Finally! I don't have to boot into Windows all the time!

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Yes. Anyone have any good reports on the performance of Cider though? I found a preview of Heroes V, which put the beta at about 75% of the Windows performance, which could be acceptable depending on the game, and could be not a lot of the time. EVE is a good performer, but, like any MMO, suffers from major slowdown in busy areas. I imagine a lot of the core game code doesn't really hinge on the Windows or DirectX API's, which is what Cider wraps, but still.

I'm not sure EVE is really a game that will be terribly popular in the Mac sector, since it's pretty niche for Windows too (despite being huge) and has a number of problems that made it eventually not worth the money for me to continue playing. It takes a significant amount of time, effort, and luck to really get involved, and I invested a lot of the first two, and never got any of the third thing. On top of that, I like to play a lot of different games (not to mention not fail all my classes), and I just don't have the time to get my money's worth out of a subscription-based MMO.

Still, I would recommend EVE as being the only MMOG that's actually massive. I never could see how the EQ model of MMO was much better than a single player / LAN coop game.

At least I imagine this kind of port doesn't take a lot of effort, so it probably won't hurt CCP too much if there aren't many Mac subscribers.

pretty cool! Even though I'm not going to sign up for it.... maybe if there's a free trial.

Goddamnit.

I knew this was going to happen. Every damn game port is going to be Intel-only (*sigh* inelegant, ugly, brutish x86 can burn) within the next year. Guess I might as well flush the $3500 I put into my G5 down the drain if I want to continue gaming.

Thankfully the scholarships are rolling in and I have enough cash for a Mac Pro whenever Apple gets around to the next refresh, but this blows for anybody stuck on PPC.

Meh, I agree with all the problems LoneIgadzara listed. EVE, while it is truely massive, can't be played by casual gamers. You really have to put way too much time in it to get anywhere.

Thats why I play WoW. Perfect MMO, you can play it casualy and have fun, and you can play it fairly hardcore and not run out of things to do. I fall somewhere in the middle. Also the community is a good one if you seek out good people. I have a lot of fun with my guild and have made some RL friends through it.

Still, there is something about EVE that isn't present in WoW, but I think its impossible to add that without making the game overwhelmingly catoring to hard core players.

-Cent

Still though, I would say all the same problems apply to WoW, as does my comment about the EQ model. I'm not denying that I had some fun when I did some trials of it, but I just don't see why I should pay $15/month for it, when I'm going be spending a lot of time playing other games that aren't WoW.

The Intel-only thing does suck, but it's not like there were ever enough ports to justify a PPC Mac for gaming to begin with.

Now if I could somehow play Mac OS Classic games on my Intel Mac, like Heroes of Might & Magic III, that would be sweet. Also wouldn't mind a few more UB's of those Mac games I do have that made it to OS X, like, oh, EV Nova, which runs at a good 15-20 fps on my MacBook Pro.

wait, intel only? Crap. Oh, well.

I guess I bought an Intel Mac at just the right time, then

People keep saying shit like this, but I still don't get it. As gaming machines, I've been very happy with all of my PPC computers. From Ambrosia games to pretty much all of the FPSes and RTSes that really matter, everything that I've ever really wanted has been ported. Everything that didn't make the cut didn't justify much more than a few hours at a friend's house playing.

Yeah, developers port the good games to Mac because they know it's easy money. The crappy games get filtered out.

That's blatantly untrue, and I didn't realize it until I actually built a PC, but the fact is there is a huge amount of great games that never make it to Mac. Only AAA titles have a prayer, and even among those Half-Life 2 stands out as a glaring exception. And "AAA" doesn't necessarily mean the most fun. I, personally, hate the AoE series and all its ilk, so I couldn't care less if AoE III is finally being ported (though I'm curious how they got around the Havok problem). Those single-A games that never get ported are not necessarily bad games. And, like I said, even triple-A is no guarantee. Right now Command & Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander are the big things in PC-land, I don't see any signs of those coming to Mac any time soon. (And I certainly wouldn't want to play SupCom under OS X, because it's slow enough in Windows.)

That's all to make no mention of the fact that when we get a PPC port of a game, the optimization is always nonexistent, and framerates have been historically hampered by Apple's rotten OpenGL implementation. And with every Apple "transition" yesterday's ports become increasingly irrelevant, because you'd have to hunt down an old Mac to play them. When the Windows versions can still be made to work fine on a modern PC.

I'd love to be able to play a few games from right in OS X, but the fact is now that I have a PC in my Mac, I have no incentive aside from convenience to buy the Mac version of a game. They're more expensive, they perform worse, I have one game-capable Mac and two game-capable PC's (one being the Mac), there's often a scarcity of patches and/or expansions, mods and maps often don't work, editors aren't available, and, in the worst case, networking isn't cross-platform compatible or Apple alters OS X to break my game in a few years.

And honestly, it's better this way, because I have less distraction when I'm doing work.

Beyond Half-Life and its ilk, what games have we been missing out on then? I can never seem to get an actual list of these must-play games we never get.

Well, the thing about HL2 is off and on Source games represent at least 50% of any list of "what I'm playing now", and it's the same for a lot of other people. You're right that a lot of the best games have made it to Mac, but I can't play a single goddamn one of them since they're either for OS 9 or PPC. My game collection consists of a massive catalog of older titles that mostly made it to Mac at some point, but I have no way of playing the Mac versions, and I'd rather have the PC versions, for reasons mentioned in my previous post.

My personal list, as I think of games I have solid knowledge of, or browse through my CD wallet (and check against a search of IMG), comes down to something like

• X-Wing Alliance,
• Nox,
• Far Cry,
• Elder Scrolls series (not a huge fan, but Oblivion was definitely good for at least 50 hours),
• KOTOR 2,
• Neverwinter Nights Diamond (though luckily all the modules do work with the Mac version, but IIRC at least one expansion never got ported),
• Neverwinter Nights 2,
• Icewind Dale II, and
• Guild Wars.
• Edit: (courtesy of your other topic!) Battlefront 2.

In addition, my collection gravitates a bit towards games I already knew about from when I was a Mac gamer, which makes the statistic look more favorable than it really is. Browsing a site like GameSpot you will see a lot more 8/10 games that never got ported or show no signs of being ported. Off the top of my head, I know the Thief games are well-liked, as is Battlefield, though my knowledge is a bit lacking, since I can't afford to buy every good game (and I hate Battlefield).

Like I said, a have a lot of other PC versions of games that I can load in Boot camp no problem, but the Mac version would still be more expensive, harder to find, and not even run on this machine.

Ugh, this is off-topic. So anyone here play EVE?

Ugh, Guild Wars is a terrible game, I know lots of people that have played it.

The only game on the list I'd like to play is KOTOR 2, but that's very low priority (I know it's not as good as the original one). Battlefront 2? Maybe, but I haven't played Battlefront 1 yet. Maybe I'm just not a huge RPG fan, but the vast majority of those games has no appeal to me.

Earth 2160 is the only game I'd care to have ported to the mac.

I don't feel like going into detail, since I've spent a lot of time defending Guild Wars on this and other forums, but the fact is that's a matter of opinion, and I and a lot of other people still feel like our money was very well-spent over 50 hours into it. I think a lot of people went in Guild Wars expecting WoW, and whereas I was pleased as punch to not get WoW, they were bored to tears.

To respond a bit, Battlefront 2 is a multi-player emphasis shooter. You don't need to play 1, and by all reports it's a lot better than 1, which was itself a limited-longevity Battlefield clone. KOTOR 2 was an unfinished, yet extremely interesting game, well worth $20 and another 40 hours invested I thought. It's also true that Icewind Dale II is not really a big deal, but like a lot of Windows-only games, it has a lot of niche appeal due to the completely customizable party and 3rd ed. D&D ruleset. It's certainly superior to the first game. If they have no appeal for you, that's fine, but it isn't enough for me. I love my niche games, and don't make many distinctions between genres.

Even if the amount of Mac games is enough to keep any gamer busy for a long time, the amount that are simply inaccessible due to Apple's various transitions is absurd. There's no point in becoming a Mac gamer at the moment, because the library of Mac games that will both run on OS X and x86 is tiny, and my list of great games with a Mac version that's off limits is huge.

And I'm not saying at all I wouldn't rather run all my games in OS X (which I would), but I'm not paying a premium for inferior performance and no mods/expansions and slow patches.

Another big point I want to make is don't discount the games that aren't 10/10 reviewing million-sellers. EVE is as good an example as any. It has a lot of issues that prevent it from being WoW, but major appeal to a certain subset of gamers. Until Intel/Cider, it would not have been cost-effective to port it to Mac, because the required support resources would have been doubled, in order to keep both clients on a par with each other, while I doubt it would have gotten very many Mac subscribers. It's true I've found Mac gamers willing to look at any old thing through rose-colored glasses due to the scarcity of similar games (and reviewers feeling the need to support the porting houses' efforts), a good example being Battlefront 1 which reviewed mediocrely and lacked depth and longevity for a lot of PC gamers but is well-liked in Mac circles, but I think EVE is just niche enough that it wouldn't work out.

EVE on the mac awesome. I just came out of a 100 ship fleet battle and the lag wasnt toooooo bad. Thanks for the heads up.
Paddy