Mac Gaming

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is probably the best PC gaming blog around, and if you’re not subscribed to their RSS feed, you probably should be. Their articles are well-written and intelligent and their coverage of PC gaming is wide-ranging. However, they are filthy, dirty enablers and — thanks to their bad puns and charming British accents — they have gotten me to buy games I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Here’s the list:

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Tags: king's bounty, stalker, swat 4, world of goo, rps, chronicles of riddick, overlord, game addiction

I’m always surprised, listening to gaming podcasts, how little love is shown to GameTap. For a monthly ($10 USD) or yearly ($60) fee, GameTap lets you play all of the games in its library, ranging from 80s & 90s arcade and console hits to PC games released within the last year. GameTap currently offers over a thousand games from almost every genre, from publishers such as Sega, Ubisoft, THQ, Eidos, Dreamcatcher — and the list goes on. While there are some regional restrictions (some games can’t be played if you’re outside of the US) and you don’t own the games, GameTap is a really great way to try games you might otherwise have passed over. For example: Titan Quest.

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Tags: titan quest

Sometimes you don’t want to boot into Windows just to play a game. Maybe you just need a break from work or only have a few minutes to play, and would rather not restart your computer, load up Windows, and open up your game. Well, here comes VMWare Fusion and GOG.com to the rescue.

VMWare Fusion lets you run Windows on your Mac without having to dual boot using Boot Camp; GOG.com sells downloadable, Windows XP- and Vista-optimized, DRM-free versions of Good Old Games for less than $10 USD per game. Since many of the games in GOG.com’s catalogue are a few years old, they don’t require top-of-the-line machines to run. More importantly, because of their age, many of them will run via virtualization. One such game is Gothic II (Gold Edition).

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Tags: gothic series, gog.com

Update: I think it is possible to resume a download using GamersGate’s software. Unfortunately their button wording is incredibly misleading. As you can see on the image above, you have a Stop and a Pause button. Pressing the Stop button not only stops your download, it erases all files that have already been downloaded. Pause, on the other hand, lets you resume a paused download. What I’m not sure about is whether or not you can pause a download, quit the downloader, and then resume the download from where you left off.

GamersGate, the video game digital distribution service, no longer requires gamers to use the GamersGate client to download and register their games. From now on, you’ll be able to log into your account and “download the games direct [sic] following the instructions.”

However, what they don’t say is that you still need to download a Windows executable file for each game that, once installed, then downloads the game for you. Now, you can’t even resume downloads, so if your download gets interrupted at 99%, tough luck! You have to grab the entire game from the beginning. Doesn’t seem like an improvement.

Personally, I prefer Direct2Drive, which allows me to download the game from any computer I want (Windows PC or Mac) and doesn’t install any additional programs. I’ve purchased 12 games from D2D and have never had any trouble with the service or, more importantly, the games themselves.

Tags: gamersgate

Long story short: The external hard drive I use to run my games off of died tonight. It was a Western Digital MyBook 500 GB USB hard drive that I picked up not quite two years ago. So, all my Windows games are gone. I’m ordering a new external drive from CanadaRAM.com, but it won’t arrive until after Christmas or the New Year, I’m sure. But, heaven forbid a gameless holiday. I picked up an Xbox 360 as my company Christmas bonus (what!? I worked hard!) and GTA IV. Rumor has it Fable 2 might be making an appearance, too.

So, there won’t be many updates here for a while. I hope everyone has a great and safe holiday and I’ll see you in 2009.

(Oh, if you’re curious, the new drive is a Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB with a MacAlly SATA/USB Enclosure G-S350SUA.)

Tags: hardware, crash, failure, canadaram, western digital, gta iv, fable 2, xbox 360, seagate

Ubisoft had totally sold me on the idea of Far Cry 2 (Oct 2008) before the game ever came out, mostly because of their promo videos (especially, “Deceiving Your Enemy“). Semi-descructable environments (including buildings and vegetation), a huge, open world, night-and-day cycles, decent enemy AI, and fire that could spread unpredictably — all seemed like the ingredients for a dream flambé FPS.

But would I be able to run it?

I had my doubts, until I read a story stating that the game ran pretty well on modest/mid-level PCs. So, I downloaded and installed the game to see. While Far Cry 2 itself isn’t everything I’d hoped for (it’s fun, no doubt about it, just repetitive), it has performed well on my “modest,” one-year-old iMac. Below are the settings I’ve used.

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Tags: far cry 2

Since GTA IV is currently a no go, I’ve been looking around to see what other PC games might be worth picking up for the holiday. One I never gave much thought to, because of how it crushed GPUs when it came out last year, is Crysis. I came across a pretty interesting forum post over at MacRumors showing benchmark results and in-game images of Crysis on a late ’07 model aluminum 20” iMac with the following specs:

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Tags: gta iv, crysis

One of the things that really seemed to improve the gaming experience on the iMac for me was updating the default ATI video drivers that came with Boot Camp. I didn’t measure how much of an improvement there was the first time I updated, but it was definitely significant. Here’s the tutorial I followed on YouTube, to upgrade the drivers so that the card was listed as a Radeon HD 2600 PRO. The tutorial is for Vista, but the steps are pretty similar for XP.

When I tried to follow these same steps earlier this week, with a new driver from ATI, it didn’t work. So, instead, I used Mobility Modder to convert and install the driver, which went off without a hitch. My card is once again listed as a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT, but I’ve gotten a bit of a frame rate boost (~4-5 fps) according to the Far Cry 2 benchmark tool. You can see the before and after test results in the gallery. Especially note the difference in the minimum frame rate for each loop — quite an improvement.

Tags: boot camp, drivers, ati, mobility modder

So, I’m on the fence about this one. I’ve loved all the GTA games and have spent an embarrassing amount of time traversing their digital landscapes. When GTA IV came out for the consoles earlier this year, I took in the reviews, listened to the podcasts, and generally decided there and then that I’d be picking this up as soon as it came out for PC. But here’s the thing: The system requirements are HUGE — and not just the recommended specs. Here are the minimum requirements listed on Steam:

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Tags: gta iv, ati, yougamers, fallout 3, far cry 2, gta san andreas, rps

Fallout 3 (Oct 2008) is the game I most anticipated this year. I loved Oblivion and the idea of a post-apocalyptic RPG from the same developers seemed like an incredible idea.

The phrase “Oblivion with guns” has been tossed around a lot to describe Fallout 3, both positively and derisively. Well, it is and it isn’t. There are definitely similarities between the two Bethesda games (for better and for worse), but I’ve enjoyed this game immensely and it runs quite well on my iMac, with a solid 30-50 fps @ 1280×800 in most areas.

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Tags: fallout 3