Mac|Life Feral Interactive RSS Feed

Feral Interactive Lets You Grab Game Demos on BitTorrent

Susie Ochs — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:46:51 -0500

Feral Interactive ports PC games to the Mac, and today the company has announced its new download page for grabbing demos. Seven demos are available as of today, and you can grab them with a BitTorrent client.

Feral has some instructions if you've never used BitTorrent to download anything. It's basically a peer-to-peer system that shares the bandwidth between everyone who's downloading -- as your computer is grabbing packets, it's also uploading packets to other computers who are downloading the file at the same time. Feral plans to offer direct downloads, too, but so far only the Ford Racing 2 demo is available to download directly.

Here's what you can grab as of today:

UNIVERSAL BINARIES:
Colin McRae Rally Mac multiplayer demo (reviewed here)
LEGO Star Wars II demo (reviewed here, with tips here)
Ford Racing 2 demo

INTEL-ONLY DEMOS:
Black & White 2 demo (review coming in our June 2009 issue!)
ToCA DTM V8 demo (ToCA 3 reviewed here)
ToCA Honda Civic demo (ToCA 3 reviewed here)
LEGO Indiana Jones demo (reviewed here)

Now go to downloads.feralinteractive.com to get your game on!

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Susie Ochs — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:00:00 -0500

Indy, Short Round, and Willie escape the Temple of Doom. No time for love, Dr. Jones!

Lego Indy packs co-op fun, cute silliness, and occasional frustration. Legos and Indiana Jones are two great tastes that—fortunately—taste great together. If the rousing trumpet theme from John Williams’ classic score leapt to mind as soon as you saw the screenshots on these pages, you really ought to play this game.

Developed by Traveller’s Tales, Lego Indiana Jones was first published by LucasArts for the consoles (PS2, PS33, Xbox 360, and Wii) and handhelds (DS and PSP) in the summer of 2008. Feral Interactive’s faithful port for Intel Macs (except the Mac mini) lets you play with the keyboard if you’re a glutton for punishment, but we found that using a gamepad with analog control sticks gave virtually the same experience as playing on a console.

And it’s a fun experience—the detailed, animated Lego characters couldn’t be cuter, down to the tiny stubble on Indiana Jones’ face. The humorous cutscenes retell the stories in a tongue-in-cheek and family-friendly manner—no blood, no Nazis, no faces melting off, and no still-beating hearts pulled from chests by witch doctors. However, you can’t save your progress midlevel (you must complete a level to move on, although you get unlimited lives), and if you quit a level and retry it later, you’re stuck watching all of its cutscenes again—no skipping allowed.

Instead of being shot by Nazis toward the end of the Last Crusade, Henry is “disassembled” by “enemies.”

When playing alone, you control multiple characters throughout the 3D environments, switching between them with a button-press. Sometimes two characters need to work together—say, Indiana stands on a platform while Marion turns a crank to raise him into the air. The cool thing is, another human player can join in (or quit) at anytime, even right in the middle of a level. Since two heads are better than one, co-op mode might help you solve some of the trickier puzzles too (search Google for “Lego Indiana Jones walkthrough” if you keep getting stuck). You fight enemies with punches, your trusty whip, or projectiles or guns. Occasionally you’ll need to pilot a vehicle, and the steering leaves a lot to be desired, but luckily those sequences are short.

Playing through everything in Story mode took us about 10 hours, but we’d still only unlocked 53 percent of the game, since a lot of treasures and special items can’t be reached with the characters you have available. For example, Short Round can crawl through hatches, but you only have him in the Temple of Doom levels. Still, the Raiders of the Lost Ark levels are silly with hatches. To complete everything, you’d have to go back and replay all the missions in Free Play mode, where you can use whatever characters you like.

Building a car out of—what else? Legos.

Between missions, head back to Barnett College, Indy’s home base, where you can view your progress, check out the artifacts you’ve collected, enter secret codes in the classroom, purchase additional characters or abilities with the coins you collected in the levels, and even solve a few puzzles. The game doesn’t give you a lot of information about what to do with your coins, how to unlock special powers or complete artifacts, or even why you’d want to.

The lack of midlevel saves caused us some frustration when we ran into very hard puzzles or seemingly impossible jumps—over the course of 18 levels, we had about 5 or 6 instances of wanting to chuck our MacBook out the window. You only get limited control over the camera view, and at times the controls can be wonky when one button has multiple functions based on context (we’d press 4 on our controller to jump into a vehicle, for example, and wind up switching characters, that button’s other task). Occasionally the video would stutter or freeze, but not very often, and we were generally able to “unstick” a frozen screen by jiggling the controller’s analog sticks.

ToCA Race Driver 3

Susie Ochs — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:49:49 -0600

We’re running in fifth but almost out of gas! Better make a pit stop.

If most of your time behind the wheel is spent commuting, hauling groceries, or shuttling a bunch of freeloading kids around, ToCA Race Driver 3 can help you recapture the thrill of the open road.

ToCA Race Driver 3, brought to the Mac by Feral Interactive, originally debuted on Windows, the PlayStation 2, and the Xbox in 2006. It’s simply packed: 35-plus types of racing, 80 real-world tracks, and 70 licensed vehicles. World Tour mode sends you through 30-some championship series, starting in cute little Renault Clio cars and working your way up to Formula 1. In Pro Career mode, you choose one racing discipline and try to unlock all the championship cups in that class. Free Race mode is for quick racing on anything you’ve unlocked so far, and you can also challenge human opponents over the local network or online

In ToCA, hitting the nitro boost in a dune buggy launches you high into the air.

It seems like every kind of racing is here—off-roading, oval racing, rally racing, open-wheel, and lots more—and the game features both modern machines and classics, like 1970s muscle cars. But you don’t need to be a gearhead to have fun. We found ToCA pretty easy to pick up and play (opting for an automatic transmission over manual helps a ton), and the difficulty ramps up gradually as you unlock more races. The cars handle realistically, and you can incur damage from bumping your opponents or going off the track, although in this game you’re actually trying to keep the car in one piece.

Toco Race Driver 3 can be played online. ToCA uses GameRanger and supports playing against Mac users only, although you can race against 12 players.

Sid Meier's Pirates!

Susie Ochs — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:54:00 -0600

It’s me and my boys against a shipload of Spaniards. En garde!

Shiver me timbers, just in time for the tail end of the pirate trend comes the Mac port of 2004’s Windows remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! (The original, groundbreaking 1987 game lived on the Commodore 64 and Apple II, hitting the Macintosh in 1988.) But this is no cheap cash-in: It’s a rollicking high-seas adventure through gorgeous environments, mixing several kinds of gameplay in an open-ended single-player romp.

You’re a young privateer on a revenge mission against the marquis who kidnapped your family. The Caribbean teems with settlements of four major powers (English, French, Spanish, and Dutch) and some minor ones (native tribes, peaceful missionaries, and pirate towns). Ships scuttle between the islands carrying treasure, goods, soldiers, and immigrants, and you can attack and capture any of them with fun, keyboard-controlled ship-to-ship combat, and a lively fencing duel against its captain when you board.

Stopping at ports, you can sell your captured ships and booty, buy upgrades and supplies, recruit more pirates, visit the governor for a promotion and woo his daughter in the ballroom-dancing minigame, obtain gossipy clues and torn treasure maps, search for outlaws and your kidnapped family members, and more. You can even overtake entire towns with the strategic turn-based land combat system.

Everything you do affects your reputation score, shown onscreen, and it’s easy to check your progress in any area in the easy-to-navigate menus. The various powers begin and end wars with each other—which you’re free to exploit, encourage, prevent, or simply ignore—even without your input, although events are helpfully kept in a log you can refer to anytime. Still, sometimes we felt like we were sailing in circles—it helps to pick a couple priorities and stick to them.

With all the choices you can make, you’re often stuck guessing at their outcomes—it’s hard to know what the best choice is, even after you’ve made it. We would’ve liked a little advice about when to divide the plunder, for example, and whether to stay loyal to one country or play all four against each other.

Still, we loved the detailed, colorful graphics (easily turned down for older systems), the easy controls, and the astonishing depth. The difficulty ramps up at a good pace, and while some actions (mostly fencing and dancing) can get repetitive, the game’s open-endedness gives it tons of replay value.

Battlestations Midway

Zack Stern — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:03:25 -0500

While Battlestations is simpler than a standalone flight simulator, these planes still pack the Gs for a quick thrill.

Battlestations Midway makes a splash in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Carriers, battleships, submarines, and aircraft clash in a game with the spirit of a kid splashing around in a bathtub. Dozens of units face off in any situation, and you have to balance calling out map-view tactics against your ability to jump into direct command of any one unit. This multiple-point-of-view gameplay loses the complexity of a standalone flight or ship simulator. But the variety allows for faster action—taking over a computer-controlled plane to personally deploy a payload—instead of the slower pace of having to run a complete sortie.

While the single-player storyline opens on the Pearl Harbor attack, Battlestations usually trades that historical weight for a lighter tone. Similarly, individual units—such as an F4F Wildcat—lack the dozens of controls and gauges of a standalone flight simulator, giving Battlestations a more forgiving, action-oriented pace. Submarines move between four levels in the water, instead of providing a real depth gauge. Destroyers can’t independently control props for maneuvering beyond the rudder. These concessions make it easy to pop into direct control of any unit, but we occasionally wanted more realism.

The game’s tactics come from squad orders and overall assignments. While controlling a single unit, you can bark a few simple commands to tell your squadmates to fire at will, return to base, or wait for an attack. The game’s artificial intelligence does a good job of keeping units in formation—our wingmen always stayed close as we turned toward a new target. Otherwise, a live map screen lets you make further assignments, and certain base units, such as an aircraft carrier, let you launch air squadrons.

We enjoyed these tactics, but the controls were often confusing. Battlestations felt like a console video game, designed for use with a controller and not a mouse. Instead of assigning commands with few clicks, we had to remember a handful of key commands, and wished for a simple pop-up menu or onscreen palette.

While often easy, the single-player game introduces new missions and units in a historical context. Online games against other humans give a better challenge. However, players can’t connect to PC gamers and are forced to use the free GameRanger application outside of Battlestations.  Both of those issues limit the number of potential opponents.

Fable: The Lost Chapters

Omaha Sternberg — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:28:00 -0500

Wake up, sleepy rock-face guy!

Life is all about choices, and the ability to explore just how good or evil you can become through the choices you make is one of the big attractions of Fable: The Lost Chapters. But when later choices don’t change as a result, are there really any consequences?

From the clothing you wear and weapons you buy, to what quests you take on and, more importantly, what good or bad deeds you perform, every choice results in a change to your alignment, which is maintained as a number counter on the game screen. As your alignment changes, so too does your appearance…you might grow horns or find butterflies fluttering around you, for example. Characters within the game react differently to you too—a negative alignment makes traders wary of trading with you, while a positive alignment can result in people cheering and calling out your name as you walk by.

Quests also affect your alignment; each has a certain number of alignment points, positive or negative. However, you’ll always have access to the same quests. The consequences of your actions are how the people of the world react to you, rather than the future choices you’re offered. We wonder, shouldn’t the true consequence of your choices be additional choices (or fewer/less desirable choices) in the future?

Your character’s reputation will impact the number and type of quests you can take on, as well as the kinds of items you can buy, and so on. Reputation is increased by the successful completion of quests and boasts. Boasts are claims you make about a quest, like boasting that you’ll complete it naked. Showing off trophies from successful quests also boosts your reputation. (Who wouldn’t feel some kind of admiration—however twisted—for a half-naked guy boasting about how great he is while swinging a bandit’s head on a stick?)

The game’s graphics are stellar. The characters have a comical nature to them, which might not work for some who prefer games with realistic avatars. But they fit well with the game world, and the colors and textures are fabulous. The music is moody in all of the right places, and the sound effects work well. It was tough to navigate the main screen at times because the context-sensitive menu items change throughout the game, and there’s no quick menu to review.

Finally, you might see a warning telling you that your Mac must use “low-end” video if you only have Tiger (Mac OS 10.4.11) installed, even if your machine matches or exceeds the recommended system requirements. We found, however, that this didn’t seem to impact game performance or graphics.