Games for Mac's

[Paulie92]

Spoiler: nerdy Mac stuph

MacBook Pro 13" with a 550 GB HDD (this baby is going to last me all the way through college and I'm a sophomore in High School! )

Yeah, mine is a MacBook Pro 15' with 500 GB ATA drive @ 7200 with 8BG ram... sophomore?

 

[0p3rati0n]

Spoiler: nerdy Mac stuph

MacBook Pro 13" with a 550 GB HDD (this baby is going to last me all the way through college and I'm a sophomore in High School! )

Yeah, mine is a MacBook Pro 15' with 500 GB ATA drive @ 7200 with 8BG ram... sophomore?

Yep going back to school tomorrow as a sophomore. Seeing how our PowerBook G4 has lasted us 7 years and still runs great I can expect a longer lifetime out of my MacBook. I would only need to get something more powerful (Mac Pro haha) only if I needed to. But I doubt it.

 

[hyperhammy]

I have a code for portal I don't need.
First person to PM will get it...

Edit: Seriously, no one wants portal?!

 

[Sebenko]

Well, I'll hold back my seething rage against Macs for now

Spoiler: Vague justification

I know little about them, but my dad bought one because he was caught up in the hype and still expects me to fix everything wrong with it when he breaks it, or worse, tries to do something that Macs just don't do. The number of times I've had to point out .exe is endless. And when he explains nothing, but expects me to psychically fix some unknown fault.

Try Steam. That's on Mac now.

 

[DeaconSawyer]

I suggest getting Steam. It has support for Mac, and a whole section of games for the Mac that you can buy.

THAT

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

alternatively you could use a program such as Crossover http://www.codeweavers.com/products. It's basically a virtual machine if you are familiar with those and works well.

Technically it's a compatibility layer, as it doesn't run the original OS at all, just translates API calls and whatnot. It does work alright for some games, though, but not necessarily the very latest ones, and you'll get lower performance that way. WineBottler [http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/] is looking to potentially be a good option, too, but both that and Crossover (or anything else WINE-based) will not work perfectly for everything and can potentially take a lot of fiddling around to get some games to work.

In terms of actual VMs, where you run the guest OS (XP or Win7 or whatever) on top of OS X, Parallels and VMWare are pretty good and a bit more compatible, especially now that they have decent handling of Direct3D stuff to translate it to OpenGL so you get some level of hardware acceleration. Still not going to run as well as rebooting into Windows, but some games are definitely playable, if you're not trying to run the latest and greatest stuff at unreasonable settings. There are other VMs than those two, including free ones like VirtualBox (which is rather good for basic apps), but they're generally no good for non-ancient games.

A lot of people have mentioned Steam, which is a good place to start, but keep in mind that a lot of games that do have a native Mac version don't have the Mac version on Steam yet. Do not take the lack of something on Steam to mean that the Mac version doesn't exist; make sure you actually check yourself. A decent number of big titles have Mac versions, and so do a bunch of indie games. There's kind of a gap in between, though, with games that aren't big enough to justify the cost of porting or small enough that the (usually indie) developer does it on principle/for fun/to reach a larger audience.

 

[RollingDigits]

Fallout, Fallout 2.

 

[Paulie92]

Well, I'll hold back my seething rage against Macs for now

Spoiler: Vague justification

I know little about them, but my dad bought one because he was caught up in the hype and still expects me to fix everything wrong with it when he breaks it, or worse, tries to do something that Macs just don't do. The number of times I've had to point out .exe is endless. And when he explains nothing, but expects me to psychically fix some unknown fault.

Try Steam. That's on Mac now.

Macs are better for artsy mumbo jumbo and run most specifically Pro Tools the best, not to mention all the desktops in the soundhouse at the University I'm going to are macs, it's the best choice

 

[Good morning blues]

Just use a WIndows CD and dual-boot using Boot Camp. Bam, you now have a Mac capable of playing any Windows game.

 

[Eumersian]

Git yerself some indie games. There are a lot of really good indie game companies out there that specialize in Mac games. For example:

-Ambrosia Software
-Spiderweb Software (if like a nice simple rpg every now and again)
-Freeverse, the creators of Burning Monkey Solitarie

Also, get Pocket Tanks. The demo is fun enough to last a while, and if you're willing to drop some coin, the expansions and stuff are really good too.

 

[Paulie92]

For my uni course (Audio Engineering) I decided to get a Mac. Unfortunately there aren't all that many games availiable for Macs

At the moment I have: Deus Ex (1), Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 (on wishlist I'm ordering the computer today)

It's a Macbook Pro so it might struggle a little bit with really modern releases, but otherwise if you could lend your thoughts to recommending me a few more titles I would be grateful. Cheers

Install Windows 7 and use Dualboot to switch between OS to suit your needs.

Massive drain on battery life, I'm going to be using it a fair bit on public transport and to kill time in between classes etc.

 

[shotgunbob]

A bunch of Valve games are on Mac now. Not sure if anything else is really available.

didn't they make CoD4 for Mac?

 

[imagremlin]

Massive drain on battery life, I'm going to be using it a fair bit on public transport and to kill time in between classes etc.

I have a MacBook pro as well. I don't really play with it though.

My observations, battery life under Windows will be in the ballpark of any regular Windows laptop. If you're doing anything CPU and graphics intensive battery life will suffer regargless of OS.

Disk space could be a problem, though.

 

[crazy-j]

For my uni course (Audio Engineering) I decided to get a Mac. Unfortunately there aren't all that many games availiable for Macs

At the moment I have: Deus Ex (1), Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 (on wishlist I'm ordering the computer today)

It's a Macbook Pro so it might struggle a little bit with really modern releases, but otherwise if you could lend your thoughts to recommending me a few more titles I would be grateful. Cheers

i game on a mac so i know where you are coming from.

ill give you a list of all the games i have for mac
- Age of Empires 3 (i really enjoyed this one)
- WoW (dont play it anymore but good nonetheless)
- Star Wars: empire at war (not that good of a game)
- spore (alright game)
- battlefield 2142 (not alot of people play anymore but i really enjoyed, played it exclusively for almost a year)
-Starcraft 2 (you already have this so i wont waste my breath)
-Steam ( i have not used it alot but there are a lot of games on it for mac)

lastly here is a website that has all the games released on mac, most of em anyways:

http://www.apple.com/games/

hope this helps, enjoy!

 

[Paulie92]

For my uni course (Audio Engineering) I decided to get a Mac. Unfortunately there aren't all that many games availiable for Macs

At the moment I have: Deus Ex (1), Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 (on wishlist I'm ordering the computer today)

It's a Macbook Pro so it might struggle a little bit with really modern releases, but otherwise if you could lend your thoughts to recommending me a few more titles I would be grateful. Cheers

i game on a mac so i know where you are coming from.

ill give you a list of all the games i have for mac
- Age of Empires 3 (i really enjoyed this one)
- WoW (dont play it anymore but good nonetheless)
- Star Wars: empire at war (not that good of a game)
- spore (alright game)
- battlefield 2142 (not alot of people play anymore but i really enjoyed, played it exclusively for almost a year)
-Starcraft 2 (you already have this so i wont waste my breath)
-Steam ( i have not used it alot but there are a lot of games on it for mac)

lastly here is a website that has all the games released on mac, most of em anyways:

http://www.apple.com/games/

hope this helps, enjoy!

Very helpful thanks, I realise this is probably one of the stupidest question I will ever ask anyone. There is no Mac specific version of these games, that is to say if I have a copy for my Windows PC I can simply uninstall it then reinstall it on my Mac?

Also, Age of Empires by Microsoft.. on Mac say Waahhh?

 

[UMID]

... It's basically a virtual machine if you are familiar with those and works well...

In addition to the ones Mr. Lemur mentioned, there's WineSkin [http://wineskin.doh123.com/Information.html], which uses "wrappers" to run programs in a kind of Windows microenvironment ... When it works, it works pretty well.
There's a bunch of games listed on the site which have finished wrappers to use. I've run Star Trek Online, Morrowind and Civ4 through WineSkin so far, and the process was simple enough that I will try out more games.
However you choose to do it, enjoy gaming on your mac! It IS possible

 

[crazy-j]

For my uni course (Audio Engineering) I decided to get a Mac. Unfortunately there aren't all that many games availiable for Macs

At the moment I have: Deus Ex (1), Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 (on wishlist I'm ordering the computer today)

It's a Macbook Pro so it might struggle a little bit with really modern releases, but otherwise if you could lend your thoughts to recommending me a few more titles I would be grateful. Cheers

i game on a mac so i know where you are coming from.

ill give you a list of all the games i have for mac
- Age of Empires 3 (i really enjoyed this one)
- WoW (dont play it anymore but good nonetheless)
- Star Wars: empire at war (not that good of a game)
- spore (alright game)
- battlefield 2142 (not alot of people play anymore but i really enjoyed, played it exclusively for almost a year)
-Starcraft 2 (you already have this so i wont waste my breath)
-Steam ( i have not used it alot but there are a lot of games on it for mac)

lastly here is a website that has all the games released on mac, most of em anyways:

http://www.apple.com/games/

hope this helps, enjoy!

Very helpful thanks, I realise this is probably one of the stupidest question I will ever ask anyone. There is no Mac specific version of these games, that is to say if I have a copy for my Windows PC I can simply uninstall it then reinstall it on my Mac?

Also, Age of Empires by Microsoft.. on Mac say Waahhh?

for some of them you have to buy a mac specific version like age of empires or battlefield 2142 but for others like spore,Starcraft or wow you don't need a mac specific copy, your PC copy will work.