Apple Laptops... are there any games?

[The Doctor Alt 8]

A friend has acquired an apple laptop (Don't ask me specifics... I only saw the distinctive logo and the fact that it seems rather.... THIN)


Are games made for these machines?


Any recommendations?

It's his birthday soon.

[Banners]

No - there are no games for Apple laptops.

[Frank]

A voucher to spend in the online game store would be the best idea:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/genre/mac-games/id12006?mt=12

[Art]

There's some games on Steam as well:
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Metascore&sort_order=DESC&os=mac

[von Boom]

If he likes rts games Starcraft 2 runs on mac.

[Goaty]

I only got Mac laptop in work, and it got loads of games in Steam, all Half Life and Portals, all GTA games, Batman both games. and Star Wars!! Perfect for me at lunchbreak.

[The Doctor Alt 8]

Oh Star Wars! he's heavily into that!

[CheechFU]

Getting a mac for games is like getting an snes for photoshop 

[Jim_Campbell]

Getting a mac for games is like getting an snes for photoshop

To be fair, gaming has never been a key demographic for the Mac, although it is amusing to speculate how different that might have been had Microsoft not bought up Bungie and Halo had been a Mac-exclusive title, as originally intended...

Cheers

Jim

[radiator]

You can run Windows on a Mac, can't you?

[IndigoPrime]

You can run Windows on a Mac, can't you?

Yes, either by dual-booting or using an emulator. When dual-booting, Macs perform admirably as Windows PCs (a friend liked the idea of a Mac, couldn't deal with OS X, but said his 'Mac' was the best 'PC' he'd ever owned). Emulation is slower but still acceptable for older games.

But OS X does have a reasonable selection these days, in part through Steam, in part through the few companies dedicated to porting titles (Feral, say), in part through the Mac App Store (which has a slew of iOS ports), and also because of growth in the sector.

Like Jim says, you'd be bad to by a Mac for games alone, but that doesn't say there aren't plenty of great games for the platform (albeit far fewer than for Windows—in other words, pretty much the opposite of the current situation on mobile).

[jackstarr]

had Microsoft not bought up Bungie and Halo had been a Mac-exclusive title, as originally intended...

Yeah, but then Halo would have been a far smaller cult hit rather than the overwhelming success it was in terms of sales (xbox being considerably cheaper and more appealing to the mass market gamer than pc, let alone mac), and I doubt it would have spawned the sort of franchise that it has.

Steam is pretty much keeping gaming on pc/mac/linux alive - and I have as much of a love/hate relationship with Valve and their practices as I do with Apple... 

Keeping more on topic, Doc Alt 8 & co don't have a good history with Steam - but then running native mac games on Steam would probably be easier for them to get running than messing around with dual boots or emulation.

[Jim_Campbell]

Yeah, but then Halo would have been a far smaller cult hit rather than the overwhelming success it was in terms of sales (xbox being considerably cheaper and more appealing to the mass market gamer than pc, let alone mac), and I doubt it would have spawned the sort of franchise that it has.

Difficult to say, though. Apple were pushing it quite heavily at Expos (back when they used to go to such things), Jobs even showed off a demo during one of his presentations, and the gaming press were writing up advance articles touting Halo as an absolute game-changer. Clearly, Microsoft thought that was at least partly true, given that they bought the whole company just to make Halo an XBox exclusive title.

It doesn't seem like a huge stretch to think that Macs might have become a substantially more credible gaming platform...

Cheers

Jim

[IndigoPrime]

I don't see that myself. Apple's never really cared about nor got gaming. It shows off games regularly, but largely because they rapidly show off the power of kit. Got a new iPad out? Great, now here's a high-end gaming shifting polygons and bling around like nobody's business. How about games controllers for iOS?

...

Oh. They're... um... not good, are they?

[Trout]

Work made me take a MacBook Pro.

I dented it a little bit but I grew to quite like it.