Yeah, okay, you're probably sick about hearing us talk about the iMac's success by now; after all, it's been the hot topic since they first leapt off the shelves in August. But we're not the only ones harping on Apple's blue-and-white home run; ever since the sales numbers came pouring in, stories about the iMac's consumer appeal started to eclipse the widespread media rants about how the lack of a built-in floppy drive was the kiss of death. And these days, people are looking at the bigger picture; take the runaway success of the iMac, sprinkle it on top of a newly-focused and profitable Apple run "temporarily" by Steve Jobs, garnish with a stock price over twice what it was a year ago, and voilà! It's the recipe for an increasing (and, we suspect, a grudging) media admission that Apple is back from the brink and increasingly kicking butt.

Case in point? Steve Jobs may not have been named Time's "Man of the Year" (yeah, okay, we'll admit that Starr and Clinton had a bigger impact around the water cooler, but Steve and the iMac are cuter than both of them by a long shot), but Time still acknowledged Apple's achievements in 1998. Apple's comeback is Time's number one tech story of the year. And while it would be remiss of them not to note that there's still lots of work to be done-- overcoming the disparity between the selections of Windows and Mac software, for instance-- it's nice to see a big, well-respected publication give some credit where credit is due.

That said, what'll it take for Steve Jobs to secure the Man of the Year slot for next year? If it involves any indiscretions in the Oval Office, our advice would be to forget about the whole thing...

Wouldn't you know it? We've been waiting for the Myth II demo to come out for months now, and when it finally does show up, it does us no good whatsoever. Myth II, is, of course, the sequel to Bungie's best-selling game Myth, in which the player controls armies of sword-swingin' berserkers, molotov-chuckin' dwarves, and various other rag-tag units in a clash with the evil minions of the Fallen Lords that invariably leads to severed limbs flying through the air, spattering blood all over the 3D terrain. It's not everyone's cup of tea, mind you, but it's a fantastic romp for those of us who dig that sort of thing.

So Myth II is supposed to continue the story of the struggle against the big nasty Fallen Lords, while adding all kinds of fun little enhancements to the overall gameplay. Animation is smoother, monsters are nastier, you can set things on fire (fire! fire!!), etc. And there's one little detail so delightfully perverse that its appeal to our darker side overcomes our admittedly vegan leanings: you can blow up chickens. Again, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but we were really looking forward to it. So of course, what happens? The 40MB demo gets released while we're on our annual Holiday Road Trip™, during which time we don't have access to a day-job ISDN line or even our 56K Global Village modem-- and at 19.2kbps, even we are not crazy enough to try to download a long-awaited, server-throttling 40MB game demo.

And even if we were able to download the monster, it wouldn't be of any use to us on our aging but beloved PowerBook Duo 280c, with its lowly 68LC040 processor; even the first Myth required a PowerPC and a screen capable of thousands of colors at 640x480 resolution. This is giving us flashbacks of Christmas 1994, when Bungle pulled a similar stunt with the release of the groundbreaking game Marathon; we had pre-ordered it the previous August, but it didn't show up until the day after we had left our home base in Boston for the two-week trek through the Midwest. So, once again, we're spending the holidays impatiently awaiting the day when we can actually fire up the latest Bungie gorefest. A pox on Bungie for their accursed product release schedules! (Just a little pox, though-- they still make the best games on the market.) If you're not as PPC-challenged and bandwidth-constricted as we are right now and you're interested in checking out the demo, Webintosh has some more information on what's included and where to pick it up.