Razer supports OS X for several of their gamer-grade mice, namely: the Mamba, Naga, Imperator, Orochi, DeathAdder, and the left-handed version of the DeathAdder. I’ve been playing with the Orochi for the past two months. I’ll soon review the new 3500DPI version of the DeathAdder. I’ll also review its big brother, the Imperator. (Razer graciously provided all three for us to review.)
The Orochi is a tiny mouse. From the outset I figured that I’d like it more than the other two since, of the three, its size compares best to my Magic Mouse. Like Razer’s Mamba, the Orochi supports both wireless and wired play. It connects wirelessly to the Mac via Bluetooth 2.0. It sports a 3G Laser sensor. It has seven buttons, on-board memory, and Teflon feet. In wired mode it can poll up to 1000Hz and track up to 4000DPI. At first these numbers didn’t mean much to me, so I did a little reading. So before we start, I’ll regurgitate a bit of mouse technology as well as the advantages of Razer mice. The latter, of course, is according to my primary reading source, the Razer website.
Without elegance, here we go.
Continue reading ‘The Orochi Gaming Mouse by Razer’
I’ve heard so much about the board game
Puerto Rico and I’ve always wanted to try it. It seems to be a balance of allocating production assets, positioning oneself to make the most out of a limited shipment space, and balancing easy, short-term exports against exports that are more exclusive and, possibly, financially rewarding. Having said this, I’ve never played the game. But Alex turned me on to a free, Java-based clone of Puerto Rico called
Tropic Euro, which takes the gameplay of the original board game (plus its two-player variant, plus its building expansion) and changes its context to a post-World War II tropical island. In it you plant, harvest, and export goods back to Europe for victory points and, ultimately, some crazy abstraction that we like to call victory.
Continue reading ‘Tropic Euro: Learning to Love Something Good’
My first couple of days with the
Frozen Synapse Mac beta have actually been rather charming. For the uninitiated,
Frozen Synapse is a turn-based tactical game under development by Mode 7. The premise involves short, curt shootouts by a handful of units per side. The game’s classes are simply extensions of their weapons: machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher.
Continue reading ‘Brain candy: first impressions of Frozen Synapse Beta’
I run a handful of Windows titles on my Mac via
CrossOver, namely:
Solium Infernum,
Armageddon Empires,
Another World,
Blood Bowl: Dark Elves Edition,
Close Combat: Modern Tactics,
Fallout Tactics, the
Gratuitous Space Battles demo, the
Sins of a Solar Empire demo, and the
Galactic Civilizations II demo.
Today, CodeWeavers released version 9.0 of CrossOver Games for Mac and Linux. So far it’s converted all my old bottles without hiccup, and I’ve launched several of my titles without fail.
If you haven’t heard,
CrossOver (and its source technology,
Wine) acts as liaison between Windows programs and Mac OS X (or Linux), sending calls specific to Windows APIs, to the open-source alternative. It’s not fail-proof, but several people have had stellar success running certain games, and they post their results in either
CodeWeaver’s compatibility tree or
Wine’s application database, ranking each application as platinum, gold, silver, bronze, or garbage depending on success.
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