TOKYO (MacHouse) – Video LAN has updated its popular cross-platform, multimedia player to 0.9.4. This update is made mostly for the Windows version, according to the organization, although there are a few bugs that have been fixed across other OS platforms.
Click on the button to read the version release note. 
Okay. I admit that the last game play video for Pure that we released some 10 days ago is boring. Hopefully, this one is better. What is Pure? Pure is an ATV racing game developed by Black Rock Studio and published by Disney Interactive Studios.
When I first played Pure, I thought it was a boring game. After playing it for about 30 minutes, it wasn’t so bad, though. While playing, a question that I always had was ‘How do they (15 other computer players) jump so high?’ In one map, if you don’t jump high enough, you won’t be able to finish it. I pressed many buttons including Tab, Control-left, Shift-left, Q, #1, #2… Well, I almost abandoned this game. But I pressed something out of desperation, and it worked. You need to press and hold down the ‘Lean backward’ key and then release it and press the ‘Lean Forward’ key to jump. Now, it’s turned out to be the best racing game that I have ever played. Continue reading
It’s been nearly a month since we released the last PC game compatibility list. Since then, we have tested several games including
Well, this time, I won’t go into details for each game. In fact, I only want to talk about Civilization IV: Colonization, Crysis: Warhead and Pure briefly.
 Screenshot 01: Source – MacHouse |
 Screenshot 02: Source – MacHouse |
 Screenshot 03: Source – MacHouse |
There are several PC game titles that start with Civilization IV. Those games include
Civilization IV: Warlords (released on July 27, 2007)
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword (released on July 23, 2007)
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Gold Edition (released on July 17, 2007)
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Complete (released on October 12, 2007)
Honestly, I don’t keep track of these Civilization IV spin-offs. I was once excited to play Civilization IV. But the Mac version (released in June, 2006) barely ran on my iMac G5 2 GHz. Now, the thrill is completely gone for me.
Well, if you have an Intel Mac machine, I can tell you that you can run Civilization IV: Colonization without Boot Camp. So far, I have no trouble playing this game with VMware Fusion 2.0. (There is no guarantee that you can play the game to the end.) It’s a stand-alone game title, whose installation takes up only 844 MB of hard disk space. Continue reading
Sid Meier‘s Civilization is definitely one of the most successful game franchises of all time. In the late 1990s, I picked up the Mac version of Civilization II at CompUSA. I had no idea what kind of game it was at first. But I thought ‘Whoa…’ when I played it. I played the game for a few days without a break. When I realized, the Christmas was over. Soon after, I happened to find the Mac version of Call to Power at Best Buy. And when I heard that Civilization III would be released, I couldn’t wait to play it. When I went to Best Buy, there was no long line for it. That was kind of disappointing. Well, I didn’t enjoy playing Civilization III until I played it on my Mac. The best one for me is actually Civilization III: Conquests, which is equipped with incredibly nice music. And Civilization IV? Oh, no… The minimum system requirement was 1.8 GHz G5 or something. And it barely ran on my iMac G5 2 GHz.
Anyway, another Civilization game was released in September 22 from 2K Games. It’s Civilization IV: Colonization. I played it for a few hours on the Windows partition through Boot Camp in order to make a game play video. But when I put the video files in Final Cut Pro, I realized that there was no audio. Something went wrong with the audio function of Windows XP SP3. So I decided to install this PC game on VMWare Fusion 2.0. Does it run? If it does, how smoothly does it run with VMware Fusion? Well, let’s see.
By the way, they say the Mac version of Civilization IV: Colonization may be released. Within this year? You never know when it will be available. We Mac users sometimes wait for 3 or 4 years. Using Mr. Bush’s famous statement as an analogy,
if we know Civilization IV: Colonization runs on the Windows partition and VMware Fusion today, does it make sense for the world to wait for the Mac version? Continue reading
A week ago, we reported that some Mac users were having a tough time playing EA‘s new game SPORE. Some people even reported problems at Apple Discussions as early as September 8, one day after the game was first released. The game doesn’t launch itself at all for some users. Many users have reported that the game will run for a few days and then now produce debugging errors.
 Screenshot 01 – Source: Apple Discussions |
 Screenshot 02 – Source: Apple Discussions |
 Screenshot 03 – Source: Apple Discussions |
Fortunately, EA issued a game patch in September 18 for PC users. And the Mac patch was released a few days ago, accordingly. (See Screenshot 01.) That indicates that this debugging problem wasn’t specific to the Mac platform. According to SPORE official website, Mac users will get the patch automatically by just launching the game. (See Screenshot 02.) The problem is finally solved, huh? Well… Some Mac users may disagree. Continue reading