This is the Mac gaming thread. Apple ][ content is welcome, iOS is not. PiPP!N, I leave it to the forum to decide.
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 SackâThe 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 Softâs 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, youâll piece it together.
Then of course there was Pangea Soft. Anyone whoâs 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 babyâs 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 Bannisterâs 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 wasnât 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!!