aspyr-media
Latest
Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy remastered for Steam, iOS
The "definitive version" of Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy is now available on PC, Mac and Linux via Steam as well as iOS. Crafted by porting specialist Aspyr Media, the updated version of the "supernatural murder mystery game" goes by the name Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered as a nod to the 2005 adventure's European name. Players can download it for $9.99 (€8.99 / £6.99). Aspyr noted in its FAQ that there is "absolutely no cut or censored content in this version" of the game. Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered features updated graphics that can be toggled on and off on the fly and controller support across all platforms. While the Heavy Rain developer's original game was capped at a resolution of 1024 × 768, Aspyr said the remastered version supports native resolutions up to 2880 × 1800. Aspyr claimed it "gave every texture in the game a facelift," giving some elements four times the detail as the original game, but the 2 GB size limit on iOS forced remastered textures to only double in size in the mobile version. While it won't provide a release date just yet, the developer did add that an Android version of Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy is in the works. [Image: Aspyr Media]
KOTOR finds the Androids you've been looking for
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare's beloved RPG, is now available on Android devices. To mark the occasion, developer Aspyr Media has slashed the usual $10 price in half (with a lightsaber, presumably). You can snag it from Google Play right now, so long as your device is up to snuff, of course.
Borderlands 2 to scavenge for loot and experience on Linux
Borderlands 2 opened fire on psychos and wildlife almost two years ago, but Gearbox Software's cooperative shoot-n-loot is keen on hunting game in as many regions as possible. Borderlands 2 is now poised to cross another target off its list, as Gaming On Linux has confirmed it will launch on Linux courtesy of Aspyr Media. The port-savvy studio is seasoned with bringing shooters to Mac (and was in talks with Respawn about Titanfall on Mac months ago), but since it already did as much with Borderlands 2 last November, the studio now has Linux in its sights. IGN's followup adds that Aspyr's plans include "all of the awesome DLC" for Borderlands 2, so Linux fans should have plenty to aim at once the port opens season. Aspyr has not offered a launch window, but it teased to IGN that the studio will have more to announce about Borderlands 2 and other Linux-related content "in the near future." [Image: 2K Games]
Respawn CEO: 'We are talking to Aspyr' about Titanfall on Mac
The giant, stompy robots and diminutive, squishy pilots of Titanfall may find a new battlefield on Apple's OS X. Vince Zampella, CEO and co-founder of Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment, was asked point-blank if the hit shooter would appear on Macs. "We are talking to Aspyr," Zampella tweeted, adding, "they should do it." Aspyr is a company that specializes in porting PC games to the Mac. Its most recent efforts include BioShock Infinite and Borderlands 2. Mac gamers should be pleased by this news, but shouldn't get their hopes up just yet. Zampella's tweet is far from a confirmation that the game is coming to Mac, and even if things pan out that way, it will take a while for Aspyr to bring Titanfall to Apple's hardware. Aspyr's Borderlands 2 port appeared four months after its PC incarnation, while BioShock Infinite lagged behind its counterpart by half a year. [Image: Respawn Entertainment]
BioShock Infinite lands, landed, will land on Mac today
BioShock Infinite hit the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in March. Now, as if spurred on by the same Manifest Destiny it rails against, BioShock Infinite has come to conquer the Mac. Though BioShock Infinite was initially developed by Irrational Games, publisher 2K Games has tapped prominent Mac porting house Aspyr Media to handle the OS X incarnation. Apple devotees hoping to enjoy the adventure can now find BioShock Infinite on both Steam and in the OS X App Store with a price tag of $40. Alternately, Steam codes for BioShock Infinite are available at most Apple game retailers or through Aspyr's GameAgent website, the company says.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic arrives on the iPad, and the Force is with it
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is the kind of game that's almost too big to be playing on the iPad. It's easily 30 hours long, with extensive attribute, skill, and combat systems, and it has some of the best storytelling BioWare's ever done, all set in the epic pre-film Star Wars universe. This is a monster of a classic game, and like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Baldur's Gate before it, it seems like cheating to play this game on Apple's touchscreen tablet, like you're somehow breaking the laws of mobile gaming physics, if such a school even exists. And yet, it works. Aspyr Media is the company responsible here. It's been porting games to the Mac for a long time, and with Knights of the Old Republic has decided to start bringing what it calls "catalog Mac experiences" to iOS. Presumably, the rights were snagged from BioWare and LucasArts, and now there's a very well-made $9.99 port of one of the best Star Wars games ever assembled, running on the iPad.
Borderlands 2 for Mac gets a multiplayer update
Borderlands 2 arrived on the Mac late last year, but unfortunately the publisher, Aspyr Media, wasn't able to get the multiplayer working in time for the release. Today the company has released a patch that enables multiplayer co-op through Game Center, along with leaderboards and achievements. Aspyr has also made five different content packs available through in-app purchase, so you can pick up new items, new levels and the Mechromancer class as well. To celebrate the game's update, Aspyr has put the title on sale at 50 percent off for a limited time, so you can grab it for just US$29.99 right now. It's a shame this content wasn't available at launch, but better late than never, and having the game available at such a low price puts us in a pretty forgiving mood anyway.
Aspyr bringing latest Civ 5 expansion to the Mac same day as PC
Firaxis has announced a brand-new expansion pack for Civilization 5, called Brave New World. The expansion, coming later on this summer, will add new civs, units, buildings and wonders to the game, along with the ability to create trade routes that circle the world, and ideologies that can be used to win a cultural victory or a World Congress that will make the diplomatic game more complex than ever. And the best news about this expansion for us Mac gamers is that it's going to arrive same day and date as the Windows version, thanks to the developers at Aspyr. Aspyr teased this to us when we talked with them earlier this year, but it's now official: The Mac version of Brave New World will be out right alongside the Windows version. Having the Mac and Windows versions available on the same day is a good thing. The expansion will be US$29.99 when it drops, and we'll keep an eye out for an official release date.
Aspyr Media charges on in the wild world of Mac gaming
I've been vocal for many, many years now about Aspyr and their like, and exactly how I feel about them. I'm a big fan of gaming, of course, and a big fan of Apple and the Mac. And Aspyr sits right at the intersection of those two worlds: They're a company, based in Austin with about 50 employees, that ports AAA and big-budget games over to the OS X platform. Given my dissatisfaction with the company and how vocal I'd been about it in the past, it was with not a little bit of temerity that I went to finally meet with them here at Macworld 2013. But Aspyr's VP of Publishing Elizabeth Howard and Sales Manager Michael Blair kindly welcomed me into the company's suite and sat down to talk about the state of Mac gaming from their point of view. The good news is that Aspyr has seen all of the signs that I've seen the past few years, and the two main concerns I've had for so long are their concerns as well. Buggy ports of PC games on the Mac was a big problem, but in the past few years Aspyr has worked hard to make things better, and even I'd agree that the ports we're seeing these days, from Aspyr and other companies, are light years better than what we used to see. The other big complaint I've had is delays -- games on the Mac often come out months or even years behind their PC and console releases. But both Howard and Blair agreed this was an issue as well, and in fact one of their biggest concerns. Late Mac releases was "definitely the most important thing to us in 2012," said Howard. Aspyr is working as hard as it can to juggle licensing partnerships, engineers, code bases and platforms to try and get these games out as close to the PC release as possible, and Howard says that "it's getting much better." With a few exceptions, Aspyr essentially has the porting process down to just a couple of months, with most releasing coming out either day and date or soon after. It's not perfect. Just recently, Aspyr had to release Borderlands 2 without multiplayer content on the Mac App Store, though it was able to get multiplayer ready for the Mac Steam release (and the Mac App Store patch is coming as soon as it's ready). But both Howard and Blair said they share the timing concerns, both because they are fans of Mac games, and simply because games released alongside the PC versions (and alongside all of the marketing and promotion for them) . "Revenue is a huge difference for us" when games are released together, said Blair. It turns out that fans like me aren't the only ones bugging Aspyr -- the companies they license the games from aren't always helpful either. Not only do a lot of AAA developers not have time for Mac ports, but they often don't have time to even help Aspyr figure out what code goes where, which adds time to the process and frustrations to Aspyr's engineers. Finally, Aspyr has one more source of concern, and it's the distributors that it chooses to deal with. The company releases games on its own website through the official GameAgent store, but most of its sales come these days through either Steam or the Mac App Store, and Howard says those are two very different marketplaces. How sales look on one or the other tends to depend on the title you're talking about (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, for example, does well on the Mac App Store, while Borderlands 2 is a much better hit on Steam, presumably because of that multiplayer problem, among other things). But Howard said that just releasing games on one platform or the other is even more work for the company's engineers: Steam has its own achievements and features, and the Mac App Store of course has Game Center and other features to deal with. I asked Howard, given how much success the company has found on the Mac App Store, what Apple could do better for games like theirs, and she said Steam is really leading the charge in supporting game developers. Steam "engages that audience constantly," she said, putting together lots of regular sales and promotions for customers to find, and leaving promotional banners and ads up as long as their relevant, rather than changing them out from week to week. Apple, on the other hand, isn't quite as active in its promotion, and definitely isn't as open in terms of how it deals with the store, says Howard. That seems to be a legacy of Apple's relationship with gaming in general: The company has never really understood gamers, and even on the Mac App Store tends to promote and sell more of its own apps rather than much more popular games. Aspyr didn't have a lot of information to share about their exact catalog this year (unfortunately, recent changes in the gaming industry have put some of their titles in question for the moment), but Howard said the content lineup for 2013 would be very impressive. She promised more content for Civ 5 (Aspyr has published both the game and the Gods and Kings expansion on the Mac), some more indie-style titles, and lots of other new titles on Mac and Steam. Howard also mentioned, though again without specifics, that the company was thinking about a new plan as well: Bringing "catalog Mac experiences" over to the iOS platform. She mentioned Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as a desktop game that had done well on Apple's mobile devices, and said that Aspyr was considering bringing games that were a few years old to touchscreens. There's no more information on that, unfortunately, but it was definitely an intriguing idea. Aspyr is definitely working hard to try and make all of its Mac ports better, and while I'm still not completely satisfied with the release schedule (and I definitely got the impression that Howard and Blair weren't yet either), it's definitely clear that the company is facing a whole lot of pressure from all sides for doing something that all of us Mac gamers want: Bringing us high profile games that run natively on the computers that we love. The quality and timing of the ports has gotten better over the last few years for sure, and I would no longer call the company "a complete dealbreaker," as I wrote five years ago. Still, there's always room for improvement, and hopefully we'll see even more of it this year, as Aspyr is able to convince more and more of the companies it licenses games from just how wonderful and loyal the Mac community can be.
Borderlands 2 now available on Mac
Odds are that you're seeing Borderlands 2 on sale all over the Internet today, as Black Friday goes down (and we head towards Cyber Monday next week). But we did want to let you know that just in case you were waiting for a Mac version, the wait ended last week. Aspyr has released the Mac port of the sequel to Gearbox's popular open-world shooter, and you can get it nearly everywhere Borderlands 2 is available. Including on Steam, where it's currently on sale for US$44.99. I haven't had much time to play it yet, but the reviews on this one are great, and especially if you were a fan of the first title, there's definitely reason to grab this and play it on the Mac of your choice. Enjoy, and here's hoping you find all of your other Black Friday deals today as well.
Black Ops takes down Mac on September 27
Call of Duty: Black Ops is set to invade Mac on September 27 through Steam and a host of other digital retailers, port wizard Aspyr announced.Black Ops will run $50, including the First Strike Content Pack. The Rezurrection Content Pack will hit digital shelves at the same time, sold separately for $15, and Escalation and Annihilation will be available later on as a bundle.The Steam version will not include SteamPlay. Black Ops will be available via the Mac App Store "shortly after" the September 27 launch.
Call of Duty: Black Ops makes a run at Mac this fall
While Treyarch is hard at work on Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for this year, its previous game is getting ready to hit the Mac.A Mac port of the hugely popular FPS is currently underway at Texas-based Aspyr Media. You may recall Aspyr's previous efforts porting Windows games to Apple's platform, including 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. System specs for Black Ops aren't known right now, but we can't imagine they'll be much different from Modern Warfare's requirements.
Rage Campaign Edition now available on the Mac App Store
I almost didn't bother telling you all about this, because the circumstances around this release really rub the wrong way. But for gamers who've been waiting to play id games' latest, Rage, on the Mac, the Campaign Edition of the title is now available on the Mac App Store, for US$39.99. The Campaign Edition includes all of the extra equipment from the original Anarchy Edition of the game, along with a whole bunch of extra missions and content to play. If you've wanted to play Rage on the Mac, this is it. So why am I so annoyed by this release? Because it's a port of the game, done by Aspyr Media. I don't have anything personally against Aspyr, but why has it taken us this long to get this game ported over to the Mac? Why can't we run the game natively? id games made a big show of the title being able to run cross-platform originally, and in fact the company released a version of this game on iOS, using the native engine, even before the main title was out. Yet here we are, five months after the game's PC release, getting a second-class version of the title on Mac. Even worse, the game isn't compatible with Steam -- it's not available as a SteamPlay title (which means PC owners on Steam won't have access to the Mac version), and the Steamworks cloud save service doesn't work with the game either. However, Aspyr will be happy to tell you that Rage is available on its proprietary GameAgent store if you'd like to buy it there. In short, while getting Rage and all of these extras for $40 might seem like a good thing for players, id games is doing this all wrong by going with Aspyr. This game should have been running natively on the Mac on day one, and it should be available on Steam. Having it available through the Mac App Store is nice, but seeing it released as an Aspyr port this late in the game doesn't say much for what id thinks of Mac gamers.
Duke Nukem Forever out now on Mac
True to its word, Aspyr Media put Duke Nukem Forever on the Mac in the month of August, a short while after the game's release on PC. You can pick up the title at GameAgent through Aspyr's website, or on Steam (where you get it, thanks to SteamPlay, for both Windows and Mac), but if you want to go cheap, MacUpdate is running a promotion where the game is $5 off the standard price, and you'll get Jets'n'Guns Gold for absolutely free as well. That's about the best deal I've seen, if you're planning on buying the game and don't mind where it comes from. Be warned, of course, that the critics didn't really enjoy the long-awaited title all that much, claiming that the design showed its age and depended a little too much on the game's reputation rather than actual innovation. But that hasn't stopped the game from being a financial success anyway, and odds are that if you're a Duke fan and just want to play the game, you're not that worried about how it stands up to the test of time. Hopefully you're low on your supply of gum, because Duke is ready to get back into action.
Duke Nukem Forever becomes a big Mac game in August
"With sales data, it seems like *customers* love Duke. I guess sometimes we want greasy hamburgers instead of caviar..." - Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford If Pitchford is right, the upcoming Mac version of Duke Nukem Forever, being readied for August by Aspyr Media, may require a marketing strategy for different tastes. A Hunch survey published a few months ago suggested that Mac users are 80 percent more likely than PC owners to be vegetarian. Before you spit out your San Pellegrino Limonata at the mere thought of playing Duke's repeatedly reheated entree on your Mac, let Aspyr President Michael Rogers remind you of the game's pedigree ingredients. "Duke Nukem Forever represents many of the best aspects of gaming: shooting aliens, saving ladies in distress, and great tag-lines," he says. "We think Mac gamers will love taking a bite of Duke's special pain cake." Well, if pain cake is anything like garrote cake, it's as vegi-friendly as it is deadly.
Duke Nukem Forever coming to the Mac
Aspyr Media has posted on its blog that it will be bringing the long-awaited Duke Nukem sequel, titled Duke Nukem Forever, to the Mac. Known for its legendary development period, the game finally arrived on PC and consoles recently, and unfortunately, it didn't turn out very well, earning generally mediocre reviews across the board (not too surprising for a game with far too many cooks in a pot that's been sitting out for years). Still, this is basically a museum piece for how not to do game development, so it's only right that we see it get ported to the Mac after the fact, right? Aspyr's version will be out in August, and it's offering a 10% discount on pre-orders right now. I can't promise it'll be any good, but if you want to at least see what the final version of Duke Nukem Forever looks like running on your Mac, there you go. There's still no word of any version of the game coming to iOS -- we had spotted the App Store mentioned in that legal agreement a while back, but for all we know, that could just have been for the soundboard, which was released recently. After the reviews on DNF, it's hard to think the Duke franchise will recover, but you never know -- if some enterprising developer wants to make a top-down dual-stick Duke shooter for Apple's mobile devices, we can't say we'd be adverse to the prospect.
Aspyr updates Civilization V for Mac with downloadable content
Aspyr Media has updated the Mac version of Civilization 5 to fix a few bugs and include support for all of the various DLC packs. The downloadable content includes various new civilizations to play with, plus map packs that load up certain areas or scenarios to rule and conquer as your favorite civ. Unfortunately, the game isn't in the Mac App Store, but it's available at the usual places to buy Mac games online, including Steam. As you'll know if you've ever played any version of Civ, it's a terrific game, and it's good to see that the Mac version has capability for all the DLC now as well.
Civilization 5 for Mac dated Nov. 23, 2010 CE
Porting powerhouse Aspyr Media has announced the Mac version of Civ 5 will be available through its GameAgent retail portal -- both digital and boxed copies -- on November 23. Confirmation of its exact availability on Steam is pending. Estimated system specs are posted after the break.
Civilization 5 brings diplomacy to Mac this holiday
Guys, can you believe it? Mac is, like, totally a gaming platform now! We never thought we'd say that but with support from Valve, Blizzard and the likes of PopCap, it's gotta be an exciting time for Mac-owning gaming enthusiasts. And joining the platform is the sensation dominating your nation, Civilization 5. Aspyr has announced that it'll publish the 2K Games/Firaxis sequel on Apple's computer platform "this holiday season." Sorry, no exact launch date for the port beyond that. Oh, and sorry-er, but the press release doesn't mention the first DLC pack, which is set to launch on PC later this month. We've sent a caravan bearing goods and questions to Aspyr and 2K Games and will let you know what we hear back.
Snap Judgment: Treasure World (DS)
Treasure World is such an innovative, potentially important game that I felt like it needed to be highlighted with a review, if only to get the word out about one of the most clever ideas to hit the DS (a system overrun with clever ideas). However, time constraints and Wi-Fi issues prevented me from obtaining what I would consider an exhaustive enough experience for an authoritative review. Hence, Snap Judgment.%Gallery-67057%