EVE sips the Cider

Well Cuppy already wrote about it(I swear she is first to everything), but EVE Online the golden boy of PvP and Sci-Fi will be playable on the Mac(OSX) and Linux platforms by years end. This is fantastic news for us Mac gamers, no longer will we have to pay the reboot tax to get our mine on. I am really interested to see how things go as far as performance, as CCP is using Transgaming's Cider portability engine to essentially fake a port. While I won't say this is a bad thing I am concerned about the performance hit the user will take as a result, because there will be some, there just has to be given how the technology works.

Press Release

I am also concerned because earlier this year EA at this years WWDC(Apple Developer Conference) announced that they would be bringing a few of their popular titles to the Mac using Transgaming's technology. Then months later nothing, and finally recently EA admitted to dropping the whole thing. Now this could have been due to cost, sales predictions, and any number of things but one of those questions asked must be, was the technology to blame? Can Cider scale to handle these kind of intense games? Looking at Transgaming's list of games already using Cider technology, it is slim at best. So while this provides no conclusive evidence it is something to consider when looking at this news. And while CCP has been good at customer relations and I don't think that they would release a piece of junk, I worry about these things as someone who has had generally poor experiences with translation technologies and Transgaming in general. I don't want to "hate on" Transgaming, they do a lot of great work for a crowd that is consistently under served, but I can't ignore my past experiences.

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Cheston

So what is going on these days?

As a proper post-first post I'm just going to talk a little bit about what I am playing right now. I'll get into in depth discussion later, this is just "where I stand" sort of post.

Anyways, what am I playing?
Lately I've been into the new hotness Lord of the Rings Online(lotro for short). I have a level 21 Human Captain on Gladden, which I don't play all that much anymore, and a level 17 Hobbit Burgler on Silverlode. I switched servers not because of any fault of the community, but because I had a few friends on Silverlode and wanted to see how things went with them. So far things have been great, I've been enjoying the game quite a bit, and though it lacks many features I'd consider a must, it certainly makes up for in eye candy, and general fun.

Now I know a lot of MMO bloggers out there are hot for EverQuest2(EQ2), and honestly I'm interested greatly. As an ex-EQ junkie I can safely say that EQ2 provides a very attractive package at its current stage. Unfortunately I've run into some technical issues that have yet to be resolved, to be specific, as my main gaming machine I have a Macbook Pro. Now of course I run all of my games under Windows XP using Bootcamp, but there seems to be some hardware issue with the MBPs that causes EQ2 to crash after about a minute of playtime. The only solution is to upgrade to Vista, something I havn't really gotten around to doing. So when I do I'll let you all know how it works out, but I just wanted to clarify that I harbor no ill will against EQ2, I just havn't gotten the chance to really explore it in its current state. I did play it a year or so ago, but due to the large changes made I don't think I really have much room to talk about the current state of the game.

Anyways, that is what I am up to. If I have any readers, please share what you are currently playing, I'd be interested to hear what you internet peoples are up to.