The Omni Group has released a Mac OS X-compatible version of Heavy Metal: FAKK2, the third-person 3D action game from Ritual Entertainment and Gathering of Developers. The initial public release, version 1.02c beta 2, has a number of known issues...

1. No key bindings on launch from a clean install. For now, you can either run the application once under OS 9 or configure your keys by hand the first time you play. This will be fixed for the next release.
   
2. Can't bind mouse wheel up/down to actions in the key configuration menu. This will be fixed for the next release.
   
3. There are still some areas that could use performance tuning. If you are seeing performance problems, you can lower your video resolution or lower the detail settings. One especially helpful change is to switch to 'vertex lighting' under the advanced video settings panel.
   
4. If you run with vertex lights, several types of effects will draw incorrectly. This includes the blue glow behind menu items, the load status indicator, the sky in several levels, and some sprites of hanging plants (and probably other stuff). This is a bug in the platform-independent portion of FAKK2, so all versions of FAKK2 have this problem.
   
5. There is at least one sound problem which we are looking at (looping monster attack sounds can sometimes continue on after the monster has been killed).
   
   

by MacNN Staff