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What Games Should I Get for My New G5?
Lane.exe wonders: "So I just got a new Apple Mac G5 (Dual 1.8s, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600, etc) and I was thinking about getting back into some gaming. I was looking over the game selection for Mac, and it's not looking as bright as I'd hoped. But I think this is due more to my ignorance of good games than anything else. What I'm looking for is a few good multiplayer shoot-em-ups (like Quake, UT or Half-Life) and a nicely engrossing RPG. The last few games I've played were Icewind Dale, Pool Of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, and MechWarrior 4. Has anyone got any suggestions along these lines?"
Halo was just released for the Mac, delivering on the promise made by Steve Jobs and Bungie all those years ago.
I saw an ad for this last year. Seems that best games for the mac are:
4.apple puzzle game
3.breakout
2.super breakout
1.Photoshop
Happy gaming
Rice University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology- "Engineering the freaks of tomorrow"
There's a lot more shareware gaming on the Mac, companies like Ambrosia, Spiderweb and Freeverse put out good quality games. If you get anything though I'd recommend Escape Velocity.
You might want to check out Yohoho Puzzle Pirates as well.
Have you considered Quake or UT?
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
NETHACK
You could try NeverWinter Nights, Bioware even has instructions on their site for installing the expansions. Jedi Academy, which I am currently enjoying, just came out. Warcraft III and its expansion are also availible. The up and coming World of Warcraft will also be mac comapatible.
With your neck on my shoulders we could wreck civilization!
try dungeon siege...
America's Army is goodun... Its good quality, and you can't beat free.
I've also found that there are some really good emulators for the mac, SNES9X being a favorite. There are more.
If you're a MUDder, you can get to those with just about anything. I use Cantrip, but it doesn't seem there are as many great Mac MUD clients...
Best of luck: I'm interested to see what others have to say... Its been really slim pickins....
P.S. - I also heard there may be another option available soon.
This shouldn't be a big deal, since if you were big into gaming you wouldn't have bought a Mac. You should definitely be able to find enough games to keep yourself entertained, though.
...hehe, just kidding. But you can run old DOS games screamingly fast (too fast, actually...) and newer (1997+) games at a good clip.
On the native side...
Fallout 2. It's ported to OSX and it's still the best post-apocalyptic RPG ever created.
I also bought Tropico, which is a fun but somewhat confusing (Why are you all unhappy? More death squads!) sim.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
Dark Horzons: Lore is an up-and-coming Action Mech game (not a simulation like Mechwarrior).
It currently runs in Win32 & Mac OS X and the Client will run [without crashing] on Linux as soon as the installer is ready, which should be Any Day Now(tm).
Here's a quote from the page:
Check it out.
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
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.
Quake 3 has been out for Mac OS for years. Lots of big-name franchises are available for Mac - Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights, UT2003, Rainbow 6, Medal of Honor, etc. etc.
The biggest glaring omission from the Mac gaming world is Half Life (and, by extension, Counter-Strike). It does really suck not to be able to play Counter-Strike.
I'd check out www.insidemacgames.com to see what's available and what's coming soon. Note: I'm not affiliated with this site. It was just the first site that came up when I did a Google search for "mac games."
-Isaac
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
If you like FPS you could give the MOH series a shot. They've got Allied Assault and it's add on Spearhead. And if you loved it then you can love it again- go DL The Adventures Of HappyWeed and play in os9. http://www.happyweed.com/
Quake and UT both run on MacOS. You could start there. This "Halo" thing seems to be kindof popular too.
Dunno about RPGs. But my Mac is a G3 (an old G3), so I don't exactly keep up with Mac gaming. RPGs are for nerds, anyway.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
All of the Quake series is available...they are growing old but are still no less playable...but I still play Quake2 as it is my favorite game of all time...nothing beats a good round of ActionQuake! (shush you Urban Terror zombies!) There's Unreal Tournament 2003, Halo as mentioned already, Ghost Recon, emulators for about any console you can think of (hint: go to www.emulation.net), Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy, Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness, Age of Empires II, Civilization III, all of the Sims series, Sim City 4, Rainbow Six 3, Aliens vs Predator 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate series, Medal of Honor Allied Assault and Spearhead, the Myth Series (another one of my personal favorites), Neverwinter Nights, Everquest, Oni, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Starcraft (old but I doubt this game will ever die), Splinter Cell, Tony Hawk 2 3 & 4, X-Plane....And this was only a skimming of the more popular/newer games from the list on Apple's site... gee whiz guys there's really no games for Mac...Pull your heads out of your asses and take a look around.
BEST RPG EVER!
One nice thing about NWN (although not officially supported) is that all the PC released expansions work just fine on your Mac.
Diablo II is still fun and engrossing, better with the expansion. The Mac version is on the same CD as the PC version is, and you can play online for free on battle.net since it's a Blizzard game.
I don't know about WCIII or whatever, but Diablo II and the expansion can be had for $20 combined nowaday, quite worthwhile.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
Pull your head out of your ass, shut the fuck up, and take a look around at the real world.
everquest?
FreeBSD Addicts
We have a couple of dual 2GHz machines at the office. Playing Medal of Honor (on a 23" display) is like looking out a window. At some point I'll have to check actual framerates at that resolution - but it's obviously *really* good. So anything using the Q3 engine will be Just Fine.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Baldur's Gate II and the expansion are excellent RPGs. Be sure you get the expansion as well, since there's a problem with dual processors that is only fixed in the expansion.
I would also check out macgamer.com ; there's a lot of overlap between the sites, but what do you expect.
If I had a nifty new G5 I would use it to play Shadowbane with the graphics turned up, since my poor old G3 can only show me floating torsos. I'd probably also buy NWN and Morrowind, as others have suggested.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
Photoshop
Windows + Intel = wintendo
Or Rainbow Six 3 as some people persist in calling it ;-) is an incredible multiplayer experience. The realism of the game surpasses that of some of the newer "realistic" shooters (e.g. America's Army, Vietnam), although not quite as good as Operation Flashpoint (although I find RS more enjoyable than OF, personally.)
You should definitely make this one of your first gaming purchases.
One of my favorite online features is coop play. Taking down 30 terrorists with a team of players is only surpassed in excitement by taking out 30 terrorists with a team of players who are all on voice comms!
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
Hi. I bought an expensive computer, I'm real cool you see. Now, maybe I should go ask people what games "Like Quake and Unreal" work on it..without saying if I know if Unreal or Quake work on it !
If you want a good shooter what the hell is wrong with Quake or Unreal ?
Um, sorry dude, but I think you got the wrong computer to play games on. Sure, many games are now being ported to the Mac, but most are pretty old (relatively speaking), and don't represent a wide variety like the full spectrum of games you can get on a Windows PC. Sure there are a few new games for the Mac, but not many. Fortunately, the ones that were ported were pretty big, like NWN, Halo, Quake3, etc. However, for cutting edge gaming performance, look at an Alienware gaming rig or something like that. I know it's not cool to advocate Windows, but when it comes to hard core PC gaming, it's sort of a must.
If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
"What Games Should I Get for My New G5?"
Plural?!
"Derp de derp."
These games won't exactly rock your setup, but I think they make excellent games to play on your Mac, and will work well with all your PC gaming friends at your next LAN party:
NeverWinter Nights (you can copy all the expansions straight across from a PC, so don't worry)
Unreal Tournament
Ghost Recon
Starcraft (of course)
Civ III
For whatever reason, I enjoyed playing these games 20x more on my Mac than I did on my PC. Granted, for each game listed here there's 2-3 other games I thought were better on PC, but for some reason these games really shined on Mac.
Here's my favorites:
Fallout 1
Fallout 2
Quake 3 Arena (for Xtreme Arena mod, among others)
Soldier of Fortune II
Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Baldurs Gate 2 - Throne Of Bhaal
Civlization III
Halo
No One Lives Forever 2
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
This Apple "switch" ad should help you figure it out:
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
mac games:
- www.ambrosiasw.com
- www.freeverse.com
- www.victoly.com/~adam/
- www.insidemacgames.com
- www.macgamefiles.com
emulation:
- mac.emuscene.com
- www.emulation.net
- www.mameroms.com
- www.planetemu.net
Circumcision is child abuse.
I was recently pleased to find that DosBox can run Impulse Tracker pretty well, which is to say better than Windows XP. Not fast enough to be useful on my G4/450 but I'm definitely saving up for a dual G5. :)
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Congrats on the purchase of the G5. For starters, check out GameRanger. GameRanger (aka GR) is the hub for most all Mac gaming outside of Bnet and MMORPGs. You can check the game list on the GR website, but you can find basically all the popular FPS and RTS games there. For the more popular games, finding a good host won't be a problem, but for older or lesser known titles it can be tough. That's just one of the downsides of the smaller Mac gaming community. However, being small can also be an advantage as you can get to know a large portion of the people you play with on a regular basis.
As for the actually games, I would recommend Raven Shield (aka Rainbow Six 3) for an FPS. It will look awesome on your G5, and the gameplay is quite addicting. Everyone I know who has tried Halo hasn't liked it. Ghost Recon isn't bad, but it feels much slower paced than Raven Shield. There are also the old standbys like MoH and Quake 3, and you can probably pick those up cheap if you shop around.
I'm not an RPG guy, so I can't really comment there. I know some guys who are enjoying NWN, but that's about it. However, one game I think you should definitely check out is Jedi Academy. It has both great single player and multiplayer action. Another highly recommend game is EV Nova. The Escape Velocity series has been a classic on the Mac for a long time now, and EV Nova does not disappoint. You should also take a look around Ambrosia's site. They are generally regarded as the makers of the finest shareware games for the Mac.
I could have taken you seriously ... until you quoted Fight Club.
Currently they're giving top billing to old Atari 2600 games. I would have hoped Apple would try harder to kill the illusion that Mac only has games which are already at least three years out of date...
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Seriously, is there any other question (aside from "Games for BSD?") that could possibly draw more apple-flaming?!? I think not.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
While they might not have the world's most descriptive titles, you'd do well to check out Rrootage and Noiz2sa
They're both highly abstract top-down shooters with pretty cool graphics. It's quite difficult to describe them with words -- the only way to experience them is to just play them. There are also windows ports availible somewhere.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
tranquility is simple to learn, yet takes months to master.
Playing through all it's levels takes most players over 100 hours.
It's a great way to show off what your G5 can do and looks amazing on a big Cinema Display.
It's good for you, it's cheap, and if you talk to it nice it might wash your car.
There's no other game like it (and there's probably a reason for that...)
Go to MacPlay.com and check out their specials.You can get Fallout 1 & 2 for $4 each!
Descent 3. Not quite sure if it qualifies as a FPS (it is first person and you do shoot stuff, so...), but it is a truly kick-ass game. Amazon's got it here.
You know you're a nerd when you can mathematically prove that you have no life.
I can't believe no one has recommended this yet... I play MAME way more than any of the piddly PC games that are out there. No system is complete without a nice copy of MAME. Of course, you'll have to dive into the newsgroups to find... *ahem*... "support files"...
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Many mods for Q3A too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
looks like Escape Velocity: Nova is also available on Windows. no details, just a link to the exe installer.
the first Escape Velocity was a memorable game.
I just downloaded both and am speechless. These are great games, thanks moosesocks!
While it's not a major game from one of the big game studios, it is a heck of a lot of fun. It's basically a 3D (actually uses 3 dimensions, not just a 2D game with 3D graphics) puzzle game. You play as Kiki, and your goal is to get to the exit. The best part is it free and the source code is available for download.
BTW, I want to sell my copies of UT2003 and American McGee's Alice.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Get the Marathon Series it may be dated but its one of the best FPS's ive ever played to this day I still love marathon. Come on after all Halo is just Marathon 4!
Hands down the best game ever
... I can't believe no one mentioned Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory!!!
imho, best damn multiplay fps out there now - an' it's free!
Wow sure showed me! 11 games and most of them are old Activision titles! HA HA HA HA HA. Admit it Mac fag you just bought that piece of shit crapintosh for the purdy colors!
Unreal Tournament 2004 (which is basically UT2003 with lots of new stuff) is coming out soon (for the PC and Mac simultaneously). Might want to hold off getting UT until then ;)
...of course!
http://secondlife.com
Well, the Mac client is currently in beta, but
it's only $9.95 for a lifetime of access.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
See title :-p
Descent 3 is awesome--as good as Halo. Not sure if it runs under OS X.
Halo, Call of Duty, C&C Generals, Jedi Knight II, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Sim City 4, Unreal Tournament 2003, Dungeon Siege, Civ3, etc.
There are a fair number of games for the Mac these days - almost to the extent where one could be a casual gamer and semi hard core gamer and be a Mac user.
I like Savitar for OS 9/X
http://www.heynow.com/Savitar/index.html
Blizzard has a good track record for supporting the Mac, and while none of their offerings quite fit the FPS or RPG catagories, I'd suggest getting Warcraft III for those with RTS leanings. Also, their World of Warcraft beta signups are still going on (end tomorrow night), and yes, the Mac platform is being beta tested.
Back in the day when I had the OS X Public Beta installed on my original rev. a bondi iMac a girlfriend of mine decided to play that game. She clicked everything in my dock and it looked kinda cool but crashed my system. OS X has come a long way since then... :)
11 games? You are far more stupid than I thought! Must you have everything handed directly to you?Try this out for size. Sure there's obviously more PC games, but the fact remains that most of them are pure shit. Sorry, but I don't lose sleep at night over the inability to play poorly made games. Have you ever heard of Quality over Quantity? You probably don't understand that concept anyways... l4m3r
Sad little boy.
Your right.
It's so obvious that all the best developers write for Windows.
What were we thinking?
(chuckle..)
Notwithstanding BF1942 and the DesertCombat mod - This took the HL(DoD) thing to a new level - Wicked! (yes I know about tribes - it's real good, just not as good as DC)
If you think I'm full of it, you'll love The Sims....
No One Lives Forever 2 is an awesome FPS game. You play a woman spy, back in the 60's. The game is quite humorous too.
However, I heard that it does not yet work with 10.3, which is why I haven't bought it yet.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
People are going to flame ya, but I totally get what you mean. Just understand only the extremists care to voice their opinion. The silent majority is the one that shows it by purchasing the games that are the best.
I used to play Civ III on my powerbook, that was before I installed gentoo on it. I think the new expansion may be out on it too.
Well, here's a novel idea.
Instead of spending ages in a fruitless search for the elusive Awesome Game for the Macintosh, you could learn how to program, and make or port your own games.
Or you could play MAngband and enjoy some fine multiplayer roguelike action. I know it's been ported to OSX. You just have to look for it on the forums there.
I think the AC is trolling you but I think you're stretching reality a bit when you claim that Macs have "quality over quantity". No, they don't. Most A list games never make it to the Mac, full stop. You might claim that Macs have some decent games and you'd be right, but PCs have everything Macs have and lots, LOTS more.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Looks like somebody spent too much time with Windows and caught a bad case of Stockholme Syndrome.
Have you ever heard of Quality over Quantity?
You sure have "a lot" of "quality" titles, such as Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, X2: Wolverine's Revenge, Survivor: The Interactive Game, and Emergency Room: Disaster Strikes.
A downside is that the guy who runs Ambrosia is a real ahole, after reading posted comments of his on various mac forums. If this bothers you stay away. I agree, though, the company makes good products. The owner, however, makes me question the ethics of supporting them.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
bolo.
and with your dual G5, you can play against 15 bots running in the background!
any old Mac person knows the fun of Tetris..... granted on a G5 it won't be under the Apple menu like it was on my Mac SE, but i bet it exists somehow?
guess that's another game we won't get....... good!
i'll stick to Elevator Action on MacMame thanks
Woo hoo!!! Get Unreal Tournament (the original one) and go find the Zark Assault rifle, then come to www.theblacklegion.com and you can find our server one listed on the front page. Come frag with us! I am {BL}Ticklemonster, if you see me, say hi! ...then die! muahahaha
ahem. hope you like the g5, dude!
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
...that prior to looking for games, you acquire a mouse with more than one button? Like many things, multiple mouse buttons assist greatly.
Why get any games at all, shit-for-brains?
Or why not write a game yourself, something you and your family would like, something close to home, something that reflects your own personal condition.
Something like 'The Retards versus the Droolers', and then you take turns slobbering over each other's mice and your bibs.
I've been using a Mac as my main machine for 3 years now. What I grates me the most is missing SWAT3 and its updates, and the lag time for most games between their release on the PC and other platforms and the Mac.
Another area sorely lacking is sports games. There's not a single football/basketball/baseball simulation that's available for the Mac, and that's a shame.
I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means, but between the Rainbow Six series, the various golf games, SOFII, MOH, and the Myst series (Uru's being released on the Mac! Yay!), I have enough to keep me happy and my wife pissed off.
...you really should have got a PC.
And I'm a die-hard Mac nut. I've been playing games on the Mac since Brickles, but actually started thinking about games when I bought new Macs since Warcraft. However, the last time I felt like I needed a new machine, I realized that to feed my need, a Mac wasn't going to do it. I still prefer my Mac, and use it for everything else (which it does just fine at). It (350Mhz B&W G3) can still handle the Mac-only games like the various Ambrosia titles, so I really have the best of both worlds. It's been a pain in the ass learning how to lock down a PC, but I've got friends who are a great help. It sucks, but if you really want to game, you gotta un-switch.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
The Sims for the Mac by Aspyr is an excellent choice. It's exactly like the PC version and works flawlessly with Panther - the only problem is it costs $30 for each expansion pack, nearly $10 more than the Windows counterparts.
to everyone who has a g5 and didn't sign up for the World of Warcraft beta, shame on you. The system specs for the beta are basically a new g5 or g4 with panther. World of warcraft will not only be the best mac game ever... but the best game in general. Let's hope it's not the last from blizzard.
Know thyself...