Works as Specified

As I mentioned, I have a MacBook Pro now. With the exception of World of Warcraft, which is a hybrid install (yay Blizzard!), all the games I have are for Windows. I have a Windows XP partition if I need it (that still amazes me – a Mac running Windows XP) but I have seen many older games get ported to other platforms once the company releases the source code. I was listening to the Homeworld soundtrack a week or so ago and that got me wanting to play the game again, so I checked the web and found out, yes a port to Mac OSX was started some 4 years ago. Unfortunately, it seems that once Homeworld 2 was released, the porting team forgot all about Homeworld 1. The Mac executable for the game was left in alpha, and the release notes say “The Macintosh version is currently incomplete, missing some major components such as sound and pre-rendered movie playback. However the game itself is otherwise quite playable.” “Quite playable?” There’s NO SOUND! How do you play one of the greatest space-based strategy games WITH NO SOUND?

I’ve run into this before. I signed up a few years back to help a development team create a retelling of Ultima IX using the Morrowind engine. Seems that there were a number of such projects, retelling classic Ultima stories using current technology. To my knowledge, the only one to ever be released was Ultima V – Lazarus, which was written on the Dungeon Siege engine (I ended up buying another copy of Dungeon Siege just to play it, since my original copy somehow managed to disappear.) Sadly it looked like the Redemption Project, as it was called, went the same – it faded away, never to be seen again. The project lead for Redemption disappeared, the project web board moved, some people came and went, and eventually all work just sorta stopped. I lost contact with everyone, so I gave up on it.

I just looked up the project again, and it seems like it’s making progress once again. Still, I doubt it will ever be released. Morrowind is 6 years old, everyone’s playing Oblivion now. I doubt anyone will be impressed with a game using such a dated engine. Plus, once again they are asking for 3D modelers – they can’t seem to hold on to anyone.

Update – okay, I take that back. I read through the timeline and project updates, and it looks like the old team merged with a new team, and the project is back on track. There may be hope for it after all.