On Line Mac Games
Oct0
The Undying Lord, Takofanes, a necromantic ruler who dominated the earth thousands of years ago is back.
Takofanes’ last encounter with the Champions of Millennium City ended with half our world’s beloved heroes slain. Who now can stand against him?
Hate zombies? Abhor mummies? Detest the dreaded undead? Like to play MMOs for free? You could be the one. You could be the Champion we need!
The free promotional weekend will run from 10:00 a.m. October 30th until 10:00 a.m. November 2nd (Pacific), but all game subscribers will be able to enjoy the Blood Moon content starting October 27th.
NOTE: This should be for all people, not only ex-subscribers, but i can’t guarantee it.
LINK to Champions City
This is not so much a review as it is a preview since the game is still in public beta.
Before I go into this let me warn you NOT TO REMOVE YOUR BOOT CAMP PARTITION JUST YET. This beta is not fully functional and is very buggy. They are leaps and bounds in front of the direct WINE version but still not quite in the production phase yet.
I used to play the game when I dual booted for windows but now that Cross Over Games has gotten up to par for L4D I am good to just play games built specifically for the Mac platform.
For a bit of history on the technology. this is still not actually a native Mac game. Instead, this is Cider which is basically an enhanced form of Cedega that is tailored for the game that uses it.
The first warning to anyone who wants to try out the beta before getting a real account is the long download time. True to the teachings of World of Warcraft, patches often include new content and expand the size of the game almost exponentially.
Being a cider copy the game is actually running in wine with TransGaming’s spin on the direct X emulator which might explain the white back drop as their version of running the game within a window although the actually logon screen will follow you between spaces without dragging its milky partner allong.
The time you launch the launcher it might fail and need to relaunch (it worked for me after the relaunch without issue) although you may want to slow down if your a fast typer because the launcher seems to read enter before finishing reading your keys (not a big bit of lag just a minor annoyance).
But thats not the end of the pre-play pre-release bugs. The downloader may need to be restarted a few times while it updates files needed for play. And I hope you didn’t start downloading with a trial account and then switched to another account because that might restart the whole thing.
To all mac users who use a firewall you may get an authentication error when you finally launch the game, just add the game to your list of programs allowed to use ICMP and you should be fine. Also you may get an error when the game launches, just ignore it and click ok the game will launch shortly.
When the install finally finished and it was time to get into the game I found the interface just as it was on windows, save I needed to drop the gamma because this game does not look its best in high gamma. Also, even though I could play the game with everything maxed out on my boot camp partition I had to play in fastest frame rate mode which still lags like hell around enemies.
Combat was functional although I lagged out a few times while attacking and there was some lag when trying to let my Squig fight while I did my ranged dps with my bow. This was actually working out as the lag started to die down after a bit.
Well soon I got the hang of things and reached rank 2 and was starting on my way to rank 3 when the game crashed. After my laptop cooled a bit I went back into the game spawning right in the middle of all the enemies with my squig still summoned.
As annoying as it is being this slow when in windows the game runs well with everything cranked I was pretty annoyed but decided to wait for a new patch.
It looks like they figured out a good bit of the compatibility issues but this game still needs work before the cider version gets a vote in my book. My recomendation to any players who switch to windows to play this game is to keep switching until its out of beta.