News

Today was a big one, folks: Apple's Steve Jobs stood in front of the world this Wednesday in his inimitable manner to let a few cats out of bags. New iPods, new Apple TV, new iTunes, and not one but two updates for iOS... to arrive on both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch alike. Today on the stage at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, the next generation of Apple awesome was revealed.

An interesting and potentially cool (or lame) bit of news on an emerging tech that's due on the iPhone and iPad soon: RTS Gameboard is an app which allows you to control Starcraft II from your Apple mobile device. Log in to the server, set your game up, but put the mouse and keyboard aside and control the action from your Apple mobile device. The whole thing is unofficial, so it's hard to say whether it'll get past Blizzard's lawyers. More to the point, the image you see here of the UI is, reportedly, just a mock up...

I guess it had to happen sometimes, but the announcement that Blizzard will be dropping support for non-intel/PPC Macs makes me wistful. With Cataclysm coming soon (though no release date is set yet), changes and improvements are being made to the core graphics tech in WoW as well as several other modifications and... well... your old Strawberry iMac isn't invited to the party.

Mac Steam users number at 5% of the total Steam population. Seems like a small amount, but it's a lot more than before Steam dropped on OS X, right? Interestingly, numbers have dropped from 8.13% in June (looks like we were all going outside and enjoying the weather instead of gaming, which is just shameful). My guess is that most Mac users have already played through Portal and Torchlight and are waiting for more of the river of goodness to flow forth from Valve. Remember when we were getting something new every Wednesday? Yeah... that's kinda dried up.

If there's one thing gamers have a lot of, it's ingenuity, and it shows in this iPhone mod in which the Apple phone is made into a pinball machine.

Valve is spinning the gears on the Portal 2 hype machine with some sweet trailers. We've already seen faith panels and repulsion gel in motion, and now we can get a look at Portal 2's multiplayer action. It shows off two adorable robots hoping to solve some problems. A picture is definitely worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand pictures. So that's gotta be, like, a ten million words, right? Whatever. Math is dumb.