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Posts with tag transgaming

Transgaming makes deal with Ubisoft

First EA, and now gaming giant Ubisoft has inked a deal with Transgaming to wrap their titles in Cider and port them over to the Mac. Which seems like great news -- Ubisoft has a huge number of quality titles, and bringing those to the Mac must be great for gamers who appreciate a better operating system. But not so fast.

First things first, Cider hasn't exactly proven itself in terms of making great games, or even ports for that matter. And apparently Ubisoft is taking it slow -- rather than bring us games like Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed or the great Rainbow Six Vegas series, we're getting... wait for it... Catz and Dogz. Oh, and CSI: Hard Evidence, which was hardly a blockbuster on game shelves.

It's definitely good news that Mac gamers are getting more to play, but if this is all we're going to get, they can keep it. If they wanted to port us Far Cry 2 when it comes out, or maybe even the long-awaited Beyond Good and Evil 2 whenever it's done, awesome. But if all we're going to get is years-old bottom-of-the-barrel crapware, we'll stick with original Mac game developers, thanks.

[via Big Download]

Will Wright: Mac users will love Spore

Well, who won't, right? If you haven't read a single gaming blog this week (you serious worker bee, you), then you may not have heard the big news: Will Wright's rumored-to-be-a-masterpiece Spore has gotten a release date. It's hitting stores (for both PC and Mac simultaneously-- now that's what I like to hear) on September 7, 2008. Which means that later this year, PC and Mac users alike will be playing God, and creating creatures that virtually evolve from amoeba form all the way up to space travel.

Mac|Life got a chance to sit down with Will Wright himself, and not only did he reveal some fun news about the game, but he thinks it will especially appeal to Mac users-- they expect the creative creature creator to do great things with Mac minds. Unfortunately, the game is a Cider port, and it's being released by Aspyr (that's right, I'm breaking my informal press boycott on them to talk about Spore-- don't disappoint me, Aspyr *see update below) but Wright sounds like he's expecting quality from this release, so I guess we should, too.

And just like all the other great developers out there, he's very interested to see what happens with the iPhone SDK -- Wright is apparently an iPhone owner, and would love to get Spore on there. Believe me, Will -- I'd love to play it.

[Via IMG]

*Update: Aspyr has contacted us to say that they are not publishing the game. And at first I was confused, because Lucy Bradshaw specifically mentions Aspyr in the interview. However, after reading it a few times, it seems that Bradshaw is actually giving reasons for why they decided not to go with Aspyr-- their native ports come out too late, and EA wanted to release Spore simultaneously on all platforms.

Aspyr also notes to us that they only do native ports, not Cider ports. So I guess my informal boycott against Aspyr is still on, but we're still not guaranteed to get a good game out of this: Madden '08 was created using Transgaming's Cider, and that didn't turn out so well. Wait and see.

Madden and the iMac: a story of woe


Mac | Life wasn't content to just read about Madden 08 on the Mac-- they tried to actually run it. And for all of us Mac gamers out there, I'm sorry to say the experience didn't go well.

Now, we already knew that neither Madden nor Tiger Woods would run on any Mac with the GMA950 graphics processors in it, so the Mac mini and the MacBook were already out of the question. The screenshot above came from an iMac, though. Clearly the text is bungled up beyond readability. The same problem appeared in the menus for the game, and even during play-- the scoreboard had overlapping graphics problems as well. Unbelievable. Did they (or Transgaming, whose Cider technology was supposed to be how EA ported these games) have their QA team play this thing even once on a Mac? This is what Apple was showing off at WWDC?

For their part, EA blames Apple's drivers, and says a driver update is coming "later this month" (M|L wisely suggests that means Leopard). Poor form, EA. Not that we expected much (EA games are often plagued with release problems, on any platform), but this is not how you bring gaming back to the Mac.

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