Gaming On Mac
For my first foray into writing for a gaming blog, I want to discuss something very near and dear to my heart: My Mac.
I've been using OSX for 5 years now, and I'll never go back. However, for the first few years, the one thing I missed was all the games my friends were playing on PC. They mocked me, "Oh, you can't come to the LAN because you can't play any of the games!". When I bought my first Mac (a 12" Powerbook that I still use daily) it was with the intent that it was for work and school purposes, not gaming. Besides, at that point in my life, I had little time for gaming. Now, I have lots of time and a desire to play "PC" games, but without owning a PC. Thanks to various pieces of software, my 24" iMac can run almost anything I want to play!
Hit the jump for a rundown and my opinions on various ways to play PC games on OSX.
Now, the last thing I want to do is start some kind of Mac/PC debate here. We all have our preferences in OS, just like we have our preferences in men. It is what it is, and arguing about it won't change a thing.
That said, the PC gaming world is changing. With an ever growing market share, OSX converts are everywhere. One frequent question from new Mac users is "How can I play my PC games on my new Mac?"
I tell my friends that they have 3 options: emulation, Boot Camp, and waiting for a port.
Emulation requires an application, like Crossover by Codeweavers to change the code of your game/other application. This is what I use to run many games like CounterStrike: Source, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.
Boot Camp is Apple's way of letting you install a windows partition on your OSX hard drive. This works for many brand new games that emulators can't quite handle. Despite being a die hard OSX user, I find having my windows partition necessary so I can enjoy games like Age of Conan, Call of Duty 4, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Obviously, waiting for an actual port of a game works the best to run it under OSX natively. However, for a long time, it would take 6 months to a year before a port was finished and released for OSX. But, times they are a changin'. Many publishers are now releasing both Windows and OSX versions of games simultaneously. Blizzard has been one of the best companies for releasing their games for all platforms at the same time. And a short time ago, EA announced that it too would bring most of its games to OSX at release.
Now I'd like your thoughts. How many of you guys are Mac users? Do you game on your Mac? How do you do it? I'd like to get to know more of our Mac using gamers! We aren't alone, and we need to get together to show the PC gaming world that their monopoly isn't what it used to be.
LunarMouse
Posted to Video Games on 12 August 2008
· Comments (12)
Other stuff like this: Mac, OSX, PC Gaming
Being a new mac user this topic has come up time and time again for me :) And i thought about getting boot-camp, but Im waiting, for what, i don't know :) I love you Lunar!
Yes, I have a 15" Macbook Pro and use it primarily for school but game on it as well. I'm an avid TF2 and WOW player, and while Crossover for Mac is a good product, it doesn't work as good IMHO as just using boot camp. Since you already have a few games that require Boot Camp to play, why not just play them all in there? I find the experience to be much more tailored to taking advantage of the various graphics enhancements that DX9 provides. Just me 2 cents! But, I
I switched to the Mac years ago. I wasn't a devoted PC gamer, but I enjoyed gaming occasionally (Star Trek Elite Force, Re-Volt, Half-Life, etc.). That's probably the one thing I didn't miss much when I switched. I was constantly upgrading the hardware of my PC to follow up the needs of the games I wanted to play. Better graphics card, better sound card, more memory, etc.
I got a Mac because I didn't want to have to deal with upgrades, drivers, etc. But I knew I wouldn't game on my computer anymore. So I later got a Wii and a PS3. That's really smoother (insert the disk, start the game, that's it). And getting consoles even got my boyfriend to play the games too! What more to ask ;-)
Hi!
I bought a load of PC games on my various trips in Asia when I was living there. They were, predictably, not of the (ahem) best quality. I had Starcraft, a bunch of "Age of" games, Rise of Nations, Warcraft III, that sort of thing.
When I got my shiny new iMac late last year, I tried running a few of them with Parallels. A couple worked (Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds), but were buggy, and most of them would just spin up too fast and get too hot that the shitty Cambodian/Balinese/Thai discs would actually _warp_ in my mac's disc drive! They'd become slightly convex (or concave, depending on your perspective), and would then become jammed in the drive! Yikes! After they cooled and resumed their original shapes, I was able to eject them and throw them away.
Since then, I've gone fully legit and picked up Starcraft and Civ 4. [Wanna play Starcaft with me? I don't have any friends who own it... :'(] Also, my girlfriend has a blast with the Sims, and I've spent some time with Empire at War lately.
So, yes! Let's all play games on our happy Macs! It reminds me of years ago when I played "The Dungeon of Doom" on my shitty old Mac IIse. Ahh, memories.
I have a Macbook, standard issue Black, and I use it for gaming ever now and again. I used to play WoW pretty avidly but recently it's been kinda 'meh' for me. But I rather enjoy VMWare. It works nicely for virtual machines. Though I've been considering using Bootcamp to install a Windows Partition...
For a long time my solution was "only care about console games", and maybe buy the couple of PC games I was interested in a few years later once the mac port came out and we had a computer that was actually fast enough to run them decently. (The performance on most mac ports was awful.)
Now that I'm graduated from college and actually working, I bought a PC whose purpose is pretty much entirely playing games. (My main computer is currenly a G4 Powerbook). At some point when I've been a good boy, I'll probably get myself a Mac Pro and put a Windows partition on it.
@Em
Aww, my boyfriend works on 3D support at VMware. VMware only started getting serious about 3D about a year and a half ago when Fusion came out and more people started using VMware products in a home computing environment... so it's still fairly hit or miss which games run perfectly, which have some graphical issues or slowdown, and which don't run at all. But given how much better things are now than they were when they started ramping up work on 3D, I suspect things'll be really good in another year or so.
Games aside, I think pretty much everyone who has an Intel-based mac should consider Fusion for running the couple of non-gaming Windows apps you find yourself wanting to use. I wouldn't mind rebooting into Windows for most games, because usually when I'm playing PC games I'm focused on the game not doing much else. But with normal apps, that's kinda lame.
I do freelance graphic design for a living, so a hi-octane Mac Pro was a must for me. That being said, it makes a pretty kick-ass gaming machine... I just popped in a second hard drive and installed Vista (I know, had to for one of my jobs) on it, and boot to it using Boot Camp for games.
I play all of my games under Boot Camp. I have Mac and PC versions of a number of games (Civ 4, The Sims 2, and their various expansions), and they simply don't play as smoothly natively on the Mac. That might change, though, as more day-and-date simultaneous releases become more common—an after-the-fact port is going to be a lot less optimized than two versions made from the same codebase. Guess I'll be testing that out with Spore.
Sadly, for serious gaming hardware, Apple doesn't make it easy. The integrated video on the MacBook makes it impossible to run some games, and the earlier Intel iMacs had pretty poor choices for video cards. (They're much improved in the most recent round, though.)
@JeffSpender:
Way to plug VMware! :-) My husband works for them, too, but in a different department (altogether unrelated to Fusion). The 3D support is getting better, definitely (and would be way easier if it weren't for stupid DirectX proprietary IP). But in my book, nothing beats Boot Camp.
Now what about linux? Is there no linux love at GG? :'
@ Jeff
That's awesome! I've actually started running the beta for Fusion 2 now and it's improved quite a bit. I still use VM for my LInux partition, though. =D
about a month back, I went the "Hackintosh" route; I built a computer that with a little bit of tweaking, and a hacked copy of OSX would allow me to dual boot the OS I want to work under, AND Windows to game with.
I really love Apple, and worked with Applecare for a solid year and a half, but that being said, Apple's hardware comes at a premium cost. to build the equivalent Mac Pro that I ended up assembling would have cost me considerably more to go their way. I would kill for them to just release OSX to run on a home built box, and would be in line on day one to buy it.
I am on a Mac, and I play WoW. I have been having problems the last few months though. My frame rate sucks. I get 2 frames per second in major cities and 1 in BG's. The worst part, I contacted Mac and they said I can't upgrade my video card because it's built in. If I want better graphics I have to buy a whole new machine.... not impressed.