Aspyr Media Game Report

The Sims 2 is now on store shelves, and Aspyr hopes you are enjoying the result of all their hard work for the last 8 months. In early June, they released a free utility, The Sims Body Shop, which lets you create and share Sims with your friends. One of the nice Mac touches added to Body Shop was the ability to upload your Sims directly to your .Mac iDisk, to share. The .Mac SDK from Apple made this process very easy, and Aspyr loves being able to implement Mac specific features into their games.

The development effort internally at Aspyr is shifting to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 and Stubbs the Zombie. Tiger 2005 is coming to the end of its beta cycle, and they think they will set the bar for Mac golf games higher than ever before with this installment. Besides the dazzling course graphics, the game has an almost endless amount of customizations for creating your golfer. Stubbs the Zombie continues to move along, Aspyr has been working on technology that allows the Xbox graphics code to run on Mac OS X through a common OpenGL implementation. This will provide a very good framework to build the rest of the game on, and should also help Aspyr in future projects.

Aspyr Game Agent is undergoing some major renovations, and Aspyr plans to release a new version in the summer that has an updated user interface and some great new features. If you haven't tried out Game Agent, download it free from Aspyr.com. [Bill Fox]