The state of Mac gaming

In the mediocre 1995 film The Net Sandra Bullock, in one particular scene, played on her Macintosh a game. This game was Wolfenstein 3D, the father of all FPS and one of the first games by id software. This was a 1992 game but its inclusion to the 1995 movie strikes me me as something ironic and prophetic as to to the state of mac gaming. Despite the efforts of some companies and despite the RDS at work in various occasions(such as inviting Carmack to talk at WWDC) the state of mac gaming is bad.

Even though I am a mac user (among all major OSes as well) for years, I rarely do my gaming on the mac. I have a Windows box for games as well as consoles for that. The reason is simple I cannot find the games I want for the mac platform and, even if I find them, they are far more expensive than their PC version. A visit at any major e-shop will persuade you. Old Mac games cost more than new PC games and you can only find blockbuster titles.

Get "brand new" games for your mac at "fantastic" prices

There are some companies, though, that for years now support the mac platform consistently by releasing hybrid discs that work on macs and on a PCs alike and release the patches at the same pace. The biggest of them all is Blizzard that releases all the games for both platforms. Blizzard is so commited to the mac platform that even released patches to play older games written for OS 9 to the modern OS X. Another company is Cyan (I admit it I am a Myst fan) who releases all the game in hybrid discs as well. EA said that it would support the platform and as a result Spore was released in a hybrid disc but I guess that was due to the nature of the game. Some marketing director concluded that the people in the mac community will likely buy the particular game. All these companies though are not the rule, but merely the exception.

Fortunately we will be able to kick Diablo's ass using our mac thanks to Blizzard

Most mac game realeases are not done by the original developer but instead are ports made by third parties. Most of the games I have played were bad ports. The most common flaw is the performance hit. Older games that you would think they would play fine are slower than death in extremely powerful mac configurations. A very good(bad) example of that is Neverwinter Nights 2. An old game by PC standards and yet it plays awfully slow on a current gen Macbook Pro. I blame Aspyr for that and I have to say that I am very disappointed about other ports done by that particular company.

The transition to Intel processors some years ago allowed companies to create mac versions of their games easier and the current market share increase made some companies think twice before ditching the platform. I am not optimistic though. We will just have to wait and see what happens in the future.

iTunes DRM free and 8 hour battery Macbook Pro

Each Macworld Expo is as exciting as the previous one. New policies are unveiled, new products are presented and as always many people talk for days before and after each Macworld about what will and what did happen respectively.

This year we saw an incredibly important announcement. One that will shake the very foundations of the music industry. DRM free songs from iTunes. For years now people complain about the DRM and the big music companies fight them following one golden rule: lock, lock, lock. At last The biggest player in online music distribution is allying with the users to provide them with what they wanted. DRM is dead. Woohoo. Apple already has 8 million DRM free songs on the store and all 10 million will be DRM free by the end of March this year.

Anoher exciting announcement was the release of the new 17" Macbook Pro with up to 8 hours battery. This is yet to be tested though. I guess if you were to use wireless and the disc drive this would go down to 6-something hours but who cares. 6 hours is more than enough for pretty much anything. I mean, my pevious gen Macbook pro does around 3-something hours if am careful and I am very happy with it.

My shiny powerful new Macbook Pro

I got my new computer...a shiny powerful macbook pro. I have been (wet)dreaming about this for a long time. Here in Europe the mac cost as much as in the US as far the absolute price number is concerned. Lately though the dollar exchange rate has dropped very much to euro. Thus buying stuff from the US is very cheap. A cousin of mine studies in NY and when the semester was over and he was about to come home I sent him the money and bought it on my behalf. It cost me 1500 euros which is very cheap in comparison to the 2500 euros that it would cost me here. Hoorey!

The machine itself is awesome. Using a mac mini at home for years now I had been sick of seeing the spinning ball of death. The poor mini, as much as I love it, was showing its age. Back at work I have a powerhouse but at home I could not even watch an HD video on the mini. I had to use another machine for that or for heavy stuff like gaming. I can now run Azureus, Neoffice, iTunes Firefox and Safari each with 10 tabs open and the machine does not even stall for a moment. Revelation! Power, I need more power!

Since this was my first Intel Mac I have to say I am impressed. I even installed bootcamp to install windows on it to play some not available for mac games. Everything worked flawlessly. A soon as I got I installed everything I could not run on my mini just to get that out of my system.

I have some small complaints. Where is the damn delete button? And I do not mean the button the says delete and it is right in front of me as I type this line. On the keyboard I do not know how to delete a character from the left...no I do not mean a backspace delete..the other side. Oh well. Another small concern that does not have to with the macbook pro itself but with Mac OS X Leopard. I do not like how spaces work. In my Linux box at work I can assign a key combination (using either Gnome or KDE) to the next desktop on the left or on the right. With spaces I can only assign absolute desktop numbers to a key combination. Go figure. I suppose I cannot have it all. Anyways...this machine kicks serious ass.

As a game geek that I am, the first thing I did was to install openVPN in order to be able to play online with friends. We have set up a small game server back at the office that we use to play LAN games from our houses. In a few minutes I had openVPN, teamspeak and Warcraft 3 installed ready to play. The next thing I will do is to install eclipse, jboss and liferay on it to have it ready for battle. I want to see in how many minutes (or seconds) jboss will need to boot with the portal engine on it. I will see about that; In the meantime I will enjoy my new macbook pro. Awesome!