EA, Others Commit to Gaming on Macs

[JohnnyWalkerBlackLabel]

WWDC 2007 - For many, the biggest complaint about the Mac is it's lack of games. Apple wants to change that. The company said Monday that EA Games would return to the platform in addition to several other developers, helping to further make the Mac as a platform for gamers.

Among the games coming to the Mac would be Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The games are expected to simultaneously release in July.

In addition, id Games will produce several titles for the Macintosh platform using new technologies that would allow for rendering of intensely detailed environments without a significant performance hit. More details are slated to be announced at the E3 conference.

A recommitment to Mac OS X by gaming developers is essential to Apple's continued success in growing market share, analysts have said previously. Gamers are typically the most likely to upgrade systems the quickest in order to ensure the smoothest and fastest gameplay.

Details on retail availability of the titles were not clear as of press time. More details to follow soon.


Uh oh..................
might spur off that console Apple's been hinting at for a while

[JohnnyWalkerBlackLabel]

GIVE THEM A CHANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sheesh

[hondarobot]

Yeah, Pippin 2. It's never gonna happen.

Apple could do great things. An Apple gaming console won't fly. They should focus on the cell phone arena, further explore that branch of the tech tree.


:2cent

[NINgirl25]

GIVE THEM A CHANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sheesh

I worked at EA last year, and all I have to say is they dont care a whole lot about quality most of the time. That and they dont treat all thier employees very nicely, although the campus in Redwood City is very pretty.
I wish thier games didnt suck so bad.



But I guess my views on thier games is baised since I really dislike sports games :(
Just my opinion though.

[hondarobot]

You worked for EA, NIN? Interesting.

I can't say I liked any EA games much, personally, but they did nail at least one great line of dialog in Medal Of Honor (a console game, I had a weak moment):

In the middle of a vicious fire fight, you hear a nazi soldier call out:

"Lay down your weapons and surrender, Jimmy Patterson! We will treat you with compassion and kindness!"

I laughed my ass off at that.

Anyhow, nice to meet you. There's quite a few of us gamers here in Hotel HA.

[werwt22]

GIVE THEM A CHANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sheesh

I worked at EA last year, and all I have to say is they dont care a whole lot about quality most of the time. That and they dont treat all thier employees very nicely, although the campus in Redwood City is very pretty.
I wish thier games didnt suck so bad.



But I guess my views on thier games is baised since I really dislike sports games :(
Just my opinion though.

PSH YEAH RIGHT. C&C Generals was the shit and still is.

[NINgirl25]

You worked for EA, NIN? Interesting.

I can't say I liked any EA games much, personally, but they did nail at least one great line of dialog in Medal Of Honor (a console game, I had a weak moment):

In the middle of a vicious fire fight, you hear a nazi soldier call out:

"Lay down your weapons and surrender, Jimmy Patterson! We will treat you with compassion and kindness!"

I laughed my ass off at that.

Anyhow, nice to meet you. There's quite a few of us gamers here in Hotel HA.

i really used to dig WWII games years ago, but now they just keep pumping them out, and i find no real fun in it anymore :(
Warhawk for the PS3 has kind of that old WWII feel to it but its also mixxed in some crazy looking technology in there too, so its like future and past mixxed together and looks like a lot of fun. i cant wait to play it online against other players. hrmmm but what Im REALLY looking forward to is Heavenly Sword and Assassin's Creed. those games make my inner geek drool in anticipation.
i find it difficult to really get into FPS's nowadays. I think mainly because I like to see my character, wich is why I love Star Wars Battlefront 2.
3rd person view games are my favorite as long as the gameplay is also good. like resident evil 4, that game was awesome.

i wish i had an xbox 360 and ps3. i only have a PS2 and PC right now, and my PC is crappy.

[flabbybody]

can someone explain why Apple stock took a tumble today after Jobs got done with his presentation in San Fran today?

[dangel]

That was one of the reasons why I got a mac so I could use it for work and a console for gaming. no distractions.

Though I don't think that I'll be that distracted by any EA games - saying that I did like Burnout 3 and Oddworld Strangers Wrath.

[hondarobot]

Apple should focus on cell phones. I'm serious, they should. If they dont, the stock will continue to drop. They are becoming the 21st century Betamax and they really should pull their head out of their ass.

And NIN, as far as RPGs go, wait for Fallout 3. That's all I gotta say on that subject.

[whatsupwithat]

mac will rule soon...as they should have long ago. Just a matter of time.

/hates PCs
//really hates Windows operating systems

[JohnnyWalkerBlackLabel]

Apple should focus on cell phones. I'm serious, they should. If they dont, the stock will continue to drop. They are becoming the 21st century Betamax and they really should pull their head out of their ass.


ummmmmmmmm sorry dude that title has and always will belong to Sony

[JohnnyWalkerBlackLabel]

the more I think about this the sillier it gets, the Xbox 360 is basically as close as you'd get to Apple making a gaming platform, I say give Apple a chance because no one gave Microsoft a chance when the Xbox was just a concept daring to go up against Sega, Sony, & Nintendo, and now they are damn near on top of the platform industry.............

As far as Apple sticking to phones, you've really got me LMAO over here on that one. If you'd asked anyone back in 1985 if they'd ever thought the Macintosh would evolve into something you could carry in your pocket people would have looked at you like your insane. What they've done as far as the iPhone is phenominal but their possibilities are limitless under the current architecture to just state they should "focus on phone development"

[hondarobot]

Apple is smart, but it's weak. Betamax was a superior format, but who owns Betamax now?

My prediction: Apple will shift gears and focus on cell phones, or they will produce some amazingly innovative variation of the Theremin, or they will be forgotten in five years.

Wozniak will score an E! Special or something on the History channel (and I know he's not involved with Apple anymore), but he'll probably be working on something else by that time.

Apple is dead, it just hasn't gotten itself buried yet. Not it's fault or fair, but shit happens.

[SarahG]

...For many, the biggest complaint about the Mac is it's lack of games.

It isn't the lack of games, its a lack of games that people actually want to play... beyond that, the good titles that DO end up getting ported to the mac, are done so horribly that there really is no point whatsoever to even remotely consider using the mac platform for multiplayer game applications- especially for lan type play.

I would then go so far as to say an other large complaint against the mac platform is the lack of 3rd party support... ok sure there are alot more things (both software and hardware related) that you can do on a mac now then ever before- but thats cold comfort for anyone looking for, for example, a mac pci video capture card (or a vid capture card that also has a rf reciever built into it). With PCs there is an almost unlimited range of such products, from subentry level all the way up the scale, for the mac not so much (in t erms of the pci vid capture cards with rf recieving abilities- there is no such product for the mac on any quality level whatsoever).


The company said Monday that EA Games would return to the platform...

This is misleading; EA never left the mac platform, mainly because it was never directly IN the platform. When a EA title is ported to the mac platform, its done threw a select group of smaller companies that they outsource the project to- Aspyr is the most famous of these. The problem is that Aspyr has never really cared much at all about the quality of such port jobs and they routinely botch what would have been the most desirible titles.

It is standard protocol that when Aspyr ports a EA title, they do not include the support for LAN play with PCs- every major EA title for the mac going back many years (such as C&C Generals, Homeworld2, whatever) could only ever multiplay with other macs (essentially making the macs worthless for any type of lan gaming setting). The end result is the mac game will cost 2-3 times as much as the PC version (with EA titles), will be under supported (not as many patch releases as the PC versions etc), and will not be able to play with the vast majority of the computers out there.... so you're paying excessively more for an inferior product (and then they wonder why no one buys mac games anymore with the rise of bittorrent...).

As to ID software, ID software has always been one of the good guys in the mac platform... in many examples, both semirecently and going back well over a decade, the mac versions actually hit the shelves at the same time or prior to the PC versions of the titles (unlike EA which usually will not see a mac release for several months after the pc version is released- my theory is that this is related to companies like Aspyr doing all the work and not EA itself...). ID and Blizzard have always generally at least made an effort to get the two platforms to be able to multiplay each other, and I suspect this was one of the deciding factors behind why the Blizzard successes such as Warcraft (talking the RTS here not the MORPG) were also successes on the mac platform.

All this being said, now with the switch to intels, the rise of bootcamp, etc- anyone who is serious about gaming who has a mac, should probably just boot into windows for it if they want to play in lan type settings because, IMO, that is at the moment the only reliable way to play all the titles with pcs... and even if companies like EA licensed developers (such as Aspyr) start making honest efforts to release quality products, it is still not going to release a mac version of every title so having the option to just boot into a fully supported OS makes more sense, especially if the EU goes to a lan with their intel mac and has the host propose they play something which has never (and will never) see a mac version (and I am not just talking legacy titles such as the original sections of the C&C series- Westwood for better or for worse didn't know two shits about marketing to mac users and then wondered why no one knew of the existance, let alone knew to go out to buy the first of the C&C series... and based on those sales figures everything from RA2 to Tsun never saw mac release).


My prediction: Apple will shift gears and focus on cell phones, or they will produce some amazingly innovative variation of the Theremin, or they will be forgotten in five years.

Apple's main focus in terms of R&D cost hasn't been computers in a while, in fact that is part of the (many) reasoning behind the decision to go to intel cpus. Consumer products have become the company's major focus in R&D in part because of how successful and profitable it has become. This has its own dangers, if they can't keep up with the consumer electronics field they might end up like Packard Bell (which is now only in France and selling a few computers but mostly kitchen appliances if I remember correctly).


Apple is dead, it just hasn't gotten itself buried yet.

The death of apple has been predicted, called out/etc so many times from so many people over the years, it almost needs its own equivalent to Goodwin's law... the one thing people fail to keep in mind in making such predictions is how addicted the mac users are in, well, buying more Apple products, and no matter how bad some of Apple's decisions may be (i.e. killing the Clones, the performa series, etc), no matter how bad they may screw the EU (PB5300, tibook designflaws), no matter how piss poor their customer service becomes (not covering under warranty failures relating to product design flaws)- their EUs always end up running back to Apple for their next computer in the end. I say this speaking from expierence, I have had a love-hate relationship with Apple since I got my first computer in 1988... every mac I have bought going back 4 or 5 purchases I swore at the time as "being the last mac I'd ever buy" and yet just this year I got an other one.



Gamers upgrade via the specs of either one game or entire fleet of games that come out. Motherboards, BIOS, Memory, HD's, (Raptors) Power supply, Video cards, etc. Not going to ever do that with a Macintosh and get a way with it.

Which brings up an old problem that just won't go away; Apple's philosophy when it comes to computers is to make things as easy is possible, to take away as much control as needed to do that, and ultimately bring the platform down to the lowest common donominator in an attempt to reach a level of existance that anyone can understand... the problem with this is that Apple tries to handle as much of the software, drivers etc end as possible... thus one of the oldest problems from a gaming perspective has been that even if a company makes a decent graphic card for the mac, the drivers for it are made by Apple (or released solely by apple) and intigrated into the OS in such a way that the card never sees its full potential... only sees updates if it is related to security or OS stability, and so on. Java is a similar story and partially why even in today's world macs have trouble with a huge list of java related browser based interfaces (from an education institutional perspective; many of the online classroom interfaces employed with colleges- think webtycho, angel, blackboard, etc either do not work on the mac, do not work well, or lack the vast majority of the features as the same interface running newer versions of java in windoze).