In a pair of tweets (via VG247), SOE President John Smedley triumphantly announced the banning of "a whole bunch of idiots" caught hacking in PlanetSide 2, including one player who apparently spent $230 on in-game items.

our CS guys are banning the crap out of a whole bunch of idiots. Including two guys with 300 hours of playtime. one guy who spent $230— John Smedley (@j_smedley) January 25, 2013

"Buh bye," Smedley followed up. "Thanks for playing. Bunch of aimbots crashing like crazy now." He also claimed two players with over 300 hours of playtime each got the heave-ho. That's quite the magnitude of time sunk by the cheaters before the banhammer swung down, though some more-honest players are already clearing the 600-hour mark.

Smedley has openly expressed unfiltered negativity toward cheaters before, often taking to Twitter to announce the latest rounds of bans as a warning to wrongdoers. Back in December, he revealed his team relished "finding the ability to virtually tar and feather cheaters in-game," calling cheaters "a threat to our game and a threat to our livelihood."

There’s some scuttlebutt regarding a new Fallout floating around the internet: the radioactive smoke is curling up from the burning, irradiated embers. Bethesda have been registering names, and the in-game DJ’s voice actor has promised more from him. Could it be? Is it possible?

With Skyrim out of the stable, there’s definitely room for Bethesda to get irradiating the world again. There’s a really good base, but there’s always room for improvement. And, what do you know, I’ve written down some thoughts on what they could work on.

Livelier roads, cities, and towns. There's a reason these things pop up time and time again on the Fallout mod sites. It’s a basic incompatibility at the heart of Bethesda’s game: most games are a bit more fun with a livelier world, but the world of Fallout follows on from the razing of the human race. Bethesda tend to err on the side of caution with this, though tech issues are probably to blame for the rather empty casinos of New Vegas, but creating a world means populating it, and the mods that add new travelers and people still do that without impacting the overall feeling of loneliness. As it is,the roads of the Wasteland are a bit too quiet for the game they’re part of.



Make it about survival. In Bethesda’s hands, the Wasteland is fun. By the middle of a run through you’re clobbering Deathclaws with concrete capped rebars and sipping irradiated water without a care in the world. Possibly with a pinkie out. The point being is that the notion of survival becomes obsolete in a world dripped in caps to find, traders to sell to, and junk to collect. New Vegas has hardcore mode, forcing you to think about food, water, and rest, as well as altering the way meds and stimpaks work, but it’s still a world that can easily and comfortably be lived in. It needn’t be the main difficulty level, but the option to make the world a harsh place to live, to make the players think about every move, not just their weapon and perk choices, would give the ashy flavour of survival.

Bethesda's Design, Obsidian's Characters. There I was, wandering beneath a line-up of broken satellite dishes, looking for things to do when I spied a door. What could be behind it? A gang of gangers? A terrified NPC? A few steps towards it, a glance around to make sure there was nothing sneaking up. I popped the door. Behind it was a wall with “Fuck You” written on it. Bethesda’s worlds tend to be packed with detail, big and small. They’re places to live in and enjoy, and just brilliant places to explore. Their characters, however, are a lot less engaging. Obsidian’s take on New Vegas was packed with morally dubious Wastelanders with dark stories. Acquiring Boone as a follower, for example, meant leading a person out into a field for the deranged sniper to shoot. That’s dark enough, but as a player you could happily lead an innocent into Boone’s sights. Somewhere in the middle of Fallout 3 and New Vegas is the sweet spot they should be aiming for: dark, compelling characters in a curated world.




Treat us like PC gamers. I've never loaded up a Bethesda game and felt the studio really understood what PC gamers want from them. We have screen space and we have a pointing device that just seems to baffle them. I understand there’s a fictional reason for the Pipboy’s clunkiness, but all too often Bethesda will choose that over usability. Fallout 3 and New Vegas are remarkable examples of how to not lead a player through a game’s menus. I *have* to install a UI mod to deal with the endless scrolling of the inventories. When it comes to pure usability, divorce the theme from the menus

The same is true for FOV: the first thing I have to do in any Bethesda game is to hunt for an FOV hack. That I can do it is evidence that the engine is capable, and I’m still baffled that it’s not a native selection. Give me a damn slider.

Meaningful Character Creation. There are a fair number of perks, abilities and skills to begin with in Fallout. But there’s nothing to set allegiances or race. Bethesda’s Fallouts give you plenty of opportunity to interact with factions, and alliances will be built from your actions, but what if you don’t want to put the work in, or want to roleplay from the opening bell? It needn't allow you to select playing as a Ghoul, but predisposing you towards the NPR would make an interesting challenge to overcome.



Think about the Karma system. I nuked Megaton. I actually destroyed a town full of people. I can’t imagine any game allowing me to claw my way back from that, but Fallout 3 let me. Through good deeds I managed to reclaim my karma and end-up with a reasonably decent character sheet. I wouldn't mind my deeds being somewhat recognised, but I blew up a town. There are no meaningful consequences that you can’t undo. Make it harder to turn myself around, and make some choices indelible. By the same token, if I’m stealing things from bad people, don’t make that a hit on my karma. By all means make the faction hate me, but the world should recognise the good I just did.

More than one city. Bethesda’s games just don’t have the scope of the original series, because building all that content and the space in between in the sort of game that they make would take a decade. But the DLC that they've added to the game has shown a willingness to allow the player to simply hop to another area without worrying about the space in between. Or just choose a reasonably close cluster of cities that the fiction hasn't totaled.

Make it it hurt. My violent streak has never been well-served by Fallout 3 or NV (I like Skyrim’s bows, though). VATs is nice touch, and certainly enhances the basic combat, but whether it’s swinging a concrete caked rebar, or zapping with the Wasteland’s most advanced lasergundeath tech, there’s weediness to it. There’s little heft to the melee weapons, and the report of the guns doesn't match what they do to enemies. Please, Bethesda, play Dark Messiah and Red Orchestra, two games where the combat feels utterly perfect. That’s the level of combat excellence that an action Fallout needs.



A use for everything. Speaking of that, Fallout New Vegas allowed you to mod your guns a little, augmenting them with scopes and such. That’s a good start. This is a world where invention is a necessary part of survival, and where scavenging should be part of a crafting system that allows you build everything and anything, and to mod things on top of that. I’d even lobby for individual components to be brought in from the Steam Workshop. Oh yeah...

Use The Steam Workshop. This is kind of a lock: the Skyrim Workshop is the third busiest of the modder’s distribution platforms. But what I would urge is for Bethesda to make the tools available on launch day. It will help with content, and if none of the above in the list makes it, it’ll give the modders a jump on fiddling with and fixing everything on the list above.

Dean "Rocket" Hall has posted another development update on the status of the DayZ Standalone release, and by the sound of things, the team have been busy. "This is the first update when I have sat down and thought 'where do I start?' There has been so much going on with the development this month that it is hard to fit it all in a post here."

Fit it in he has, though, and the resulting post contains information on everything from volumetric clouds to diseased clothing. There's also a giant comparison shot of the game's new lighting system. "The result is pretty striking when combined with some of the other improvements we have made in the engine," Hall writes. "These improvements make the world really come to life, improving the visuals overall."



Rocket also talks about the game's new server architecture, assuring that the game will have some anti-hacking mechanics on launch. "DayZ’s game servers will function like servers in other MMO style games, that is the server will control the behavior and the sending of updates. No longer will your machine receive all the updates allowing their analysis by various cheats." The team are also experimenting with spawning all zombies and loot at the start of a server's initialisation.

There's a new clothing system, allowing you to put on and drop clothes of various durability. Clothes can also carry disease. In addition, the team are beginning to focus on a character customisation system. "The obvious starting point for us is to allow players to select the gender and race of their character. Beyond this, allowing ways for your character to become your own are key for us; from getting tattoo’s to finding unique clothing items, trying to deal with your own health aliments, etc..."

Rocket confirms that an internal closed test has begun, but stresses that the server architecture needs to be finalised before any public testing takes place. " have been working with Valve to ensure our new server browser system is working (we utilize Steam for this purpose rather than Gamespy as for ArmA2)."

Despite the progress, Rocket isn't yet prepared to make a guess at DayZ Standalone's release date. "We don’t know. We’re going to take our time. I feel fantastic about the situation, more than ever I feel like we’re doing something really interesting with this development. Now is not the time to rush things, but we do need to ensure our pace is kept up."

There are some new screenshots, embedded below. You can see the rest, and read the full details of the massive update, here.

Darksiders 2 may not have had the care and attention we like to see of a PC port, but that didn't hold back the game's tough, rewarding combat from making the game an overall enjoyable experience. So when the details of THQ's auction were revealed, it was a surprise to see that no-one had bid for Vigil. What gives?

As it turns out, the lack of interest shown in Vigil may have had nothing to do with the quality of the studio, as much as the timing of the sale. Speaking to Game Informer, THQ's president Jason Rubin touched on the difficulties with finding a home for Vigil. "Having just finished a product, Vigil was farthest from release of their next game, and we were not able to garner any interest from buyers, despite a herculean effort. Additionally, they were working on a new IP, which meant even more risk for a buyer."

Essentially, many of the bidders weren't just buying up a development studio, but also their games which, for the most part, were well into development. Relic were preparing for Company of Heroes 2's launch and Volition were well into development on the next Saints Row. Darksiders 2 released at the end of last August, giving the team less time to gear up and launch into development of their next project.

That project was codenamed Crawler, and it sounds like the team were extremely excited about the direction it was heading. In an emotional post to NeoGAF, made from an empty studio, Vigil's lead combat designer Ben Cureton wrote, "I knew, without a shadow of the doubt, that the project we were working on (Codenamed: Crawler) was going to blow people away. In fact, it DID blow people away. We did, in TWO months, what many companies haven't done in a year. The pride of knowing that no one was doing anything like us was so satisfying, it kept us coming to work and giving 100% every single day, even through the dark times."

Unfortunately funding a studio's development, marketing and staff costs for an untested new IP appears to be a risk that bidders involved in the THQ auction found too great. The situation likely wasn't helped by Darksider's 2 financial performance, which THQ's sales projections, taken from the first day motions, put at a loss.

The studio may have closed, but the Darksiders property, along with Vigil's staff, have attracted some interest. Platinum Games' JP Kellams tweeted at Dearksiders 2's lead designer, asking him, and other staff members, to get in touch if they were interested in working with the Bayonetta developer. And Platinum's head Atsushi Inaba also tweeted his interest in picking up the franchise at the upcoming auction, saying (translated by Kotaku), "In THQ's studio and IP selling off auction, Darksiders is unsold? wanna buy it...on the cheap..."

Here's hoping that both Darksiders and the studio's staff quickly find a home.

Thanks to Eurogamer for the Platinum Games info, and to Distressed Debt Investing's Hunter for the analysis of THQ's first day motions.

If you’ve got an Nvidia graphics card then get over to their website now and download the open beta for the GeForce Experience. It’s been in closed beta since before Christmas and now Nvidia has now opened it up so that anyone can have a go.

I’ve been playing with the GeForce Experience on my rigs for a few months and I think it’s an excellent, unobtrusive bit of software.

The more of us that get on the beta, the more accurate the results are going to be, so get on there, test the optimal settings and report back your findings. There’s a feedback button built into the client and it’s comments-based so you can go into full detail about how you find the service and what you think needs to be changed.

Up until now the optimal settings have been based on what Nvidia’s experts reckon to be the best fit for your hardware, but the real test is what you guys think needs to be the ultimate PC gaming experience.

Do you want frame rates prioritised? Do you want native resolution to be the most important? Is is all about anti-aliasing for you?

Even if you’re a hardcore PC gamer there’s a good chance that GFE has something to teach you. You may still enjoy tweaking your settings, so they’re exactly how you want them, but GFE will give you a great starting point to move forward from.

The software is also good at teaching you what the different in-game graphics settings mean, using highlighted screenshots to show you what different options mean for specific games.

To get the optimised settings stuff though you’ll need an Nvidia card from the last two generations, so any GeForce card from the 400 series upwards.



I genuinely think this is an incredible bit of software and important for PC gaming moving forward.

As PC gaming moves ever more into mainstream consciousness (last week I had Rupert Murdoch’s representatives and other mainstream press breathing down my neck asking what this PC gaming thing was...) I think it’s important to have software that simplifies the increasingly complex graphics options without ever taking away choice for the enthusiast.

Granted most of us are pretty clued-up on our games and hardware, but there’s a good percentage of people playing games on PC that might not ever delve into the options screen; there’s folk still playing CoD on the low-res settings it boots with. These people are PC gamers too, and if we can help them get the most out of their gaming experience that can only be a good thing.

Whatever your pre-conceptions are about GeForce Experience, if you’ve got an Nvidia graphics card - especially if it’s not a top of the range one - then get downloading and give it a looksee.

It’s in beta so this is the time to make your opinions heard.

Well the snow has finally melted, and you can now walk down the street without fear of slipping on an ice-patch and skidding in front of the number 47 bus (my paranoid brain has really thought this through). However, it's still a bit cold, so rather than heading outside to replenish your tea supplies and absorb that horrid Vitamin D, why not close the curtains, nail the letterbox shut, and play some browser games with your trembling, sun-deprived fingers? Read on for Bieber, bull murder, a lot of space to walk around in, and the ritualistic sacrifice of your friends.

OUOAAAAH by Tim Garbos, Eske Nørholm, William Reynish, Jacob Junker Larsen Play it online here.

Warning: this game is not suitable for children over the age of 0.

Here's that Justin Bieber simulator you were looking for. OUOAAAAH was a Keynote Favourite at the recent Nordic Game Jam (theme: grotesque), and playing it makes me sick up in my mouth a little bit. Thankfully, you only control Justin's lips, contorting them in time to one of his songs, as tweenage girls scream in the background. Mesmerisingly horrible.

Press To Give Up by Anders Børup, Bram Michielsen, Henrike Lode, Jonas Maaløe, Jonatan Van Hove, Mads Johansen, Thomas Ryder Play it online here.

You can't beat a bit of bully.

Bullfighting is an evil sport, but it makes for a damned tense minigame. Despite the name, the Nordic Game Jam's Press To Give Up isn't some jokey one-button thing; X is the just the 'I've had enough' button, with the arrow keys and space bar being used to control your pixellated matador, as you attempt to stab an animal for the pleasure of a bloodthirsty audience. I didn't manage to succeed in that respect, but I did gore the matador a handful of times.

Sacrifice by Yoshio Ishii Play it online here.

Characters have differently sized health bars, essentially, but the premise is still pretty neat.

In this odd little puzzle game, you lead a merry group of adventurers... to their deaths. Placed in a series of fatal situations, you're forced to decide which member of your team will lay down their life to ensure the safety of the rest. I have a feeling it might make a bit more sense if you can read the Japanese, but I managed to muddle through a few stages, until I hit what seemed to be an unwinnable situation. Despite that, I really like the idea of Sacrifice, and I hope it's expanded on one day. (Spotted by IndieGames.)

good morning, commander by allen Play it online here.

Suit you, sir.

Sometimes it's enough simply to have a space to interact in, with buttons to push, instruments to knock over, and faucets to turn on and off. good morning, commander starts off like that, before taking you somewhere that's (ironically) chock-full of atmosphere. You're left to figure out what you're actually supposed to do yourself, but the slooooow movement speed and obscured controls don't help. (Here they are.) Stick with it, though, as when it gets going this is pretty much Moon: The Game. (Thanks to Free Indie Games.)

A tale of two cities

I played SimCity for about five hours at Maxis’ offices last week, and I started by building Port Foozle, a landlocked gambling town with a very deceptive name. Following that, I built an actual port town in the same region, hoping it would feed Foozle with tourists. I didn't play long enough to realize all of my long-term plans, but I’m about to start over in this weekend’s closed beta, and I already know that all I want to do is keep playing until the sun rises and my eyelids turn to lead.

I like a lot about SimCity, and it's going to murder tons of my time, but (aw, bummer that there has to be a "but") I have some early criticisms. It's like I'm eating my favorite ice cream, but it's dripping on my hands and making them all sticky. I hate having sticky hands, but I keep eating, because the ice cream is so damn good. Especially the first bite, so I'll start with that.





The birth of Port Foozle

A city is initially defined by its roads, starting with an avenue connecting it to the freeway, which is necessary if you want any Sims to move in. Once I'd placed that, I built cross streets, and eventually smaller grids for my budding residential, commercial, and industrial districts.

The option to design curved and circular roads actually makes a huge difference in this early stage. Curves can conform to tricky terrain, and maximizing space usage early on is important for fast growth. Port Foozle's ridiculous circle street was just an aesthetic decision, and a pretty bad one. I did an awful job preparing it for a denser and more populous future.

Still, I spent a long time on this stage, because starting a new city is such a great feeling. It's a land canvas ready to be painted with a free-form, living machine. It's all possibilities and no restrictions—at least, it feels that way at first—and it did what SimCity is supposed to do: it made me forget about everything outside my field of view, like my limbs, which started going numb from my reprehensible posture. Hey cheek, how long have you been resting on my left hand? An hour? Oh.





Zoning

Once I'd built a few roads, I zoned Foozle's residential, commercial, and industrial areas. Unlike previous SimCitys, zones border roads instead of filling areas, and density is defined by the size of the zoned road.

High density streets zoned for residential construction will result in apartment buildings, for example, and small streets will become suburbs. Eventually, the commercial properties on my main avenue will become much bigger, as long as there's room for them to grow. This gets tricky: if you pack in low-density roads early on, you may have to demolish them later to make room for bigger buildings.

I didn't plan for Port Foozle's future very well, but there’s always the next attempt, and the attempt after that. Starting a city is like rolling and re-rolling an RPG character to get just the right mix: it's almost as addictive as actually playing the game through.





Building infrastructure

Your Sims will build houses, shops, and factories on their own, but you need to provide things like police stations, hospitals, bus depots, water towers, sewage outlets, and power plants. Here's Foozle's City Hall, which I plopped in the lower-left side of my totally inefficient circle street. It's the first and most important civic structure, because upgrading it with department wings gives you access to new structures. As you can see, I did not know what I was doing when I added the wing on the left.

All of your ploppable buildings can be upgraded. I like the fidelity improvement—it doesn't make sense to drop hospitals all over my city to fix my healthcare problem when I could just make one bigger—but it turned into the most tedious part of the game for me. Some decisions are clear (extra windmill equals more power), but others are not so clear. My residents are upset about too many "germs" in the city, so, I guess I'll add more stuff to my clinic?

I just couldn't tell whether upgrading a building was better than building a new one elsewhere, or if bulldozing a house so my school could have extra classrooms was the right decision. I feel bad knocking over someone's house, but the simulation often requires it. What if they're in there? Eating TV dinners, watching reality shows (I hear The Sims 3: University Life is popular)... is that just progress? I guess I wouldn't make a great politician, and maybe I needed to spend more time digging into the stats to make informed decisions.

That minor confusion aside, these structures are the balancing act that keep you active. Growing cities constantly need more of everything, so you've got to find the funds and space to keep the power on, water running, sewage flowing (away from the water, ideally), and so on until you reach equilibrium. It's a tricky and engrossing tug of war. Too much sewage! Build an outlet. Too much pollution! Build a sewage processing plant. Not enough power! Build a coal plant. Too much pollution! Dammit.




Designing within limits

It didn't take long for Port Foozle to fill its borders. Pictured up there is as much space as any city can occupy in SimCity, and according to Creative Director Ocean Quigley, the restriction is a necessary trade-off to keep the game performing well. I think allowing those with beefier rigs to push them would be nice, but this is how it is right now, and the limit actually has some positive effects.

The early game in SimCity would be much less important if cities could expand beyond their initial tract, but because they’re limited, planning ahead is imperative. And most plans have at least a few flaws, forcing mid-game mayors to redesign districts to accommodate the increased demand for high density housing, shopping, and industry. It creates tough decisions, like whether or not to demolish your quaint, carefully plotted suburbs to make way for the future.

I still hate knocking over people's houses, but I like that there are trade-offs. I guess you just can't get anywhere without driving a bulldozer through town now and then. What I don't like is the creative restriction. Port Foozle could never be the city I wanted it to be. I wanted a dense, Las Vegas strip-style downtown which gave way to a sprawl of suburbs, but instead I had to zone high-density residential, commercial, and industrial blocks right next to each other to pack in more people, and every new casino required me to demolish more low-density roads.

Because the border never expands, population growth is entirely about density. A cute little service road leading out to my power plants would quickly impede progress, so that bit of personality has to go. Every inch of land must be developed and optimized for growth, unless your goal is a stable medium-sized city.





Region play

SimCity does have an answer to complaints about the city size limit. It's imperfect—I'd rather be able to build bigger cities—but it's a decent solution: I can approximate my urban planning ambitions with multiple cities in the same region. Because they can interact by buying and selling resources to each other, I can build symbiotic cities, each with its own job and personality. One might be dedicated to suburban sprawl, another to industry, another to tourism, and so on. I didn't have time to test this fully, but it's clearly the idea behind region play.

Above is my second city. My plan, which I didn't have time to see through, was to build a bustling commerce city with high-wealth residents who might want to drop by Port Foozle now and then to play some craps or go clubbing. As you can see, my plan was also to make lots and lots of curvy roads. I love those curvy roads.





The always-online problem

My biggest criticism is also going to be the most common: there are a lot of problems with SimCity's always-online requirement. What if I want to play on my laptop while I commute? What if your servers go down? These are valid questions, and so are the smaller ones, such as: what if I make a mistake and want to reload an earlier save?

I can’t. There’s no “undo” in SimCity. You can demolish mistakes, like the foolish placement of my City Hall wing, but you pay for it, because your city isn't just yours. It partially lives on EA’s servers, where it can interact with other player’s cities (if you choose to open your region), make purchases from the global marketplace, and stay up-to-date on the global leaderboards.

Is there anything to like about taking SimCity online? Sure. It means that, if I choose to let my friends build in my region, I'll be able to see and interact with their decisions every time I log in. It means we can work together and construct great works. It means I can amass wealth by playing the global market, and that fantasy stock market challenge sounds fun to me.

Having no offline single-player option at all, however, is bothersome. I just don't buy the idea that it would have been impossible to include a separate offline mode. No friends. No leaderboard. No global market. Just me and a few cities that can live in isolation.

Unfortunately, I don't foresee these concerns swaying Maxis or EA, and they'll continue to explain why the online requirement is technically and philosophically imperative. Oh well, I'll count it as a flaw, but I can deal with it. I have to, because I'm going to play a lot more SimCity. I haven't made it to skyscrapers and complex industries yet, so I can't comment on mid- or late-game cities, but the early game has all the same addictive properties of SimCity 2000, with even more complexity and decision making. I need to wash my hands afterward, but it's still some damn good ice cream.

Miguel Cepero's Procedural World project was already an insanely impressive example of the collision between maths, nature and beauty; creating vast landscapes and detailed structures. Recently his work has taken a familiar, if equally spectacular turn, adding a Minecraft style WYSIWYG landscape editor and building system that lets him shape his random worlds. There is a video. Try not to gawp.



If that wasn't enough, the engine's building tool can go further and shape the blocks, adding curves and smoothing. As Cepero explains in this blog post, "you still lay boxes the same as in Minecraft, but then you can go back and alter them. I saw that a single operation was enough to produce both curved and straight angled surfaces. If you applied it gently you would get curves. If you applied it more, it would straighten out." There's another video showing this system at work.



The engine, codenamed VoxelFarm Realtime, is still firmly in the development stage. It's not yet known whether this is building towards a commercial release, but you can keep up with the project's progress over at the Procedural World blog.

Amazingly, if you're looking for a medieval multiplayer FPS (that's first person slasher), you have two choices available to you. Paradox's War of the Roses may have called in Scottish back-up, but Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is reinforcing with an open recruitment drive. This weekend you can play the game for free on Steam and, if you find decapitating knights to your liking, buy it for half its usual price. Naturally, there's a new trailer to show off the brutal combat.



The game's first content patch is due later in the month. It will add new 1v1 duel and capture the flag modes, new maps, a flail and polehammer, as well as a plethora of bug fixes. Also, blood decals will be painted to the ground when a player is hit. Chopping up your foes is messy business after all. The full patch round-up is available here.

Thanks, RPS.

EA are planning to bring Mac support to Origin, and are accepting testers to help trial their client. As an incentive, they're offering a free copy of Popcap's Bookworm to anyone who takes part. Applicants had better really like Bookworm, though, because the Origin store isn't due to go live on Mac until the client's official release.

Origin for Mac aims to bring all the features of the PC client - including cloud storage and auto-patching - to Apple's OS. Right now, as well as the Store being MIA, the Mac version is also missing Origin's nifty Twitch.tv streaming feature. Again, it's probably for the best. I'd imagine there are only so many Bookworm livestreams that I could stand to watch in a day.

EA assure that when it does properly launch, the Origin Mac catalogue will feature a selection of EA and third party games. According to their announcement, "We’re very excited about the upcoming launch of Origin for Mac and the opportunity to reach the millions of Mac-based gamers out there. We’re continuing to build Origin into a gaming service that truly lets you purchase and play anywhere, anytime."

The alpha trial is only available to a few thousand testers, but until that cap is hit, you can download the Mac client from here.

Thanks, The Verge (via Joystiq).