming, Freeware, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Call of Duty for the iPhone will track your World at War kills

Activision has released Call of Duty for the iPhone... but don't get too excited, it's not exactly what you think. The first-person shooter hasn't quite been ported yet. Instead, they've released a "Call of Duty: World at War companion," which instead lets you track the activity on the popular World War II shooter game. You can track all of your ingame stats, and even follow your friends in the game and what they've done with their characters as well. And the app also comes with a news browser, to keep you up to date on the latest map releases and updates with the game. It's completely free, though you of course need a Call of Duty: World of War game for Xbox 360 or Playstation to actually get anything out of it.

In that sense, this app isn't quite so notable for what it is (World at War wasn't nearly as popular as Call of Duty 4, and this app is specifically about Treyarch's game), as what it portends: with Blizzard releasing their Armory app and a few other game companies releasing "companion" apps like this, we could be in for a very interesting holiday videogame season this year. Ports or translations of games don't do much to sell copies of the real games (as they tend to be either too similar or too different to the parent games), but "companions" like this can represent added functionality, and thus can do a lot to help and promote games on other platforms (imagine a Halo ODST app that sent you a push notification when your friend was playing or got a higher XP score than you did). This is far from the last we'll see of "companion" apps like this.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Humor, Peripherals, Apple, Mac mini, MacBook, Mac Pro

Goodbye, FireWire 400


As Macworld notes, this is it for the ol' Firewire 400. With the introduction of the new Mac mini the other day and the refresh of the Mac Pro and iMac lines, the old version of Firewire is left only on the white MacBook. It's evolution at its finest, and our good friend Nilay Patel over at Engadget put together this perfect video showing just how hard it is to say goodbye to yesterday.

As I said on the Talkcast a long time ago when this was first hinted at, it's not a huge loss in my eyes. This is an outdated standard, and if you've got anything sitting around that absolutely requires a FireWire 400 port (and you've already upgraded completely to a computer that doesn't have one), then it's time for an upgrade. Those happen, you know -- there's a reason they're not selling Polaroid film any more. Besides, FW800 ports can easily drive your FW400 gear with a $8 cable.

Nostalgia, however, is a powerful force. So it's with a damp hankerchief and wet eyes that some of us will bid farewell to FireWire 400. Long live FireWire 800!

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, OS, Software, Odds and ends, Freeware, Apple

id pushing hard for Quake Live on the Mac

Our good friends at Joystiq recently spoke to id games' John Carmack (the man behind games like Quake and Doom, and fervent supporter of Mac gaming), and heard that id's new product, Quake Live, is headed to our OS just as soon as they can get it there.

Quake Live
is a free, browser-based, multiplayer-only version of the popular first-person shooter, and it's Windows-only at the moment and packed -- I've tried to play, but have been locked out by thousands of people ahead of me in server queues. Even some of the developers at id are having issues. One of them (a Mac user, apparently) complains that even he has to jump into Boot Camp just to play his own game.

A little more significantly, Carmack says he recognizes that while there are lots of other choices for PC gamers, a game like Quake Live could make a much bigger splash on Mac and Linux, where there aren't as many other developers and titles grabbing for attention. We've heard that before -- while developers claim there's not a big enough base for them on OS X and Linux, the truth is that some of your best and most loyal customers will use Macs.

Good to see that Carmack recognizes there's an audience here who want to shoot each other online, too. Hopefully we'll see Quake Live running on our machines sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, Apple

Aspyr delays Guitar Hero III, they are now dead to me

Man, remember how excited we were that Guitar Hero III was coming to the Mac at a reasonable time? Yeah, well, guess what. Aspyr has no love for Mac owners. Our friends at Joystiq say that while the PC version is sitting happily on shelves, we're still waiting on the Mac version. "Later this year," Aspyr says. I'll believe it when I see it.

I don't want to get off on a rant here, but who the hell put Aspyr in charge of Mac gaming anyway? Their incompetence has reared its ugly head time and time again. They deliver late, buggy ports all the time, and yet game companies still seem to flock to them for development and publishing jobs.

There is something rotten in the state of Mac gaming, and it is Aspyr Media. Have they ever kept a promise for release? Have they ever delivered a worthy, on-time port? Or have they continually and constantly profited off of placing junk on Apple Store shelves, forever confining Macs to the bottom of the list for gaming platforms? I won't tell you what to buy, but I'm done seeing Aspyr's name on Mac games. Until they show that they actually have the capacity to release a game that even slightly compares to the PC release version (or even shows up on time -- I'd settle for punctuality at this point), the Aspyr name is a complete dealbreaker for me in terms of both interest and purchases. As far as I'm concerned, they're out.

Filed under: Gaming, Multimedia, Software

Aspyr porting Neverwinter Nights 2

Aspyr, maker of many Mac game ports, has confirmed they're working on a port of Neverwinter Nights 2 for the Mac. The game features straight-up D&D action in the Forgotten Realms setting, and while not quite as critically acclaimed as Neverwinter Nights (that one was made by Bioware, after all), it did grab a pretty respectable rating of 82 over on Metacritic.

There is one problem-- the toolset that players can use to create their own content which came with the PC version won't actually be ported to Mac (more evidence that we're getting leftovers). Those of us who buy NWN2 on the Mac will still be able to play that created content, and join up to all the persistent world servers players have put together (and some of that stuff is pretty cool). No release date yet, but we'll keep you posted.

[via MacBytes]

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