Mac Gaming Suggestions?

February 26, 2009 6:29 PM

MacGameFilter: Please help me find a new action/adventure game to play on my iMac.

I don't care if it's recent or older - just that it has good gameplay.

Games I have liked: Deus Ex, Halo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament, Quake 1-3, Doom 1-3. Also, a long time ago I played Myst briefly while housesitting & remember it as interesting.

So, some kinda FPS/RPG, maybe flavored with either scifi or fantasy motifs (though that's not really necessary), maybe some puzzle-solving... something like that? I do like a good story...

I'd prefer something that has a good single-player mode. I'm not much for multiplayer.

iMac G5, OS 10.3.9 - 11gb currently available

posted by jammy to sports, hobbies, & recreation (12 comments total)

I guess you'd say I'm kind of a frustrated mac gamer. The Mac gaming community is still kind of immature... as far as what's produced for it. There's a bunch of games that run under Cider or something similar, which is basically a layer of virtualization. It really runs in Windows/Wine or an equivalent shell on top of OSX.

Other things we need to know though include your system specs (which machine you're on, how much RAM, what processor and if you have a DVD player) and how much you're willing to pay. It's REALLY hard to recommend something without it, especially seeing as you're two versions behind on the operating system and that stuff important to game development (like SDL and OpenGL as well as the Cocoa framework) have changed a lot since then.
posted by SpecialK at 6:47 PM on February 26

Oops. You said iMac G5. Um. Frankly, there isn't going to be much for you because you're on such an old machine. You'll probably need to upgrade to an intel machine before you can play anything that's come out since 2005 or so.
posted by SpecialK at 6:48 PM on February 26

Diablo II, if you haven't played it.
posted by deezil at 7:24 PM on February 26

Download ScummVM and *ahem* FIND *ahem* copies of the old LucasArts adventure games. The emulator is free and runs beautifully on even older Macs. Hours and hours of adventuring fun.
posted by raygan at 9:20 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

(proselytizing here, mods feel free to delete)
The open-source Quake 3 spinoff I run called ioquake3 has enabled a bunch of derived games that run on the mac as well as linux and windows..
posted by TimeDoctor at 9:28 PM on February 26

Marathon. Sci-Fi? check. FPS? check. Puzzles? check. Mac version? check. Free? check.
posted by Wild_Eep at 9:30 PM on February 26

What is interesting is every game in your list of games you like is on the Mac. It just goes to show the most popular games were usually brought over.

Sadly once intel macs came out, progress on that front slowed down due to the ease of running games in boot camp. And since you are on a G5, not much has come out in the past couple of years that will run on one.

I like Peggle, it is PPC compatible.
posted by OwlBoy at 10:06 PM on February 26

Not particularly current, but the Doomsday Engine will allow you to run the old Doom/Doom II, Heretic and Hexen and Hexen games, provided you can source copies of the WAD files.

And they're not exactly action, but I really like Little Wing's series of pinball games.
posted by permafrost at 4:02 AM on February 27

I enjoyed the hell out of Oni back in the day. The scenario and visual style are derived from Ghost in the Machine, if you're into that. It's not long on puzzle-solving, although just figuring out how to get through each level involves some lateral thinking. The game is oriented towards hand-to-hand combat and stealth at least as much as ranged-weapon combat.

It ran fine on my G5 iMac. The version on CD might only have the "classic mode" game engine, but there is a downloadable OS X engine out there if it's missing from the CD.

If there were a newer game kinda like Oni, I'd buy it.
posted by adamrice at 8:16 AM on February 27

I found Cube which is a Quake update/port and the latest incarnation, Sauerbraten. The frame rate is crazy fast (I routinely get 120+ on my Intel iMac), the game is well set up and incredibly configurable (in that you can easily remake levels, change lighting, do whatever you want).

The input options are a little annoying but its still good fun.
posted by fenriq at 3:35 PM on February 27

Fallout & Fallout 2 were both ported to the mac (OSX PPC I think). They really are much better with a 2 button mouse. You may not be able to find new copies though as the ports were quite a while ago.
posted by chairface at 12:59 PM on February 28

thanks for the suggestions, folks... i appreciate it - but i do get the general feeling that i've already played the best on offer for my (apparently ancient) mac

Marathon seemed promising at first, but i found the constant headbobbing motion made my eyes hurt - also, the fact that it only saves the game at certain moments makes for alot of tedious retracing of steps (i'm leaving it up as a best answer because it did in fact answer my query quite perfectly)

haven't been able to find Oni yet but it looks cool - as do the Quake ports/spinoffs... but I think, upon thinking more, that was really hoping for some single-player fun (a la Wolfenstein or Halo) - maybe should have been more specific about that

anyone ever play any of the Alien/Predator games that made it to mac?
posted by jammy at 1:14 PM on March 9