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It's a start, anyway.

MacPlay is still around; Interplay sold the name off a long time ago -- in fact it may have passed through a couple owners since then. (I think WizardWorks/GT/Infogrames/Atari owned it for a while.)

-cough-

I guess I should have moderated that a bit... a new G5 (as the asker is getting) will come with panther, and it's not meeting the specs on the nolf2 box ("at least 10.2.6"). It's been over three months and my patience has been wearing thin. Apple can sell it, but they should be informing the customers of the incompatibility or else they'll start to look bad.

MacPlay doesn't have their act together with this game: NOLF2 only plays on QuickTime 6.3. The most current version of QuickTime is 6.5, and Panther cannot be downgraded below 6.4. It's a mess and customers who upgraded to Panther have been stuck waiting... Our only hope is that someone (apple or MacPlay) fesses up and fixes their problem. I'm a bit disappointed that Apple continues to sell faulty game - they should wait until it's fixed.

I think we'll have to wait for an update from MacPlay to make the game to work with Quicktime 6.4. (See MacPlay's NOLF2 support page.

In the meantime, I'm rebooting from an external Firewire drive with 10.2.8 / QT 6.3 if I want to play NOLF2.

JP

Funny how this post gets a score of 2, but the response that shows that he's full of crap only gets a 0. The response is correct too; there are hundreds of games available for the Mac. Just go to Aspyr, Macplay, and Macsoft to see three companies that make most, if not all, of their income from selling Mac games. Even Age of Mythology and Dungeon Siege, which are produced by Microsoft, have Mac versions. I can name one company that tried the same approach to Linux. Loki, and they went bankrupt because no-one bought their Linux games.

I read it on Slashdot that no one makes games for Macs, so it must be true. I better let Aspyr, MacPlay, MacSoft, Westlake Interactive, Ambrosia, Freeverse, The Omni Group, Blizzard, GraphSim, and Feral Interactive among many other commercial operations and hundreds of shareware developers that no one at all makes games for the Macintosh and that they should all shut down immediately. Additionally, Inside Mac Games should shut down their operation immediately as they are a waste of server space because they will never have any news to report ever.

I heard it on Slashdot so it must be true.

See:

Aspyr
MacPlay

There's also MacSoft but I don't see too many ports coming from them.

Many of the A+ titles make it to the Mac at least.

How many Quake3 engine games have there been? Wolf3d, MOH, SOFII, STV:EF, JKII, etc. Afaik all of these titles have been ported and are OGL since they're based on the Q3 engine.

Just wait until the Doom 3 engine is done, I'm sure it will find its way into just as many if not more games, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if those find their way to the Mac or Linux (if anyone other than LGP can step forward and put some cash down on some decent ports).

I missed out on a lot of the years of gaming. I didn't have a Nintendo when I grew up, I didn't have a Genesis or all of the other games.

I use Abandonware to play the games that everybody else talks about. (It's been a near joke playing Final Fantasy I, and marveling that this launched a multi-billion dollar gaming franchise.)

What amazes me is how stupid most publishers are. How hard would it be to take Ultima Underworld I and II, Shadowcaster, update the code to a Win32/OSX/Linux base, then sell the CD for $20 and say "Hey, folks - the great games you loved? Come pay us $20 for it!" 90% of the development work is done, they just have to get an engine in.

Square gets it - look how they're rereleasing Final Fantasy games on the Wonderswan color - and making a mint. How much work did they really have to do? A little engine work, check it out, and *poof* - profit.

I abandonware because I can't find these games any other way, because the publishers won't do it. Heck, if they just sold the porting rights to another company (the way that Macplay ports Win32 games to OS X), they could leave the success/failure to somebody else, and probably still make a good profit.

But until publishers get half a brain that the past can still be profitable, I guess I'll have to keep going around them and downloading it for free elsewhere.

The programmers should go to work for MacPlay. MacPlay, a Mac porting house, has committed itself to only bringing games to Mac OS X from here on out, and it would seem to me that the experience that the Loki porters developed bringing DirectX games to Linux would directly translate to bringing DirectX games to Mac OS X. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.)

In fact, it's still a little beyond me why Loki was able to bring some games to Linux but not Mac OS X--once the games were on Linux, I would've thought that the expanded marketshare of the games-hungry Mac market would've been attractive. And Mac users are willing to pay. Personally, I would've given my right nostril to play Tribes2 or Heavy Gear on my Mac. That just seems like an opportunity lost.

In fact, I would still pay to play these games--if Loki needs to divest it's assets, they might consider selling their codebase to MacPlay (naturally, MacPlay would still need to acquire the license for the Mac market.)

The bottom line: Apple is trying to get some gaming cred, MacPlay and others are furiously hard at work bringing PC titles to the Mac, and Mac OS X programmers can be hard to find. I would love to have Loki's talent in the Mac development community.

That being said, you probably could make more money off the mac users. Mac users probably aren't as heavy into gaming, true, but mac users are a captive audience. Unlike (((the majority of!))) linux users, mac users do'nt have the option of booting into windows. Now that bungie is dead, they have only what can be ported or emulated, and because there have been almost no new mac ports to speak of in nearly forever they are mostly starved for decent games and will probably run anything even mediocre that runs on their computers.

For example, looks at any genre, and many of the 'leaders' in that genre have made their way to the Mac. I wont list all games, as I dont even know all games, but for example:
Unreal Tourney, Quake3, Deus Ex, Baldurs Gate (1, 2, and expansion), all of Blizzards' games, the entire Tomb Raider series, the Sims, all the Sim City games, Sim Theme Park, Rune, Oni, the Myth series, Majesty, the Might and Magic series, and Alice.

In addition to these, you have several upcoming ports, as well as a bunch that I didnt list that already exist. Most big game houses like Blizzard are realizing that the Mac market is big enough that with the relatively small overhead of porting that comes due to good OO design, their Mac products are very profitable, because they've already done the most expensive work with the PC version. The Mac ports are getting closer and closer to the release date of their PC counter parts so that they are able to ride the hype wave a little better.

The additional problem here is that while I'm sure Loki is a good company, the Mac porting world isnt just there for the taking. You have experienced Mac publishers and porting houses such as Westlake Interactive, Aspyr, Mac Play, etc, who all have advantages in this area: they have experience, are established, and have earned some measure of Mac user loyalty because they have stayed with the Mac gamers throughout the ups and downs, and, as important or more so to a potential partner, they arent under chapter 11.

That said, there is definitely still a demand for some Mac games, and certainly not every company supports the platform yet. But I just dont think people understand how far the platform's gaming status has come in the past 3-4 years. And I dont know how much luck Loki would have breaking into the scene. The Mac gaming scene is much healthier than you might expect.

-swc

There are not enough users of non-Microsoft operating systems to make profitable a company dedicated only to porting high-profile games to them.

Uh, what about MacPlay? Or were you forgetting about non-Linux non-Microsoft OSs? I think the problem is the demographics of the user base, not the size.