December 9, 2005 by Santaduck.

In news that really pleased and surprised me, Google is apparently working on a Mac version of its Google Earth application. Think Google Maps, but with more detail, and quasi 3-D rotation, and some skyscraper model information. I love it on my XP machine (remember when it was “Keyhole”?), and the satellite photos frequent have better coverage and better resolution than the satellite source in Google Maps. In other related news, Google maps is also trying out a public transportation map search, initially confined to the Portland, Oregon area (northwest US). It’s currently incompatible with Safari, so you should use Firefox. I haven’t tried spoofing Firefox with Safari however.

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December 9, 2005 by Santaduck.

Of course UT2004 has seen a new update from Ryan Gordon, days after the XP release, it’s version 3369 and more info is here. Ryan also did the Linux and Win64 ports. The render-to-texture support has been fixed (and shadows), so this means some motion blur effects may be fixed– in other words try out all those UT2004 mods that had bugs. I’ll try the puzzle mod Metaball soon and see if that now works completely well. I’m also proud that Macologist got its third mention in MacAddict magazine, see the bottom of Page 16 in the December 2005 issue– they featured our C&C Generals: Zero Hour mod conversions by our C&C expert super_kev. Unfortunately one of the mods they mentioned, Imperial Assault (a star-wars mod), was taken down from our downloads due to some issues relating to its very early beta status.

Recent releases: Stubbs the Zombie, Zoo Tycoon 2, Lego Star Wars demo.
Casual game releases: This is a few weeks old, but some games I betatested for Ryan Gordon a long time ago have finally been released for Mac. These are some great casual games. One is a breakout themed game, but the real selling point is that it comes with a map-editor that works in OS X. The other game is one of the best casual puzzle games I’ve seen in a while, and it features something called “Mouse Party”: up to six USB mice can be simultaneously connected, so multiple players can compete with each other in completing the one puzzle. The breakout game is called Richochet: Lost Worlds, and the fun puzzle game is called Big Kahuna Reef.

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