First Myth 2 Total Conversion Released

• Two completely new units, the Soldier and Field Cannon.
• New Flag and Ball scenery.
• Multi-cultural units.
• New sampled sounds.
• New weapons (and the stains they leave).
• New explosions.
• Natural terrain with unlimited passability. Your tactics are only limited by your situation and imagination.
• Overhead Map view is limited to the area you have explored, allowing you to pick up grenades and customize troops in privacy.
• You can throw grenades and special weapons at anyone, even your friends, so make SURE you know what you are doing.
• Entirely new feel, this is not the Myth you are accustomed to.

WW II: Recon (6.1 MB)


Meanwhile, Myth mapmaker "Gandalf" has announced an ambitious project to bring the world of Tolkien to the Myth engine:

"There is a group embarking on a great challenge in the realm of Myth 2 Mapmaking... we shall be recreating moments from the brilliant writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. This is no small project. The group is being assembled, we are calling out the guard. We need a talented scripter, someone who can create new unit sprites (not a ton of them we promise), someone who can create models (I can create the 3d part, just not sure about importing), and one more colormap artist. Leadfeather was pledged his help after his wife has their baby. Btw - congrats LF! So we are close to embarking on this project - Helms Deep shall be the 1st installment. It is planned to be a fantastic solo level with possible maps for netgames. It is not inconceivable that we string some of these finished plugins together to form a game unto itself with its superb storyline already in existence.

Before you start thinking that this is yet another project like Daimyo that will never get off the ground, take note that Gandalf has already earned a well-deserved reputation in the Myth community for getting things done. We just may see this happen someday! [Simon]





MacSoft Chat Wednesday
IMG is proud to announce our upcoming chat with Mac game publishing giant MacSoft on Wednesday, April 14th at 10 PM Central, 7 PM Pacific. MacSoft's Nate Birkholz will be joining us as we discuss MacSoft's upcoming releases of Falcon 4.0, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Rainbow Six, and much more!

The chat will be held in the IMG Chat Room. All you'll need is a java-enabled browser to join the chat! See ya then!





Mac Civ II Gold Debuts
The Mac version of Civilization II Gold has just been released! Published by Macsoft, this promises to be one of the year's biggest hits. Here's the press release:

Civ II Gold with Multiplayer has been released.

Starting the week of April 12, boxes will begin flying out of our doors and into your mailboxes and onto your retailers' shelves. The good news is that you don't need Civilization II to use Civ II Gold. But if you do already have Civilization II, look in the Civ II Gold box for a special rebate offer!

Civ II Gold with Multiplayer doesn't just add multiplay via hotseat and TCP/IP networking; it also adds Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds, two scenario add-on packs never before seen on the Mac! Conflicts in Civilization recreates conflicts from Earth's own history, while Fantastic Worlds adds dinosaurs, spacemen, Mars exploration, alternate histories, and more to Civilization II.

Included in Civ II Gold with Multiplayer, you will find a suite of powerful editing tools which allow you to create your own scenarios, units, technologies, and civilizations. Redesign units' capabilities, create new art, and change the rules of Civ II, all from one convenient menu accessed within the game itself!

Get some sleep now, because the addictive gameplay of Civilization II just got better, and we guarantee you'll be up all night trying to beat the computer or playing against other emperors from all over the world!

Ahh, press releases and their excessive use of exclamation points. Anyway, look for a review of this MacSoft title from IMG very soon! [Daranciang]





Sony Loses First Round to Bleem
Bleem LLC announced late Friday afternoon that Sony Computer Entertainment of America's request for a temporary restraining order to delay shipment of the bleem! PlayStation emulator for the PC has been denied. The request, filed in San Francisco Federal District Court earlier this week was Sony's attempt to prevent Bleem from releasing its PlayStation emulator.

The company recently announced that they would also be releasing a Macintosh version of Bleem in the near future.

"We're very happy with the court's decision," says David Herpolsheimer, head of Sales & Marketing for Bleem, LLC. "We've always held that bleem! will be good for Sony, since it expands the PlayStation's reach to millions of PC gamers. We've always worked to respect the interests of Sony and all PlayStation developers, and have repeatedly reached out to address any legitimate concerns they might have. In spite of Sony's recent actions, our door remains open and we hope Sony will see what industry-insiders and retailers already know: that bleem! can only result in a larger market for PlayStation games, and increased sales of PlayStation software overall."


"We'd originally intended to ship a few days sooner, but responding to this lawsuit has taken up a lot of time we'd rather have devoted to bleem! and our users." Herpolsheimer said, "We're working around-the-clock to make up for lost time and get bleem! into the hands of anxious customers."

Galactic Patrol Comes In for a Landing
Well, Galactic Patrol was released, but it was harder to find than a needle in an intergalactic wormhole. We've nailed it down to two servers, so download away and enjoy! [Eilers]

Galactic Patrol (3 MB)
Galactic Patrol (3 mb) Logicware mirror





Firsthand Report on the new OpenGL Drivers
Last night I downloaded Apple's new beta OpenGL Drivers and installed them on my Blue and White G3 Pro 350/DVD. The results were, to say the very least, impressive.

The latest beta of Unreal (2.2.0b2) showed marked improvement, climbing 5.5 fps in timedemo scores: from 24.1 to 29.6 fps according to several cycles of the built-in test. Note that this is at 640x480, 32-bit color. In addition Unreal seems a bit more stable and was able to run for hours without a crash.

Even more surprising was the effect on Connectix' Virtual GameStation. Installing the new drivers seems to have turned on a "hidden" option: full-screen image anti-aliasing! No more blocky pixels; CVGS now interpolates the low-resolution graphics on the fly with no loss of speed. Battle Area Toshinden and Gran Tourismo look like brand-new games, and Resident Evil: Director's Cut is just plain amazing to behold.

Note that neither of the games mentioned actually uses OpenGL in any way-the improvements I saw were due to new versions of the ATI extensions (both 2D and 3D extensions were updated.) The OpenGL installer also updates QuickDraw 3D extensions and installs several OpenGL libraries, taking up about 4 MB of drive space.

What about OpenGL itself? Well, currently no Mac game takes advantage of it, and very few applications either: only the Mac port of LightWave 3D accesses OpenGL directly. We'll have to wait a while to really see OpenGL scream on the Macintosh, but not too long; rumors are buzzing that OpenGL code might make it into Unreal 2.2.4 (coming soon for the PC, a little later for the Mac) and Unreal Tournament, and of course the Quake III test for PC, Mac and Linux will take advantage of OpenGL.

What is OpenGL anyway, and why should you care? The best analogy that I can manage is that OpenGL is to graphics what Linux is to operating systems-an open-source, cross-platform solution with lots of speed, but one that was not taken very seriously-until recently. Just as Linux is becoming the rebel's path to freedom from Microsoft and the dreaded Windows NT/Windows 2000 juggernaut, OpenGL is the new salvation from Microsoft's clumsy and difficult-to-manage DirectX/Direct3D. Originally developed on the Silicon Graphics platform, OpenGL now runs on every major platform you can imagine-including the Mac. This is good news for several reasons: lots of OpenGL games are coming out, and many major graphics engines (such as Quake III) are based on it "natively". This allows for rapid cross-platform development; John Carmack himself bragged at Macworld San Francisco that there was a 15k (yes, kilobyte) code difference between the PC and Mac versions of Quake III.

There are two obvious drawbacks to the new OpenGL drivers: one, that they expire by June 1st, thought I'm sure that they will be updated long before then; and two, there is no VooDoo (3Dfx) support, and none is planned for the future. Currently the drivers will only run on ATI chips, and just as on the PC side, it is up to the card manufacturer to create drivers for their particular cards. It will be up to VillageTronic and the other Mac VooDoo card makers to implement OpenGL support, not Apple.

In the meantime, anyone with a Blue and White G3 should download and install the new drivers immediately! If they Beta version of these drivers is this fast and this stable, I can't wait to see what the final version is like. Quake III Test just can't come soon enough... [Eilers]

OpenGL Beta Drivers for ATI





Unreal To Reach 2.2.4, UT Delayed
The following Unreal tidbit was posted at Fastest Games News Online:

The release of the 224 version of Unreal i[s] nearing. In addition, despite a tentative March or April release expected for the obviously excellent Unreal Tournament, Epic has confirmed that the game will not ship before E3. Mark Rein, vice president of the developer, has given details as to a demo release, as well as the emergence of the latest version of Unreal. "There will be a demo of Unreal Tournament sometime prior to it's retail release," he confirmed. "I don't know if we'll do a public beta or not. We'll be releasing the 224 update for Unreal sometime soon and it's got a lot of the same underlying code as the current build of Unreal Tournament, so it should serve as a pretty good test for shaking any engine-related bugs out of Unreal Tournament. We'll certainly be watching for bugs with much enthusiasm."

No word yet from Marks Adams or Westlake Software on this announcement, but we can assume that Mac Unreal will be updated to keep pace with the PC version just as before. [Eilers]





Total Annihilation enters Alpha
MacSoft has reported that Total Annihilation for Mac has entered the alpha stage meaning that most of the preliminary porting has been completed and they have a playable, albeit buggy version in their hands.

The site currently lists an expected late Spring release.

[Simon]





Mac StarCraft Dirt Cheap
For those looking to buy that latest Mac games (and who isn't?) at a low price from a great company, we thought we'd pass this press release along:

STARCRAFT IS BACK IN STOCK!! MAC-O-RAMA has one of the hottest Mac games of all time for only $35- the BEST price on the web!!! Price includes FREE Priority Mail shipping in the US. Don't forget... purchasing Starcraft at MAC-O-RAMA automatically enters you to win cool Starcraft action figures! Contest ends April 15, 1999.

Also, be sure to stop by to check out the list of winners from MAC-O-RAMA's MACtacular EGGstravaganza! A special thanks to all our sponsors and participants.

MAC-O-RAMA is a Gaming/ Software site that caters strictly to Macintosh users. We offer the world's most *awesome* customer service! Plus, we have great deals on gaming software and hardware, contests, and other fun stuff! Best of all, IT'S ALL MACINTOSH, ALL THE TIME so mac users get the attention they deserve!

So stop by and grab Starcraft, and while you're at it get Carmageddon II and Civ II Gold and Pro Pinball: Big Race USA... Who says there are no games for the Mac? [Eilers]





Marathon Map Makers Group Website Debuts
For those hardy souls still playing Marathon I, II and Infinity, here is evidence that this excellent first-person shooter is still supported by a dynamic and creative fan base. A collection of tips, hints, forums, maps, and map-making tools, the MMMG website (with the litigation-inspiring URL of http://mmmg.bungie.org) is intended to help keep this community together. If anyone needs proof of the concept that releasing editing tools for a game prolongs its life, here it is. [Eilers]







Mac Starcraft Hybrid CD-ROM
Astute IMG reader Jeremy Maher passed along this information about Mac StarCraft:

Don't know if you've reported this or not, but I just purchased StarCraft for Power Macintosh at Electronics Boutique, and was surprised to find that it is a hybrid CD, containing full versions for both Mac and Windows!

So for those of you on both sides of the OS fence, you can run StarCraft on both your wonderful Mac and your grotty old PC. [Eilers]





Quake II for Mac Update
Logicware's Nate Trost, the programmer working on the Mac port of Quake II issued a short statement on his progress on the newsgroups recently:

"It has entered testing. We're beta. Things are coming along nicely. :-) One of the main hassles has been the delays in the OpenGL SDK, but that finally shipped this week. This is the stage of the project where there's zillions of little stupid things to do so I'm rather preoccupied."

ATI Sales Soar
ATI today announced Q2 results for the period ending February 28th, '99. Sales for the three months ended February 28th were $297.2 million, an increase of 63 percent from $182.0 million for the same period last year. Actual net income was $21.7 million compared with $27.0 million for the same period last year.





Descent 3dfx Update
Duane Johnson has released another update to Descent 3dfx. The new version, 1.19, includes the following changes.

D1/2 Multiplayer IPX Network Protocol (Including Internet play with Kali)
Play against MacPlay & PC D1 pilots may result in strangness
D2 pilots can only play against others with my version of D2
D1/2 Software render version released
D1/2 More efficient frame buffer writes (smoother/faster battles)
D2 Translucent force fields

Johnson also indicated that he has begun work on a OpenGL version for Descent. To download the latest Descent 3dfx betas, head over to the Descent 3dfx web site.





Douglas Adams Chat Transcript
Missed the Douglas Adams chat? World Without Borders has posted a chat transcript from last week's chat with Starship Titanic creator Douglas Adams. The chat brought in over 6500 people, making it the most successful chat in WWB's history!





meQuanno 1.10b Released
meQuanno, the Mac Quake model editor, allows Mac users to edit weapons, monsters, power-ups has been updated to version 1.10b with following features:

• HTML documentation, and an illustrated tutorial.
• Enhanced DXF support, import and export models to most 3d modelling apps.
• Revised skin construction, neater packing and Quakeworld compatibility.
• Enhanced animation editing: import and export frame sequences and reorder animations via an elegant 'frame browser'.
• All known bugs fixed!

meQuanno 1.10b [674k]




Subscribe to Inside Mac Games
Inside Mac Games is the only magazine solely devoted to Macintosh entertainment, covering the latest news & information on Macintosh game software and hardware. Each CD-ROM issue of IMG is packed with exclusive previews of the latest soon-to-be released games and in-depth game reviews plus demos, shareware, and much more!