Anyone who downloaded the iTunes 7.5 last week probably noticed something in the change list about a new game called Phase. It’s now out on the iTunes Store (link), priced at £3.99, and it’s a rhythm game from Harmonix.

Yes, that Harmonix. And yes, it’s an iPod game.

It’s basically Amplitude in miniature, and it’s made all the more impressive by the fact that it allows you to import your own music. Hopefully this is an indication of where we’ll be going with the next Rock Band – or the next Amplitude? – because if an iPod can do that analysis of a song (actually it’s iTunes that does the analysis, but let’s not be so pedantic that I ruin my point) there’s certainly no reason that a modern console can’t do it. It’s probably the only possible feature that would make me entertain paying £170 for Rock Band.

The quality of the experience really depends on the music – dance music and anything with a prominent, repeating rhythm works well; more subtle music not so much – but when it works well it works very well and what it could represent for the future of Harmonix’s rhythm games is very exciting. I just hope that the implementation of mass DLC in Rock Band doesn’t cause dollar signs to blind them to the potential of importing one’s music collection manually.

Phase isn’t as good as Guitar Hero or Amplitude, but on this showing I see potential in bespoke iPod games that the ever-nascent mobile phone gaming market continually fails to fulfill. And Guitar Hero and Amplitude, least of all Rock Band, aren’t £3.99, are they?

It says something that a new OS X release is an event to be celebrated in the Mac world, whereas even a Windows service pack is approached with trepidation and furious backup-taking. And while forums across the world are filled with moaning about recalcitrant Vista installs and pining for the good ol’ XP days (remember how much fun those were pre-SP2?), I’m enjoying Mac OS X 10.5.

Leopard isn’t without flaws though, and I suppose you have to give the benefit of the doubt to any new OS release to a certain extent. Here’s what I think so far. Mac geekery will follow.

The new Finder is a good improvement that’s been needed for a while. I like it and the only feature that I really want is a way to easily set the default window size and layout style so that I can set certain folders to open in Cover Flow (awesome way to navigate images and PDFs, incidentally), etc.

Quick Look is probably the thing that I’m going to use the most. I have a lot of similarly-titled Word documents that I rely on Spotlight to look through and this just adds another way to quickly navigate documents.

Spaces is quite useful when you’re doing something that involves a lot of different programs. I was doing some website work earlier and so had the play programs (Camino, Adium, iTunes) open in one, TextWrangler (text editor) and Transmit (FTP) open in the other, and Photoshop open in the third one. It definitely makes things less cluttered when you’re working with limited screen space and don’t want to keep minimising and hiding programs to keep them out of the way. Too bad that it can’t magically add more RAM though, eh?

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Having gone through two internal hard drives and risking running it from a Firewire drive for far too long now, it was time to replace my good old iBook G4 with something a bit more 2007. Like something that is clocked in multiple GHz and can run both Mac OS X and lesser operating systems for the sake of convenience Battlefield 2.

Here’s the specs of my latest baby:

• 15-inch matte display (1440×900)
• 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB RAM
• 120GB hard drive
• ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (128MB)
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Airport Extreme (802.11n)
• 6x dual-layer Superdrive
• Mac OS X 10.4.9/Windows XP Pro (via Boot Camp)

Ended up costing me £1,150 after student discount.

I bought it with the stock 1GB RAM and added another 1GB stick myself (£40 from Crucial compared to £140 from Apple, which is in the dictionary next to ‘no brainer’) and it’s awesome. It obviously performs much better than my iBook and I’ve been playing with some Intel-only apps and stuff that’s been added to OS X since I last bought a new Mac like Front Row and the Joost beta to which I got an invite last week. The iBook couldn’t play 720p video smoothly but I downloaded a couple of 1080p trailers and this plays them without a hitch. Lovely!

The only annoyance was that it doesn’t ship with all the latest updates, so I had to download a stack of patches before I could really get down to playing. That included 10.4.9 which came out well over a month ago, so I wonder how long this was sitting in a warehouse. But if that sounds bad when I installed XP Pro I had to download SP2 (200MB+) and 55 (!) security updates.

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I make no bones about how annoying I find the tendency of the games industry to pile all their big releases into the Christmas period and leave an incredibly lean summer. I understand why they do it but for those of us to whom picking up the latest releases is an obsession – part of the growing Xbox Live mentality where you have to play what all your friends are, I suppose – it’s tantamount to torture.

I went through various release lists and worked out all the games and hardware that I intend to buy before the end of the year. Take a look:

October

• Contact (US DS)
• Final Fantasy XII (US PS2)
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (US PSP)
• Power Stone Collection (US PSP)
• Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (UK 360)
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent (UK 360)
• Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (UK 360)

November

• Call of Duty 3 (UK 360)
• Elite Beat Agents (US DS)
• F.E.A.R. (UK 360)
• Guitar Hero II (US PS2)
• Football Manager 2007 (Mac)
• Final Fantasy III (US DS)
• Final Fantasy V Advance (US GBA)
• Gears of War (UK 360)
• HD DVD drive (UK 360)
• Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (US Wii)
• Lumines II (US PSP)
• Rainbow Six Vegas (UK 360)
• Wii (US)
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Mac)
• Yoshi’s Island 2 (US DS)

December

• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (US DS)

Throw in a few HD DVDs and all the summer movies that are hitting DVD and you have some serious wallet rape going on here. The average person isn’t going to be able to afford to spend a tenth of that on games alone so surely this practice of all saturating the market at the same time can’t be beneficial.

I’ll bet that there’s more than a couple of European gamers out there who are silently thankful that the PS3 was delayed.

This is sensational news – Apple now support dual booting OS X and Windows XP on Intel Macs with their new Boot Camp utility, to be included as a part of 10.5 Leopard when that’s released.

I’ve been considering upgrading my iBook to an Intel model when those are released and now I see absolutely no reason not to. The ability to dual-boot was made available a few weeks ago when some enterprising individual released a hack, but this is a matter of turning on the computer and clicking the one you want to use.

No shitty text bootloaders and no more worrying about whether an app is available on OS X or not. This could seriously be an Apple killer app.

What I loved though, were the quotes on the Boot Camp page like this one:

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Pwnd.

What I’m more interested in, however, is the effect on the Mac gaming market. It’s been steadily growing with companies like Aspyr producing a steady stream of decent ports and official support from big names like id and Blizzard, but I have a feeling that this will kill it off, since developers will assume that Mac users who want to play games will have Windows anyway. They seem optimistic, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Now this is genius, and I just found it from listening to the latest episode of TWiT. It’s the audio from the live Windows Vista demonstration from CES where Microsoft were showing off the latest innovations that will be in the new Windows whenever that turns up. The twist is that the video shows all the same features in Mac OS X right now, and indeed since Tiger shipped way back in April 2005. There’s another one here showing yet more search and control functions that Mac users have been enjoying for the best part of a year.

Nice to see that Windows is staying as innovative as ever. Now I just need the money for a MacBook Pro…