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22 September 2007
Posted in
MyBlog
So to many it may have seemed a little odd that on NZMac I would be talking about Nintendo. The truth is that many have noticed, myself included, that there is many similarities between Apple and Nintendo.
For example, both are underdogs in their respective industries. Both have altered the thinking about how we interact wit h devices. Both have bought in some degree of backwards compatibility that others have not thought about. Both are outselling their competitors. Both look gorgeous compared to their competition.
There was also rumour that Nintendo was in the process of making games for the iPhone and new iPods. Sweet if this is actually true.
But all of this is leading up to the big one, the advancement of Macs as serious games machines, and the downfall of gaming on the Mac platform.
Macs have had some really awesome games. Marathon was a biggie, Deus Ex was stolen from the Mac, as was Myst and Zork. All titles that changed the gaming world (RTS games were invented on the Amiga with Westwood Studios bringing out Dune). Despite this, when Apple went down in the late 80's early 90's so did the gaming scene and it's only been recently that this has changed. But Macs have had an underground gaming scene for a while with the advent of Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings allowing for OpenSource games like VegaStrike, VDrift, Sauerbraten, Planeshift, and many others being released with Mac versions.
But underground doesn't sell and Macs have only really had Aspyr and MacSoft bringing in ports of Windows games to the Mac. Yes they have been awesome releases but they've been behind by months if not years and very few of them can connect to their Windows counterparts.
Then EA and ID Software said they are going to be bringing games to the Mac around the same time as the Windows products being released and now all of a sudden the Macs are looking like viable machines for gamers again.
The advantage of the Macs over PCs for gaming is the very same reason that the consoles are better for gaming than the PCs. Controlled hardware. Apple makes the OS and the machines and as such any game working on a Mac will work on any Mac. The downside is that to enjoy the latest games you need an iMac, MacBook Pro, or Mac Pro. I've been wanting to play C&C3 when it's released for Mac but guess what, I can't. Why? Because I have a Mac Mini with the Intel graphics chipset in it. This is not supported by the new games which require either an ATI or NVidia card in them. That sucks because the Mini is more than capable of playing highend games.
And this is the downfall aspect of the Mac being a gaming platform. While it would be nice to have an iMac or MacBook Pro, not everyone can afford these machines and so the very ones who would be inclined to play games, can't afford the machines to play them. Thus Macs run into the potential for it's fledgling gaming industry to fall apart before it begins. And this harks back to my first post about gaming where it requires high power to play simple games.
Gaming is really a double edged sword. We want the big names but the big names are crap at making games. But what if Nintendo ported games to the Mac? What if we got well designed, simple to play games, that didn't require a Godzilla machine to play them? What if we got intuitive control systems that add to the playability of the games? What if Apple bought out Nintendo?
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Philip Roy
said:
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Your post reminded me of this event..... http://archives.cnn.com/2000/T...ndex.html Read at the bottom that there was a minor hope that Bungie would still support Macs as much as they had when they started, but the reality was (even at the time) that most felt it was a very strong event against the Mac community |
Philip Roy
said:
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Just found this....the announcement of Halo for the Mac that a year later saw M$ buy Bungie and the Mac version get shelved for some time.... http://youtube.com/watch?v=_KqFJ5pPu2g |
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