OpenArena: Pure, Fragilicious Fun

As Tanya pointed out today in her post on the Eve Online update, Macs aren’t generally known for gaming. There are only 70 games listed on Apple’s website under Action Games. While this number isn’t extremely small, it’s not extremely large either. Most commercially available games don’t get ported to the Mac, because of the lack of demand and install base. Only the really popular ones ever make it to our humble screens. They usually come years too late, and the next version is already out for PCs and other systems by that time. So what are we to do?

Turn to the free games, of course! Of all the ones I’ve tried, the cross-platform OpenArena is my clear favorite. Based on Quake 3 Arena’s source code by the legendary John Carmack, Open Arena is a simple yet addictive first person shooter. You shoot at people. They shoot at you. They gib in a splatter of blood. The more frags you get, the better your score.

I’ve tried many of the free and open source games available for the Mac, but none of them match OpenArena. The graphics aren’t up to par with the new games coming out for the PC, Xbox 360 or PS3, but they certainly match (at full quality) some of the earlier games on previous video game systems. When you consider this is free, it’s actually a pretty darn good looking game as you can see below.

Still, any gamer will tell you that graphics don’t matter as long as the gameplay is good - and it is. Whether you do multiplayer or singleplayer, the game is a fun ride even though there’s no real need for depth to it. While there aren’t any real objectives or strategies, there is a Capture the Flag mode that is particularly fun, and takes the game a little bit beyond running around and killing as many people as possible.

Although it doesn’t have the advanced AI and strategic aspects of many newer games these days, OpenArena is my favorite game to come home to after a long day. Who doesn’t like shooting bad guys or their friends? OpenArena is free, open source and available for download at OpenArena.ws for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s still in development, and every new release pushes out a ton of great maps and better features. I think that OpenArena is going to be the best free game on the Mac once it hits 1.0. What do the other Mac gamers out there think?