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28
Jan

Week in Review: Jan 21 – Jan 28

Posted by Rachel Burger
Introducing our newest series, Week in Review, where we highlight the past week’s top stories involving Apple, gaming, and our own blog.

Apple

As Mac celebrated its 27th birthday and the new iOS App store ushered its 10 billionth download, Apple enjoyed a smorgasbord of press celebrating  its new efforts in security, product innovation, and sweet new campus advisor program for college students. The iTunes store also has a new available upgrade, which will allow iTunes to sync with the CDMA iPhone 4.

Gaming Stories

Sony finally released details about the “Next Generation Playstation Portable,” now known as the “NGP.” Bethesda announced release dates for RAGE, Brink, Hunted and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for XBOX 360. Arrowhead’s Magicka sold 30,000 digital copies in 24 hours after its release on the 25th.

Our Posts

User Review – Unreal Tournament 2004 Mac Quicksave: Macworld 2011 Means Discounts for Everyone!

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Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted Aspyr News, PC Games, Weekly Round-Up |

  • ltcommander.data

    Something else that also happened over the last week was the release of Mass Effect 2 on PS3 (North American release was 2 weeks ago now), which is notable for it being a non-Microsoft platform being possible now that Microsoft is not the publisher and for it being graphically enhanced by using the Mass Effect 3 engine. Now it’s been mentioned in a previous GameAgent post that Aspyr is looking into getting the rights to bring Black Ops to Mac. How about bringing both Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 to Mac?

    This seems like the perfect opportunity now that Bioware is open to bringing the Mass Effect franchise to other platforms. Aspyr has previous console porting experience which positions you nicely to directly port the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 to Mac. Using the PS3 version kills 2 birds with 1 stone since it already uses the Mass Effect 3 engine meaning less work in bringing Mass Effect 3 to Mac as well. With the PS3 version being graphically superior and already bundled with DLC, bringing this version to Mac provides plenty of incentive to gamers who may already own Mass Effect 2 on PC to buy it again for Mac. SteamPlay support would not be needed since porting the PS3 version would make the Mac version distinct from the PC version, which should be good from a revenue perspective. And the great thing about the Mass Effect franchise is that the character save continuity means many gamers will be replaying Mass Effect 2 again as Mass Effect 3 nears in order to have the right save state they want to carry over. This provides resurgent demand to offer a Mass Effect 2 port into despite the game being a year old.

    Now there were previous rumours that Mass Effect 2 was coming Mac, which given EA’s Intel Mac history, probably means that it might have been a Cider port. Given the considerable growing pains of the Dragon Age Origins Mac Cider port, hopefully Bioware isn’t too enthused about going that route for their premier Mass Effect franchise, especially since Mass Effect seems to use a more graphically intensive engine than Dragon Age, SM3.0 vs SM2.0 GPU requirements respectively. If Mass Effect 2 and 3 do come to Mac, it deserves a high performance native Mac port and I believe most Mac gamers feel the same way. Hopefully Aspyr can make this happen.

    Oh, and you if are able to bring both Mass Effect 2 and 3 to Mac, hopefully you’ll be able to minimize the release gap of Mass Effect 3 Mac to the PC version. While a superior PS3 Mass Effect 2 Mac port does not need to have Steamplay support with the PC version of Mass Effect, it would be nice for Mass Effect 3 to have Steamplay support since presumably the PC and Mac versions of that would have feature parity. If Steamplay isn’t supported, hopefully you announce your intentions before the PC version is released so that Mac gamers can choose appropriately.