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Hi folks,

We’re pleased to announce that Madballs in…Babo:Invasion is coming to Macs everywhere - today!

When we were designing the BrainCandy engine that MiBI is built upon, we always had Macs in mind - which is why we built in low-level support for *both* DirectX and OpenGL.  Of course, when it came time to actually publish Madballs, we ran into a roadblock - no Steam on the Mac (and thus really, no multiplayer gaming infrastructure on the Mac at all!)

Needless to say, we were excited when Valve announced they were bringing Steam (and their games to the Mac) - and have been working hard to make Mac MiBI a reality.

Features of the Mac/Steam version of Madballs in…Babo:Invasion:

• All game modes - single player, co-op, survival and versus
• All gameplay features - characters/classes, weapons, abilities, etc.
• All DLC - support for all downloadable skins, unlocks, etc
• All mission types - support for personal and community missions
• All Steam community features - steam cloud, achievements, leaderboards, etc
• SteamPlay - if you bought MiBI for the PC, you already own the Mac version!
• Plus…  PC+Mac players play together! Co-op or versus, doesn’t matter if you’re on PC or Mac, play with/against your friends on all peer-to-peer or dedicated server games!

Now, there are a couple of small limitations in the current implementation - they won’t keep you from playing with your friends and having a great time - but the game will get even better on the Mac when we address these in the future:

• Babo Crash not included - As you know, we added a free embedded version of our mobile game, Babo Crash, to the PC version - we haven’t yet had time to port it over yet
• Advanced shader support missing - We don’t yet have our advanced shaders working under OpenGL…  the game still looks great though and graphics performance is top-notch…  there will be additional eye-candy in the future once we enable this
• Controller support - we don’t support the Xbox 360 controllers natively in the Mac version yet
• Slower map load times - older Mac’s may experience a 10-25 second black screen at the tail end of our map loading process (this happens while we load all the textures into memory).  Furthermore, this delay *might* occasionally cause you to be disconnected from the multiplayer server you were attempting to join. If you get disconnected, just attempt to re-join the server - it will be faster and you should make it in.

Anyway, we happy to provide a new arena for the ongoing battle of Macs vs. PCs!  See you online folks!

To pick up Madballs for Mac - click here!

Paul.

Hi folks,

We’re finally ready to announce the prizes for our Madballs Fan Video Contest!

First of all, we’d like to do a big shout-out to the Bumpatrol.org folks for doing such a great job organizing things!  And of course, to all y’all for entering - thanks a bunch!  It has certainly been fantastic to see the love the community has for the game, and the creativity that’s been brought to creating the videos is awesome!  We wish we could give prizes to everyone!

To determine the winners we put together a panel of Playbrains employees who reviewed all entries — we came up with a short list of our top 5 - and then we voted on the rankings of the top 5 videos.   The results may surprise you

Oh, a quick reminder (and apology) regarding our interim winners!  As you may or may not recall, we extended the contest deadline when our Free Week-end got postponed - but some folks had already got there entries in, and we figured they deserved bonus prizes ($50 US) since they’d have to wait longer…  Those winners are arramus, finderhome, tukamalight and aprone — and the apology part is that we haven’t sent those prizes yet, but we’ll send them out with the full prizes next week.

Okay, without further ado…  here are our winners…

#5 - winning $100 US -> Montage, by Blaze

We liked the tunes, the camera angles and transitions - and the wide use of characters and loadouts…

#4 -winning $200 US -> Madballs Evolution Part 1, by eccod

Great quality scans - game looks great.  Also, “Best Cinematography” !

As for the top 3 videos - something very unexpected happened.  The top 3 videos all got the same number of votes from our panel…  it’s interesting, because the 3 videos are each very different in tone, content and approach.  The panel spent some time debating, with proponents of each arguing for top placement of their favorite.

In the end though, we’ve decided to let the votes stand, and evenly split the pooled prize money amongst the top 3!  [So each winner gets 1/3 of the top-3 prizes ($1000 + 500 + 350), or $617]

Presenting our three-way tie for first!

Babolon TV, by Sonic4Ever - $617 US

A super creative Machinima effort - we love it!

Madballs Damnation, by Benetti32 - $617 US

Awesome music, great pacing - good mix of SP and MP footage!  This is really the best gameplay video - and really shows off our game!

Requiem of Guns, by Tornis - $617 US

Super-catchy tune created from MiBI sound effects - we can’t get the tune out of our heads!

Next steps

Okay, now that we know who has won - winners (including interim winners again), I need you to contact me via private message via the Steam community forums.

We’ll need the following information to start:

- Your real name
- Which video was yours
- Your e-mail address
- Your mailing address

Thanks a bunch folks - and congratulations to all of the winners!

Paul.