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While I agree that this is a real shame, there's no numbers available for how many people are:
1) Downloading the game, and thereby stealing a sale from you
2) Downloading the game, that never would have bought from you anyways
3) Downloading the game, and being excited about a cool indy developer and buying the game from you.

Now, I've got no idea what the ratio of 1:2:3 is.. and neither do you. But I'll say this: I steal music, but I'd NEVER steal from an indy developer. In fact, I'll go ahead and plug the two most recent indy game purchases I've made, both HIGHLY recommended:

Enigmo - a friggin' great puzzle game (mac only unfortunately)
http://www.pangeasoft.net/enigmo/index.html

Darwinia - http://www.darwinia.co.uk/

Have there been 100 Mac games worth paying for since the Lisa?

Hey, there are thousands of good games you can play on your Mac. You just have to install Boot Camp first.

Seriously, there is actually a pretty healthy Mac games market. I'm just not sure it's one that appeals to the average Slashdot reader. If you want the latest and whizziest FPS--or if you spend enough time gaming that you need a new epic game every few days--then yeah, you need to run Windows.

But for a more casual gamer, the Mac is a perfectly good option, even without Boot Camp. Many of the most popular Windows games eventually get ported to the Mac--the Sims, Doom III, Jedi Outcast, etc, etc, etc, are all available on a Mac. Then there are companies like Ambrosia Software, Pangea, and Freeverse that make games primarily or exclusively for the Macintosh. The smaller Mac market means that these games will sell fewer copies, and they therefore tend to have smaller development staffs. On the one hand, this means Mac-exclusive games often don't have the vast scope of original PC games. On the other hand, it means there's more room for quirky, off-beat stuff.

You might be interested in iPartition. It's not free, but it's more flexible than /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. There are others, but this is the only one that quickly comes to mind. Don't bother asking Powerquest/Symantic to make a Mac version of Partiton Magic, ports of existing Windows utilities generally suck on other platforms.
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php

As for other Mac Applications, there are several websites you can check out for various Mac apps. I have never found a shortage of Mac (or Linux) applications, once I avoided the pitfall of finding a "port" or "perfect replacement" for my favorite Windows applications. Things are a little different in the Mac and Linux world, so you might need to find similar, but significantly different applications to meet your needs.

Check out:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
http://www.macorchard.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/
And if you want games:
http://aspyr.com/product/product_listing
http://www.destineerstudios.com/macsoftgames/mac_l isting.html
http://www.feral.co.uk/
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/all.html
http://www.pangeasoft.net/index2.html
http://www.freeverse.com/
http://www.apple.com/games/
http://www.macgamefiles.com/

Did the original poster say 'snick your nose into every godamn thing? No he didn't. He said 'be there' which is decent advise. When my kids are old enough to have their own computer - not quite yet at 3 years, they will have their computer in the 'office' where I and my wife also have my machines. We treat it like a shared communal space where people can nip in and out of all the time. I suspect that this will avoid a lot of the 'my kid is just surfing porn' issues.

In terms of introducing them to tech, I'm finding that there are quite a few good, non-violent vaguely educational packages out there, that I have lined up *if* they are interested. Enigmo 2 is great stuff, for example and I really hope that they may be slightly interested in programming, in which case, it's out with the utterly splendid freeware implementation of Logo ... both for the Mac.

• MacSoft
  
• Aspry (Scroll Down to find list)
  
• Feral Interactive
  
• Freeverse
  
• Ambrosia
  
• Pangea
  
• Blizzard
  
• United States Army

• MacGameFiles
  
• Apple: Games

Also might want to check out:

http://www.pangeasoft.net/index2.html
http://www.udevgames.com/
http://www.apple.com/games/
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/cat/games
http://www.macupdate.com/games.php

As a side note, the Mac platform has never been known for a wide range of shrink-wrapped software; the main place to find software has always been "online", even before the internet was popular, and people got their software from BBSes.

You should have a look at Enigmo from Pangea. It is originally a Mac game, but available for PC too now.

Fabulous.

My daughter is 2 and I'm waiting until she is old enough to play it. I'm also busily writing some Logo routines to draw pretty stuff that she will be able to tweak about whenshe is much older... if she wants to .

Sure. Until you get Enigmo.

-ccm

What do you mean? This is a common thread and misconception in just about every part of Slashdot. Since when do you have to have a $500 video card to run 3D apps?

If you don't care about 3D, then don't waste money on something more powerful than a Radeon 9200/9250.
I am running a Radeon 9200 w/ 64MB of RAM (and it does have a fan on it, btw). It plays Half Life 2 nearly flawlessly at 1024x768 with most settings on Max. So, does that mean I don't care about 3D? Come one.
Video cards have been doing 3D just fine since 4MB cards started coming out about 8 years ago. I had an original Lime iMac with 6MB of Vram and it ran Nanosaur. You don't need a Radeon 9200/9250 with 64 or 128MB to generate 2D graphics. An ATI Rage will do the trick (shoot, that will probably run quite a few 3D apps as well).

Video card fanboys are getting to be just as bad as Apple/Linux/Vinyl Record fanboys.

Of course, if I don't get modded to hell, there will be a dozen replys from the Apple "amen corner" telling me that the Apple is a better deal, etc.

I won't tell you which system is the better value for you, but let's for the pure fun of things look at that Mac Mini's software, and then figure out from there what you're paying for the naked hardware, okay?

Let's see -- the Mac Mini comes with (with prices listed at Apple's Online Store in brackets (using all USD prices):

• Mac OS X v10.3 ($129)
• iLife 05 ($79)
• AppleWorks ($79)
• Quicken 2005 ($69.95)
• Nanosaur 2 ($24.95)
• Marrble Blast Gold ($19.95)

For a grand total of $401.85 if you were to just buy the software alone, leaving the hardware portion costing you only $97.15 . When you factor in the fact you don't need to outfit the system with firewall or anti-virus software, it looks like one damn fine deal to me.

Yaz.

so nobody produces games for the Mac? That's a real surprise to me.

Please quit posting crap like that. It's just not true.

Be sure and check out Enigmo, at Pangea
It's a puzzle game, and highly addictive.

Also, it's pretty unoffensive, but involves some good strategy play, Spaceword Ho! at DeltaTao Software

pop-pop is a great knockoff of the classic breakout, at Ambrosia Software

And of course, as people have mentioned, there's always Sim City :) Also Zoo Tycoon, published on the Mac by Aspyr is pretty un-offensive I'd think.

All these companies, with the exception of Aspyr (who publishes a lot of the triple-A ports), have pretty much exclusively G->PG-13 titles. But the ones I mentioned pretty much are lacking anything I can think of that could possibly offend.

Pangea Software have a lot of fun games for kids. Take a look at Enigmo , it's a great puzzle game.

There is also The Incredible Machine but it may only works on OS 9.

If you want something a little more "arcade", you can find on GarageGames Marble Blast .

And FroGames will soon release a fun racing game : MiniOne Racing . (ad)

Pangea Software have a lot of fun games for kids. Take a look at Enigmo , it's a great puzzle game.

There is also The Incredible Machine but it may only works on OS 9.

If you want something a little more "arcade", you can find on GarageGames Marble Blast .

And FroGames will soon release a fun racing game : MiniOne Racing . (ad)

The great thing about using a mac is the cool shareware stuff. We've got some of the best developers (Ambrosia, Pangaeasoft, they're everywhere) and we get some great games. Here are a couple of great ones...

enigmo
escape velocity nova

As far as commercial games go, Halo is a great choice, you can pick up UT, EverQuest, Warcraft III...There are a ton, and more coming thanks to great porting houses like Westlake.

I'm personally hooked on EQ right now, and it's great...not nearly as many people per server, but it's become a nice community without the assholes that plague the pc version. If you don't know what I mean by that, think your typical battlenet user.

Uhmm. Wrong. This game ( Enigmo for the Mac) is NOTHING like Wetrix for the N64/Dreamcast/PC/GameBoy except the fact that they both have falling liquid...

Mighty Mike

Is that Jay Leno?

I swear recently reading somewhere that Power Pete had been purchased, updated, renamed, and was being distributed again.

[wait a few minutes to simulate the time it took me to do some Googling]

Ah, here you go. It has been renamed "Mighty Mike," and is now $15 shareware.

~Philly

Shareware games is where the real creativity is these days.

I'm not a big gamer, but I do own a mac (read my user bio for specs) and I mainly play one 3D game: 4x4 Evolution 2. It runs just fine. When I go read about PC users' experiences, they often have glitches in the graphics. Maybe it's just because macs have good OpenGL? I dunno.

I should also note that there are good mac-only 3D (and 2D) games out there, some of them shareware.

Here, check Aspyr for game ports, and Pangea for original games.

Or Pangeasoft

Unfortunately, Apple has ceased all development on QuickDraw3D. It is still available on the current versions of MacOS, but will not be available on MacOS X.

That is, no official version of QD3D will be available on MacOS X. There is always the Quesa project, which is a cross-platform library that runs on top of OpenGL and provides the same functionality as QuickDraw3D (with API-level compatibility). As to whether any game companies will actually use Quesa remains to be seen. (The project is open-source, licensed under the LGPL.)

In any case, I think it was a big mistake for Apple to stop development of QuickDraw 3D. It's a great API, not just for porting, but for doing original work as well. Look at Bugdom and Nanosaur, two fairly sophisticated 3D games that were written by a very small development team. That just goes to show how easy it is to develop using QD3D. Hopefully the Quesa project will keep it alive and maybe even increase its popularity.

"YOU CANNOT...

[...]

4. ...port any of this code in any quantity, shape or form to Windows/PC. Nanosaur and the code are happily Mac-only and we want to keep it that way."

With an attitude like that, I sure as hell won't be checking the game out.

"YOU CANNOT...

[...]

4. ...port any of this code in any quantity, shape or form to Windows/PC. Nanosaur and the code are happily Mac-only and we want to keep it that way."

With an attitude like that, I sure as hell won't be checking the game out.

pangeasoft has their priorities WAY, WAY out of line. what they REALLY ought to be porting is "gerbils".. NOT nanosaur. :)

of course let's keep in mind this is why Quickdraw 3d was originally created; so that people could _do_ things like porting a 3d app crossplatform ("crossplatform" at the time meaning "windows and mac os", of course) without massive rewrites (although i never saw anyone do this except for the makers of the game "Havoc"). Of course, then OpenGL came along and made QD3D irrelivant, but we didn't _know_ that was going to happen when QD3D first came out.. at the time, sitting there staring for hours at pangeasoft's gerbils demo, and to a lesser extent their (still very cool) 3DTicTacToe and Wormhole 3D demos.. oh man. it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world. Esp. right after we were recovering from Quicktime VR.. we may never find a use for quicktime VR, but damn, it was nifty. :)

Oh well. Maybe someone could get hold of the gerbils source or something-- i dunno. i can't even find a place to download the binaries anymore, nor can i find a 3dtictactoe or wormhole 3d, or for that matter any of those small yet at the time mind-blowingly cool (3DCalc!!!) original Quickdraw 3D apps.. they used to all be linked from apple's website but now that's all gone. What happened to all this stuff?

Both games seem intended for fairly young children; neither kept my attention for very long. However, it is interesting to at least one game company doing something other than car racing, one-on-one fighting or shoot-em-ups with modern 3D hardware.