According to a report on Big Download, "over 50 percent" of Aspyr's workforce have recently been shown the door, with those remaining left to shamble around the company's now-spacious offices.

As an owner of an Apple computer (albeit my laptop, not my main desktop), it's be a shame if this turns out to be the case. It's not like there are many Mac publishers lining up to take Aspyr's place.

Large layoffs reported at Aspyr Media [Big Download]

Just in case you missed my last preview, here's a little history lesson. The Fighting Fantasy books were penned back in the late 70s/early 80s by now-game developers Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. They were pretty popular in the UK, but over here in the US, we liked choose-your-own adventures where not every path but one led to death.

What Is It?
Fighting Fantasy is a DS action/adventure RPG where players take the role of a generic hero out to find a warlock somewhere on top of a mountain that presumably is on fire – since the specific book on which the game is based is called "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain."

What We Saw
This time around, I played through a mission immediately following the tutorial. A PR rep from publisher Aspyr backseat-gamed for me.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is still scheduled for an October release.

What Needs Improvement?
How Many Oranges Do I Need…? Within five seconds of taking the controls, the Aspyr rep instructed me to visit the store and stock up on oranges and cheese. He explained that these hit-point-regenerating items were necessary in the early levels because you don't have enough HP before level 10 or so to warrant buying expensive HP potions. That would have been fine, except it turns out you need a lot of oranges and cheese for those first 10 levels. This gets tedious because there's no way to buy items in bulk – so I spent way longer than seemed necessary clicking through menus to buy enough cheese and oranges to feed China.

Music is a Must: No music played while in the dungeon portion of the mountain. I'm told this is a bug, but after long treks through winding hallways filled with trolls and such, I realized just how crucial music is going to be for Fighting Fantasy. The right music will blend with the scenery to keep players engrossed, while the wrong music – or no music at all – would make the resulting monotony of slaying trolls and scrolling through exposition text feel like torture.

What Should Stay The Same?
They Fixed The Stylus: Before, it felt like the stylus had no purpose other than the odd menu tap or as an alternate combat method. Now I feel like I can't live (or walk) in the game without it. Pressing on the D-Pad still steers your character on the upper screen, but keeping the stylus trained on the lower screen will correct your aim during combat (which is managed by pressing the shoulder buttons or tapping the weapon slot with the stylus in the lower screen). It also helps you find items in the dungeons by tilting your field of vision to take in every corner of a room. Plus, they've added stylus mini-games.

Mini-games Make Variety: There are several mini-games in Fighting Fantasy. Like many RPGs, there's a gambling mini-game in town – but most of the mini-games are inside the dungeon. Once inside, you'll come across traps and locked doors or chests. In most cases, a hand icon will pop up on the screen and tapping it starts a stylus-based mini-game that will disarm the chest or open the lock. I enjoyed the ones I encountered – such as a timed lock-picking puzzle where you had to guide a fuzzy dot through a maze of tumblers without touching the sides of the puzzle. This was made much more challenging by the fact that the puzzle appears on the upper screen, while your stylus stays on the lower – so you've got to fight some cognitive dissonance to keep from picking up your stylus mid-puzzle because your hand is telling you you're too close to the edge of the lower screen.

Simplified Character Class System: Instead of letting you choose your class from the lineup of usual suspects (mage, warrior, etc.), the game allows you to create a custom class right off the bat. Or, if you really want to experience the choosing of your own adventure feeling you got from the books, you can answer a series of questions that the game then uses to assign you a class. Kind of like a personality test, only you could wind up as a mage at the end of it instead of being asked to sign up for an online dating site.

Final Thoughts
My appetite for this game is now thoroughly whetted. The stuff they've added, the changes they've made and just how far the game seems to have come in the last couple of months speaks to the quality of the experience Fighting Fantasy will probably offer. But then, my RPG glasses are known to be a little bit rosy.

Choose-your-own-adventure books were popular in the 1980s. Nowadays, I can only find them at garage sales with a lot of the stat pages missing. I didn't grow up with the Fighting Fantasy series, but it sounds like the character development was more detailed than my Master of Kung Fu book. Also, I'm told that while most choose-your-own-adventures had multiple endings, the branching paths in Fighting Fantasy typically led to death. Yikes.

What Is It?
Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a first-person action RPG set in the same place as the novel with roughly the same plot. Players can choose from one of three different classes with modifiable stats and venture through the mountain and the town around it in search of the Warlock. There are side quests along the way and tons of non-playable characters to interact with. The 3D action takes p lace in the top screen while the bottom screen is home to the inventory and the map, which you can make notes on.

What We Saw
I spent about 30 minutes with the game in a dungeon halfway through the main quest. The primary objective was to find a secret entrance into the upper levels of the mountain, while the secondary quest involved a choice between helping skeletons by killing dwarves and helping dwarves by killing skeletons.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is due out in October.

What Needs Improvement?
What Do I Do With The Stylus? The control scheme in Fighting Fantasy allows players to use the face buttons or the stylus to look around; but other than that, it's not clear what you're supposed to do with the stylus. You can use it to make notes on the dungeon map or cast spells and select weapons if you don't feel like jabbing the lower screen with your fingertips. However, unless you're using the stylus to look, it's almost like you're just trying to keep it out of the way while you play.

What Should Stay The Same?
Rich Environments: From the exterior town around the mountain to the various caverns inside Firetop Mountain, the 3D environments in Fighting Fantasy just look so detailed. I'm not sure if it's the art style that gives colors and textures this really rich detail, or if somehow the developer has optimized the DS's rendering capabilities. But either way, visually, Fighting Fantasy is very entertaining.

Fast Combat: Whether you're a melee class or a ranged class, the combat in Fighting Fantasy is fast-paced. The shoulder buttons control melee combat – both quick attacks and slower, powerful strikes – and to cast a spell, you double-tap it on the lower screen (and make sure you're pointed in the right direction in the top screen). There's no targeting reticule, but from the few spells I cast, I get the feeling that the game is forgiving in ranged combat. Always a plus if you're going to be frantically casting spells.

Final Thoughts
I'm not sure how I feel about there being only one ending, but it's good to hear that even with a single critical path, there will still be 8-10 hours of solid adventuring. If nothing else, I'm always happy to have another adventure game on the DS, especially one that comes with a rich IP already attached to it.

The company declined to say how many people have been laid off, but did send this official statement to us.

"The current economic environment has forced Aspyr to make some tough decisions. The most difficult of which has been a reduction in staff and the loss of some very talented, valuable team members and friends. We have taken these steps in an effort to restructure to better meet the challenges ahead. No additional staff reductions are planned or expected, and operations will continue without interruption on all titles scheduled to ship in 2009 and beyond."

While the official number of people laid off this week weren't released, we've heard that as many as a third of the staff were let go.

Founded in 1996, the developer is probably best known for their work porting PC titles like Call of Duty 4 and Sims 2 to the Mac. They also published ports of Guitar Hero III to the PC and Mac and published 1701 A.D.

More than a dozen temporary full time employees were let go from the developer yesterday as well as some regular full time employees, with more layoffs expected. The company has also shut down their internal servers, sources say.

Founded in 1996, the developer has also published ports of Guitar Hero III to the PC and Mac and published 1701 A.D.

Reached for contact this morning, Aspyr declined to comment on the rumor.

Billed as a 'real life treasure hunt', Treasure Troves will scan the area around your DS and alerts you to the presence of 'treasures' either by on screen display or an audio alert if the DS is closed - allowing 'passive' play when you are just wandering around.

Leingang says that testing the game has actually changed the way he experiences his home town.

"I take walks frequently," he explains, "and all of a sudden I'm doing stupid things, just laughing at myself because I'm walking ten more feet to the left this time, or turning down this different street, or walking down the opposite side of the road. Even though I'm going down the same street, I'm on a different side now, facing a different direction. It's so funny how much more I do actually see."

Aspyr's Treasure Troves To Use DS As 'Real-Life Treasure Hunt' [Gamasutra]

It features six mini-games across three categories that apparently represent everything Americans need to know in order to go to college; reading, writing, and math. It even tracks the player's progress, so you can tell early on if you need to hire a more intelligent doppleganger to take the test for you child. All this for only $29.99! No no parents, don't thank me. It's all part of my ongoing plan to ruin Christmas for children everywhere.

Aspyr Media Ships New SAT Prep Video Game, futureU™, for Nintendo DS™

Interactive Test Prep Game Based on Study Material from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions Designed for Studying While On The Go

AUSTIN, TX - November 5, 2008 - Aspyr Media, in collaboration with Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, announced today that futureU™, a first-of-its-kind SAT prep video game, has shipped to retail stores nationwide for Nintendo DS™. Following on the heels of the PC/Mac version of the same name, futureU represents a new medium for supplemental SAT prep by adapting test preparation material into a collection of fun interactive games.

Utilizing the touch screen capabilities of DS, futureU offers a complete interactive experience unlike any standard test taking method to date. Designed for studying at home or on the go, the game consists of six distinctive mini-games that are divided into three main categories - Math, Reading and Writing. Developed as a complement to traditional SAT study methods, the game is grounded in Kaplan curriculum and features hundreds of questions and track-able player progress.

futureU incorporates a wealth of in-game content that challenges and sharpens skills including:

* Reading: Focuses on refining players' reading skills, vocabulary, main idea identification, themes and arguments, technique, and recognizing word meanings based on context.

* Writing: Concentrates on improving players' writing skills by covering topics such as passive voice, run-on sentences, misplaced modifiers, parallelism, conjunctions, fragments, coordination and subordination, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, tenses, adverbs and adjectives, gerunds, idioms, wrong words, and double negatives.

* Math: Enable players to practice critical math areas such as algebra, geometry, data, statistics, probability, polynomials, and sequences.

futureU for Nintendo DS™ is rated "E" for Everyone by the ESRB and is available for an SRP of $29.99. For more information, please visit www.aspyr.com.

futureU is the latest supplementary test prep offering from Kaplan which adapts test preparation content into a medium relevant for today's teens. Last year, Kaplan launched SAT prep for iTunes® and a score-raising graphic novel series.

The first title, based on SAT prep curriculum, is indeed coming to DS as we heard at the first announcement, but as you can expect from Aspyr, the companies also confirmed PC and Mac versions too, all for the Fall of this year.

It's been just about ten years since I was a high school senior, and I know I took the SATs, but I have no recollection. I still remember the nooks and crannies of the video games I played in 1999, though, so maybe if my SAT prep had been a game, I'd still remember how to multiply fractions or whatever.

Actually, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for a notable game developer to hook up with a test prep company. Seems kind of like a no-brainer, right?

Full announcement follows the jump.

SAT* Prep Enters the Videogaming World

Kaplan and Aspyr Team Up to Create

Dynamic Interactive Entertainment

AUSTIN, TX – April XX, 2008 – High school teens may soon be able to play their way to a higher SAT* score, thanks to a new collaboration between Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions and videogame developer and publisher Aspyr Media.

Kaplan and Aspyr have entered into a multi-year agreement in which Aspyr will bring Kaplan-branded interactive entertainment products to market. The first game under the deal will be an engaging, visually dynamic and unconventional title that is rooted solidly in Kaplan’s SAT prep curriculum. The game marks the first ever widely-released SAT prep video game in the market.

“Students learn best when they’re engaged with the study content. While a videogame shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for a full prep course, it’s an innovative and effective way to reinforce preparatory learning,” said Anthony Manley, General Manager of Pre-College Programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. “At Kaplan, we seek to adapt our offerings to students’ lifestyle needs. In Aspyr, we found a partner with a proven track record of creating engaging, dynamic titles that appeal to today’s teens.”

“Aspyr has proven over the years that it excels in caring for huge brands and successfully extending those brands to new audiences,” said Ted Staloch, Executive Vice President for publishing at Aspyr. “We couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Kaplan, a trusted, high profile brand and a company that is the undisputed leader in its field. Aspyr will create games under this brand that will truly surprise and excite people with their originality.”

Scheduled for release in 2008, the SAT prep game is currently in development at Aspyr Studios and will be published by Aspyr Media for Nintendo DS™, PC and Mac. Additional information on Kaplan branded games from Aspyr will be announced later this year.

Last year, Kaplan introduced interactive SAT* prep programs that can be purchased and downloaded from iTunes®, as well as a unique SAT/ACT Vocabulary-Building Manga (Japanese word for comics and print cartoon) series.

###

*SAT is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board, which neither sponsors nor endorses this product.

**iTunes® is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc. All rights reserved.

About Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions

Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (www.kaptest.com), a division of Kaplan, Inc., is a premier provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses. Established in 1938, Kaplan is the world leader in the test prep industry. With a comprehensive menu of online offerings and a complete array of books and software, Kaplan offers preparation for more than 90 standardized tests, including entrance exams for secondary school, college and graduate school, as well as English language and professional licensing exams. Kaplan also provides private tutoring and college and graduate admissions consulting services.

About Aspyr Media

Aspyr Media, Inc. is a leading video game publisher that creates, packages and delivers fun to millions around the world. Hailing from Austin, Texas USA, Aspyr strives relentlessly to ensure a quality experience for consumers and industry partners.

To fall more deeply in love with Aspyr and its amazing line of products, visit www.aspyr.com and see just how much fun you can legally have.

ASPYR MEDIA ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH ACTIVISION TO BRING GUITAR HERO™ III: LEGENDS OF ROCK TO PC AND MAC

AUSTIN, TX – Sept. 11, 2007 – The rock gods have spoken, and gamers around the world will now be able to unleash their inner-rock star on two brand new platforms. Aspyr Media, in partnership with Activision, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI), today announced that the third iteration of the wildly popular Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero™ III: Legends of Rock, will be available to PC and Mac gamers for the first time ever this fall.

Being developed and published exclusively by Aspyr, the PC and Mac versions will match their console counterparts with explosive new content and features including a multiplayer action-inspired battle mode, grueling boss battles, a host of exclusive unlockable content and visually stunning rock venues. With more than 70 songs in the set list, and more original master tracks than ever before, players will be able to shred from many of the freshest and hottest artists today, along with many of the most popular rock songs ever recorded. Expanded online multiplayer game modes will also allow PC and Mac enthusiasts to rip head-to-head against players around the world and across either platform, raising the level of competition for true legendary rock status.

“Working with such a wildly successful franchise and helping to strengthen an already powerful brand has us feeling like rock stars ourselves, only without the fame, money or musical talent,” said Ted Staloch, Executive Vice President, Publishing for Aspyr. “But even without Slash’s chops, we still have what it takes to bring the best music game on the planet to PC and Mac gamers. Aspyr’s expertise in developing and publishing for these platforms means that we will deliver a game that wails just as hard as it does on consoles but feels natural on this audience’s chosen platform.”

“Providing the option for our fans to play Guitar Hero at their desk or on a laptop on the go is incredibly exciting, and we’re thrilled to now offer the ability to rock out literally anywhere and everywhere,” said Dusty Welch, head of publishing at RedOctane. “PC and Mac gamers can now shred as hard as their console counterparts do, and it’s a great opportunity to help promote musicianship and expand the growing number of Guitar Hero fans worldwide.”

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on PC and Mac is rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and will be available this fall. For more information, please visit www.aspyr.com.

About Aspyr Media
Aspyr Media, Inc. is a leading video game publisher that creates, packages and delivers fun to millions around the world. Hailing from Austin, Texas USA, Aspyr strives relentlessly to ensure a quality experience for consumers and industry partners.

To fall deeper in love with Aspyr and its amazing line of products, visit www.aspyr.com and see just how much fun you can legally have.

Last year we talked with author David Fisher about his work on mafia game Made Man by Aspyr. This video gives you a taste of gameplay and has a bit more from Fisher. The game looks sorta crap generic, but if the storyline was just amazing would it make up for it? Another vid on the jump. Brian Crecente

No, despite the supposed benefits - money, women, infamy, all the free cannoli you can cram into your smack-talking pie-hole - that the smorgasbord of gangster-iffic games, movies and TV shows we adore would suggest Mafia members enjoy, the real underworld is actually, well... kinda boring, says the noted organized crime expert. But hey: What better way to educate and amuse today's impressionable teens than make an interactive adventure out of authentic real-world goodfella antics like cigarette running, shaking down innocents and fetching coffee for some greasy-haired, pock mark-riddled lard ass ostensibly named Paulie or Remo?

That's right... The so-called "most realistic Mafia game ever" is almost upon us, courtesy of Aspyr, who, having already succeeded once with Stubbs the Zombie, will now attempt to resurrect Acclaim's once shit-canned, now re-planned ay-fuhgeddaboutit-'em-up Interview with a Made Man this coming March. Newly rechristened as just Made Man and keen on storming the burgeoning value-priced PS2 shooter market it's sure to have you fans of The Sopranos in stitches. (Or, if nothing else, praying it's not as crappy as the officially-licensed alternative...)

But we digress: Back to Mr. Fisher, who took a break from slaving away on his ever-growing, 50-odd book catalog (and chumming with pals like FBI agent Joseph "Donnie Brasco" Pistone and former Mob consigliere Bill Bonnano) to not only pen the script for this little gem, but also ensure its slavish authenticity. As for the quality of the game, meh - we'll let you decide whether to start chortling or polishing that semi-auto based on a recent, conversation with the man.

Q: With Made Man, what did you bring to the table to help them make the title more realistic, and what does that mean from a videogame perspective?

A: Well, I basically created the whole story - the characters, the plot, to some degree suggested what stages would be featured and worked on them with the developer. It was really fun for me because I've done a lot of writing about organized crime, and they basically wanted it to be the most realistic Mafia game ever made. I have two kids: They're 16 and 17 and they're both gamers. One of the things I really had to learn was how this universe works.

I was just speaking with someone this morning and they mentioned how they did an interview with [The Sopranos] creator David Chase a couple months ago and he was saying he's not a big fan of the game world. He talked about games' inability to ever bring any emotion into scenarios. I remember reading an interview a couple months ago where a very successful screenwriter was brought in to work with a company and he said pretty much the same thing.

Both of these guys, they only wanted to make the gaming world an adjunct of their world though, of TV and movies, and they just really failed to recognize the possibilities of this universe... I had to learn at the beginning what you could do and couldn't do. But I can tell you after learning, the possibilities are endless.

Q: Based on what you can do, how does that go in and improve the gameplay, make things more fun and interesting for enthusiasts?

A: If you can provide any sort of emotional attachment to the character, it brings you more into the game - you wind up getting rid of that detachment which leads to eventual boredom. Originally, Made Man was part of a trilogy and it may still be depending on sales. My goal is to tell a story of how you succeed in the world of organized crime. And so my guy, all the action takes place in one day, where he's going somewhere - he's either going to become a made man, or he's going to get whacked. And at the beginning, you don't know which it's going to be. So every one of the stages that we have parallels a real stage in the experience of a Mob guy...

Our guy starts in Vietnam - we've got a couple of stages set there. And he saves somebody's life, comes back to New York and gets sucked into the world of the Mob. We did a lot of backstory on all the characters, including this guy who eventually becomes his antagonist, who brings him into the family. He starts at the beginning, where any Mob guy would start, running cigarettes from North Carolina to New York. What we had to do was find a way to make running cigarettes and other mundane tasks like that fun from a gameplay standpoint. And we did - there's a great scene where he ends up in the swamps of North Carolina, and it's a lot of fun.

The other thing is that, as a writer, at the beginning, I really wanted to have some longer cut-scenes because I was convinced that I could write the kind of dialogue and branding of the characters that people would love. The type of script that would make people laugh out loud - it's just a skill that I have, and I also know these characters because I've written about them for so long.

Q: Touching on that, we've all seen these guys on TV, or via games such as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty/Vice City Stories and movies like Goodfellas or Casino, before. How realistic are they, and how do your characters talk differently or act differently that are more true to form?

A: That's a good question. What American culture has done is created a mythical Mafia. The first mob guy I ever got to know was a guy named Joey Black. What was amazing to me was the extremes that he could go to - he could be funny, he could be garrulous, anything... One night we were out to dinner with some friends of mine in California, and somebody said to him, "What would you do if I said I didn't believe you are who you say you are?" Who he said he was, was a Mafia hit-man. And with that, he took a fork, and jabbed it under the guy's jaw and pushed it upward, and he said "I'd ask you to say it again..." If you could see that scene in a movie, that kind of tension, that's the bar scene in Goodfellas...

Q: Naturally, we all see the supposedly glamorous side of being the Mafia. What's the other side look like here?

A: The main object of every Mob guy is earning. 99% of the time it's the most boring job in the world: It's collecting gambling debts, shuffling stolen goods, hustling hot television, hijacking a truck... There's so much of that stuff you have to do, and the other part of it is, often, the people you're dealing with are not the brightest people in the world. So what's happened is Hollywood has made these characters humorous in some ways, and that's a good thing. It's not necessarily the route I'd choose to go, but I've seen how people respond to them. That's what makes them interesting.

Q: So how realistic is a game like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories? How exaggerated is that? You see guys coming up, grabbing clothes and cars... How many people really get killed that often or go out guns blazing in this line of work?

A: Not so much. Very, very few people in the Mob get killed, and even fewer in shootouts. Most people who get killed get shot in the back of the head. My guy Joey was killed by being shot with a shotgun in the back. There's this great story... Donnie Brasco is a friend of mine, and the story he told in his book and later in the movie about the guy who brought him into the family, Sonny Black, when he discovered Joe (Joe Pistone is his real name) was an FBI agent, he knew he was going to be killed. And the FBI went to him, and they offered him his life. They said come into witness protection, and he said no, I know what I got into. And he handed his wallet to somebody, he gave his ring to somebody knowing he was going to go to this meeting and never come back. Real-life Mafioso Bill Bonanno and I have become friends, and Bill and I talk about this, and Bill talks so much about the way the Mob was, and honor and loyalty and those things that he learned from his father which are no longer part of the Mob anymore.

Q: If I were to ask about your character, Joey Verola, I know he comes back from Vietnam disillusioned and disenchanted, so he's obviously a prime example, but who else in your opinion is a good candidate for becoming a part of the Mafia, what type of person? What type of personality best suits the lifestyle: Someone larger than life, a tough talker...?

A: I've just finished a book - do you know the Mafia cops case? In New York, we had two highly ranking detectives, who were, in fact, for most of their careers, on the Mob payroll. And one of them became the head of the police organized crime bureau and he was funneling information to the Luchesi crime family and so I did a book with the guys who broke the case. One of them is a detective named Tommy Dades, who grew up as a street kid in Brooklyn, and his best friend is a made guy. Tommy is a great detective - one of the best, and we've talked about it. I said: "Why did you go that way and the other guy the other route?" And he said, you walk around the block, and whatever happens to you happens to you. He said that there's no question that he could have gone the other way. And for me to say to you who's a candidate... I mean, the fact that that world has been so glamorized makes it attractive to a certain kind of person.

Q: Maybe the better question is how many people really get the opportunity to join the Mafia, and how coveted is the honor truly?

A: Well it used to be a lot tougher and a lot more coveted. The thing about the Mob is that it's like corporate America. You actually move up the ranks, and as you do, you get more respect and more money. But, of course, you also have more obligations. You know, in the other world we would call them kickbacks, but in fact, every dollar that is earned goes up the ladder to the boss and eventually to the don. But everybody's taking a piece of that. So if you earn $10,000 you probably have to give $1500 to the boss. But you have to earn - that's really what it comes down to. Joey told me once that a guy asked him what makes the Mob work, and what he said is that you can't legislate morality. And anytime the government does, all it does it create situations where it's possible for the Mob to be successful.

Q: I remember in Donnie Brasco this great quote where they said "You go in alive, and you come out dead, and it's your best friend that does it." Is there a way to get out of the Mob alive, though? And how many people manage to get out?

A: Well, Bill Bonanno did it successfully. John Gotti, Jr. is trying to do it now. It's really hard because one of the things I do from time to time is talk to people in the witness protection program. And they just love to talk, because this was the greatest time of their lives, when they were living on the edge, when they were rich street guys, when they had status or whatever it was... But when you go into the witness protection program, you become a regular guy with a job oftentimes, and there's no one you can talk to about this stuff. So they love to talk about those days, so in terms of coming out, there's a lot of people in witness protection who have come out, but it's hard because it doesn't provide the excitement or adrenaline rush that they're using to enjoyment. It also doesn't provide the status - no one looks at them when they walk into a restaurant as if they're somebody special.

Q: So what, if anything, should game fans take away from today's Mob titles, given your experience with the real thing?

A: Going back to what I said earlier about learning about game universes, one of the things I had to learn about was when to get out of the way. In Made Man, we have this running voice-over telling you the story with some pretty good - not the best - but some pretty good dialogue telling you the story while you're actually playing. So we don't get in the way, prevent you from playing... I used to watch my kids playing games, and all they wanted from cut-scenes was for them to be over. You take every opportunity to develop a character to get a funny line in from a writer's point of view, but the story has to tell itself as players play it.

I don't think people realize how young the games world is. I'm enjoying being a part of it a lot because I'm talking to some really interesting people, but it's like the early days of television all over again. The limitations were unbelievable, and there's where we are now. But that's part of the fun and challenge, and things are only going to get better from a narrative standpoint...

One surprising thing is exactly how beefy the system requirements are: a 2.0 GHz processor, a gig of RAM and a beefy video card. These requirements are actually higher than the ones for Doom 3 for the Mac. Macs are definitely getting more and more powerful and with Boot Camp, Mac owners can happily game by just loading up Windows XP. But it defeats the point of a port entirely if a game running natively on OSX requires twice the resources that it would require if you installed the XP version. Florian Eckhardt

Edit: Ooops! My bad. Eric Duncan over at Aspyr Media wrote to inform me that I'd quoted the recommended specs, not the minimum, which are a 1.8 ghz processor, 512MB of RAM and 64MB of video RAM. He assures us it plays pretty well even at those. Swell!

Civilization 4 for Mac [Apple Store]