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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 294. We talk gaming on the Mac with Scott Johnson (Film Sack and App Slappy) and Brian Ibbott (Coverville). Valve and Steam on the Mac. Does this change the game or just expand it? Ye old Mac vs. PC as gaming platform debates. Blizzard, Starcraft II Beta for Mac in April. iPad, does it mean anything for gamers?
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I’m trying to grok the comment about there not being an app store for the Mac. Have you seriously missed it? It’s been there for years — the only difference is that Apple does not control the flow of cash from buyer to vendor as it does in the iPhone/iPod app store.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
Does it have thousands of free and low-cost apps? You betcha. Are new apps being added daily? You know it! Could it be polished? Sure. But it’s there, now, today…
What more are people expecting? Do you want Apple to force you to only buy from this source?
Really excellent and thoughtful discussion. Great job playing moderator, Adam.
Great show, and a timely discussion of gaming on the Mac. As a gamer and Mac user of several years, it’s great to see a serious move by Valve to bring gaming to the platform via Steam.
On my MacBook Pro I have a XP on Bootcamp, and actually run Steam on this,and have to say it is a superb system. One of the games I have bought is Half Life 2, and it runs incredibly fluidly on my machine – in fact you can run it with fluid frame rates even at max resolution (1440 x 900) WITH antialiasing and AF. What this shows is that games fully optimised for the operating system run well (in this case Direct X based) and I can imagine that a full “port” to the Mac will offer a similar polished experience. Some games, such as Doom 3 certainly work better on Windows, as these have not been optimised for pPen GL as I understand it, and so again, thanks to Valve for making the effort for us Mac users.
However, even with these non optimised games, you’ll find they run really well – in fact even on the energy saving integrated nVidia 9400. Anyone who’s played Tomb raider Anniversary on this low energy setting will testify to the power of the nVidia chipset.
It does raise another question – when Apple refreshes the MBP range it might be that the new core i5/7 chips will not be married to an integrated nVidia chipset (due to ongoing licensing issues) and so a drop down to integrated Intel graphics would likely be a step back. I’m sure though that Apple will include discrete cards with these systems, so that even entry level MBP’s can run games well.
Regarding your discussion on cloud gaming – there are a couple of developers who are using the cloud gaming in beta form right now – Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes. Quake Live beta gives you a glimpse of what first person shooters could be, its not the best graphic of the day considering games like Modern Warfare 2, but runs entirely in the cloud. All you need is a web browser, works on pc and mac. Battlefield Heroes, a cartoon third person shooter, kinda in style of Team Fortress 2, only works on the pc because it has a small program it runs in the background.