iGame Radio

Yesterday, shortly after the Apple September 1st Keynote event, I appeared on the MacJury to discuss and adjudicate the revelations Steve Jobs made. Hosted by Chuck Joiner, I appeared alongside Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab, Chuck LaTournou of Randomaccess, and Don McCallister of ScreenCastsOnline. We had great fun chatting up this content filled keynote and all the implications therein, including the importance of Apple streaming the thing. Yeah, every little detail is important. ;-)

I, of course, had a lot to say about Game Center, and the lack of information still provided in the keynote, what the new iPod Touch will mean to gaming (and Job’s comments about it being the #1 mobile gaming platform now), and the gaming possibilities that AppleTV 2.0 will represent.

Go, listen. It’s a fun-filled hour of Mac geeks chatting about their favorite subjects.

The Apple event today was all about the music, as could be inferred by the invite with the guitar in the background. But game treasure could be found all around if one knew where to look. Jobs gave us more information about Game Center, we saw a wonderful demo of an Epic Game in development on the new iPod Touch, and we discussed the possibilities about the new AppleTV.

First up was the announcement that iOS 4.1 would be released next week. Read more

The rumor of a possible replacement to the AppleTV set are running rampant, and everyone has their ideas. Today, Kevin Rose of Digg fame blogged about his theories regarding what we might see as early as September, stating that this is all going to change everything. But is it change that we can believe in?
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What’s inside this episode:

• Corey Tamas of MacGamer reviews StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty by Blizzard Entertainment. A true inheritor of the StarCraft crown with superbly balanced gameplay and gorgeous graphics, Corey still wishes that Blizzard was willing to go out on a limb and evolve it.
  

Show Notes:

• Host Omaha Sternberg chats with co-host Corey Tamas of MacGamer about the announcement of Torchlight II and Steam’s impact on Mac gaming in general.
• Apple is rumored to be acquiring Chinese online game developer Handseeing. Is Apple finally getting into the publishing business?
• Corey and Omaha talk about other games they’ve played, and games soon to be released, including the pending launch of Supreme Commander 2.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Digital Droo for featuring music from Burning Monkey Solitaire.
• Rich Carlson for featuring music from Dr. Blob.

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Omaha reviews Torchlight for the Mac by Runic Games. A lightweight 3rd person adventure dungeon crawl with fun monsters to defeat and cool swag to find. Comfort food for your Mac gaming habit.
  

Show Notes:

• Omaha hosts alone as she talks about the StarCraft II launch, and whether it signals the beginning of the end of midnight launches.
• Apple has announced a new Mac Pro for August. Is it worth it to upgrade? Will it compete with other gaming machines?
• Other games for the Mac have been announced or released this past week, and Omaha talks a little about them all, including Ubisoft’s announcement of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Tom Clancy Splinter Cell: Conviction in their financial statements.
• No Plants vs Zombies 2 this year, and say goodbye to the dancing zombie, and hello to the disco zombie.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Zach Young for featuring music from The Great Tree.
• Tomas Dvorak for featuring music from Machinarium.

Apple has announced today the new Mac Pro 12 core, to be released in August. Faster than any previous Mac Pro, you can go up to 3.6 GHz using six cores. This new machine will hold up to twelve cores of processing power, although you can custom configure it for as little as four. The machine holds up to eight TB of hard drive space, or a new option for Mac Pros…four 512 GB solid state drives. As for graphics, you can take the default ATI Radeon HD 5770, or upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD 5870, with dual support.

If all of that sounds incredibly top of the line, you’re right. This is meant to be a machine for professionals needing heavy duty graphics powerhouses for animation, 3D modeling, and motion graphics. And the price tag proves it. The Quad Core starts at just $2499, and the twelve-core tops out at $4999.

But is this a machine for the ultimate gamer? Let’s just do a comparison, shall we?

Alienware, the highest end PC game machine maker around, sells the Area 51 ALX right now for $3999. For that price, you get 3.86 GHz speed on an overclocked Intel i7 975 Extreme processor, and a choice of two ATI Radeon HD 5870 cards dual-linked through the ATI CrossFireX system, or two Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 cards dual-linked through the Nvidia SLI system.

The six-core Mac Pro, coming in August, doesn’t have an exact sales price, but considering that the quad-core is $2499, and the eight-core is $3499, the six-core will probably be $2999. This is the machine with the highest clocking speed of 3.60 GHz, on the new Intel Xeon “Westmore” processors. You also get a choice of the ATI Radeon HD 5770 or ATI Radeon HD 5870, with dual support only for the 5770. There’s no mention of Nvidia support, which is surprising and a bit disappointing.

The two machines, however, still seem pretty comparable, with the Mac Pro coming out just slightly slower and slightly lower in the graphics department with a bit decrease in the price department. The fact is that you probably won’t notice a difference between the two.

It remains to be seen, however, whether Snow Leopard can compare with Windows 7 in GPU support, because that’s where the future of graphics-based gaming is really at.

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Omaha reviews Osmos HD for iPad by Hemisphere Games. A great port of a beautiful ambient arcade game, Osmos HD has taken everything good from the original and dumped any bad stuff. Except for getting it to go fast, fast enough.
  

Show Notes:

• Apple announced today their fixes for so-called “antennagate”, the issues with the iPhone 4 antenna and connectivity. Free bumper cases for all (till September 30, at least). So, what does this all mean? How will gamers benefit? And shouldn’t Apple have figured this one out during testing?
• Omaha Sternberg and Corey Tamas of MacGamer talk about Blizzard’s re-decision to nix requiring their RealID to use their official forums. They do the Strike-Counterstrike thing and come to some interesting conclusions.
• A mysterious picture is floating around the net, sporting an image of a zombie hand holding up the date of August 2. Could we be looking at an announcement of Plants vs. Zombies 2??
• DS Effects has created what is probably the first HTML5 gaming portal. What could this mean for the future of iPhone gaming?

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Digital Droo featured music from Active Lancer; pick up the Active Lancer soundtrack
• John Gatti for featuring music from El Ballo; pick up the El Ballo soundtrack

Steve Jobs of Apple announced today that due to antenna issues on the iPhone 4, all iPhone 4 users would receive free bumper cases. Additionally, he outlined tests that Apple performed to determine the extent of the connectivity issues that were being claimed, as well as gave brief information on the release of the white iPhone 4 and availability of the device in other countries.
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MTV Networks announced today that it has acquired Social Express, Inc, a stealth startup in the social gaming market. MTV intends to develop new social online games based on original IP, as well as shows and characters from MTV, Nickelodeon and its other brands. The first game is set to be launched in the third quarter of this year.

Social Express started life in December working on a social games publishing platform, which MTV also intends to launch for independent game publishers later this year.

Both CEO Tony Espinoza and Neil Souza, co-founders of Social Express, will become Vice Presidents managing the social gaming side as MTV integrates Social Express into Nickelodeon Digital. MTV claimed that Social Express includes “…former executives and developers from Apple, AOL, Yahoo! and Zynga.” However, Espinoza’s experience at Apple amounts to two years, ending in 1994 as a product manager. One can question listing Apple in the list with such limited experience.

According to MTV, their game sites attract more than 22 million visitors and are ranked as number one in online gaming on ComScore. This will be the latest endeavor of MTV Networks into gaming, which also launched AddictingGames on the iPhone with the AG iNetwork and a virtual goods platform to the site in the past year.

This is the third of a multi-issue expose about the iPhone 4, iOS4, and the impact both may have on gaming on Apple mobile electronics (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad). Today I’m going to talk about what affect the gyroscope will have on gaming.

Another feature that Steve Jobs announced for the iPhone 4 is the gyroscope. If you wondered what the heck a gyroscope is, the simplest answer is that a gyroscope determines your orientation. Unlike the accelerometer, which measures out how fast your are going and can therefore determine which direction you’re facing, the gyroscope adds in measurements for pitch, roll, yaw, and turning around a gravitational axis.

Apple linked the accelerometer, the gyroscope, and the compass together. This means that in total your iPhone will now sense motion around six axis rather than just three. They also created new CoreMotion API calls (the API used to make calls for the directional aspects of the iPhone) so that developers can create applications using the gyroscope.
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