It was only a matter of time before bundles became so prominent they became feral. But that isn’t what’s happened here. In what I believe is a first, there’s a bundle exclusively for Mac gamers, featuring games from Feral Interactive, and available through the Mac Game Store.

What’s in included the bundle? Let’s take a look:

• Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
• DIRT 2
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Battlestations Pacific
• The Movies: Superstar Edition
• Tropico 3: Gold Edition

A package of games bundled together would be worthless if they were not also part of some discount scheme too, and in that regard, the entire bundle will set you back $19.99.

The bundle is available for pre-order right now, with the games becoming available on Monday, and the bundle available until June 2nd. Pre-ordering will net you a bonus $10 off any Feral game (hint: XCOM), valid until the end of June.

To be honest, it’s probably worth getting the bundle just for Arkham Asylum, let alone all the other goodies.

It’s a long weekend, and that means only one thing: more time to play video games. What are you going to be playing this weekend? Something from Double Fine perhaps? Are you in the Card Hunter beta (you should be)? Maybe you’re just going to stare in disbelief at the Max Payne 3 store page, wondering when you’ll be able to play it? Or perhaps the mere concept of a “game” just won’t do any more, and you’ll be playing for Steam achievement achievements?

If none of those options do anything for you, maybe you should take a look at a weekend of keyboard-strafing and mouse-clicking virtual people to repeated death in Aspyr’s Black Ops weekend:

Aspyr will be hosting a special Black Ops Multiplayer Weekend running from Friday, May 24 – Monday, May 27. You’ll need to keep an eye out for Aspyr players on Call of Duty: Black Ops servers–they will be giving top Call of Duty: Black Ops players instructions on how to get a coupon for a free Aspyr game all weekend long!

This is a great opportunity to try out the game’s multiplayer mode if you haven’t already. If you don’t have the game yet, why they’ve thought of you too, with a sale all weekend. And if you’re worried that you are simply too lame to compete, you can get some tips direct from the publishers, as well as the video series by MacGameCast, one of which I’ve carefully embedded below.

Honestly, it’s great to see events such as these organised within the Mac gaming community. As always, if you’re looking for people to play with, try our forums.

(Oh, and you can also rent your own servers now too, if that’s your thing).

It’s rare that a developer will talk openly about choosing to take advantage of SteamPlay’s system of ensuring that gamers only buy a PC game once, no matter which platforms they prefer to use. Egosoft’s Managing Director, Bernd Lehahn recently did just that, posting an open letter to clarify their position on Steam. Of note is where he talks about Mac and Linux versions of their game:

Today when we talk of “PC Games”, we no longer ONLY mean Windows. For some time already, both Mac OS and Linux have become valid alternatives. External partners ported our games over to MAC and Linux and sold them as a new product, sometimes for a different price. Unfortunately these externally developed ports had a number of problems for us as a developer as well as for our customers:

For the customer: Should you ever switch to a different operating system and want to continue playing our games, you had to buy the game again.
For the developer: Since the porting is not based on a single set of source code, it gets increasingly expensive to develop updates for all platforms.

Steam’s solution to this problem is quite radical and customer-friendly. Steam encourages all developers to turn their titles into so-called “Steamplay” games, where versions for all operating systems are part of just one product. You buy it once and you can play it on all operating systems that the developer supports. This even works if you bought a game for windows in the past and the developer adds support for another operating system later.

Egosoft, the developers behind the X3 series, have 3 of their games available on the Mac App Store, but the games were ported by a third-party, Virtual Programming Limited (who were also responsible for porting some of Paradox’s strategy games). When we reviewed X3: Albion Prelude, we found a lot to like about the game which was let down by the less than stellar performance. VPL have patched the games since the initial release, but the complaints with regards to performance have not subsided.

The price point is something of a quandary too. X3: Albion Prelude’s lowest price in its 18 months on the Mac App Store was £6.99 (for just under two weeks). The Windows version on the other hand has been priced as low as £2.50 on occasion, and that doesn’t even include third-party resellers and bundle offers. So why are Mac gamers paying more money?

The answer is of course that the company did the port effectively then owns the Mac version of the game, and sets their own price, independently from everything else. From their point of view, it’s a good system, because they can afford to buy the rights from the original developer (or publisher), do the work in getting the game to run in Mac OS (and let’s not discredit this at all), and then sell it as a new product.

But it’s the consumer that’s getting screwed over. Remember, you’re getting the same game here as the Windows version, there’s nothing that the Mac version has that the Windows version doesn’t (in fact, there’s arguably less, as the Steam version also has achievements and better mod support), and in many cases is fraught with problems. But arguably the biggest complaint I hear from gamers is that they have to buy the same game more than once.

Take XCOM: Enemy Unknown. A truly brilliant game, that was first released in October 2012. People rushed out and bought it, whether it was on console or Windows. With the lack of a Mac version available (or even announced), Mac gamers would simply have to do what they always do, run boot camp and get the Windows version. Four months later, the Mac version was announced, a month after that a release date was provided and the hefty required system specifications were detailed. It was nearly half a year between the game being available to buy on other platforms, and then knowing whether you’d be able to play the Mac version. It was 7 months after the original release before you could pay £34.99 for a game that had already dropped to below £20.00 in many outlets (below £10.00 if you really looked), and that you then wouldn’t be able to play multiplayer with people using the Steam edition. And yes, people wen and bought it again, just so they could play it on their Macs.

This isn’t to knock (the publishers of the Mac version) Feral Interactive, as their ports are consistently high quality and arguably good value for money when taken in isolation. But no-one in their right mind could suggest that this is an ideal situation. Yes, the point can be made that it’s better, after all, to at least have a Mac version as opposed to no Mac version at all, but this is an attitude that won’t ever improve things.

But look at how differently Bioshock: Infinite has worked out. A week before the game was released worldwide, Aspyr announced that a Mac version was forthcoming. Not only that, but they further clarified that it would be SteamPlay-enabled, meaning that buying the Windows version on Steam at the time of its release would eventually net you the Mac version when it’s available. Cryptically, the Aspyr representative said of buying the game prior to the Mac version release that “we won’t get credit for the sale”. In other words, Aspyr don’t earn money on sales of the game prior to the Mac version’s release.

But strangely, even this arrangement doesn’t seem to be in Aspyr’s best interests. There’s no way to “pre-order” the game from Aspyr. They could have set up a system where you give Aspyr (or more accurately, GameAgent) your money, and then you immediately get a Steam key, ready for when the Mac version is available, with the added benefit of being able to play the Windows version right now if you choose. By “pre-ordering” in this way, you as a consumer have pledged your support to the Mac development of the game, whilst still being able to access the currently available one. Instead, you can look around for a deal, buy it, and no-one would ever know you were really after the Mac version.

As a gamer, I fully support SteamPlay, not because I think Steam is the One True Digital Distributor, but because it’s in the interests of the consumer. SteamPlay encourages developers to be agnostic about platforms and devices. Maybe I’ve got a Windows desktop computer and a MacBook Pro, and I want to buy FTL to play on either. SteamPlay lets you do this. We shouldn’t be paying a hardware tax on our games. SteamPlay means that you can buy the  Steam version of a game from anywhere you like (even if the seller only advertises it as being for Windows), and you can play it on your Mac, paying the same price as everyone else.

As Mac gamers we’re in a tangled mess right now, with different places to buy different editions of games, each of which is lacking features from the others. Part of the issue is the business model of the Mac App Store, as it simply doesn’t allow to “register” games on the service like you can with Steam, having acquired them from other sources like bundles or giveaways, but I suspect that people buying from the App Store are doing so because they want to buy directly from Apple, which is certainly their prerogative. Another part of the issue is that the original developers and publishers simply don’t seem to care about Mac gamers enough to warrant treating them as target consumers.

Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need companies like VPL, Feral Interactive, and Aspyr to produce good quality versions of games that we can play on our Mac, and to champion Mac gaming on our behalf. But we need publishers and developers to take ownership of the problem too. Don’t just sell off the rights to have an inferior version of your game produced just to make a bit of extra cash. Either plan to make a Mac version in-house, or contract those companies with the expertise to help you do it. It should be a point of utter shame for big publishers like Bethesda that small independent companies can produce versions of their games for every platform under the sun, whilst one of the biggest-selling Windows games of all time isn’t available on Mac OS.

Let’s have consistent and fair pricing. Why am I paying a premium for the privilege of playing on Mac OS? Let’s celebrate Steam and Gog.com’s policies of being able to buy a game once, regardless of the platform we happen to be using.

And for goodness sake, let’s be more open and forthcoming about future Mac releases. Don’t just let gamers know about Mac releases from rumours and bodged secret betas. Tell us if there’s going to be a Mac version of a game that’s due to be released on other platforms. Then let us buy the other versions anyway, if we want to play now, even if we fully intend to play the Mac version later.

As for Egosoft, they’ve had a change of heart:

EGOSOFT is currently working on porting all X3 games (X3: Reunion, X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude) natively to both Linux and Mac OS. There will be a transition period in which we phase out the older ports by 3rd parties, but our goal is to make all three versions available under “Steamplay” for all customers. This means that everybody who owns a Windows license on Steam will automatically own all three versions!

That’s a sentiment I can get behind.

Wonderful roguelike-like and Victorian hunger simulator don’t starve has been updated with a new set of subterranean goodies:

This is the first in a series of updates to create a new explorable underground adventure. While there are plenty of fun things to find and experiment with down there right now, please keep in mind that this is just an early version of our overall vision for the caves.

We’ve added the first pass of the new caves biome. Who knows what’s down there. You should be able to find one cave entrance somewhere on survival maps generated post-launch but before this update. Newly generated maps will have a handful of different entrances, all leading to different caves.

This is the latest in a series of updates that the developers have been regularly pushing out, for a game that’s highly enjoyable, so long as you don’t mind either referring to a wiki, or replaying the somewhat slow opening moments over and over.

Sure, there are games where you play a gangster. But sometimes one gangster isn’t enough. How about a gang of gangsters? That still doesn’t seem right. A village of gangsters?

A city of gangsters. That’s the thinking behind Omerta, released today on the Mac App Store:

OMERTA – CITY OF GANGSTERS is a simulation game with tactical turn-based combat. Taking the role of a fresh-from-the-boat immigrant, with dreams of the big life, the player will work his way up the criminal hierarchy of 1920’s Atlantic City. Starting with small jobs, his character recruits a gang and expands his empire by taking territory from other gangsters. Eventually he establishes his own crime syndicate and becomes the de facto ruler of Atlantic City.

PC Gamer’s Tim Stone called it “a destination well worth a visit”, although it’s safe to say other reviews haven’t been quite so kind.

Whilst we’re still waiting to find out what the story is with Max Payne 3 (spoiler: he drinks and then shoots people very slowly), Paradox are only too happy to announce their latest Mac release, Dungeonland:

Dungeonland is a cooperative action game that sends three players to a theme park just for heroic adventurers, surviving relentless hordes of friendly staff and stealing loot from all of the gift shops.

Best of all, it’s currently on sale at 50% off on Steam.

(via IMG)

Um yeah. So it turns out Max Payne 3 is now available on OS X. We mentioned this possibility a while ago, and it looks like it’s finally happened.

Today Max Payne 3 is showing up under my “Mac Games” section in Steam, and the official store page shows it as well. So what does developer Rockstar have to say about all this? Er, nothing. Apparently they are too busy with a “triple XP weekend” to worry about anything unimportant like announcing a new release.

The game itself was reasonably well, with Rock Paper Shotgun’s Jim Rossignol calling it “an accomplished, expertly produced shooting gallery (with a few faltering steps) the likes of which we always have an appetite for”. You can probably give the season pass a miss though. Check out last year’s trailer, below.

At this exact moment in time, the cheapest place to get it looks to be Amazon.com (it registers on Steam regardless of where you get it, and is SteamPlay-enabled, so you can grab the Windows version and use the code from that).

UPDATE: It looks like the game won’t launch (yet), despite it showing as SteamPlay. We’ve contacted Rockstar about this, will update again if there’s any news.

“Think kicking doors is fun? Try blowing them up!” is probably not how to best describe forthcoming Door Kickers, but that’s what Killhouse Games is going with:

Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team. Analyze the situation, plan team routes, choose equipment and breach points and coordinate multiple troopers to reach the hostage room before the bad guys get to press that trigger.

It may sound daunting, and like real world CQB combat, it sure is. But most levels can be completed in minutes and on the fly improvisation works. Achieving the perfect planning, getting the mission done with no false steps, that’s a skill harder to master.

Judging by the trailer, which you can watch below, it looks like Frozen Synapse and Hotline Miami got together and came up with an intricate plan to abduct your free time. The game’s on Steam Greenlight, with an alpha version of the Windows version currently available to people who like to live on the edge, with a Mac version coming soon.

(via RPS)

XCOM Challenge is a series in which I look at different ways to tackle situations in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Be warned, minor spoilers may follow.

Challenge #2: Operation Frozen Engine

The building’s on fire and there’s just a single, slightly damaged Sectopod left to destroy in order to complete this terror mission. The problem is, it’s on the first floor, out of the line of sight for most of my squad.

Colonel Florrick is down, and will bleed out next turn. Luckily Colonel Lee is on hand with a medkit.

The Challenge

How can I ensure everyone survives?

Download the save file if you want to play along.

The Solution

Let’s assess the situation. We’ve got a support guy with a medkit, holed up with our downed sniper. We’ve got two heavies, neither of which has the Sectopod in sight. We’ve got a near-death assaulter, and a shotgunner who’s out of moves. Finally, the Sectopod itself is due a reaction shot.

Although we could revive Colonel Florrick with the medkit, the problem is that we won’t be able to enough damage to destroy the Sectopod this turn. Then on the Sectopod’s turn, it will use one of its two shots to permanently take her out, no matter what else happens.

We can’t revive her this turn, She’ll bleed out on the next turn. So the Sectopod must be destroyed this turn.

Li Ming Pan, our assault gal, is badly wounded. A single shot will easily kill her. However, she has the advantage of line of sight to the Sectopod. We need her to deal as much damage as possible.

The odds aren’t exactly in her favour, we need to get her in closer, cover be damned. It’s all or nothing now, remember?

The Sectopod gets its reaction shot, but Li’s got some lightning reflexes, so she survives. From a closer position, the odds are more to our liking. Rapid fire will help here too.

The first shot misses but the second hits for 7 damage. A good start.

One of the Heavies, Zhang, can move a bit closer, but it’s still not close enough to get a bead on the cursed thing.

With no rockets left either, he’s useless. Our other heavy, Zhao, can just get up the stairs and still be able to fire. Let’s do that.

Interesting choice at this point. We could just take the 48% chance to shoot, and hope for the best, or we could suppress, hoping that this will aid our next shot.

We take our chances with direct fire, scoring a hit for 9 damage.

Just Colonel Lee left now. One shot, 60% chance to hit, 6 damage needed.

Yeah! Take that, stupid alien!

We head back to the base, and this time at least, no one gets left behind.

Steam’s found a new way to get people who don’t really like to play games, to play games. Currently in beta, certain games will now award you “trading cards” whilst playing, that you can then, uh, trade with others to make a set. Make a set and you can “craft badges”. Craft a badge, and you’re awarded with achievement paraphernalia like emoticons to use in chat, profile backgrounds, and even discounts (presumably for Half-Life 2). All of which are tradable.

And if that wasn’t meta enough for you, your Steam profile itself can earn XP and level up:

All badges now have XP which contributes to your Steam Level, a summary of your badge collection. You can view someone’s Steam Level by hovering over their avatar. Leveling up earns you non-tradable items like profile showcases, extra friends list slots, and more.

Those who are interested to join the beta need only to level up their clicking skills and join this Steam group. Games supported right now are Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike Global Offense, Half-Life 2 and the as-yet-unreleased (but marvellous) Don’t Starve.