Is EA Committed to the Mac or What?
Let’s take a trip down memory lane; before the iPod Touch announcement… before the aluminum iMacs were unveiled… Little bit more, and ah hah! Here we are, it’s June 2007 and we’re standing at the Moscone center.
You might’ve guessed it, we’re at WWDC2007, where EA (and ID Software, for that matter) announced a slew of games for the Mac. At the time, it seemed promising; both Bing Gordon and the legendary John Carmack were enthusiastic about their support for the Mac.
Fast forward to today, and things don’t seem as pretty as they were. Roman Loyola over at MacLife recently tried out Madden NFL ‘08, and ran into a lot of graphical problems. Now, I will admit that I’m not much of a sporting fan, I enjoy a good game every now and then, but that’s it. However, looking at the screen shots that Roman took really made me cringe.
The game was tested on the new aluminum iMac; this one was a 20-inch model with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and an ATI Radeon HD2600. The configuration screen above was unreadable, but it seems like the problem is currently isolated to some ATI hardware. EA admits they are aware of the situation (especially with ATI hardware), and says Apple will be rolling out updated graphics drivers “later this month”.
In comparison, the game ran perfectly fine on a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a nVidia 8600M GT graphics card. It’s these sorts of issues that grinds Mac gaming to a halt, but who’s fault is it? Is it ATI for their horrible driver implementation? Is gaming not an area that Apple can be bothered focusing on right now? Or is it game makers like EA and id Software that just aren’t very committed to this platform?
Me? I personally think it’s some combination of the three. I don’t believe gaming on the Mac is a major market right now; most consumers buy Macs to manage their digital lifestyles. Besides, hardcore gamers are usually fairly tech-savvy and prefer tweaking their own hardware, something that Apple isn’t too particularly fond of (just look at the iPhone). Right now, if you’re a hardcore gamer, I only have one thing to say. “Buy a PC” or console.
Here’s another screenshot of some in-game action. Notice that some of the items in the top bar are overlapping.
Do you think gaming on the Mac is something that we’ll see more of? Have you tried Madden NFL ‘08 on the Mac?
““Buy a PC†or console.” I think you forgot an option : bootcamp Windows XP and voila
Bootcamp all the way. It’s easier and cleaner than mucking with games on the mac.
If you want quality gaming on the Mac, you should just think about Blizzard’s games and not much more, unfortunately. But yes, Boot Camp is there to save the day!
Well, y’all just said pretty much what I was gonna say. Blizzard does an awesome job, and I would love it if more developers did. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I’m running Bootcamp too, and I really enjoy Orange Box right now. Nuff said
i bought battlefield 2142 for mac, and it would crash after about 5min and now it won’t even launch, it’s quite sad
Get a PC or a console if you *really* want gaming. And to those who say “just Bootcamp it!”, Bootcamp doesn’t help the shitty hardware that Apple sticks into its machines (even the Mac Pro’s cards are pretty bland).
Truth is, gaming on a Mac is even more of a joke than gaming on Linux.
I am really annoyed, I know that mac’s hardware sucks, but they should make it work on all ther computers, i have a macbook thatI bought about a year ago, and I finally got 2142 for it, i pop it in and it says that i need to upgrade my hardware after like an hour of installing. I mean come on!! not to mention the time before that I bought it offa amazon and when i got it it was for pc so for me to get it for mac and find outthat it didn’t work took about a month and a half because they weren’t giving me a refund
It’s not all the Mac hardware that sucks, only the video card… Apple has some work to do on this part before we get the (almost) perfect machine. But it seems that they sleep on their banknotes nowadays.
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