Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘games’

The next step for iTunes…

Now that iTunes has a great Application manager. What would be the next step for iPhone apps and iTunes.

I think a logical new feature would be to run apps IN iTunes. Especially on laptops with multitouch touchpads this would work very well. For navigation tasks you just point and click with a mouse. But for more complex things like playing a game with virtual joypads the multitouch features of the newer laptops are perfect. How you would achieve this on other Macs? Say iMac or even a PC (ew)… No idea. Perhaps a USB tablet thing like a Wacom tablet could leverage there. Or even just Key controls like traditional games do.

So, what do i want? Well… I’ve got some really nice games on my iPhone. Mini-Gore, Assassins Creed, Hero of Sparta etc. Also i have a great App for learning Japanese and many more… Wouldn’t it be great if i could run those in a sort of “video style window” in iTunes.

I do realize that a laptop monitor by no means is the same as a iPhone screen but with the nice graphics of most apps i’m sure you could easily double the resolution/screensize to make it look better on a computer screen and still know what’s what without wading through pixelated rubbish.

When was the last time you got a thank you message from a big game developer, in writing!?

I certainly can’t remember. With the upcoming moving i’m going through my stuff and decided to throw out a lot of crap and old things and came across this flyer included in the Unreal box.

Saying:

If you’re a hardcore gamer, please read this.

When we started creating Unreal almost 4 years ago, our goal was to make the best 3D action game of all time. At long last, we feel we have done just that. To those people that have been following unreal’s development and anticipating its completion as eagerly as ourselves, we truly thank you. Your interest, encouragement and enthusiasm have kept us going through the hundreds of thousands of hours we’ve spend working on this game. We are now very proud to say “it’s done.” Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say “it’s begun.”

With Unreal, we have made our best attempt to push 3D action gaming to new limits. To this end, we have added many features and multi-player game types for the hardcore gamer, like yourself. For example, fully configurable deathmatch, team-play, and co-op play modes are all easily launchable from Uneal’s menu. However, we recognize that we are not perfect, and (like most games) a few bugs may have slipped through into the initial release of Unreal. Additionally, like most new software products, Unreal has some evolving to do, especially since we intend to continually enhance and tweak it to give you a game for the millennium. The key area we plan to work on is, of course, network play. We expect to learn a lot from your feedback and will make improvements accordingly. Please post any and all comments on the Epicgames messageboard at: http://www.epicgames.com

How cool and nice is that We all know Unreal (the real one, not Unreal Tournament), if you don’t know it, you’ve been missing out on one of the greatest games ever made. Both in single player AND multiplayer.

Vista for games?

I am wondering about something. At the moment it’s just a thought…
Lately i bought an iMac 2.4Ghz with 4GB ram and i have a PC AMD 4200, dual core, with 3GB ram.

I am wondering, purely out of a gamers perspective. Is Vista better than XP?
I know all about the bad things Vista can do. I also know XP isn’t optimal on faster Computers. Currently i run XP pro SP2 on both computers for games. But i’m not comfortable with installing Vista only to discover it doesn’t work right.

I don’t want replies bitching on Vista for all it’s suckyness… I know it sucks mainly. but if it runs it runs and it will be PURELY used for games, the PC is for when i have a friend over to play games with and the iMac has OSX for everything else except games. So the ONLY thing that counts is game performance and OS performance while running games.

My main game being Civilization 4, some Steam games like HL2/TF2 and such…

For instance, would Civ4, which is sluggish on bigger games, work better on vista? Or can i put the world reflection on HL2 which are causing some slowdowns sometimes on the PC to “reflect all” instead of “reflect world”. Or can i put “Motion Blur” to high (HDR) in Vista?

Any experiences, tips, hints, ideas or whatever welcome…

CrossOver for Mac

CodeWeavers is at it bigtime with their CrossOver software. While it’s nothing new and has been around for years. Their recently released version 7.0.0 is supposed to be some milestone and huge… Let’s hope so.

I’m installing GuildWars now… And hope it works nicely. It’s supposed to have native support from CrossOver. It’s marked as officially supported anyway. We’ll see…

So far i have created a winxp “bottle” which means that any software i install will think it’s running in windows xp. Should be nice… And i have X11 running in the background which is kinda weird. It’s default setting for graphics is like 256 colors which makes grey look like blue

Took some time before i figured that one out… But ok… It’s set to millions now, just like OSX.

[update]
It’s not so great after all. Sure Guild Wars installs fine, it loads fine it even downloads fine. But damn are the Directx9 shaders poor. Even dx8 doesn’t work like it should so that makes the game near un-playable. Guild Wars being the primary game i play lately it renders Crossover near useless. If i cannot eliminate windows because of one game i might as well reap the full benefits of windows and stick with all my games on the doomed os… So its bye bye CrossOver.

The iMac as a gaming computer?

I recently bought an iMac and kind of feared it would not outperform my previous PC in gaming. I had read on various large mac sites that the iMac “still was not capable of running games” and more of such stories.

Soon i discovered that that was not true at all. To properly play games you still need Windows installed so i installed Windows XP Pro SP2 with all updates and all that rubbish. And some recent games. Like ‘Rainbow 6 Vegas 2′ and ‘Supreme Commander’ for example. Both games are quite heavy on the graphics and memory part of the game and i can play both on 1680×1050 resolution all settings high without a hitch.

Also battlefield 2142 which is a bit older but still a heavy game specs wise runs fine with 64 bots enabled on Singleplayer. No problems there.

All fullscreen and high resolution and settings. I don’t see why the iMac would be a bad computer for games. It outperforms my guestpc which is a AMD Dual Core 4200 with a 512MB Vga. While the iMac is a Intel C2D 2.4Ghz with 256MB Vga.