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A Mac announcement is just around the corner, according to Macgamer.com: http://macgamer.com/news/civilization-v-interview

There are a TON of games with substantial artistic value. Some notable older ones I can think of offhand:

-MDK
-ZPC
-Alice
-Myst (plus Riven and the Myst sequels)
-Unreal

more recently:

-Bioshock
-Okami
-Zelda Twilight Princess

I mean, I could go on, but I'm getting tired of copying & pasting all these URLs.... ;)

From what I gathered from the EA stuff, they are only going to support the intel Macs in this movement. The problem though, is how exactly they plan to execute the deployment of these Macintosh versions. Are they still going to require six months to a year or longer to perform the conversions from DirectX to a Mac compatible format, like we had with the PowerPC macs? Will they delay the Windows versions of these games to allow for a simultaneous release of these titles?

If these issues still remain a constant problem for games ported to the Mac, then why both making the Mac versions at all when just about every intel mac user who cares about gaming probably already have Windows installed under Boot Camp?

Ever since the Mac went to intel processors, a number of previously major Mac-specific game sites, such as MacGamer, have been dead silent for several months now. Unless we start getting simultaneous releases on the Mac, most of us are just gonna continue to tolerate the annoyance of booting into Windows to avoid a lengthy wait for the next big thing in PC gaming.

• GeForce 3 - Is It Worth It?

  During Steve Jobs' Tokyo Keynote last February, Mac fans everywhere became delighted to hear of NVIDIA's continued Mac support with their release of the GeForce 3. Moreover, Mac gamers were exceptionally pleased to learn that the GeForce 3 would debut on the Mac first. Although the card was anounced five days before the PC version, PC owners got a hold of the card before most Mac users due to manufacturing delays (It's the thought that counts though).

I do strongly feel this may well describe the future state of the Macintosh in general. Look at sites like Mac Gamer, and you'll see a steady decline in the updates to these sites since the Intel Macs went mainstream. It almost seems like the Mac game developers/porters have thrown in the towel and have acknowledged that the majority of their previous customer base would rather install Windows on their shiny new Macs, rather than wait the usual six months for them to produce a native Mac OS X port.

If gaming on the Mac has eroded to this lowly state, it can't be long until other markets are affected too. Developers of several popular multimedia/graphics/productivity tools that have maintained multiple code bases over the years may finally decide to kill off their Mac versions to cut costs, once armed with the knowledge that the average Mac user can simply be coerced into buying a copy of Windows and installing it via a Bootcamp-like utility. Before long, Apple may well have to break down and start to officially sell Macs with Windows pre-installed to remain competative in the PC market.

Eventually, being a "Mac user" could mean little more than "someone who uses the Mac OS for file management, internet activity and itunes, and uses Windows for everything else". Granted the integration may be tighter between the two OSes, but it'll still end up with Mac users paying royalties to Microsoft in the end... either for Windows, or the necessary APIs needed to ensure complete compatibility.

In a few years, Apple will be as generic a name brand as IBM, Dell or HP.

Macs are fine. OSX is nice. But there are no games.

Apparently this site didn't get the memo about no games:

On Windows, there is tons of free software to do anything you can think of. There are a million websites dedicated to NOTHING but freeware. In Mac-land, everything costs money.

Would you please explain how are these sites able to offer so many free utilities then? I use many of them.

macupdate.com

versiontracker.com

Geez, where do you get your information? Microsoft?

Ha. That's funny. WEBoggle was probably the major inspiration for the stuff I'm working on, when I first discovered it a few months ago. It's really a brilliant implementation of Boggle - so simple and enjoyable. Great fun.

Even though my partner is now dreadfully addicted to it :), I must thank you for making it. It's really cool.

When I have a bit more time I'm thinking of having a bash at implementing a Fungus clone using this sort of technology - there's probably a huge variety of simple-but-addictive games that'd be well suited to this kind of framework.

why bother? real games [sic] dont buy Mac any way since there's merely not enough games on it and the game release of mac edition is much slower than pc edition.

This may have been true years ago, but times have changed.

http://www.apple.com/games/features/

http://www.macgamefiles.com/

http://www.macgamer.com/

MacGamer

It lists all kinds of Mac games and if they are compatible with their Windows counterparts.

Tada. Case Closed.

From firearms to facials, aromatherapy to assassinations, Beaches: the First Person Shooter could have it all. Using the Soldier of Fortune II engine with advanced sound features from Undying (to catch not only the hiss of flying lead but also the spirit-lifting cuts from the soundtrack), the game could begin in mid-70's New York, C.C. Bloom and Hillary Whitney having recently moved into a low rent New York apartment and begun to work on their careers.

Just a few things on you recent migration- Home/End may not work, but arrows up/down jump to the beginning/end of dialogs. Alt-tab isn't what it is on the Mac, it's Apple-tab. Since you're using a MS keyboard, you probably see Alt where the Apple key would normally be. You can change that in your MS keyboard control panel preferences. Not sure if it affects terminal, though. Check http://www.macgamefiles.com http://www.imgmagazine.com & http://www.macgamer.com for games. Hope that helps!

MacGamer has some much better stories today, though you might not get some of them if you don't follow the Mac gaming industry, or are at least somewhat familiar with the companies involved.

Actually, Half-Life DOES exist for Macintosh. The conversion was completed, the software was ready to ship. Then Sierra pulled the plug and decided that they don't want to do Macintosh software anymore. Of course, if you can find a copy of Half-Life, you are either a first class cracker who has broken into their archives, or are the lead programmer (Andrew Meggs), who will soon be set upon by the flock of a thousand lawyers.

MacGamer.com recently reviewed a dual 1.25GHz PowerMac with a GF4. They reported 93 fps in Unreal Tournament under OS9, and 55 fps in OSX, in 1024x768. They didn't list actual numbers for other games, though. They just said "silky smooth frame rates."

Let's see...

• Radeon 9000: The tragedy of a graphics card still too fast for anyone not looking for 150 fps out of Quake III (maybe you're anticipating EQ on Mac...)
• ATA-66?! Oh No! You can barely burst that kind of transfer rate, let alone maintain it. Besides, when was the last time you were copying 40GB from your second 80G drive to your forth 80G drive?
• FireWire 2 - it's nice in the same way having 80 gigs of RAM is nice - bragging rights. Nothing else. Do you see many FireWire 2 compliant products out? Do you see many Apps that say "40GB RAM required, 80GB recommended"? It can wait. Meanwhile, the lack of the North/South bridge allows a FireWire 2 PCI card to get better transfer rates when they come out. The flashiness of FW2 doesn't yet justify the price.
• I'll agree about no up front ports - it would be nice. But the vent holes are an important part of the equation.
• Eject probably won't eject both, just one. Which one? Maybe the selected one. Maybe the first one only. Maybe Apple will write a nifty add-on that lets you select. Maybe it isn't a huge concern for most people.
• This was an upgrade for the box, not the screens. You don't like the $2500 price tag? Buy a CRT - the VGA convertor is included. Sure, they are pretty, but even Apple knows that not everyone is going to spend $1000 on a 17" LCD when they could spend $250 on a 19" CRT.
• Bluetooth built-in would have been OK. Except that maybe 1% of the people will use it in the next year. Despite the attempts to make Bluetooth the short-range communications technology, cables are still pretty popular. It isn't dying, it just isn't pervasive enough to include. And I know how hard it is to have to reach around behind the case and plug something in once.
• Shitty G4s? I was just disagreeing with you until now. Do you have a general dislike of 1-digit numbers, or do you have no appreciation of the way processors work? G4 may not be Power4, but at least it's not Pentium 4.

Hey, wouldn't ya know, but apple already co-invented your vibrator idea in the Harmon/Kardon SoundSticks

Hehe.

Tech Report article

Just a MacGamer short blurb

Here you will find this lovely quote:

If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody, I would be very likely to give my win NT machine the cold shoulder and do future development on rhapsody.

More Carmack-style old pro-OS X ranting can be found here. There's a lot more around, but I gotta run. Google reveals all.

Westlake Interactive has announced that all their titles currently under development will have carbon versions (and they will do some carbon versions of older games as well depending on the publisher). Check here for the projects they are working on and here's the announcement from Westlake Interactive about OS X support.

A review of those "HI-FI" soundsticks is available.

Some quotes:

"you're going to find that this is not a super-high end sound system."

"and even steam-rolls the inexplicably popular Cambridge 5.1 speaker setup". What a contender. I bet it even beats Bose!

"the Harman/Kardon SoundSticks... ...[have a] clear, even and crisp sound system that should please almost any average Mac user".

"Will the SoundSticks stack up against high-end stereo equipment by leaders in the industry such as JBL or BOSE? Absolutely not". I was wrong. It is actually worse than bose (what, no mids either?).

I'm not saying the soundsticks are horrible, but I'm willing to bet they don't beat even those mini-system stereos. 20 watts of subwoofer is just not enough for even reproducting a mild fart. :)

Oh, and for fun, you cannot, ever, have your speakers located more than 5 meters away (without a hub) from your sound producing device (using USB). This will make building concert halls really interesting. A computer every 20 m. The network alone would be awesome!

The best computer sound system I've ever heard was a computer hooked into an amplifier with real "tower" style speakers sitting beside it.