The Brad Hole

I just want to thank everyone for the kind words and well wishes for my new job at Aspyr. The feedback both here on my blog and at the various forums across the net has been overwhelming. I hope we don't let you guys down. :-)

Semi-related to that, the Alice 1.1.1 patch was finally posted earlier today. Grab it here. (The URL on the Aspyr web page is currently pointing to the wrong place - d'oh!)

Expect to see updates for Galactic Battlegrounds, Clone Campaigns and Jedi Knight 2 shoot out soon. I've also tried to finalize the Civ3 1.29 update for MacSoft, and I should be able to squeak out an update to one of my all-time favorite ports, Centipede, before I leave.

You wanna know why Centipede was one of my faves? First, I thought the game was a surprising amount of fun. For the price you pay (now even more so) it packs quite a lot in. Second, it was the first OSX-native game I did - it went gold back in April of 2001, under a month after OSX was introduced. Third, John Butler and I knocked this port out of the ballpark. We added OpenGL support and particle effects and re-sampled the movies from the original art assets so that they looked a ton better than on the PC. The Mac port also had a real emulator for the arcade mode (written by yours truly). And we had an extra world (6 extra levels) not in the PC version for a total of 6 worlds and 36 levels. (Most of the online specs and documentation incorrectly list 5 worlds and 30 levels.) There was an interesting twist to this - the guy that did the version for the PC is actually a hardcore Mac fan. He was quite supportive of us throughout the entire porting process.

The manual for the Mac version sucked though - it had screenshots that were from the PC version and were completely different from the Mac (which we based off the Dreamcast build) and as such not only looked like ass, but got a lot of the information completely wrong. Well, you can't win them all. :-) It's unlikely I'll ever see a penny in royalties from the Mac version, but if you see a copy for cheap, do yourself a favor and pick it up.