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Posts with tag world of warcraft

"One Thumb to Rule them All"

Posted May 30th 2007 11:00AM by Mat Lu
Filed under: Gaming, Video, Odds and ends



This video is just flat out amazing. Mike Phillips is a Mac gamer and writer, who just happens to have been born with spinal muscular atrophy. He's apparently only able to move his thumb, and yet that doesn't stop him from playing Unreal Tournament and World of Warcraft. This is possible thanks to a proximity switch connected the Swifty USB switch interface from Origin Instrument and the SwitchXS software from AssistiveWare. The latter looks basically like a kind of on-screen keyboard, that Mike scrolls through to select arrows or letters, etc. Seeing Mike frag people left and right is enough to make me keep away from him online.

AssistiveWare has a variety of products to help disabled Mac users, as well as other videos demonstrating some of them.

[via MacDevCenter]

Mac gaming on the cheap: Our favorite low-cost Mac games

Posted Mar 21st 2007 4:30PM by Dave Caolo
Filed under: Gaming

With the release of Myst Online for the Mac* (and our own nagging, monthly World of Warcraft bills), we TUAW bloggers got together to discuss our favorite low-cost Mac games. Sure, those MMORPGs are fun, but $14.99/month (Warcraft) and $6.95/month (Myst) isn't. So, in the name of gaming cheapskates everywhere, here's our list of great, inexpensive Mac games (in no particular order).

SketchFighter 4000 Alpha by Ambrosia Software. Cost: $19US. Requirements: Mac OS 10.2 or later.

By Ambrosia Software, this shoot-em-up game features upgradeable spaceships, mean bosses, challenging levels and even a level editor. But most of all, we love the dead-on, retro, "hand-sketched" graphics. SketchFighter was designed to look like the very images that young geeks like me spent all of Jr. high school scribbling on notebook paper, and the developers at Ambrosia really nailed it. As an 11 year old, I could only imagine my creations coming to life. Ambrosia made it actually happen, and as a result SketchFighter is wicked fun to play.

More after the jump.

Continue reading Mac gaming on the cheap: Our favorite low-cost Mac games

Control iTunes from within World of Warcraft

Posted Aug 28th 2006 6:30PM by Dave Caolo
Filed under: Gaming, iTunes

Well here's something I missed last week. This past Tuesday was "patch day" in the world of Warcraft. The latest patch, v. 1.12, brought several changes to the game, including the ability to control iTunes. From the Key Bindings preference window you can set up keys to control play, pause, next, back and volume from within the game. Why would you want to do that? Because that song you hear in each of the inns can get stuck in your head for a long, long time.

ASIA--or--Another Stupid Inquirer Article

Posted Apr 20th 2006 7:30PM by Damien Barrett
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Now, this is just stupid. Here's an inquirer article that suggests Apple doesn't want Windows running side-by-side with Mac OS X because then people would see that "Mac OS X is slower than Windows."  What's their proof? They installed Mac OS X and Windows on the same Intel machine then ran World of Warcraft while booted into each OS and compared framerates. The Windows version scored better. C.K. showed us this a week or so ago.

Um...how exactly is this a speed comparison between Mac OSX  and Windows? It's actually a speed comparison between World of Warcraft for Windows and World of Warcraft for Mac OS X. WoW is not a benchmarking tool.

Everyone knows games are better on Windows, including us Mac Heads. But I guess the foobs at the Inquirer couldn't pass up a chance to snipe at Apple and Mac OS X.

Blizzard: We won't stop Mac development

Posted Apr 14th 2006 11:00AM by Dave Caolo
Filed under: Gaming, Software

Blizzard Entertainment, creators of highly addictive cross-platform games like World of Warcraft (among others) have announced their intentions to continue work on Mac-native games. In a statement earlier in the week, the company said, “We have a recognized track record of native Mac OS support, and we have no plans to break with that tradition. We understand that our Mac player base prefers native software whenever possible, and our cross-platform development practice addresses that."

Translation: Just because Mac OS 10.5 will allow you to very easily run Windows on your Intel Mac, Blizzard (and other Mac game developers, we're betting) won't be giving up the ghost. So fear not! Now if you'll excuse me, it's been a whole ninety minutes since I've played World of Warcraft, and I'm starting to twitch a little.

[Via Macworld]

Hello, Mac Gaming Machine

Posted Apr 6th 2006 2:00PM by C.K. Sample, III
Filed under: Gaming, Hardware, OS, Software


After my initial tinkering with Windows XP on my 17" iMac Core Duo, I reinstalled XP on my Mac, using Boot Camp to eliminate the original partition and build a new one, this time 20GBs in size, so I'd have plenty of room for games. I then installed  World of Warcraft, since I already had a copy installed on my OS X partition that I was very familiar with and which would serve as a nice comparison. The results: WoW on Windows XP on my iMac, running fullscreen on my external 24-inch Dell monitor with all the graphics settings ramped up clocks in at about 6fps faster than my OS X installation of WoW, running fullscreen on the same display with the graphic settings pulled back to their default settings. Nice!

Let the PC gaming on sleek Mac hardware begin!

ps--sorry the picture above taken with my cameraphone isn't better.

WoW Universal Binary FAST on iMac Core Duo

Posted Feb 8th 2006 8:00AM by C.K. Sample, III
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Universal Binary

In case you didn't see my post yesterday over at WoW Insider, I just wanted to point out over here that, yes, indeed: yesterday's Universal Binary patch for World of Warcraft means the game runs nice and fast on my iMac Core Duo.

On a 1.83Ghz Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and 128MB of VRAM, I'm seeing 50-60 frames per second in unpopulated areas with the graphics set to the defaults. If I ramp all the graphics up, I'm still seeing 40-45 frames per second in these areas. If I enter something like a battleground where there's lots of action going on, I'm seeing about 30-40 frames per second with the graphics set to the defaults and 18-28 frames per second with the graphics pushed to their limit. Keep in mind that 24 frames per second is a stop-motion animated film, and regular full motion video is normally 29.97 frames per second.

Overall, I'm ecstatic. Finally! A Mac gaming machine that actually plays games!

Dear Game Developers: the time to code for Mac is now!

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