|
MacWorld New York 99 Live Update:
iBook Appears, Halo Announced, Focus Saves Our Bacon
Bill Jahnel, Senior Editor
Intrepid Mac fans, MacWorld New York is proving to shape up into a truly amazing event. Despite some setbacks in terms of staff mental aphasia (see "Focus saves our Butts," below) MacWorld has delivered the goods with humour, new games, new toys, and new tools for game developers. What follows is only the highlights of what will be weeks worth of news and reviews born from the womb of MacWorld NY.
The #1 news item at the convention was Apple’s new portable iBook. Debuted by Steve Jobs at the keynote address. Well, at least we THINK it was Steve Jobs. . . they actually started out the show with Noah Wylie playing Steve Jobs and starting to deliver the keynote address. Perhaps if Jobs is our iCEO (interim CEO) then Noah Wylie, fresh off playing Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, can be our bCEO (backup CEO, or CEO revision 1.01). The iBook sports speed, a slick, "iMac to Go" design in Blueberry and Tangerine with 300 mhz under the hood and 12.1" worth of screen real estate. Yummy. Home gamers will especially find the new AirPort wireless networking to be sexy; Apple’s answer to the wired home networks, the AirPort allows up to 10 iBooks to be wirelessly connected to an Ethernet LAN or online connection. This means you’ll be able to pick up your iBook and run in to catch the rest of South Park in your living room while waiting for your bozo friends upstairs to finish their turn in Civ II Gold.
Bungie Takes Our Breath Awayi
The keynote address continued Apple’s recent tradition of recommitment to Mac gaming. Bungie had been working on a new game project for some time and that it would be awesome, but no amount of bribery, begging, or outright attempts at spying had allowed any leaks to the press. The project, called Halo, is sure to blow you away. Halo offers what looks like cinematic QuickTime movie quality being rendered live in a game with OpenGL. Imagine the openbing of Warcraft II, where the orcs are rowing their intricate crafts in the shimmering water towards the fortness. Now imagine not WATCHING it but PLAYING that as the game. From what little the demo gleaned, Halo will offer single and multiuser play, with multiuser play focusing on cooperative mode. It appears to be humans versus some very inticate looking aliens; combat appears to be not only first person but also that your characters can take over vehicles, including military jeeps with gun turrets and alien ID4-like pods. Make no mistake: This game is GORGEOUS. Bungie will have a website at http://halo.bungie.com. Go there to check out the most recent news and screenshots available. We’ll be taking a closer look at this game on Friday, so expect an update soon
Focus Enhancements Saves Our Butts
Before moving forward, though, the MacReactor staff needs to give a huge thanks to the folks at Focus Enhancements. This report would not be presented without their aid. You see, certain unnamed editors (Rafi and I) did a Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. (We’ll let you all decide who goofed worse.) SOME editors, such as Rafi, apparently think the best way they can get work done is by accidentally leaving their G3 powerbook in the Bungie booth to be locked up overnight. Other editors, such as myself, think portable computing means hauling your G3 Blue and White Tower from Houston to New York with you in expectation that the friends you are staying with have a monitor. Ah, but how sad when that expectation proves to be that your friends only have laptops! Argh.
Focus, like a Knight on a white charger, came in and leaned us an ultra-cool iTView unit, which allowed this particular editor to hook his monitorless B&W G3 to a large-screen TV. This is one extremely exciting unit, and this is one editor who wishes he had time to put this unit through its paces (meaning: play a lot of games on the large screen TV). Alas, work must come before play, but the macreactor staff hopes we’ll get a chance to review this unit in the future. Personally, I love the idea of whipping the rest of the editorial staff in You Don’t Know Jack on a 3 foot tall screen. . .
Title Announcements and Cool Toys
Some new titles were announced and the progress of some titles confirmed by MacReactor at the show. We got to put our hands on MacSoft’s Total Annihilation and Rainbow Six. The coding is going along extremely well for both, with TA being closest to completion. LucasArts let us play with the conversion of Star Wars Episode One: Pod Racer. They’ve finished converting a number of the tracks and the game is smooth and really gives a feel for roaring along in a hoverpod at incredible speeds. Particularly impressive is the high performance we saw displayed on an iMac; we can only imagine how gorgeous the game will render when using a more buff graphics chip. We had hoped to sneak a peek of LogicWare’s conversion of Half-Life for Sierra at the show, but they aren’t planning to show anything until the code is pretty much completed. However, we had a good talk with Sierra Studios and were very excited about their interest in the Mac as a gaming platform: Pharoh has been confirmed as being ported to the Mac platform. Expect details of our interview with Sierra Studios to be posted here soon. Logicware also announced they will be porting Heretic II to the Mac and will be publishing it under their own banner. Freeverse also was showing a new gangster-related title called BattleGround at the show that we’ll be playing with Friday.
On the hardware and retail side of things, the iMac’s influence continues to pervade: USB candy-coloured hubs, speakers, and mice are the rule of the day. We got a chacne to peek at some extremely affordable firewire drives from LaCie, with prices comparable to external SCSI drives. The MP3 revolution has spread to the Mac, with at least two different MP3 portable players being demonstrated at the show. Both the Rio and the I-JAM will be competing for Mac dollars, with clear differences in how each unit stores and loads MP3 songs. 999 Software, a web-based discount software company, wowed us with their selection of $10 Mac games, including Riven and Journeyman Project 3. However, my personal favorite of the show so far has been the blow-you-away 200 DVD changer showing from Escient. This baby sports 2 DVD ROM drives and a turntable that can hold 200 CDs or DVDs running through firewire to your Mac. The box itself is styles in bondi blue and frosted white like a B&W G3.
Staying (a)Live
This quick update really only gives a fraction of the new toys and exciting developments we’ve seen at the show so far. Friday we’ll be running about like chickens in search of our heads in order to finish gathering coverage of all sorts of amazing Mac gadgets, games, and development tools. Expect more show updates over the weekend after our staff recovers from the hospitality of long-distance travel back home. Oh, and we wormed a few special toys from our friends at the show, so look for new post-show software giveaways!
|