Archive for the Games Category

Mac Install Kit Rehosted: Kamek AW7 for AW for Postal 2:STP

June 17, 2007 by Santaduck.

This is a bit of old news, but the old Mac Install Kit for Kamek’s AW7 mod for Apocalypse Weekend singleplayer expansion for Postal 2: Share the Pain is now hosted here. Apparently our file hosting via Macologist has not been maintained, so I wanted to make it available again.

As a reminder this includes Mac INI files, and a launcher application for OS X.  You still need:
1) Kamek AW7 Mod zip download
2) Retail Apocalypse Weekend expansion
3) Retail Postal 2: Share the Pain (probably updated to the latest v1409.2).

No I haven’t kept up with Postal recently so I’m not sure what the status of the AW7 that is included in the ‘fudge pack’ version is.  In related news, the controversial ban-magnet Postal franchise is being updated, and Postal 3 will be out for Mac OS X. Read more at Macologist.

UPDATE: The new bundle includes the AW7 mod, which has been renamed “A Week In Paradise”, or AWP. I’m not sure if this Mac Install Kit will work with that, or if the Mac kit was included in the bundle. I’ll have to check with RWS one of these days and ask them.

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Russian 70’s-80’s arcade games

June 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

Tetris may be the best-known gaming export from the USSR, but before western exports of arcade games poured in after the fall of communism in 1991, there were indeed arcades in Russia. I was reading an interesting article in PC World about a new arcade museum in Moscow that is attempting to resurrect cold-war era cabinet arcade games from the 70s and 80s, from periscope sea battles, pinballs, and more. Check out the museum’s official site (named after their version of the quarter, the 15 kopek coin), and especially its exhibition page gallery, which stirs a nostalgia we never had in the west.

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Santaduck Toolpack for UT2004 Updated: version 3.3 (Sep 2006)

September 15, 2006 by Santaduck.

This is a really minor update, I’ve added the new 1280×800 resolution and added an arrow in the results pointing to the AVG fps, which is what you should normally be reporting and comparing. I need to examine all the new Intel Macs (and new CDs) for any resolutions I’ve missed, but I’m sure Rob-ART Morgan of Barefeats.com will quickly let me know of any. ALSO there have been reports that all the download URLs for the Santaduck Toolpak are dead. So download it here:

Santaduck Toolpack for UT2004 version 3.3 (Sep 2006) (Fixed link July 2007)

Keep your eyes peeled at Barefeats.com, they are running a lot of great new gaming benchmarks on the latest Intel Mac Pros.

Posted in Unreal, Games | 5 Comments »

Santaduck Toolpak update

July 20, 2006 by Santaduck.

A very small update is coming, mainly to incorporate some of the new native resolutions in the new Macs. I did a quickie internal version for Rob-ART Morgan of Barefeats.com, and I just need to package it up and fix some typo bugs.

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Tactical Ops: Crossfire Interview and XIII Review

April 21, 2006 by Santaduck.

Tactical Ops:Crossfire Interview: I just interviewed my long time friend Petterf regarding the upcoming Tactical Ops: Crossfire release. TO:C is the free mod for UT2004, an updated of the original mod for UT99 which was the most popular mod for Unreal. Of course, the prerelease begins today (see April 2 news below), with the server version being released, as well as a client encrypted with a password– the password will be released in one week (Apr 28), so that servers will be up, running, and populated from minute one. Petterf is the official Mac member of the TO:C team, but I also know him from his earlier roles as TO:AoT [rm] server admin, and an official Mac betatester for UT2004, the original TO and TO:AoT, as well as for TOST. Petter also gave us some exclusive screenshots, and Province looks very nice indeed. Check it out here.

XIII Review: Our reviews editor just finished up his review of Feral Interactive’s XIII. Now I saw this game before on a Feral preview disk, and it was beautiful– it’s a FPS based on the Unreal engine, but omg, it’s beautiful with severe tweaking of the engine which results in beautifully cel-shaded (think comic) graphics. They did a great job on this, much better than that old Robin Hood cartoon mod. You’ll see comic panel headshots, and POW! hit damage, and the like. The thing is, now I want to buy this game, after reading his review. The storyline is apparently Robert Ludlum-esque, with the conspiracy theories ratcheting up a notch at every step, and of course, you wake up with a loss of memory and the world after you. Check out the review here.

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Intel Mac Benchmark Smorgasbord

April 14, 2006 by Santaduck.

I forgot to mention, we just published a XXXX-load of benchmarks on the new Intel-based iMacs and the MacBook Pro, in comparison with the Macologist staff’s machines, from an iMac G4 all the way up to a quadcore PowerMac G5. The article is HOT apparently– we’ve only had it up three days and it has gotten almost 30K (yes 30,000) unique hits. See the secret is quantity = quality =x. Haha, Actually it was such a bear to do all of these benchmarks, and coordinate the staff, I’m happy to have what we have, and just left it at that, but the FUN part is that I’ve tried to provide crystal clear instructions so that you can run all of the benchmarks yourself. I’d like to do an update soon, as Cinebench got updated (for the 3rd time since we began testing for this article: we had started with CB2003, then we had an internal Universal Binary, then they came out with the UB 9.5, and now they have some OpenGL optimizations), we also had some tips on running a compiled SciMark (rather than relying on Java’s JIT– just in time– compiling), heard about an interesting benchmark called GeekBench(MBP results here), and need to finish up some more rigs on the Photoshop benchmark. Man, the iTunes vs. QT player finding was really neat too…

Go take a look: Macologist’s Intel Mac Benchmark Smorgasbord.

Posted in Hardware, Benchmarks, Apps, Games | No Comments »

Tactical Ops: Crossfire Release Date

April 2, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well this is actually April 1 news (I’m a day late), but it’s not April Fools. Do any of you remember the alias MadOnion? He was the head of TOST, that Tactical Ops anticheat app way back when, and I had lots of chats with him back in the day. Anyways now he’s the lead coder for TO:C, that’s Tactical Ops: Crossfire for UT2004, the mod that was announced on April 1 of last year. Well on year later, they are ready to go. They have announced an April 28 launch date for their first public release. Actually it will be a slam BANG of a release, since they will prep the community to be up and running from the first minute. Here’s how: Downloads of the server app will be made available one week earlier, on April 21. Also the client will be made available for download on that day via bittorrent, but it will be password-encrypted. The password will be released on the official launch day, April 28, when the normal http and ftp download links go live.

In case you missed the original Tactical Ops, it was a semi-realism shooter, that became the most popular mod for the old Unreal Tournament (UT99). TO:Crossfire, like the original, will stay true to its action-oriented roots with well-planned multipathed maps but with beautifully updated looks for the UT2004 engine– that maps are just stunning. Updated screenshots are available at the official site, and the Mac member of the team, Petter, let me know of the ModDB feature URL on TO:C.

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Political sim, The Republic

March 6, 2006 by Santaduck.

We just posted a review of The Republic from Feral. From what I hear it’s really a unique game, you’re trying to run a revolution from a person’s point of view, using individual interactions. I remember in the 80s there were some early PC political simulators running in DOS, and they were quite sophisticated– you would choose either the USA or USSR, and you’d wield your influence over minor countries, and you might think some small country in southeastern asia or south africa wouldn’t be a big deal, but even minor decisions would soon snowball and you’d be at war. It was very educational back then, and I’m trying to remember what it was called. Anyways… apparently this new game, The Republic, is quite different, and will be a lot of fun to sim fans. We found a few graphical bugs (mouse pointer issues) that we’ve forwarded onto the engineer over at Feral, and we’re told it’ll be bundled in their next patch if possible. Read the full review here.

The other Feral review we have in the pipeline is for XIII. If you don’t know it already, it’s a cel-shaded game based on the unreal engine. It really modifies the engine hard, so that the cell shading is pretty awesome (including zoom-in comic panels for headshots, or POW bubbles for damage hits), especially compared to similar efforts I have seen such as the ambitious cartoon-style Robin Hood mod for UT2004. XIII graphically blows such efforts out of the water with its close to seamless professional quality. Anyways, surprise! I had played the game on a demo disc (also available for download from the XIII page at Feral), and had a lot of fun, and was impressed by the graphics. However, I soon forgot about it in my flurry of busy work, and only remember later when Feral shipped it to us for review. Then I heard the absolute raves from our reviewer, Mac_Jedi, who is actually quite picky. Now I was intrigued. What I didn’t get from the demo is that it’s this huuuuuuge conspiracy game– think Robert Ludlum, Bourne Conspiracy, all that in a game. Your memory is gone, you don’t know if you’ve killed the president or you’ve been framed, and both sides are out to get you while you are trying to solve this deadly political conspiracy. According to him, it’s totally embroiling. I mean, he essentially said: just buy it now. Anyways, so that review is coming soon.

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Mortal Kombat fix in P2: AW 7

February 22, 2006 by Santaduck.

User Firestorm PM’d me with info he recently posted on Postal forums on fixing the Mortal Kombat subgame in Kamek’s AW7 mod for Apocalypse Weekend. He’s the one who cornered me into making that Mac Install Kit for AW7 a few weeks back. Read full instructions here, apparently Kamek didn’t really provide clear instructions, so Firestorm has done it for you.

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UT2004 Shadows reminder

February 20, 2006 by Santaduck.

Just in case you don’t already know, full dynamic shadows are now available in Mac UT2004 via the 3369.2 patch. Yup, better than blob shadows. However Ryan said he made a li’l mistake in implementing the settings menu in the GUI, so it doesn’t actually work via the menu. If you want real shadows, you need to edit your INI file manually (you know, the ut2004.ini and user.ini in your ~userhome/library/application support/unreal tournament 2004/system folder).

In UT2004.ini in the [OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice] section:
UseRenderTargets=True

Also in the User.ini in the in the [UnrealGame.UnrealPawn] section:
bPlayerShadows=True and
bBlobShadow=False

and you might as well set in the [Engine.Vehicle]section:
bVehicleShadows=True

One of my favorite maps to check this out is in our old standby Antalus, because you can see the shadows of the trees on the ground, and the shadows of the branches and leaves are visible, and they *move* in the wind! Of course, take a look underneath other players or bots to see real character shadows, and not just fuzzy blobby ovals.

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Santaduck Tools for Mac UT2004 Updated

February 19, 2006 by Santaduck.

I’ve just updated the Santaduck Toolpak, which if you don’t already know is a set of utilities for the OS X version of Unreal Tournament 2004. Specifically I updated three of the tools: The installer app DropInstaller now correctly installs .upl and .ucl files. I haven’t had the time to exhaustively test this, say with the Community Bonus Pack manual zip, so no guarantees atm. I was suddenly inspired and just tried to do it as I was falling asleep at 3am. Also, the retail and demo benchmarkers now enable full rendering of shadows, and allows for the enabling or disabling of audio as well as graphics rendering. (Demo benchmarker hasn’t been tested– the 3am syndrome again– that, and I no longer had the Demo installed so I didn’t bother downloading it at that time of nigh). The disabling of graphics rendering provides and indication of the CPU-limited processes, and we’ve long since known that UT2004 is a very CPU-limited app, so this is a fun option– look for it in some of our future reports. The use of shadows during benchmarking brings the results closer inline with Windows-based UT2004 benchmarkers (such as UMark), as full shadows have been enabled in the recent v3369.2 patch to the game, despite the UI option for shadows having a bug– in other words you can get shadows in UT2004 by tweaking the INIs (ut2004.ini and user.ini), but checking the box for full shadows in the settings menu of the game might be broken.

It’s cool, run the Antalus botmatch benchmark (in “Max” detail), and you can see the shadows under the trees moving, and you can see each individual branch and leaf! And of course the shadows under the players are no longer ovals.

The other tool applications remain unchanged from the previous release, and include tools for UMod extraction, UZ2 compression and decompression for online servers, and a cache cleaner– this utility set is the only one of its kind available for the Mac version of UT2004. The Santaduck Toolpak has previously been recognized with an honorable mention in the Atari/Epic Make Something Unreal contest, and benchmarks using these tools were cited by Apple in introducing the Rev. A iMac G5.

Download it here at Macupdate

Yes, btw the download works, even though 99% of our download system at Macologist is still down. We are working on a solution that looks good, but it will take time, and all of us are volunteers and we just went through moving the entire forum at the beginning of the year so this is the next big step.

Tactical Ops: Crossfire: Well the news is that there’s no news. I’m still trying to get Petter to get us any information from the team– I know they are testing away, but have no idea how close they are for release. This will be a big release party I’m sure, since this is probably the only UT2004 mod that will have an absolutely huge waiting audience, if the mod gameplay turns out to be recognizable to fans of TO:AoT.

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Apocalpyse Weekend 7 mod for OS X Postal 2:Share the Pain

February 8, 2006 by Santaduck.

Today a stranger IM’d me with the charming yet creative online handle of Satan’s Beer Can. It didn’t surprise me that he then proceeded to ask me about Postal. Specifically he was trying to get the good Mr. Kamek Magikoopa’s mod AW7 to work. Now AW7 is a mod for Apocalypse Weekend, the bug-ridden (sry RWS) single player expansion to Postal 2: Share the Pain– I think Kamek has added new animations, weapons, and maps, as well as removing the constraint of a linear story line. Sounds like even more political incorrectness served up hot and toasty. The problem is no one seemed to be able to get it working in OS X. A few people had posted about it in our forums at Macologist about a month ago, but I hadn’t had the time to take a look. The first thing to do was look at the windows .bat launcher. Basically it just launches the postal game with the switch -ini=PostalAW7.ini. Sounds easy enough. Of course the default PostalAW7.ini uses D3DDrv as the render device, and WinDrv as the viewport manager, so I changed these to OpenGLDrv and SDLDrv from my Mac INIs. What results is the game boots up into a small square room with the bubbly texture-missing textures. Boo. The INI just didn’t make sense. No where did it specify the path to the Apocalypse Weekend folder, which is where all the AW7 content gets installed– no wonder it can’t find a texture, or even a menu. But neither does the retail AW’s INI file, so I was missing something. I took a look at Ryan Gordon’s launcher that he wrote for retail AW. Nicely he left an uncompiled .c version, (which includes instructions on how to compile it w/gcc in its comments!), which revealed the commandline in its true glory, which is different probably because the compartmentalization of OS X .app bundles as well as some bugginess in the implementation of the unreal engine switches. Long story short, this commandline worked. Now I’ll clean up the INI file as well as the default.INI file (which presumably is used to generated the AW7 ini from the stock AW ini), and write up an launcher. Maybe I’ll even compile one with gcc instead of using Applescript, which is kind of clunky anyways.

BTW on that note I’ve been doing a lot of Applescript yesterday. I’m making some big improvements to the UT2004 benchmarking application by adding some features to really improve the options. No, I haven’t made a convenient radio-button version yet, you’ll have to do with stock Applescript dialog boxes still, but you’ll love what I’ve got up here for you. Thanks in advance to Ryan Gordon, as well as PetterF and Rogue for help suggesting fixes and doing the legwork on how to implement the options. I’ll write up an equivalent version with the new options for the UT2004 Demo benchmarker as well, and pack it up as a new Santaduck Toolpak version 3. No, the dropinstaller will not be fixed yet– it doesn’t install .upl or .ucl files, which usually isn’t a problem with most packages, but I’d like to address that some day, since some packages like the Community Bonus Packs use these filetypes.

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UT2004 Universal Beta released

February 4, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well, Ryan Gordon had the MacNinjas testing this one for a bit, and only a few of us had access to Intel iMacs. Originally the release was just going to be the old 3369.1 PPC released glommed onto the Intel universal binary. However now it’s been released as a full-blown 3369.2 revision for PPC as well. I was also curious about OpenAL, since fellow MacNinja Petter always seems to have something interesting up his sleeve. When I asked Ryan in email, he told me: “It was rebuilt to the latest version in Subversion. Originally the PowerPC side was just going to be 3369.1 glued to the new Intel build, but the UseStencil fixes required a rebuild, and SDL had some serious changes recently, so I opted to rebuild everything so we had known quantities on both CPU architectures.”
Anyways 3369.2 does not exist on Linux or Windows, as these are Mac-specific issues. Also, the server exploit fix from Dec 2005 has also been incorporated, and even better, the Epic Mega Pack is now included with the update, which causes what would be a rather small download to now weigh in a hair short of 200 Mb. If you want to know about the 9 new maps in the Mega Pack, see BeyondUnreal’s overview. Anyways see all the download mirrors at Gordon’s site here. If you want a faster mirror, I don’t know if it’s listed yet, but Petter got a mirror up in Sweden here, and I think MGF has a link as well, but it usually just redirects to Gordon’s icculus.org site. If you’re doing a brand spanking virgin install of UT2004 on your Intel (or PPC) Mac, and the retail installer crashes on you, make sure to use Gordon’s fixed retail installer for Tiger at Macologist downloads. I don’t see a link for this file at MGF, so get it here as icculus.org will be slammed for a few days, and the file was previously in a temporary folder so who knows if it’s still there. Finally, if you want to see our preliminary benchmarks of Universal UT2004 running on Intel iMacs on a pre-release version last week, read our article here, which we wrote in collaboration with barefeats.com. It flies. Keep your eyes peeled as we’ll be working with barefeats again on another benchmarking feature with more universal binaries. w33t indeed. It’s already a good year!

Posted in Hardware, Games | No Comments »

UT2004 Update, and Casual games

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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America’s Army Framerate fix

November 3, 2005 by Santaduck.

There’s a fix for those of you experiencing extremely slow framerates in 2.50. Simply disable “Auto Login” in Settings>Personnel Jacket. Quit, then restart the game. When you join a server, your settings will be reloaded automatically anyways. (Save login info should remain checked). My framerate went from sub 10 to over 50 on an iMac G5/FX5200. For more information see this thread at official AA forums.

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