Electronic Arts Delivers OS X Games

pete314 wrote to say that "Electronic Arts had broken its WWDC promise to launch games for OS X on the same day as the Windows version." Thankfully, the company has come through, with four new titles now available for order: Battlefield 2142, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Need for Speed Carbon, and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars . Thanks to mr100percent for the update.

Pretty inaccurate

[mr100percent]

MacNN reported on Sunday [macnn.com]:

Four titles are available now for order: Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars (trailers of which are available on Apple's website) are the "first games ever" published by EA for Mac OS X, according to release. The games are now available for order via the Apple Store and at Apple's retail stores nationwide later this month: Need for Speed Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be available on Tuesday, August 21, and Battlefield 2142 and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars will be available on Tuesday, August 28.

The company also said that Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08 and Madden NFL 08 are expected in the "September/October window."

Heck, did anyone even check EA's Mac platform page [ea.com]?

Re:Boot Camp?

[MBCook]

Boot Camp is Windows.

It's Apple's name for basically a partitioner, a boot loader, and a set of drivers.

I have a MacBook Pro and I use it for one thing and one thing only: Windows for Half-Life 2. It runs fantastic, but since Windows is on the bare metal, this is basically hat you'd expect.

If you don't want to go that route (which is really the only good way to do things right now for games) there is through these special game packages (they should work pretty well, but don't expect decent performance I'm betting).

Past that is Parallels (which is amazing) and it's new ability to run Direct3D stuff. That said, Half-Life 2 runs with all the details on very well on my MacBook Pro at full resolution (15" model). In Parallels it stutters unbearably at 640x480 with lower details. We are talking up to 5 (yes 5!) FPS. This is partly due to RAM (when I'm in Windows, it's got a full 2 gigs, when in OS X it has to share so it gets about a gig), partly due to optimization (they just released that not too long ago, they can tweak for better performance), partly due to the nature of Parallels (it will never be as fast as running native). For simpler things I'm sure it will run great. I bet you would have no problem with Half-Life, or Quake 3, or any other game from more than a few years ago. But for something as complex and detailed as HL2, it wasn't great.

Note that HL2 was the only thing I tested as that's all I was really interested in playing.

Hope that answers your question.

Apple failed to come out with good gameing systems

[Joe The Dragon]

There mini still has the low and gma 950 only 1 gb of ram and laptop parts.

The I-mac update only added mid-range video cards and there build in screens remove choice and make games slow down when running at full screen.

The mac pro at $2000+ is over top in cost and only comes with a low end 7300 and 1gb of ram in the base system and adding ram costs a lot because of the FB-Dimms and the video card up grades are a rip off as well $249 to go from a 7300 gt to a a ATI x1900 XT with a EFI rom or you can add one to your mac pro for $399.00 so you are paying $150 for a 7300 gt with a EFI rom. You can much better video cards on the pc for the same price this may be part of why EA is pushing the games back.

Re:Apple failed to come out with good gameing syst

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The mini's a very entry-level Mac. It can be used as a media center and for basic use. It's not a hardcore gaming machine.

The iMac is the mid-range desktop solution, it comes with an OK graphics card.

The Power Mac is a powerhouse, but it's mostly for professionals.

The Macbook is somewhere between the Mini and the iMac. It's the entry level mobile platform.

The Macbook Pro is the professional powerhouse mobile offering. It has a pretty good (DX10 actually) video card.

Macs aren't aimed at gamers, since in the past most Mac users have been audio/video professionals and basic internet/im types.

Apple isn't a gaming company. They've never claimed that. But they CAN be used to play games, just like any PC.

Mac games :D

[Vipersfate]

I'm running bootcamp on my mac, and I can just play the windows version of the games, but it is nice to see that games are being ported to Mac!

Re:Boot Camp?

[SuperMog2002]

How about this, I use BBEdit and vim running on OS X to edit my asp.net files, then command-tab over to VMWare to use Visual Studio to compile and run them. It's often faster than using the Dell the company provided since I have a much faster processor and more memory.

Apple and Gaming

[LKM]

Well, when talking about Apple and gaming, it's kind of important to keep in mind Apple's history. During the early years of the Mac, Apple was scared that people would perceive it as a toy. This is kind of what happened to the Amiga 500, by the way: A powerful desktop computer that was mainly used for gaming. Apple, however, wanted a "serious" computer, a business computer. Macs didn't look very serious next to DOS computers with their green screens and text input, so Apple discouraged game development on Macs so as not to give people the impression that Macs were toys.

Later, Apple tried to change that and introduced the Pippin, a Mac-compatible gaming console, to increase the Mac gaming market share. It failed. Then, there were the Sprockets on pre-OS-X systems. Basically, that was Apple's gaming API, and it didn't survive the move to OS X.

After that, Apple never really did anything for gaming. I think they've basically given up caring too much. Gaming is nice, but Apple doesn't really need it to survive, and after their ambivalent past and many failed steps to get gaming on the Mac, I think they've just stopped caring.

Re:Run it under VMware or Parallels.

[Professor_UNIX]

uhm... IIRC VMWare doesn't even support 3d acceration.

You recall incorrectly. VMWare Fusion and Parallels support a number of DirectX 8.1 3D accelerated games. Granted, they don't support the newest DirectX 9 or 10 games, but that support will come eventally... in the mean time we can play older DirectX and OpenGL games.