EXCLUSIVES

The latest offering in the White Wolf family of role-playing games has arrived on the Mac. Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption is a fang party waiting to happen for the dark and spooky video game lover.

Originally a popular PC game developed by aptly-named Nihilistic software and published by Activision based on the 3D Nod engine, Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption was ported to the Mac by the folks at MacSoft.

The digital version of this popular real-life game strives to recreate the feel of role-playing with a group of your closest kindred. The lead character of the first-person version of V:TM, Christof, is already part of the Brujah clan, the scholars, but the player gets to select the disciplines, or mystical abilities, of the character, as well as the typical RPG selections of strength, intelligence, wit, and so on. The disciplines include typical ones like blood healing, awaken (a.k.a the joy of reanimating another vamp), and feed, which allows your character to drink a person's blood without killing him or her. The player can also choose a type of discipline to explore, such as animalism, auspex (telepathic powers), mortis, and obfuscate. The nuances of each clan and its specialties are too in-depth to get into here, but suffice it to say, the level of detail in V:TM character development is enough to send any RPG fan into hibernation for a couple months while they fiddle with rolling the digital dice.

Because each clan has its own special flavor of crazy, there has been an unterminable period of infighting, besides the obvious fun of munching on humans and animals. It is this interfamilial nitpicking that forms the basis of your adventure in Redemption.

The single-player mode of V:TM starts with Christof, the suddenly endarkened Brujah and former Crusader. His religious nearsightedness leaves him well open to the evil around him, so in his battles for light and fluffy bunnies, he gets bitten by a vampire and made into a Brujah. Not only is he totally freaked out by the prospects of drinking blood for the next thousand years or so, he now has to contend with the snarky infighting among his fanged bretheren.

These fights take him across the world and time, from a convent in medieval Prague to modern London and NYC complete with disgruntled punk rock vampires. Through his travels, he meets other like-minded undead folks and forms alliances and a coterie that travels and fights together. The player controls Christof and his coterie with the fancy in-game system of menus and key combinations typical to RPG games. The perspective is third-person, with the cursor controlling movement, fighting, and the viewpoint. This is where things get a little messy.

The graphics looked pretty good, but the in-game movies left something to be desired. Frankly, I wondered what the heck the point was. I woke up in this darn convent, and was I a vampire already? What's the deal? Suddenly I'm fighting Czech zombie rats, and some nun is in love with me. Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket?

Playing V:TM began to remind me of my one attempt at role-playing in college; as my dorky friend droned on about ravens and whatnot, I fell asleep.

www.wizworks.com/macsoft > $29.99 rated m for mature > Mac G3/ 300 or faster with at least 128MB RAM, MacOS 8.6 or higher > 765MB hard drive space > video card with at least 8MB VRAM