iGame Radio

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Host Omaha Sternberg and co-host Corey Tamas of MacGamer talk about the week’s news in Mac and iOS gaming. InstantAction is closing its doors, and looking for a buyer for Torque. What does that mean for developers using the Torque engine, and gamers alike? Omaha and Corey discuss the issue in detail.
• iPad iOS 4.2 is *still* not out…oops, time for Corey to rant. What, you mean December is the end of Fall???
• A bunch of great games have been released or announced this week! Feral Interactive announced Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition. Majesty 2 by Virtual Programming was released (but no Kingmaker as originally announced). The GTA Trilogy was released for the Mac by Transgaming. And id Software released their Rage game for the iPhone.
• EA’s purchase of Chillingo has had some interesting fallout, including comments by developer Secret Exit about publisher branding of a game leaving out the developer. What does this mean about game choices? Should developers choose publishers based on what gamers like about them?
• Omaha talks about the iGame Radio poll, and Omaha and Corey talk about games they’ve played.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Matt Jarvis for featuring music from Osmos.
• Bobby “Glorian” Slavov and Victor Stoyanov for featuring music from Eschalon: Book 1.

 

If you want to know what are the newest games that InstantAction is bringing to their site, look no further! We chatted up Ian Tourney about the music game Instant Jam that let’s you play your music from your own computer Guitar Hero style. Also, I talked with Rob Choi regarding the embedded game technology that they are bringing to PlayGreenHouse (and soon other places). Play a game demo right in your webpage, and click to purchase. To learn more, just hit the button above.

Have a couple of minutes to breath, so thought I’d post a few images from the PAX 2010 floor.

InstantAction, the browser-based gaming service, has announced that they intend to support iPad gaming. InstantAction has been evolving over the past few years, and is now embeddable in websites, Facebook pages, and blogs…similar to videos. CEO Lou Castle is apparently a big fan of the iPad he has been playing around with, and told IndustryGamers that “…InstantAction will absolutely support the device with dedicated applications…”

Big news for all of us iPad users!

(via The Loop)

Some of you may have already heard that Garage Games has made their great announcement regarding Tribes, that they’ve obtained the IP for the game, that they are going to implement it into the InstantAction format (like Legions) available in a browser-format, and that the game will be available as a stand-alone as well. Nothing will be changed content-wise, but a lot of the format for things such as images have been changed so that things are now open source or at least not proprietary.

But…no Mac support.

Cause, see, Tribes 1 came out back when Mac was OS 7, and Windows was 95/98. And whereas as much as Microsoft would like to babble about how it’s made such vast changes and improvements to Windows, it just hasn’t made the kind of changes that the Apple OS has going from OS 7-9 to OS X. Which means that to actually release Tribes 1 for the Mac or port it into InstantAction would mean an almost complete rewrite from the bottom up.

And GarageGames just ain’t willing to do that.

So, I’m going to propose something. GarageGames has the source code for Tribes 1. What if some energetic and inspiring group of Mac developers were to pull together and decide that they would actually rewrite Tribes 1 for the Mac, and in exchange, GarageGames would pop it up on InstantAction? This would not just be cool. It would be an example of the power of the Indie game industry at work.

Otherwise, maybe, just maybe, we’d see Tribes 2 for the Mac. I mean, didn’t someone out there almost complete a Mac build and then drop it?

Garage Games has announced that they have obtained the IP for the entire Starsiege universe, including the original Tribes, for InstantAction and will be showing it off at GDC.

From their blog:

In addition I’ve got some info straight from the lead on the project:

1. GarageGames purchased the ownership of the Tribes IP (all Tribes games) from Activision/Vivendi late last year.
2. We do have the source code to the game, and the build has been updated with bug fixes
3. The build will be distributed through the website, but still playable as a standalone game.
4. The game will use the existing Master Server system that the original game used. We will provide a new master server address with the release.
5. The game is not compatible with version 1.11 but you should be able to play the same demos as recorded on previous versions
6. Mods and configs used in 1.11 will not be directly compatible, without at least minor changes, as the base game scripts have been cleaned up considerably by Andrew
7. The game does NOT have updated graphics, this was a PR misunderstanding. The game does support modern file formats (PNG textures, Zip files)

Still waiting to hear back on any info regarding Mac support, though. But wouldn’t that be awesome!!

For those of you who play InstantAction games by GarageGames, according to the IA blog, Rokkitball, Galcon, and all the maps on Marble Blast Online, ThinkTanks, and ZAP have now been unlocked for unlimited free plays. If you had purchased an ActionPass as an early adopter never fear…you get access to 3 unreleased private betas. Yummy!

 

First day of PAX 2008 coverage. Including interviews with Meteor Games and GarageGames. Also, rumors and commentary from the expo floor.

Just finished posting the first podcast episode in the PAX series. Haven’t updated the website yet…I’ll get to that later. Also, this is just a basic episode…I’ll get to the enhanced version a bit later when I get some of the assets (screens and such). I’ll be honest and say that I’m beginning to think that maintaining an enhanced version is becoming a pain, and rather unrealistic, as anyone who is listening to the show can pop on over the the site in their iPhone/iPod Touch/Webpage while listening, and if using an iPod Classic or such, will only be able to see the pictures.

So, here’s a quick survey question:
Would you like to continue having me post enhanced podcasts or not? Post your responses in the comments (or email me at omaha@igameradio.com).

In other news, remember that announcement that Epic’s Mark Rein mentioned last year in July about Gears of War for the Mac, and then heard nothing else about since? Yeah. You’ll be hearing something about it in the next month or so. :D