Gaming on a Mac? Why so hard?

Bioshock for the Mac is coming soon. Photo / supplied

Once upon a time I didn't mind that there weren't that many games for Macs.

There were a few - usually the best - and they always looked great. There were even Mac-only games. Developers like Bungie, which pushed the boundaries with the marvellous game sci-fi Marathon. It was utterly stand-out and absorbing, but then the unthinkable happened. Microsoft bought Bungie. Goodbye Mac development.

Of course, there were other gaming houses, and some of them had had great success on the Mac. The Sim City games, then The Sims. Myst.

Increasingly, though, games were coming out for PC, then being recoded for Mac some time later. Halo, which Bungie had been working on before Microsoft, came out PC only. (It eventually got ported to Mac.)

But the lag! Now the Mac gaming flag is pretty much carried by three companies only, and even they seem to be losing interest. The last strong Mac gaming houses are Aspyr, Feral Interactive and, in a different league but still strong, Freeverse.

Aspyr specialises in ports of great games like Call of Duty, a 'first person shooter' that started off as a World War Two game but which has become, with CoD 4, a more morally ambiguous shooter set now-ish.

The game is terrific, but it came out for Mac so far behind the PC and other platform releases, the few Mac players got abysmally fragged when they joined the online games because their experience was so far behind.

They didn't know the maps and they were still working out the moves. The other players, with months of experience on them, not to mention rank and perks, gleefully fragged Mac players.

And hacks. We brag of having no malware, but it works the other way in games, too. There are no, or very few, Mac hacks. If PC users combine hacks with their hard-won experience, the Mac gamers are like green and blinkered troops going into action with obsolete weapons. It's no fun at all.

Feral had Fallout. Fallout was great. A little glitchy but absorbing, set in a dystopian future where you could play as a bad person or a good person, or just as yourself. The game changed accordingly. But then Feral dropped any plans to release Mac versions.

Feral has changed its tune a little lately, with the announcement that Bioshock is coming to the Mac. Bioshock (R17) has won many awards from the gaming press and holds metacritic.com's joint highest review score for any PC game ever. And it's out for Mac on October 7th.

This game is dystopian and Sci-Fi and looks really cool ... but if you're an avid PC gamer, you'll be chortling, as you've had it for so long already.

Freeverse is in a different league because of the types of games it creates. Game play may be sophisticated, but there's an emphasis on board games and card games reinterpreted for computers, and its action games are, well, cartoony.

In Freeverse's favour, the games are popular with kids, and with older computer users who like the older games reinterpreted. Most game companies don't exactly target older players. And for those wanting to push their brain power, Freeverse makes brain teaser games like the Big Bang Brain Games.

But I like sophistication and first-person action if I'm going to assign any of my precious time to a game. Most of the action games are ports - the code gets rewritten for the Mac OS with greater, or lesser, success.

Ported games can be good, mostly, but Mac gamers often have to put up with glitches, lag and other problems.

Many of these ported games originate with the big PC game publishers like Activision and EA Games. Two years ago, Electronic Arts decided to actively support Mac OS X games, which was seen as a significant boost to Apple's gaming ambitions. Mac games were to be simultaneously released alongside their Windows' equivalents.

The new 'Mac' games were going to be converted using TransGaming's Cider engine, which - unlike direct reprogramming (porting) efforts - wrapped a layer around the game's original code to make it Mac compatible.

EA was thus hoping to cut down on development time, and also to guarantee equal support as multiplayer games, patches, and other features could immediately be shared between Mac and Windows' versions.

Patches had created chronic difficulties for games in the past, as developers had to convert code both to a new OS and to a new processor architecture at the same time. Mac patches often lagged behind Windows' patches.

But EA's plans, supported by Steve Jobs no less, never really seemed to happen. It certainly doesn't seem to have led to better game availability.

But things have changed. Apple now represents 12 per cent of computers in US homes. This was just revealed by The NPD Group's 2009 Household Penetration Study. Last year, the same survey showed Mac penetration at 9 per cent.

Of those 12% of Macs in US homes, nearly 85% also had a Windows PC - or perhaps they are running Windows on their Macs?

And maybe there's the real rub. Why program games for Mac at all when Mac users can run Windows, giving them access to any and all the games that PC users play? The Mac hardware is (mostly) up to it.

And now there's a further obfuscation - the iPhone. So much game development is going into the iPhone and iPod touch, what does that leave for Macs? Seemingly, not much. But my attention span for a game that fits in my palm is not great, no matter how good, and thumbing through games just doesn't seem like a good way to play, especially when your thumb is partially covering the gamescape.

Of course, gaming also pushes tech - Apple's video cards, as so may have pointed out in the comments, are not only expensive, but not exactly the latest. If there were more games, there'd be more pressure to keep up.

But NVIDIA is halting Nforce integrated chip investment with Intel until an issue between the two hardware companies is dragged through the courts next year. This could jeopardise development of video chipsets in relation to Apple.

Isn't that just great?

Meanwhile, if any Mac gamers out there play Call of Duty 4 on Macs, let me know. A server is booked for the MadMacs clan every NZ Tuesday night. All ages, all experience. And the clan communicates freely in Apple iChat as they play.

No PC users allowed.

- Mark Webster mac.nz