It's Sunday on AtAT, and you know what that means-- It's Fluff Day! There's never any real news going on in the Mac world on Sunday, so during the week we save up some non-pressing but interesting tidbits to tell you about on the Sabbath. So, to start, we thought we'd shoot you a little info on the Next Big Game® from Bungie Software, the way-cool folks who gave us the Marathon series. It's called Myth: The Fallen Lords, and Yours Truly was lucky enough to be chosen as a beta tester. (Yes, there was a non-disclosure agreement, but parts of it have just been lifted; Bungie's smart enough to know that free advertising is nothing to be scoffed at.)

Myth:TFL is a real-time strategy game, sort of like Blizzard's Warcraft 2 on steroids. The big difference is that Myth uses an amazing 3D engine that allows the player to watch the action from any direction; it's incredible to zoom in and circle around as your barbarians hack a floating skeleton into dust. And while the game ships with an engrossing single-player scenario, most people will buy the game for its network play. It's a lot of fun playing "king of the hill" with six other players over the internet, etc.

If you're at all interested in playing games on your Mac, we seriously recommend that you visit Bungie's Myth page for screenshots, movies, and tons of information. The Macintosh Conspiracy also recently posted a great mini-Q&A with Bungie Software, which gives a lot of inside information that even the beta testers hadn't been told about. Take my word for it; Myth will revolutionize the computer gaming world when it ships.

Thanx to Webintosh to providing a link to Bill Vlahos' homepage, who has an interesting "grass roots" alternative to Apple's "Think Different" campaign. Bill acknowledges that "Think Different" is a good start to getting Apple's brand name back in the collective mind of the computer-buying public, but he feels that product-centric ads are crucial right now-- and that if Apple won't provide them, perhaps we the users can.

Bill proposes that everyone use his slogan, "It's a Macintosh, It Just Works!" He provides a few free badge graphics to use on web pages. We like the whole idea-- it's simple, it's straightforward, and it just might work. And heck, it couldn't hurt. Remember the Mac OS 8 web campaign? The users can make a difference. Although, one might wonder, how long do we need to do Apple's work for them?

One quick bit of "real" news-- In contrast to earlier reports, MacInTouch says that Apple has not committed to providing a Yellow Box for Mac OS, though they haven't ruled out the possibility, either. (Read: waffling.) The Yellow Box is the modern portion of Rhapsody that will run programs written in Rhapsody's development environment. Apple has committed to providing Yellow Box runtime enviroments for Rhapsody (for both PowerPC and Intel), Windows 95, and Windows NT. This basically guarantees that when developers do their programming in Rhapsody, the resulting software would run on any of the above platforms.

For a while there, it looked pretty likely that Apple would release a Yellow Box runtime environment for the next major revision of Mac OS, code-named Allegro. This Yellow Box environment would essentially allow Mac OS users to run Rhapsody software, which would be a big draw to developers. Hopefully, Apple will have the time and resources to get this working.

In an embarrassment of riches, we're proud to have been chosen as Mac One's site of the week, for having "the Right Stuff-- the Mac Stuff." That makes three awards in as many weeks. How long can we possibly keep up a rate like that?

Show your support for us and your appreciation for them by giving them a visit. They are committed to making the Mac OS the number one OS on the planet by 2004. No small task... Oh yeah, be prepared for a big ol' picture of fellow Macophile Drew Carey on their home page. (Nothing against Drew, but you want to be ready before sudden Drew exposure on a Monday morning.)