GameTap to bring classic gaming service for Mac
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GameTap, which provides legal access to classic arcade games, is coming to the Mac later this month.
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Microsoft's new Virtual PC emulator lets an Apple computer run Windows XP amazingly well. It's a great product for those occasions when you must sully your Mac with a Windows-only application. By Leander Kahney.
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Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
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MacCentral - Digital music service Napster LLC on Thursday announced the release of Napster To Go, a new Windows-compatible portable digital music subscription service that lets user move an unlimited number of songs songs from Napster to compatible MP3 players for a US&#36;14.95 monthly fee. A &#36;30 million marketing campaign kicks off Sunday during this year's Super Bowl, and is aimed squarely at Apple's iTunes Music Store.
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Open source developers are working to port Xbox Media Center (XBMC) to Mac OS X.
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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MacCentral - New software licensing fees dictated by GameSpy Industries Inc. may make it impossible for Mac game publishers to let their forthcoming games play against their PC counterparts. GameSpy's licensing fees have increased by a factor of five to ten in recent months, an amount that Mac game publishers say is unreasonable to expect them to pay.
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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In a move that should help the company improve the printing capabilities in Mac OS X Leopard, due this October, Apple has acquired the source code to the UNIX printing software CUPS in addition to hiring the program's author. CUPS will continue to be available under its existing GPL2/LGPL2 license.
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It's easy, really -- just sync your Mac to Steve Jobs Time. In Cult of Mac.
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(InfoWorld) - On Thursday afternoon at the D: All Things Digital show, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser demoed a new version of RealPlayer, to be released as a beta in June, that adds the ability to download video that's normally available only as a stream from Web sites and save it to your hard drive for later playback in RealPlayer. There's nothing earth-shaking about that -- utilities like KeepVid and the Firefox extension Video Downloader have offered similar functionality for quite awhile. But Real is aiming for something close to universal compatibility: It says its feature will work with video in Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, and its own Real formats. And the mere fact that such a widely-used program is offering this capability may make it more mainstream. Sometime after the initial release, Glaser said, it'll follow up with a version that allows you to sync the videos you've downloaded onto an iPod. Walt Mossberg asked Glaser a question that I wondered about instantly myself: Is this all legal? Glaser said that Real respects DRM if it's there and won't let you download copy-protected video. As for non-protected video, he said that Real takes no stance -- it's up to the user to ensure that he or she is using the product for legal purposes. In other words, I'm still not sure whether it's kosher to download and preserve, say, a copyrighted clip from YouTube. But the chances that anyone will come after you if you're only doing it for personal use are presumably slim. Real's implementation of this idea looked slick in the demo: When it finds a video it can save, a little button appears over the video window. Click on it, and you can download. If you're one of those people who thinks of RealPlayer as a program that's hard to download and install and that mucks up your system in various ways, the new version may still be worth investigating: Glaser says getting and using it will be a smoother process, although he didn't provide details. To be fair to Real, its current version is already no more irritating than a heck of a lot of other free applications.
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Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox said that he is somewhat surprised Google is pursuing a search utility for the Mac. &quot;The search utility within a Mac OS X is already quite good,&quot; Wilcox said.
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Maui-X-Stream has developed a low-cost emulator that they claim allows Apple's Mac OS X to run on x86 processors. The company announced the software, dubbed CherryOS, earlier this week and proclaimed it to be a breakthrough for home users, software developers and Web designers who operate Windows based PCs.
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Research In Motion couldn&#39;t be bothered to ever get around to doing this themselves, but Information Appliance Associates has just come out with some software which should finally let Mac users satisfy their CrackBerry addictions. There&#39;s no support ...
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MacCentral - IDG World Expo on Wednesday offered details about the Macintosh Games Pavilion, featured at next month's Macworld Conference &amp; Expo in San Francisco, Calif. The pavilion will feature new games from publishers including Aspyr Media, MacSoft, Freeverse Software and Ambrosia Software. It'll also be populated by an Arcade area where showgoers can get their hands on Power Mac G5s and iMac G5s running the latest titles available for the Macintosh.
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Tycho:  Positive Sony news here, at Penny Arcade?  I know, right?  We shall redouble our efforts.  The story all this was based on has been changed to say that none of it is true, or that very little of it is true (depending on who you ask), but if you're asking me I think the original story hit pretty close to the mark.  The alternative - which is to say, that xFire technology would be used for a single game and no others - suggests that their service will be another briar patch of vendor "interpretations" of an online community, which can't possibly be true.  I refuse to believe that, in this generation, they would leave something like this to chance.
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Pangea Software &#8212; makers of Bugdom, Nanosaur, Enigmo and many other Mac games &#8212; on Friday released Pangea Arcade, a collection of three games inspired by classic arcade coin-op games. A playable demo is available for download; unlocking the full game costs $19.95.