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Why Apple Should Port Games
DanTheMan writes "For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least two for Windows. It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Apple to port games. By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now. Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"
I think you can forget about games for PCs or Macs, as that whole market will soon be irrelevant. Gaming is all about consoles and mobile platforms nowadays.
Here is a fine example of a Mac zealot not realizing that a person with low income cannot afford "equivalant quality parts"... hence the reason they go out and buy a $500 gaming PC, which can play more and newer games than a high-quality Mac anyway! So, let's see, $1499 for a Mac, $500 for a PC. That's $1000 difference!!!!
Meh.
Xbox isn't a gaming machine either. ;-)
I mean, think about it for a moment before modding me as a troll. Xbox is a hamstrung Celeron (128k of L2 cache), with UNIFIED MEMORY, and a CISC CPU running Windows. Honestly, how good of a gaming machine do you think it's going to be? As it would turn out it's about on the level of a GameCube in terms of hardware power, but without the advantage of a console game library. Xboxes tend to get more PC ports than anything.
But calling the Xbox a gaming machine is a bit much for me. It's honestly just a stripped down PC running Windows...
(ok, now you can mod me as a troll. I'm done.)
I was a Mac User for ages, and this sure is a sour topic. Here is the answer to a majority of the Macintosh problems:
Not enough people own Macs. When you are only 2% of the global computer userbase, nothing gets ported to your platform, and when it does, it is buggy and you are ALWAYS the last to get updates/patches.
Don't take my word for it, the high and mighty Adobe even launched a "PC Preferred" campaign, and refused to port Photoshop to OSX at a time when EVERY mac was shipping with OSX. Apple users had to wait for the next whole release.
These aren't games I am talking, I am talking about Graphic software. Mac zealots love to talk about how the Mac is for artists.. pfft!
Alias Maya (industry standard 3D software) was FINALLY ported to OSX, and it was a joke! It was so buggy and lacked so many options, it wasn't even SMP capable!! heh..
Um, where did you get your info? Halo was NOT a Mac-only game originally. Jason Jones had switched to the PC and was coding Halo on a PC. Second, MS didn't swallow Bungie, moron. Jason and Alex willingly sold their company to MS for the opportunity; it was a BUSINESS deal. Alex had been making other deals (hello, Take-Two Interactive) before the MS buyout. So please, don't spread Mac lore as truth. You weren't there to know what was going on inside the company.
-- Not a
Which makes it particularly amusing that all of our in house color is calibrated both to proofer and press through 3rd party calibration software.
I guess Apple's isn't that great huh?
Sometimes my arms bend back.