Dear IMG: Just a note to say thank you for the fair and accurate review of The Seventh Guest in your March issue. Your criticism of some of the UI is taken to heart and will be addressed in The Eleventh Hour. Although you attribute some of these problems to “shades of DOS”, it was actually an attempt at keeping the abstract game UI inside the game and not a shell on top of everything else. Time and technical issues kept us from making the menu bar accessible, and the lack of music and sound controls was an oversight. This is all fixed in The Eleventh Hour.
You also mention that unlike MYST, T7G “does not use adaptive palettes in its graphics.” This isn’t true as we use adaptive palettes on every frame of animation, adding and removing colors to optimize for the best possible palette. Unfortunately, this was a new technology for us and the less than perfect implementation caused some banding effects. This and more has been fixed for The Eleventh Hour to create stunning, high quality animations.
Work on The Eleventh Hour is progressing quickly and it will be a much tighter and cleaner game from a technical and UI standpoint. The world is also much bigger and we are struggling to fit it onto 2 CDs.
Hayes Haugen
Programmer, T7G Mac
About your Castles Review...
Dear IMG: I have a question for the Castles reviewer in this last issue of IMG: did you
know about the Option and Shift-Option keys? Holding down either combination during
either the main screen or the battle screen causes time to fly by much faster.
This feature was originally implemented on the PC via the right hand mouse button and had to be moved to the keyboard on the Mac. The game is deliberately set up so that at its normal rate the player has time to think and look around without being under too much pressure, but also gives the chance to speed progress up (massively if both shift and option are held down).
I mention this because I saw its use mentioned nowhere in the article and because it was not clear if the reviewer was referring to pure graphics speed or rather the speed at which “game time” goes by. We feel that the graphic speed is adequate, particularly on our target machine which is an LCIII with VRAM - perhaps we will have to push it a little harder in a later update.
I especially hate to be a whiner when we got such a good rating. We hope it is the case that you will enjoy the game more by use of this extra option. (I guess the documentation could be improved a bit too).
Rob Barris
MacPlay
• Yes, the reviewer was fully aware of the Option and Shift-Option keys. The reviewer was mainly concerned with the graphics speed. —TD
 
I Can’t Find Castles!
Dear IMG: You may be interested to know that, for whatever reason, MacPlay has made Castles: Siege and Conquest a restricted game and US companies are not allowed
to distribute it. (got a long email from MacWarehouse about this). Any idea what’s going on?? - Dave Fitch via Internet
- MacPlay says it has asked various Mac mail order companies in the US no to ship their products overseas. Their main reason for doing this is “to protect our distributors in Europe.” You can buy MacPlay products from any European mail order companies or by calling the MacPlay sales offices at:
Interplay UK
The Barn
St. Johns Yard
Main Street
FyField, Oxon England
0X132LN
011-44-865-390029
More on Screensavers
Dear IMG: In your review of screensavers you left out what I’d consider the best for pure visual stimulation... Bliss Saver by Imaja Software. It’s incredible ever-flowing, changing patterns boggle the mind. I just wanted Imaja to get credit where credit is due on a great program. And for those curious, a demo is available on AOL. - Sam Hall , Chattanooga, TN
Dear IMG: I was pleasantly surprised to see your recent article on screen savers in the May) IMG. My initial positive feels were soon turned around by your comment about shareware screen savers; “They tend to be very basic in design and lack the options that usually can be found in commercial versions.” Here at Ambrosia Software, Inc. we are very proud of how our shareware competes with commercial releases. I would like to direct some attention to our screen saver utility Eclipse 2.2.
Eclipse 2.2 offers most of the features mentioned in your coverage of commercially released titles. It defaults to displaying the time, but using cut and past any picture or logo can be entered to appear on the screen. The screen dim is programmable, and users can designate sleep/no sleep corners. Users may select to override the dim function if a printer or modem is in use. Eclipse will not interfere with any background processing or calculating and several years of bug fixing guarantees compatibility with most systems. Eclipse even features an option to select the white background needed for Powerbooks. All of these features are offered for the $10 registration fee. Users are encouraged to try it out before registering and see what works best for them.
John Haley
Marketing Manager
Ambrosia Software, Inc.
Publisher E-mail Addresses
Dear IMG: I have recently come across IMG and am going to subscribe to it next week Anyway, I was wondering whether you, being an amazing mag team and leader in Mac games reporting, could tell me the e-mail addresses for some companies. I have an e-mail address for a user hotline for Origin <origin@world.std.com>, but there are many others I would like to know. In particular, I have a few Q’s I would like to ask New World Computing (I bought and finished Might and Magic III last year) about products on Mac et hoc genus omne. Amil via Internet
– In the very near future we will be updated our Mac Games Publishers List (found in the DISK version only of IMG) to include more information like e-mail addresses.
Your Review Helped Us!
Dear IMG: We thank you for your great review of Moriarty’s Return - one of the few intelligent games that’s awesome too! Your ‘cons’ even helped improve the game; we changed it so you can’t complain of religious quiz or obstructing plane.
Jame Harvey, author of Moriarty’s Return
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