Mac gaming - the love that dare not speak it's name?

super_furry

Anyone here into Mac gaming? I'm about to inherit an early 2012 27 inch iMac which looks like it'll be a fairly decent jump in specs from my 2010 Vaio laptop which was really starting to chug with anything released in the last 18 months.

I've never had a Mac before but a sizeable Steam library means that I'll have a fair few cross platform Steamworks games to jump straight into. Anyone else have any experience of gaming on a Mac and know what kind of performance I can expect?

I've been reading that dual booting with Bootcamp may give better performance under Windows but have no idea how messy this could get. I know that there has been a big uptake in companies supporting the Mac platform over the last couple of years but it stills seems to lag behind in terms of big name games.

melekalikimaka

super_furry wrote: »

I've been reading that dual booting with Bootcamp may give better performance under Windows but have no idea how messy this could get. I know that there has been a big uptake in companies supporting the Mac platform over the last couple of years but it stills seems to lag behind in terms of big name games.

its not messy and a better option if you have a lot of steam, native games run grand, just not a great selection

grizzly

Check out this forum over at Macrumors. Lots of info on bootcamp and which games run natively.

K.O.Kiki

I'll tell you one thing: GET A SECOND MOUSE.

The Apple Magic Mouse is lovely for everything EXCEPT gaming - the scroll "wheel" software is so sensitive I had to rebind Next/Previous weapon in TF2 to keyboard to stay sane!

*edit*
Oh yeah, and lots of mods don't work. So that's a bummer.

Creamy Goodness

not to mention if you need to hit mouse 1 and 2 at the same time or in quick succession. pain in the balls

johnny_ultimate

Yep, regular Mac gamer although noticing my MacBook is struggling with some newer titles at this point.

Some ports are undeniably shoddy. The Darkness 2 struggled to run at minimal settings, whereas Driver San Fran runs beautifully at surprisingly high ones. I believe there's a porting company whose work is best avoided as they tend to be quick and subpar jobs. Forget who!

Indie games for the most part tend to run just as well as you'd expect, with exceptions of course. Shame we are still waiting for that long promised Hotline Miami port

It is handy to remember that Mac OS oddly enough has inbuilt support for PS3 controllers if you're looking for game pad support. Only some games will directly support it, but you can always use a keymapper. You can with a bit of effort get a 360 pad working but PS3 is just a matter of plug and play to get it synced.

tinner777

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Yep, regular Mac gamer although noticing my MacBook is struggling with some newer titles at this point.

Some ports are undeniably shoddy. The Darkness 2 struggled to run at minimal settings, whereas Driver San Fran runs beautifully at surprisingly high ones. I believe there's a porting company whose work is best avoided as they tend to be quick and subpar jobs. Forget who!

Indie games for the most part tend to run just as well as you'd expect, with exceptions of course. Shame we are still waiting for that long promised Hotline Miami port

It is handy to remember that Mac OS oddly enough has inbuilt support for PS3 controllers if you're looking for game pad support. Only some games will directly support it, but you can always use a keymapper. You can with a bit of effort get a 360 pad working but PS3 is just a matter of plug and play to get it synced.

Johnny how hard is it to map a Nintendo game cube controller? Would it work with gta

Zillah

I've played quite a few games on my 2011 23" iMac so I think you should be fine. Don't play natively though. Bootcamp is actually really easy and very effective. Virtualisation is also an option. You'll need to keep newer titles fairly low, but as an example, I was able to play Mass Effect 3 on it with acceptable performance.

As said though, I wouldn't even contemplate gaming with the magic mouse. Any cheapo windows mouse is fine for anything except top level first person shooters in my opinion.

K.O.Kiki

tinner777 wrote: »

Johnny how hard is it to map a Nintendo game cube controller? Would it work with gta

>Cube pad

Wait, what.

tinner777

sorry i meant n64 controller, i got a controller adapter, but i can't seem to find what games it is compatible with

cherryghost

Origin is coming out on Mac in a few months, as is Sim City of course. Apparently the next DICE engine will support Mac too so make of that what you will.

johnny_ultimate

tinner777 wrote: »

sorry i meant n64 controller, i got a controller adapter, but i can't seem to find what games it is compatible with

Haven't a clue, TBH. I assume you'd need a special driver as well as the adapter.

cherryghost wrote: »

Origin is coming out on Mac in a few months, as is Sim City of course. Apparently the next DICE engine will support Mac too so make of that what you will.

GOG has recently added Mac support too. The gaming potential of OSX has come on in leaps and bounds since I first got my MacBook and was happy to get World of Goo and Spore (!) up and running.

K.O.Kiki

tinner777 wrote: »

sorry i meant n64 controller, i got a controller adapter, but i can't seem to find what games it is compatible with

Assuming it's a cheap adapter, you might get D-pad and button functionality as a basic HID-compliant USB device.

I wouldn't assume more than that.
Might be time to invest in a 360 pad.

5uspect

I don't really use my 2010 13" MBP for gaming it hasn't really got the grunt, but it's great for those indy titles when your travelling.

I even played Portal 2 on a power socket equipped train from London to Edinburgh once, with the trackpad, good times!

tinner777

emm just got a wiimote connected to my macbook, any of you lot play any wii games on your mac?

lazlo

I was a mac gamer back in the early 90s - before Apple became popular again. That really was the gaming wilderness. Still we could sneer at everyone because we all had Marathon and no-one else did.

Also the mac versions of Prince of Persia surpassed all others

5uspect

lazlo wrote: »

I was a mac gamer back in the early 90s - before Apple became popular again. That really was the gaming wilderness. Still we could sneer at everyone because we all had Marathon and no-one else did.

Also the mac versions of Prince of Persia surpassed all others

Mac gaming Hipster! :pac:

lazlo

I'm proud of my heritage. Mail order was the only way to get new games. Once I remember walking into a GAME store and there was a shelf devoted to make games(about 6 titles in all and I'm pretty sure one of them was Flight Simulator so technically speaking it was 5 titles)

My heart skipped a beat that day

Sierra Oscar

I have a few Steam games that can be played on my MBP, havent tried any of them yet. That is mainly due to the fact that I am not a huge fan of laptop gaming though.

Retr0gamer

Ah Marathon. The Mac users were going on about how they had a game more advanced and better than Doom. I won't dispute the more advanced but we all just ignored them since PC gaming had moved on beyond marathon.

Kinski

Years and years ago I got Powermonger on the PC for Xmas (it was a sort of spiritual sequel to Populous). Turned out that the floppy disks inside were the Mac version...so disappointing. And now I realise I've still not played that game.

lazlo

http://macintoshgarden.org/

screw all the news games

Sad Professor

Any long time Mac users remember Ambrosia's Escape Velocity series? Man, I loved those games. I don't think it's possible to run them anymore though.

I don't play many games on my Mac these days. I'm not sure my 4 year old MacBook Pro is up to the task. I've also been burned by too many bad ports.

lazlo

Ambrosia were a great developer. I loved Maelstrom most of all. Escape Velocity was excellent too. I still have an old G3 that works somewhere running os8 so I think they're all still playable

balkieb2002

lazlo wrote: »

Also the mac versions of Prince of Persia surpassed all others

This was one of the first games I fell in love with and one of my first steps into gaming on a computer.

I think my father had at the time a Apple Macintosh II (or something similar) but all I would use for was POP. Still haven't completed that game

lazlo

balkieb2002 wrote: »

This was one of the first games I fell in love with and one of my first steps into gaming on a computer.

I think my father had at the time a Apple Macintosh II (or something similar) but all I would use for was POP. Still haven't completed that game

I remember beating it on my halloween holidays when I was a 11/12 - the second one took forever to beat. To this day it has the the most poxy hard ending to any game ever made.

There is a screen on level 6 where you have to die, let the game over screen roll and then you will be resurrected and imbued with the sacred flame. Only with the sacred flame can you finish the game.

I had gotten to end of the game and was beating my head against a wall for months and months. I think I only ever came by solution by accident on replaying the game. Still it was an awesome game in spite of this disgustingly cheap mechanism

pedatron

Sim City is something I would like on my Mac now. Steam collection is limited but I'm fairly content with my collection right now anyway!

Virtual

I play a lot of games on my MacBook even though you can tell most of the time its not the best choice. There are gaming laptops that do a much better job. The iMac you have will run must stuff but do yourself a favor and run them all in bootcamp because the Mac ports are very bad. Sometimes the same game could run a lot better on the same machine but in Windows. Good luck and have fun. If you do decide to game only on Mac then try the Blizzard games, they usually have good Mac versions.

super_furry

TF2 on a 27-inch is glorious. Surprised by how well it handles the Source engine games and even the Witcher 2 runs butter smooth in native resolution. Going to have to pick up a copy of Windows now for bootcamp. Anyone know if I'd be better off with Windows 7 or 8? I'm guessing the tablet/tile nonsense of Windows 8 offers nothing.

Virtual

I installed Windows 8 and switched back to 7 for now. The drivers are experimental at best in some cases. I just had too many problems running it in bootcamp and I found myself 95% of the time in Desktop mode so... no point for 8 at the moment.