Ambrosia's Uplink goes universal

Who among us didn't want to start a career in illegal computer hacking after watching the movie Wargames (and who actually did)? You can fulfill your cyber crime fantasies with Uplink, Ambrosia Software's corporate hacking game.

You play as a covert agent hired to gain information from rival companies' computers. As you go, you earn money to upgrade your own equipment, gain deeper access and more.

I only played briefly, but I had fun. Ambrosia released verison 1.6.0 earlier this week, which is a Universal Binary. Other changes include

• Updated game content
• Toggle fullscreen and change resolutions in-game without restarting Uplink
• Various bug fixes and enhancements

If you like DEFCON, another Ambrosia title (we took a look at DEFCON here), you'll probably enjoy Uplink. A single license costs $25US. Uplink requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.

Fastlane Street Racing [ iPhone ]

When I showed this to my brother he remarked that it looked almost as good as any PSP game. Featuring a ton of cars, tracks and simple gameplay, Fastlane Street Racing (App Store link) is the best racer I've played on the iPhone. Each track is incredibly detailed and appears very large to boot. If there's only one weak point it's the audio. While passable, the engine noises could possibly be better. That said, they are dynamic (and change if you go into a tunnel or change speed, etc.) and it's likely this was the only way to make them so.

The key to the game is drifting -- either turning so your tires squeal and engine noise changes, or tapping the brakes as you turn. Each car handles a bit differently, and you will find some are better suited to how you steer. But once you get the hang of drifting, there's just enough challenge on each level to keep you coming back for more. As always, the gameplay balance is what makes a game replayable and fun over time. In other words: if it is just enough of a challenge to keep you playing and unlocking new stuff, it's probably balanced well. This is tricky, but Fastlane has done a great job here. It's currently available on the store for $5.99, and that's a good price for this much game. Check out the gallery for all the locked items plus a bunch of in-game shots. Or skip to the video and watch the fun.

Apple goes Nvidia with MacBooks

The day we gamers have been waiting for is finally here -- Apple is announcing at their event right now that the new MacBooks (and presumably Pros) that they'll be releasing will have Nvidia graphics chips inside them, finally replacing the integrated graphics chips that have been the bane of 3D gamers on the Mac for years and years. The "NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M" boasts 16 parallel graphic cores, and 54gflops of graphics performance.

This couldn't be better news for Mac gamers -- The new chips offer 6x the performance in terms of 3D graphics that the old chips did, and while that level of 3D performance probably still won't be able to go toe-to-toe with the very fastest of 3D gaming PC rigs, it does mean that World of Warcraft and all of the other popular 3D games on the Mac will run faster than ever before.

Update: Looks like that's not the only chip in there -- the Nvidia 9600M GT will offer more power (and less battery life), and it looks like both will be included on the MBP, with an option for double the graphics memory.