Gaming On A Mac

The first counterpoint of any PC advocate in a Mac Vs. PC argument is gaming. The fact of the matter is, none of us Mac owners bought a Mac for the purpose of gaming in the first place. However, the argument is valid. It’s the one area where the PC is, and always will be, superior.

Recently I introduced my oldest son to UFO: Alien Invasion, an excellent, open source, modern interpretation of the gaming classic, X-Com: UFO Defense, or simply UFO Defense if you live in the UK. X-Com has been my desert island game, the one game I would choose if I had to limit myself to just one game for the rest of my life, since about 1995. Turns out that IGN agrees with me, as I saw that they had voted it their best PC game of all time in 2007.

Anyway, it’s done my old heart good seeing my 15 year old dive headlong into UFOAI and really get into it. It rekindled a nostalgia in me, something that isn’t hard to do, for beloved games from yesteryear, and I began to populate the Mac with games for the boy to discover and for me to revisit.

So, here are my recent experiences with Mac gaming, both with apps that run native on the system, and others that we need a little smoke and mirrors to run:

• Native Gaming As the name implies, native represents those games that are ported to run directly on OS X and Apple hardware. Most of the blockbuster PC games do receive ports, although the timeliness of their arrival depends on the developer.There are a couple of developers that specialize in porting games to Mac, and a couple of the big publishers are also pretty good about releasing Mac and PC versions simultaneously. Id Software has always been good about providing Mac binaries for their games, and Quake through Doom 3 can be played natively on a Mac. So can Doom through Final Doom, but you’ll rely on one of the source ports that popped up after Id made their source open.I recently got the wife Sims 3, which supports PC and Mac out of the box. I was pretty surprised when I looked in the package and saw that the Mac Sims3 app contains a Windows install of Sims 3. Turns out that EA utilizes Cider technology, a proprietary fork of WINE, to run their Windows games on Mac. WINE is a system service that runs a Windows API compatibility layer on a non-Windows system. So far no complaints from the wife about how it runs, so I can’t bash their decision not to port when the Cider technology represents a way for them to potentially offer all of their games for Mac consumption.

  Also, a lot of older Mac ports that were made for Power PC architecture run just fine. Apple has included a Power PC emulation layer in Leopard called Rosetta, and so far all the old PPC titles I’ve played haven’t shown any sign at all that they were running under a wrapper. The only question is, how long does Apple keep Rosetta in OS X? Is it going to disappear in future versions the way Classic support did?

• DOSBox This excellent DOS emulator is just the ticket for old MS-DOS games no matter what platform you are on, and that includes Windows. So far I have had great luck with the original X-Com games, some old LucasArts adventure titles, and a couple of old DOS first person shooters. They all run better under DOSBox than they ever did on the old PCs I used to play them on. DOSBox is an open source solution, and you know how I love to support free software. It works great.
• VirtualBox As much as I love Sun’s VirtualBox, it’s not up to par for Windows gaming. As an open source project, it will be, but until then…..
• VMWare Fusion or Parallels VMWare Fusion and Parallels both do the same thing that VirtualBox does, you just have to pay for the privilege, unlike VirtualBox which is free. However, they both do something that VirtualBox doesn’t: provide Direct3D support under Windows. I’ve been using Parallels this week to play some old Windows titles, and while it works great for the most part, the key phrase with both VMWare and Parallels is YMMV.Some games work perfect, some display slow performance that makes it a deal breaker, some stutter on cutscenes, and some have weird issues with keyboard assignments. On the whole, games play just fine for the most part, and faster than on any PC I’ve played them on. Of course, the PCs I played them on were about 10-15 years old, so I would hope that modern hardware wouldn’t be too tasked with these old bits of code.I recommend VMWare and Parallels for gaming, provided that you don’t mind the odd, but frequent display of off-kilter behavior with the peripheral portions of the game like cutscenes and menus. You need to play around with compatibility modes for executables on games that have issues. Sometimes that is all it takes to go from unplayable to nearly perfect. Also, searching the web produces quite a few links to home brewed widescreen patches of these old games, if 1024×768x16 on your 24” LCD isn’t your thing.
• Open Source Projects You aren’t the only one who experiences gaming nostalgia, and in some cases enough of the right people are suffering it for a certain game that new projects have arisen. I mentioned UFO: Alien Invasion already. In 2002, the developers behind Star Control II, the best space opera of all time, went open source, combining the code from the PC and 3DO versions of Star Control II and unleashing The Ur-Quan Masters on the world.My 15 year old is also playing this game, and thinks it’s brilliant. He asked me why Mass Effect wasn’t as much fun as a near-20 year old game that could be made to run on a cell phone, and I had no good answer for him, just an agreeing nod. I’m sure there are many more cool projects out there that recreate gaming classics, and I welcome your mention of them in the comments section.I’ve had a lot of fun this last week revisiting some old favorites, and getting into some crusty old games that I missed the first time around. Should the Mac be your first choice for gaming? No way. Is there a lot of gaming to be had on a Mac? Absolutely. If you’re a Mac user that’s really into gaming you already have a PC, a 360 and/or a PS3 anyway.

Read Related Posts

1. What Games Do You Play?
2. Holland Picks Up Gaming Trophy
3. Is The Oracle Acquisition of Sun Cause For Worry?
4. Mobile gaming is the fastest growing area in the games market
5. 3 To Launch Wireless Multiplayer Games

Subscribe To RSS Feed Updates (What is RSS??)