Archive for the ‘Mac’ Category

Blizzard released patch 3.2.2 today. Highlights include the return of the Brood Mother, Onyxia, two new pets and one new mount.

The Onyxia encounter is available for testing as a 10- and 25- player raid. One of the rarest drops to win is the Brood of Onyxia, a 310%-speed mount modeled after Onyxia. The two new pets are the Little White Stallion and the Little Ivory Raptor. And as usual, bugs have been squashed, skills changed, and the interface tweaked. Check out the patch notes on Wow.com or in your patcher.

Razer, manufacturer of cool gaming keyboards and mice, has introduced a new mouse, Naga, which better supports your MMO sessions. This 5600dpi Laser mouse has 17 “MMO-optimized buttons”, including a 12 button grid arranged right under your thumb. It is supported on both the PC and Mac and preorders are being taken now for $80 and should land on your doorstep in 3 to 4 weeks.

Take a look at this video on YouTube showing how to configure the mouse for use with World of Warcraft. They even have an in-game addon to setup the mouse.

Many hardcore gamers prefer the keyboard over the mouse? Will 12 keys placed right under your right thumb make you switch? Engadget has a hands on review of the Naga here. Check it out.

While browsing the Warhammer Online site today I saw this graphic for the beta version of the Mac client to play WAR.

Since it has been over six months since playing WAR, I thought I’d DL the client and try the game out again.

There was a slight wrinkle, however. I forgot about the server consolidation and had to go into the account manager and move my characters from Red Eye Mountain to BadLands. The worst thing about this move is having to change the name of all of my toons. But once I got that done I attempted to log into the patcher.

The first time I attempted to install the beta client I received a notice indicating the patcher could not find the “C:\” drive shortly after receiving the manifest file. Well, it is a beta client. But its still funny to see a reference to a C: drive on a Mac. Restarted the patcher and it began downloading the files.

I am interested in how it performs on the Mac and will report on my experience later. Will it run? What’s your experience been with the beta client?

Update:

I started downloading the nearly 10 GB of files at about 1:30pm on Monday and two days later it finally finished only to be greeted by an error from the patcher stating it couldn’t connect to the server. And the patcher hung up trying to get a file it can’t find. Discovered the network the patcher runs on decided to take the afternoon off. So I tried Thursday morning to log in and it finally connected to the patch server and got the last of the files downloaded.

I logged in and the experience was decent. But I couldn’t see myself playing on my Mac Book Pro. The frame rate was just decent enough for fighting but visiting towns was laggy. My Mac Book Pro has the 2.93Ghz CPU with a 7200RPM drive and I used the performance setting so the 3D GPU would kick in. The Mac temperature rose quickly and the fans went into overdrive. The game chose “fastest frame rate” so the video is not all lush like on my gaming rig. I think I would only play the game on my Mac if my main gaming machine was down for some reason.

Has anyone tried RVR on their Mac or MacBook Pro? How is your performance? Are there any good tweaks to make it even better?