starcraft-2-mac posts

Last week we reported that Valve has been thinking of making a Half-Life movie by themselves after dealing with crappy movie pitches from Hollywood. One developer that likely has the resources and talent to make its own movies is Blizzard. Their CGI unit makes perhaps the best cut scenes of any game developer.

However it looks like Blizzard is looking to Hollywood to make movies based on its game franchisese. It's already teamed up with Legendary Pictures for its long-in-development World of Warcraft movie. But what about another big game franchise, StarCraft? Blizzard VP Rob Pardo told MTV Multiplayer that's its all up to finding the right people who are excited about bring their game properties to movies. He stated, "I think if Jim Cameron came to us tomorrow and said, 'You want to make a 'StarCraft' movie?' we'd probably sign that." We certainly think that the director behind some of the best sci-fi films of all time (The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss) would be a perfect choice for a movie based on Blizzard's RTS series.

It looks like the internet reports this week of Blizzard offering a "Professional Edition" of StarCraft II with LAN support for pro tournaments turned out to be bogus after all. Despite supposed translated reports about today's Blizzard event in South Korea promoting the game's launch (complete with StarCraft II-decorated 747s from Korea Air) that stated such an edition had been announced Blizzard's PR team has now sent back word to Big Download that those reports were false.

However, Blizzard did give this statement concerning StarCraft II and its use in pro tournaments: "We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that." So while there may not be LAN support for launch it sounds like Blizzard is trying to create some kind of solution to help with big LAN events.

Blizzard's support for the Mac gaming community is matched by nearly no one else in the game industry and the company continues to prove that with the release of the Mac client for the StarCraft II multiplayer beta. If you have your beta codes you can go ahead and download the Mac client right now from the Battle.net web site. At the moment it's just for North American users but Blizzard plans to expand the Mac client to other territories in the near future.

Hopefully the release of the Mac beta client means that we are one small step closer to the actual release of Blizzard's long awaited sci-fi RTS sequel. Both the PC and Mac versions will be included in the boxed copy of the game when it ships to stores.

While there hasn't been a new patch for the StarCraft II beta in over a week that will soon end, according to Shacknews. They report that Blizzard plans to release the next beta patch for the upcoming sci-fi RTS sequel sometime by the end of the week. While there will be some game balance changes, the big addition is the beta version of StarCraft II's Galaxy Editor.

The map editor will let folks get a head start on learning how to use the tool, but the beta version won't be linked to the new Battle.net 2.0 interface. The final retail version of the game will let players upload their map creations to Battle.net 2.0 to share with the rest of the StarCraft II community. Shacknews also reports that the long awaited beta client for the Mac should be released three to four days after the release of the next PC patch.