Hello MPC members,

As some of you have been insistently speaking to me about, I announced a few days ago on the forums that sometime this weekend I would announce a ‘surprise’. Well, the time has come for me to announce said surprise to the general public! This has taken up a good amount of our time for the past few weeks and we’ve been working on it constantly.

MPCGamers, and this community in all its incarnations, has always been about one thing- cross-platform gaming. Every game we play together has both Mac and PC players coming together for a fun time playing some of our favorite online video games. This is even reflected in our name, Mac-PC Gamers.

Now is a very important time for Macintosh gamers. They recently received Valve’s acclaimed digital gaming service, Steam. This has opened up a whole new world for Mac gamers and has led to some of gaming’s most important titles becoming available on your Mac computer. Macintosh gamers, while a small part of video games, are still an integral part of gaming for the majority of creative professionals, who are primarily Mac users. We here at MPC feel that it is important that those gamers have an online community that they can call home and use for all their needs relating to a game.

With that said, we are very pleased to announce the launch of two brand-new websites revolving around our two most important games- the one that has brought us from a simple free forum to one with over 500 members, 30,000 posts, and nearly 2750 topics with visitors from all around the globe, and the game that will soon be one of Mac gaming’s biggest titles starting this October… Star Wars Battlefront and Left 4 Dead.

So, we are very pleased to announce our new sites to you: L4DMac.com and SWBFMac.com!

Our new sites will be hubs for news, mods, mod reviews, and (in our opinion) the best gaming community there is. Modders and mappers can upload their new files to our sites and have them posted for the world to see, with fully-featured reviews from members of the MPC staff. Gamers from both platforms can come to our site for servers to play on, people to interact with, and files to extend their experience with the game.

Please sign up on the sites and feel free to upload your own content to either of them. Please also feel free to spread the word about our sites- we are not a large corporation and cannot afford large advertisement budgets. We feel that we can provide a service and a community so good that you will want to spread the word about them to everyone you can.

We hope you enjoy the new sites and continue to enjoy the ones that we already provide!

Sincerely,
The MPC Staff

Valve, the developers of Left 4 Dead 2, have announced some interesting things in store for their popular title Left 4 Dead 2 on the official Left 4 Dead blog. Among them is community campaigns, which means that Valve will be running selected campaigns on 120 of their official servers. First up in the community campaigns list is 2 Evil Eyes, which is a campaign made by don set in a foresty type environment. It supports co-op and versus, and will be available for play both on the official servers and MPC’s own Left 4 Dead 2 server starting now. You can download the campaign from MPCGamers’s server page here for fast download speeds. Don’t forget that we also have many more custom campaigns all installed on our server, which you can join by joining our Steam group. All our customs installed can be found here.

Next up is an announcement by Valve that they will be releasing more info on things like DLC plans, upcoming events, and the Mac version on August 20th at 12:30 AM Eastern on Gametrailers TV on Spike. We’re eagerly anticipating this information’s release and hope that it brings good news to our many Mac players! Be sure to catch it on Spike if you’re interested.

Yesterday, Irrational Games announced their latest installment to the Bioshock series:

Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock Infinite takes the series, known for its underwater gameplay, into a city in the clouds, and it takes place in the 1910′s.

Bioshock Infinite is still in production, and will be launched in 2012, for consoles unknown.

Thats right, its finally time to find out who won the MPC Photography contest! We had alot of great entries and hopefully everyone enjoyed them, if you didn’t get to see them you can view the entires in this post in the Art Gallery.

And because I want to write a lot to draw out the suspension i’d like to thank everyone who entered the contest we hope you’ll all enter our next contest for designing a desktop wallpaper so get to work on that!

and finally without any more time wasting, Jedikiller won the photography contest with the Waterfall photograph below!

Click to view full size.

Congratulations JK! His prize is his own user group color and a user bar for his Signature showing that he won!

Honorable mentions are Raje’s Tea Cup and Blade’s Flower

Thats it until next time check back for the Desktop Wallpaper contest winner!

The release of the game has also kept everybody in South Korea stuck inside playing the game. Battle.net has been overwhelmed by the extra 50 million users, but Blizzard’s still pretty happy since every employee is now a millionaire  and their CEO just bought Switzerland. Sweet.

The chaos in South Korea dissapointed North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il when he tried to send his daily taunting to South Korea’s president. Reportedly, Il is now stuck inside his office in the fetal position saying that nobody is paying attention to him, with his staff standing around him telling him he’s still their favorite insane  dictator. Castro is a close second though.

We’ll continue to report on this horrible stall of  South Korea until this whole thing blows over. Since it took Blizzard 10 years to make a sequel, this Starcraft craze should be over by 2020 or so. I think I should have packed some more clothes…

EDIT: Xfire has been acquired by Titan Gaming, who are taking on the Xfire name. Here is the announcement: “Titan Gaming has purchased Xfire. The terms of the purchase are undisclosed. Titan will be taking on the Xfire name. The Xfire services will continue uninterrupted for its users. Xfire redefined how gamers communicate, Titan intends to build upon this tradition and utilize the Xfire platform to help gaming companies better engage and monetize their games.”

ORIGINAL POST:

The popular in-game instant messenger known as Xfire has been sold today to an undisclosed company. It was previously owned by Viacom Inc., the conglomerate in charge of MTV Networks, Gametrailers, and Paramount. Viacom acquired Xfire in 2006 for over $100 million. While it is currently not known who Xfire’s buyers are, we all wait in anticipation to find out who they are and what their plans for the service are. We hope that they will be good corporate overlords for a service that PC gamers around the world have come to know and love. 

This announcement was broadcast over the Xfire network to all users logged in. After this, the Xfire site briefly came down but soon went back up, with the same announcement on the front page. The Xfire forums are currently buzzing with speculation over who the new owners are, and occasionally digging up the old Viacom acquisition news and claiming it to be the current buyers. However, this is untrue, as Viacom just sold Xfire.

With this announcement came the news that the majority of the Xfire development team is leaving the company and will not be staying on. High-profile people at Xfire, Inc. like Chris Kirmse, the General Manager, have announced that they will not be staying on for the new Xfire. As he was one of the developers of the original Xfire, this is sad news to hear.

We’ll update this post with information once it comes onto the scene.

If you want to disable it permanently:

Microwave your passport for a couple seconds – this will fry the chip.

If you can determine exactly where the chip is, a sharp blow of a hammer will disable it

WARNING

Physically damaging your passport is probably against the law of the country that issued it. While it will be close to impossible to determine whether or not you intentionally defaced your passport, you should bear this in mind.

Well, my plane’s flight was cancelled so I am a little mad. The bright side is I managed to catch the live coverage of the press conference on Engadget. Pretty much everything I expected yesterday was correct. I am glad to see Apple decided to give out free bumpers. However, they still haven’t done a recall or placed the consumer reports threads back on their site which leads me to believe that you still wont be able to get your antennae repaired in the near future. Job’s response to the iPhone, issue, “you can bring your iPhone back within 30 days for a full refund if you don’t like what you got.” Glad to see their world class customer service is working out for them.

All things aside, going down to your local Apple Store and asking them to take a  look at your phone may help. Several people have reported getting real fixes after leaving the retail chain.

As you all may have heard many people are angry over the whole “not being able to place calls while holding the iPhone a certain way” fiasco. Even Consumer Reports has reported that there is an antennae issue on the iPhone. After that report, Apple proceeded to delete every single consumer reports related article on their support forum. In light of the antennae issues and several other faults in the design, many people have asked Apple to recall the device. While recalling the iPhone would make a lot of people happy, it doesn’t seem like it will happen. Research analysts have said that a recall on the iPhone would cost Apple 1.5 billion dollars. A recall would also cost Apple a very valuable reputation. Steve Jobs still denies that there is even a problem with the iPhone antennae so don’t expect a recall or a fix of any sort coming from Apple.

As many of you have heard the iPhone 4 will not let you make calls or surf web or anything 3G related while holding the phone in your left hand. Yes indeed, the mere clutching of the left side of the iPhone causes signal reduction. I had the best time of my life doing that in the Apple store- I personally showed an Apple store employee the issue and asked if that was common as a joke. Recently I came across a web site dedicated to left handed people (link). The left-handers club is a website that dedicates everything they do to left handed activities and as you can expect they didn’t take to kindly to the iPhone “discriminating against them”. So this begs the question… why does Apple hate left handed people?