Mac Gaming

A long time ago I used to be a big fan of gaming.  So big it used to take up most of my evenings, into mornings then most of the afternoon.  The days of sitting in front of an Amiga 500+ with SI Games - Champ Manager loading for hours on end are long gone.  Playing Legend Of Mir for so long my hands and wrists began to ache.  No longer do I spend 4 hours asleep and 20 hours gaming.

We now jump to the present day.  After various PCs, laptops, Xbox and Xbox 360's being played constantly I find myself owning a Macbook.  It was purchased 12 months ago and sees me rather restricted on my games.  But should that be the case?  Gone are the days of Macs being purely for image, video and music editing, the machines have become much more than that.  A user friendly, crash free (99% of the time), beautiful looking and fast loading beasts.  Beasts that game developers and publishers don't seem to be harnessing.

Blizzard have shown that Mac gamers are also part of their ever expanding empire.  The fact you can download a Mac client of World Of Warcraft and receive second to none support when its required.  Diablo 2 and its expansions were all Mac compatible, long before the days of the Macbook and the trendy image Apple now portray.  CCP have also joined the party and developed a Mac client for Eve Online (A current game of mine).  EA releasing The Sims phenomenon onto the Mac has only boosted their sales.

Now I'm no game developer or designer, however I know how to make money.  You have to hit the market hard and open it to all avenues.  So with games developers spending huge amounts on games that are full of graphical pleasure and no gameplay (FarCry 2 with its annoying 'You're in my radius' drone enemies coming in a straight line for you), how about they look at getting some people in to develop these games for the Mac?  I'm not saying they will solve the gameplay issues, but they will take some of the budget away from stupidly good looking scenery and add more heads to the storyline/gameplay.  You already have Virtual Programming Ltd and Feral Interactive doing their best to port games over, why not get these guys in during the development stage and make the games cross platform?

I'm not saying Macs will take over the world, I'm not saying that the Mac should be a gaming platform, but what I am saying is that I would love publishers to take the leap and get these top titles out on the Mac as well as PCs.

Now, time to try and get Star Trek Online working via Bootcamp...