Tom Bridge is a crack pusher:
“WoW Interface” by Tom Bridge
Tom Bridge is a crack pusher:
“WoW Interface” by Tom Bridge
Frankly, gaming on the Mac has been a punchline for a number of years now — it’s hard to imagine it was ever any different. Oh, but it was.
Things have gotten better again of late, particularly as Mac OS X has arrived and matured, but certainly it will never be as good as it used to be. Truth be told, I’d grab a Playstation 2 before a Mac for most gaming purposes. And even if the gross qualitative difference between Mac and Windows gaming catalogues might be small, the sheer quantitative difference is just crazy. Sometimes, you just can’t play a game if, like me, you refuse to buy a Windows-based computer.
One intriguing thing that’s happened in the last few years is the advent of open-source games that run on multiple platforms right out of the gate, thanks to using open standards and cross-platform technologies. It is truly a surreal experience to check out some of the great games under development, click on their Downloads link, and find a Mac version.
And the criticism that open-source games are often “rip-offs” (more kindly, “tributes”) of existing games has its advantages: some of those games were never on a Mac. :)
The next few years hold the potential for a brave new world of Mac gaming, with the move to the Intel chip environment. Not to say this guarantees a sudden Deluge o’ Fun (TM), but at least there will be one fewer commercial game cop-out for not producing a Mac version. If nothing else, a “native” Virtual PC or WINE on an Intel Mac might be sufficient for games that aren’t too graphically crazy.
One can but dream.
Did something this week that I had figured to be doing about five years ago: played Halo on a Mac. It was the demo, which was just now released. Unless a boxed copy of the full Mac Halo suddenly materializes next to me in the next few seconds, the demo is as much as I’ll be playing. Let’s see…
Nope, no sudden materializations.
I’ve always had a special place in my heart for flight simulators. In fact, one of my favorite programs on my Apple II+ (ahem, back in the day) was, ironically, the original Microsoft Flight Simulator. Still one of my fondest early computing memories. I spent hours flying around virtual skies.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Microsoft doesn’t make its Flight Simulator available for Mac these days. There are, however, a couple of spiffy options available.
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X-Plane (Laminar Research, $50 DVD) is arguably the current best program in the Mac OS X flight sim field and comes bundled with the Linux and Windows versions all on one disk. Its flight dynamics are pretty amazing tech, as are some of the automated scenery generation routines, based on real-world terrain maps. With the full scenery disk, you can literally go to any airport on Earth (not to mention Mars!) and see some fairly okay facsimile of reality. However, do not expect to necessarily see any recognizable building landmarks in the default installation. The autogen buildings do a serviceable job of creating a cityscape, but you won’t look out your window and gape as you fly past the Hollywood sign.
There is also justifiable criticism of X-Plane being in perpetual beta, and since the company that makes it basically consists of one rather easily distracted developer, at times you’ll find some strange new features crop up (hot air balloons, anyone?) while important bugs languish unsquashed.
Even still, the $50 price tag is worth the ride, and there is a large community of content developers surrounding the product — see X-Plane.org for lots of cool 3rd-party stuff. Other X-Plane resources:
…Virtual airline built around the flight simulator X-Plane. Our aim is to give X-Plane users a highly realistic flying experience, simulating real-world airline operations for pilots who appreciate doing it just right.
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FlightGear (free) is a open-source flight sim released under the GPL, available for the major platforms. This paragraph does a good job of describing the philosophy behind the project:
The idea for FlightGear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The FlightGear project is striving to fill these gaps.
As with many open-source projects, there is still a lot of roughness around the edges (polish is one thing that full-blown commercial projects often have in spades), but the core important work has been done. I haven’t had the chance to mess around with FlightGear much yet, apart from sitting on the SFO runway and attempting to guess the controls — not the best method I realized as I began to taxi off the side of the runway. :) More on this later. There appears to be lots of potential, but it takes some poking around to find out what’s going on.
With both of the above programs, you won’t find much of a standard Mac OS X look and feel, partly out of the necessities of their cross-platform nature. However, if you can put aside the lack of polish (and landmarks), there is a lot of fascinating flight fun to be had.
See you in the skies!
Back in the day… no, back even farther than that… in fact, unless you’re in your mid-30s, you might as well skip this paragraph… back in my Apple II+ days, there was a set of games that I played incessantly. One of these was Choplifter, by Broderbund. It was in HiRes color! Check out the majesty (click for larger):
Choplifter is a simple game. You are a helicopter pilot charged with rescuing hostages. You have to land your craft nearby them, wait for them to board, then fly them a few at a time back to your base. You had to do this without landing on them, crashing your helicopter, or getting shot by various enemy bad dudes, including tanks, jets, and mines that homed in on you.
Phew.
Now, there have been various rewrites, arcade, and console versions over the years. But I tell you what, the very best interpretation I’ve seen, bringing Choplifter to the modern age (aka Mac OS X), is Chopper, by Majic Jungle Software. And since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I’m going to shut up and let you take a gander at couple of thousand of them (click for full view):
