Aspyr Media's Star Wars: Empire at War Coming this Month--Intel Only

For all you gamers, get ready for a new Star Wars release from Aspyr Media for the Mac. Their work on Star Wars: Empire at War is finishing up, in preparation for the game shipping in February. This is the first Mac game they have developed that is Intel-only.

Aspyr says the decision to not support PowerPC Macs was a difficult one. The complexity of bringing a totally new game engine to OS X meant there was plenty of work just getting the game up and running on the Mac and adding the extra work of supporting PowerPC as well would have pushed the game release off several months they claimed. The other wrinkle to Empire at War is that it is likely a PowerPC version would not be able to play multiplayer against Intel Macs, due to slight differences in floating point calculations between the two types of CPUs. Having a Universal Mac version of the game that didn't allow multiplayer between all Macs would be confusing at best. But because they focussed solely on the Intel version of the game, they did take care to ensure it would run on all Intel Macs, including those with the Intel integrated graphics chips, like the MacBook and Mac mini Core Duo. [Bill Fox]