Game different.

This is the Mac gaming thread. Apple ][ content is welcome, iOS is not. PiPP!N, I leave it to the forum to decide.

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The first computer I ever got to use regularly was a Quadra 840AV that my father got on a fire sale after his work upgraded, or something. We would mostly play and get nowhere in Myst, but especially spend hours and hours and hours of time with Civ II.

Some of the more interesting games we played included Bad Day on the Midway by The Residents. It scared my sister so much that I think my parents threw the game out lol. I've always wanted to find time to sit down and play all the way through this.

Abuse by Crack Dot Com, included in Bungie's Mac Action Sack—The Orange Box before The Orange Box. Very fun side scrolling action game and I think I actually beat it once!

The Action Sack of course included the entire Marathon trilogy and other Bungie hits like Pathways.

There was Ambrosia Soft‘s Deimos Rising, a slick if not terribly attractive vertical shoot em up. I tried and tried to find a longplay with zero commentary and music turned on, because the music is pretty good. Take a look at yt, you’ll piece it together.

Then of course there was Pangea Soft. Anyone who‘s family picked up a G3 iMac knew the budget shareware pack-in action-adventures Pangea would provide: Nanosaur, whose one gameplay track is a serious deep cut from my #InternalOST; and the punchline to all Mac gaming jokes Bugdom. These are very simple OpenGL-ass baby’s games each scored to one repetitive earworm that never lets up. They are nonetheless important touchstones in the Mac gaming canon.

On the emulation side we had Richard Bannister‘s single-handed effort to port maybe every?? emulator out there to Mac OS and then OS X. I would check Emulation.net regularly for updates on my favourite emulators until that wasn’t necessary or I got a life, whichever came first.

Nowadays we have OpenEmu and Steam, but still very few ports, so things haven't really changed much. We can talk about modern Mac gaming if people want! I think the efforts to rewrite the launcher for FFXIV in Swift is really cool, for example. Tell me about other stuff!!

3 Likes

~~~~Shareware Memories ~**

having to use wine to launch games sucks. i don’t want to have to go through a bunch of steps just for a game to probably not work!

>!tommy tallarico was right about gaming rascists: us mac gamers are basically an oppressed group.!<

>!(that joke is supposed to be making fun of tommy tallarico and rascists and mac gamers in case it wasn’t clear)!<

>!((and i am only one of those three things))!<

Our family‘s home computer died in a spectacular way and I decided to replace it with something that was about the same price, but 10th the size and that draws 10th the power and is (depending on your precise workload metrics) probably faster. Once I realized I really don’t like playing games on PC for all the reasons people don't like playing games on their PCs it was a pretty easy choice.

So I've got one of those M2 Mac Minis and I really like it and I installed the one Mac game I have a license for and now _Caves of Qud_ won't go back to full screen anymore because it took over some weird option and there's no way to revert it in the game. This is after I did a 20 minute song and dance to even get it to launch since I bought the game years and years ago on Itch and that package is unsigned for Mac and now I know how to clear sandbox protection flags from a Plist file.

In conclusion, Mac PC gaming is just as bad as Windows PC gaming but for slightly different technical reasons.

# The End

(Not a slam on _Caves of Qud_ or Freehold Games - game is neat and probably pretty Insert Credit.)

@“antillese”#p106002 gosh I sure do love re-disabling gatekeeper with every point update to the OS.

If we want to let rip some long-standing gripes about the direction M/macOS/X has been going since Lion (downward), I will 100% make this our safe space to do so.

@“NoJoTo”#p105993 I feel the same way about my own body as an artist. Sometimes it requires wine to just to launch the project and if I don‘t use the right options I often won’t even work.

>!I have now cleansed your karma by making an even worse joke. You're welcome.!<

Wine sucks, I prefer a brew.

@“connrrr”#p106003 Imagine two semi-trucks: one is labeled BSD-UX and the other is labeled NextStep. Hand these two trucks to a toddler to smash together while maintaining the kinetic energy and damage potential that a truck moving at freeway speeds has. This is what I imagine is happening under the hood of MacOS.

On top of the hood, it's probably generally better than Windows, but it doesn't have the benefit of my 40+ long year relationship with DOS and Windows. So I get stuck in super weird ways that normal humans don't get stuck in. Also the Finder file manager UI sux in ways that I wouldn't be able to conceive if I had tried.

Still **really** like this computer though.

I didn‘t have a mac growing up, but when I was very young I played kidpix at a friend’s house and was blown away by how chaotic it was compared to MS paint. I thought it was more fun to just test all the buttons and hear all the sound effects then actually draw stuff.

I didn't get a macbook until I went to college but I don't think I bought any OS X games except Civ 5, Sims 3, and that awful SimCity reboot. Instead I was popping wine bottles like a sommelier.

lol I remember visiting a friends house and using kidpix to draw a view of a butt from below, like you were looking up at the hole, then using that ? tool to try and make it look like diarrhea. This friends parents were super religious like a rod and todd Flanders situation, and when they saw it they called my mom to take me home

what i‘ve learned, in trying to find the junk i used to play on the mac, is that the junk i used to play on the mac has vanished from the internet. i won’t even bother trying to describe the games i'm thinking of.

but in my looking i found [this youtube playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7448930675416B5B) that might be of interest.

@“pasquinelli”#p106042 have you checked Macintosh Garden?

@“connrrr”#p106044 actually, i have. i‘m taking a look at the fps category again though, you caould say i’m actively doing it. but i‘m pretty sure i’ve done this before.

@“connrrr”#p106044 oh shit! i found the body gaurd game i was looking for. it was an fps where you protect 1 guy from a bunch of bad guys with various weapons. it looked like virtua cop with fewer polygons and smaller textures. it played pretty nice. black shades is what it was called.

https://youtu.be/-nP6q_JkzzA

i'll have to dig in the macintosh garden some more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE4PrIGtoO0

I listen to Linus Tech Tips‘s WAN show sometimes. I definitely don’t go to him for video game taste or opinions at all, but last night he was discussing Fantasian a bit, how it reviewed, and why a stupid boss made him “rage quit”.

Kinda made me wanna play the game, dude

Eventually I may download it on my iPhone, use my iphone->HDMI cable, and my 8bitdo Pro 2 and see how I fare.

I got a fancy mac from work with its M1 Pro chip and it's quadrillion billion processors and I turn it on and it shows me the jankiest login screen at like 3fps and it is hilarious.

I too played KidPix at a friends house. I desperately wanted to play it at home and my parents couldn't figure out how to install it on whatever our black and green monitor IBM? computer was.

Also played a lot of apple II games at school during computer lab which was mostly just playing games like math blasters and Oregon trail. We had a whole lot of games remembering now. I wonder if they were just like anything to get these kids using computers?

>

@“NoJoTo”#p105993 (that joke is supposed to be making fun of tommy tallarico and rascists and mac gamers in case it wasn’t clear)

> ((and i am only one of those three things))

Shocked and appalled to find out that in light of forum user @NoJoTo clearly not being racist or a mac gamer, that can only mean they are in fact Tommy Tallerico

Reposting from the Sokoban thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2kcPycSYcw

speaking of mac gaming at friends house, I went to this richie richie kid‘s house to play warcraft 2 over TCP/IP (multiple game capable computers owning household (this was also the only person I ever knew to own a TG16 which has caused it be the silver spoon console in my mind)). Never really played warcraft so he won pretty easily - but I remember him raging because while the game was at that stage where his guys were slapping my remaining farms or whatever into rubble and all my soldiers were dead, I left to get a sprite and that was "disrespectful.’ I didn‘t quit the match or anything I just got up and walked to the fridge. Still don’t get what the problem was