iGame Radio

Virtual Programming announced last week that The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is coming to the Mac. Think Vin Diesel. Think anti-hero. Think a website that buffers way too often. There’s a lot to be excited about regarding this game…it’s really two games in one (featuring Pitch Black as well as Assault on Dark Athena).

But I’m also interested in the system requirements. The recommended CPU speed for the game when it came out is a 1.8 GHz machine. Will they be able to keep the CPU speed there, or will it get raised up a bit? At least most Macs released the past year or two match or beat those requirements.

Also, Dark Athena requires at least a GeForce 6800 or better, but recommends an 8800GT. Past experience with game ports like this tells me that the video card will be more of a factor than the CPU speed, and “recommended” sometimes becomes more of a “required” for decent play. With all of the Macbook Pros having an 8600GT card in them for the past couple of years until just earlier this year (the Macbook until late last year), it means that most Macbooks and Macbook Pros will be at minimum system reqs for the game. The iMac at least had the minimum ATI card and speed back in 2007…but its update recently hasn’t updated the card. So what that all means is that most people who own Macs will be at minimum system requirements for the video card…assuming that the port doesn’t increase those requirements. Joy.

Com2Us announced recently that they had released Baseball Slugger: Home Run Race 3D for the iPhone/iPod Touch 3D. They had links to trailers and gameplay footage, which I reviewed. And I noticed that while playing, you only got to see your bat swing when you missed, not when you connected to the ball. Except every once in a while when you got to see the bat and ball connect in this Matrixy-like pause session. Weird.

The game also provides for a multi-player segment, and you can see your opponent’s play in a little mini-screen within yours. The nice thing is that the mini-screen doesn’t feel crowded. The weird thing is that your opponent isn’t the pitcher when you are up to bat, which you’d expect when playing a game like baseball. They are also up to bat. So I guess you are competing against each other in regards to the number of points you get for hitting home runs, base hits, etc.

I don’t know…I think it would have been as much fun to have a pitcher vs batter component to the multiplayer. Then your opponent could choose from fast balls, curve balls, etc which would have a real tactical impact on how you could or couldn’t hit them.

I downloaded PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies game recently, and I’ve been running through the game (will have a review shortly). At it’s heart, Plants vs. Zombies is a tower game. Create your towers (in this case, many different kinds of plants and plant materials) and bring down the waves of the enemy attacking you (in this case, zombies). And it plays on the big fashion for the past year…zombies.

The gameplay that I’ve seen is solid. You have a selection of tools to use against the zombies, but after a certain point you can never use all of the tools you have obtained, so you have to learn to pick wisely for each wave of zombies you have to fight against. However, you continue to gather more tools level after level. Just as the game continues to throw new zombies at you as time goes on. Makes you strategize and think, as the hardcore gamer loves to do. At the same time, the game is not so overwhelmingly hard that casual gamers are turned off by it.

This is part of the reason why PopCap will make a ton of money off of this game. But it’s not the reason why PopCap will rule the world.

PopCap will rule the world because this isn’t really a game so much as a performance. Every little aspect of the game feeds into the meme of Plants vs. Zombies. You want to keep playing…not just because you want to see if you can beat the next wave of zombies, but because you want to see what kind of zombies show up. What new plants the game has in store. What Crazy Dave is going to say to you. What the zombies will try to bribe you with next.

And PopCap went beyond the game in their performance as well. When I received my media package for the game, it included Brain Ooze (an energy drink), sunflower and pea-shooter seeds, and dirt in which to plant your zombie defense seeds. Now, that in itself is not necessarily unusual…I’ve received these themed media packages before, but usually they are for high priced hardcore games. PopCap also released a viral YouTube video, a music video of the game. My youngest flipped over it, and still sings the damn song.

And most importantly, all of this marketing feels, well, honest. It’s as though the folks at PopCap sat around trying to figure out how to market the game, and you could just imagine that they had as much fun coming up with the ideas for the marketing as they did for the game design itself. That the marketing is not just to get you to buy it, but also to *join in their fun*.

Maybe I’m just downing the wrong pills, but there’s an honesty, as I said, that you don’t always see or hear from other companies. I mean, witness what EA did at E3 with Dante’s Inferno. They had to pay a company to create a fake protest of the game with actors. I mean, doesn’t that just make the game feel like a fraud?

If you believe in your game, put your heart and soul into your game, then put that fun and joy and show that in your marketing scheme. Cause if you can’t show your joy when you market the game, then how am I supposed to believe that you had any joy in making it? And that can result in a game with no life.

I’ll try to get some screens for this shortly, but GameLoft is showing off a new iPhone game, Asphalt 5 (racing game), using the iPhone 3.0 software. I’ll get more info as I get it…

ETA: Touch Arcade has some shots up already. Go look. Also, Asphalt will allow you to listen to music from your iPod app in the car’s stereo. Very cool!

I’ve been keeping track of the WWDC Keynote by Phil Schiller and co. today (through Macworld), and just read that Snow Leopard will indeed have OpenCL. This is really important for gamers. Above and beyond the fact that Apple developed it, OpenCL is a bridge between the CPU and GPU, basically. You can do some awesome stuff with gaming, especially when it comes to graphical acceleration. For an idea of what I’m talking about, see this video of Havok and AMD showing off OpenCL’s abilities (via Engadget).

According to Macworld Magazine, EA launched The Sims 3 simultaneously for the Mac, PC, and iPhone/iPod Touch. The Sims 3, the latest in The Sims franchise, promises unprecedented customization and choices for both your sims and their homes, while removing tedious micromanagement, like sending them to the toilet and the shower (excuse me??? I liked doing that…er, I mean…uh…). And microtransactions have found a home in The Sims 3 as well, with a store that allows you to buy items for your sims and their homes. You’ve even got the ability to create movies of your sims and email them around to others because, well, your sims mean so much to you.

In any case, a game that many, many gamers, both core and casual, I’m sure are going to enjoy playing for a long time. And it was really nice of EA to allow us Mac users to share in the fun, sort of a token gesture on their part to recognizing that we still breathe oxygen and are capable of pushing buttons on a keyboard and mouse. Oh, and that we have a few dollars.

Because apparently we don’t have enough dollars, button pushing ability, or oxygen to share in any other fun with EA. Such as FIFA 10, Mass Effect 2, Battlefield 1943, APB, Crysis 2, or The Saboteur (even though Dragon Age: Origins doesn’t specify Mac, I do know that the intention is to bring it out for the Mac as soon as PC development is over…we’ll see if that actually gells into reality tho). Ooh, ooh, but we get Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince! Weee!

I guess I shouldn’t be all that cynical. I mean, out of the 27 games that are mentioned in the list, nine actually are coming out for the PC…a third. Man, that pill tastes damned bitter, don’t it. Well, welcome to the club.

I like reading The Bottom Feeder, which is the blog of Jeff Vogel (of Spiderweb Software fame). He always has something very thoughtful, but also candid and pragmatic to say, with just the right touch of cynical humor. Anyway, he talks about Resident Evil 5, and of course as it’s mentioned everywhere else when talking about Resident Evil 5, he also touches upon the claims of racism in the game. I tend to agree with his view. Stupid design results in stupid output, not intentional racism. People not thinking.

But it got me to thinking…what if other groups were stereotyped in the same way and turned into a Resident Evil style zombie game? Like, I’m a Pagan…so what if we took a bunch of Pagan zombies and threw them against the world. Then you’d have a lot of people in colorful skirts, utilikilts, and natural fibers throwing tarot cards, incense, and athames at you, and trying to give you unrequested massages and natural remedies.

Better yet, let’s merge some genres. Grab the ever popular RTS war games, especially set during the Roman times. Yeah, Celtic and Germanic Pagan zombies charging after Roman troops. That would do it! Or you want to really offend people? Set it during the Crusades! Yeah…then it wouldn’t matter who you made the zombies…Christian Crusaders or Muslim defenders…you’d offend people. Success!!

The iGame Radio Logo Contest is over! I want to thank everyone who participated: from the contestants, to the sponsors, to everyone who voted. All of you made this contest possible and successful.

And so, without further ado, I’d like to present the winner of the 2009 iGame Radio Logo Contest and the new iGame Radio logo…

Entry #15 by Thomas Filipiak!

Thanks to all of the contestants: Thomas “Flip” Filipiak, Jack Shiels, Jean-Francois Blais, Paul Spooner, Fabio Chavez, Neeraj Sarna, Jason Moss, Arthur Palsenberg, Anna Olejniczak, Lincoln Green, Steven Lai.

Thanks to all of our sponsors: MusicSkins, PopCap Games, Howling Moon Software, Creaceed, Griffin Technology, Codeweavers, and Omni Group

But this is not the end. Because now I get to integrate the new logo into the redesign. In the next week (possibly two) I will unveil the new redesigned site. And in the coming weeks (and months) I’ll be adding even more cool content to the site that will hopefully give you a chance to make a difference in what Mac games are available to play.

Notes on the voting process…

The voting plugin I used, Democracy Poll, regulates voting via IP address (so it logs IP addresses for comparison). However, that doesn’t stop voters with dynamic IP addresses from voting more than once. That, of course, would require logging out of their ISP completely (shutting down the modem, etc to be completely logged out).

The vote was scheduled to end at 11:59 pm (Pacific Time) May 30. Unfortunately, I did not deactivate the poll before the morning of the 31st (hey, I was tired…I fell asleep before midnight). So, the voting continued beyond the scheduled time. But, because I had a log of exactly when votes were made and which choices those votes were attributed to, I was able to remove all votes cast from after 11:59 pm on May 30.

If you would like to see a spreadsheet of how I did this, email me and I will send it to you. I also welcome any comments or questions regarding the voting procedure, either in the comments here, or email to me. Don’t hesitate to make your thoughts known!

And again, thanks to everyone. You all made this a success!