Come, fellow Mac owners. We must chat.
Friday, September 4th, 2009 - 1:09pm
Doesn't anyone else find it odd that the 'firearm owners' get more forum play than Mac- or Linux-heads?
Let's turn that around. What are the best current games playable on the Mac, without Boot Camp?
Right now my list is:
I've got lots of OLD favourites and casual games I come back to:
Zuma, Escape Velocity, Diablo II, Warcraft III, Weird Worlds, and of course my fink-install Nethack (ascii only)
Blizzard and Bungie USED to rule our world. Now we're down to Blizzard. Here's hoping that StarCraft II, Diablo III, and WoW stay cross-platform compatible.
Anyone got leads on fun stuff to do when you don't want to reboot?
----Nathaniel
I wouldn't worry about WoW going anywhere.
Other than WoW, I think the last thing I played without booting to Windows was World of Goo, unless you count the demo for Plants vs Zombies. I'm pretty sure that PopCap is actually also pretty good about porting their stuff to the Mac within a few weeks of release for Windows. Oh, and I guess I played Spore on the Mac as well.
Honestly, I just don't think of my Macs as gaming machines. I have my consoles, and I have my dual boot Windows partition. I certainly don't complain when something is playable without having to reboot, and I'm certainly glad that WoW is such a game, but the day dual booting became a possibility was the day I really stopped caring in any significant way.
XBL/PSN: zeroKFE | BHA: zeroKFE/zeroanne
Well there's EVE Onli—oh, you said "fun". Hey-o!
For current, there's Sims 3, Civ IV, Call of Duty 4, Red Alert 3, Lego Star Wars/Batman/Indiana Jones, X-Plane.
Spore is debatable I suppose... hm, browsing the list of Mac games on the Apple site. TOCA Race Driver 3? Battlefield 1942 is always a good classic.
I've also only got old stuff installed: Fallout, Fallout 2, WarCraft III, but I've also got a first-gen MacBook (C1D, GMA950) so there isn't much doing there. Installed the Zeno Clash demo in Boot Camp, and it runs, but haven't played it much so can't say how well. Not going to bother trying The Witcher or STALKER until I upgrade to an iMac.
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"When Gravey wins an internet argument, it's like the whole internet wins." - oilypenguin
"I love you, Gravey, you taffer." - Clock
Yup, I'm not that worried about games in OS X. The couple I have were more for the novelty, but when I gave up the video card-update treadmill of PC gaming and switched to Macs and consoles a few years ago I didn't miss playing on the comp. Now I installed Boot Camp and Steam the other week and dug out my mouse, and am pretty happy with dual-booting to play some old PC classics I missed or didn't finish way back when.
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"When Gravey wins an internet argument, it's like the whole internet wins." - oilypenguin
"I love you, Gravey, you taffer." - Clock
Yeah; the nice thing about the new macs is they are PCs, so you can boot into Windows if you really need to do some serious gaming. I'm happy when native games are released, but it's not a blocker for me.
That said, I do have fun trying to get them work in Wine under OSX.
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Jonman wrote:
Well according to Inside Mac Games Rome Total war is coming to the Mac in 2009. So...... can't wait for that.
Other than I just hang out at mac gaming websites and watch the flash based tumbleweed rolling by.
Holy crap there is a ten day free trial of Warhammer Online available on the Mac. Didn't know that.
Tag for XBL and Steam (Mac) = Higgley (Friend me up!)
... herald of Piggledy 'Destroyer of Worlds'
Hmm, if I eliminate Boot Camp, VMWare, and Crossover games:
- All of Everett Kaser's games, but especially "Baker Street"
- Dwarf Fortress
- Plants vs. Zombies
- Civ IV
- Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble
I pretty much rely on bootcamp to get in the majority of my (PC) gaming these days. However, I do have a copy of Civ IV for mac and I've been slowly playing through a multiplayer game of that over the months.
The problem with Civ IV on mac, is after sometime, the textures start going black, also there seems to be a missing function. In the PC version, you could mouse+hold over an enemy stack to determine the odds of success; this is missing on the mac side.
Other than that, if I am gaming in OS X, it's often something very old school using DOS BOX.
Other than the Blizzard stable (bless them every one), I've played EVE Online, City of Heroes, Spore and Sims3 on my Mac. Every one of those non-Blizzard games are cider wraps which kinda bugs me, but they all run just fine. Mythic is working on a cider wrap of Warhammer Online as well which I'll be checking out.
I just don't like booting over to another partition and running Windows at all, so I mainly just stick to the consoles (which I prefer anyway). If we get more native or cider version of games I'll pick them up if they catch my fancy.
XBL/PSN Tag: Sithcundman
Steam: Sithcundman
There probably isn't another goodjer who has drunk as much Apple cool-aid as I have. And I have a PC for gaming. Don't torture yourself, get a windows machine and enjoy your hobby.
"Once you can accept the universe is matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy." -- Albert Einstein
Agreed. It's nice to have a PC dedicated to gaming. That way when upgrade hardware and software I don't feel like I'm jeopardizing my work.
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If there are any text-based sports gamers, the latest Out of the Park Baseball, OOTP X, is fantastic. No Windows necessary, and it plays nice with my Windows friends.
I thought EA was going to start doing simultaneous releases for the Mac. Have they abandoned that idea?
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I know, it's sad that I never gave a damn about Tim Tebow. And he never gave a damn about me.
Aye! I got my nice little Mac-Mini running Windows 7 and is strictly a Media Center PC. Runs fantastic!
PAR
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For all who live in such times, it is not for them to decide. All we get to decide is what to do with the time given to us
Totally agreed on buying a Windows machine for gaming. You don't even need a terribly expensive one.
For when you're on the road, though, (this is assuming you have a Macbook).... the Mac has Sims 3 and Plants v. Zombies.
Elewis17 wrote:
Going to start? You mean in 2007? Pretty much, and within two months of announcing it:
June 12, 2007: EA, id back gaming on the Mac
August 16, 2007: EA officially backs off of Mac releases
To EA's credit (
), most of those games (Madden 08, Tiger Woods 08, C&C 3, Order of the Phoenix, NFS Carbon) did eventually come out, but I think that's been it...
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"When Gravey wins an internet argument, it's like the whole internet wins." - oilypenguin
"I love you, Gravey, you taffer." - Clock
As others have said there isn't a good substitute for gaming on a real PC, but mine is too big to travel with (if only!) so I enjoy having some games on my macbook too.
If you install the macports version of wine-devel you can run a lot of games under wine without any issues. Most of the GOG catalog works, and I've got these installed at the moment:
- Sacrifice
- Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader
- HOMM3
- Divine Divinity (not on GOG sadly)
I'm sure it could run even more modern games but and I find the tiny macbook fans get loud playing anything too demanding. As for native games, I've got these installed at the moment:
- Tropico 2
- Age of Mythology
- Depths of Peril
- Dwarf Fortress
- Diablo 2
I've also compiled Jagged Alliance 2 natively for OSX before using the available Linux version and making some changes to get it building. For some reason I don't have this installed anymore, but I do have a screenshot of it in action: http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/6407/ja2osx12aq2.png
And if you're not sure if you're a text-based sports gamer, OOTP 8 is available for free. A lot of nice additions have been made in the two versions since, but if you've never played a text-based baseball game, OOTP 8 is a fine place to start.
Steam ID: billt721
Hmm, I just switched to OSX again over the summer so I still have a lot of games that I play on bootcamp. My biggest disappointment is no Steam on OSX! Crappy when you have a dozen+ games tied up on there. What I have installed right now:
WoW
Starcraft
Peggle/PeggleNights
On the Rain Slip Precipice of Darkness (from Greenhouse)
NWN2
I am really looking forward to Starcraft II, too bad it is a year away.
Well, I'm glad people are coming out of the woodwork, anyway.
I have a PC at home, but it belongs to The Wife, and I can't afford a new graphics card. (My Mac laptop dates back to an earlier time - i.e. last year - when I had a better income.)
As for why I don't just Boot Camp and forget it.. well, there's a whole lot of things I don't like about that:
- Rebooting takes a while, particularly when you include multiple-reboots to install system updates for both OSes.
- I can't easily check mail or do any serious work when booted to Windows.
- None of my notes, music, or picture are available when booted to Windows
- Windows takes up too large a share of my laptop hard drive (it's such a beast) and spare space is not shared between partitions.
- Downloads or torrents are awkward - I can only do it in one OS, which I have to be careful to revert to when I leave the computer for long periods of time.
All of this means that I can game in Windows.. but only if I'm willing to devote my time to gaming and nothing else. Booting into windows only to discover that the TF2 server is full is really annoying; I can wait until space clears... or go read a book.
---Nathaniel
I play most of my games through VMware or Boot Camp, but excluding those, and excluding too what most others have mentioned above, consider:
Armageddon Empires
Battle for Wesnoth (free, open source)
Dominions 3
Nethergate: Resurrection (also the Geneforge and Avernum games, all by Spiderweb Software)
Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
The market has much to answer for as to why gaming is NOT an art. -- illum
I love my MacPro soooooo much, but I really only ever play WoW on it. I just got a retail-box one which only a mediocre ATI GPU in it, so even WoW only runs so-so. I generally play all my games on my nearly 2-yo Dell XPS instead, even though it has less than 1/4 the computing power of the Mac.
I tried for several days recently to see if I could re-flash the BIOS in one of my old Nvidia PCIe cards to beef-up the graphics on my mac, but I guess Apple discontinued support for all the old G70 boards in Snow Leopard. Buying a new GPU looks to cost over $450, which is waaaaay too much just to avoid using a PC. I suppose I'll just give-in and upgrade the PC next instead.
I think the point of this ramble is: GPU vendors need to start shipping EFI-compatible cards, so we have more/cheaper upgrade options.
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Amen!
I've got a 2006 era Mac Pro that's been mostly awesome, but the ATI GPU has had some heat issues. It was fine in Tiger, but Leopard introduced some problems. I think WoW extending the draw distance in the 3.0 patch also did a number on it. Snow Leopard seems to have killed it dead with OpenCL... the display went from flickering once or twice a day to once or twice a second. It was acting up when I booted to Windows too. Hopefully the nice people at the Applecare-authorized service center will hook me up with a replacement. Even if I just get another Radeon X1900 that should last at least a little while before it burns out on me again...
Come to think of it, maybe the problem isn't with Apple's hardware. Maybe it's just that PopCap is evil. My MacBook Air spontaneously broke a hinge, and then a week later my Mac Pro's video card issues reached the critical stage. In both cases I had just completed the adventure mode in Plants vs. Zombies...
A number of Steam games (but not all) work well via Crossover Games. Anything based on the Half-Life engine (for example, Portal) should do just fine. Likewise, the less graphically intense ones will work in VMWare. It doesn't completely eliminate the need to occasionally reboot, but can lessen it.
The only thing I can add over what has already been mentioned are the Fizzwizzle games by Grubby Games. They appear kid oriented at first, but the advanced puzzle modes are devious.
You guys are missing some biggies. I saw Dominions 3 mentioned, and AE, but there's also a bunch of Paradox games. Try Virtual Programming, they do tons of conversions. They offer the EU3 games up through In Nomine, EU Rome/Vae Victis, Championship Manager, Crusader Kings Complete, Flatout 2, Massive Assault, Victoria Complete and X3:Reunion.
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one by lethal injection. - Paleocon
We said they were people, we didn't say they were black. - Yonder
Quake Live is Mac-compatible now.
Mostly I boot into Windows for gaming unless there is a native simultaneous-Mac release.
You can buy an ATI 3950 for the Mac Pro with an EFI ROM. Snow Leopard probably has built-in drivers.
Elewis17 wrote:
Sort of the sad story of Mac gaming under the Steve Jobs tenure. A lot of lip service inside and out of apple have spoken of parity. Every few years Will Wright, or Carmack, or some other luminary is sent out at Mac World to say gaming is coming to the Mac in a big way.
I doubt Blizzard is going to stop any time soon. They have a big chunk of their market on Mac.
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I spotted a new EVGA 285 card for the MacPro and bought it only to find out it wont work on my late 2007 MacPro
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
I'm about to go a little off-topic: Yes, but the Mac doesn't need games—history has shown it, non-user upgradeable hardware is another barrier (do you want hardcore PC gaming on a Mac when you can't swap your vid card?)—and of course there's the iPhone/iPod touch.
Apple doesn't need to push gaming on the Mac when the iPhone turned into a legitimate gaming platform within half a year of the SDK. By Christmas of last year it was DS, PSP, and out of the blue, iPhone. Why work too hard trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with the Mac and game publishers? It's all lip service because that's as much effort as the endeavour is worth. After all, they have another platform that spontaneously started printing games-derived money for them.
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"When Gravey wins an internet argument, it's like the whole internet wins." - oilypenguin
"I love you, Gravey, you taffer." - Clock
Yeah, NVidia is a bunch of chuckleheads; they didn't use the bytecoded firmware, but rather directly wrote their firmware in 64-bit x86 code, so it won't work on the 32-bit EFI firmware in the first gen of Mac Pro.
ATI writes their firmware in bytecode, so it'll work in any Mac Pro.
Elewis17 wrote: