Golden eras of gaming: Macintosh

In the days before Apple started using Intel chips and offering Boot Camp, gaming on a Mac was a different proposition than it is now. Instead of switching back and forth between OSX and Windows, you only had OS, and had to wait for game developers to create games for the Mac or port Windows games across, and the Mac had a small enough share of the market that neither option was a top priority. The funny upshot of this was that it made compiling a list of the ten best games for the Mac a less troublesome process than most of our top tens. The games that got ported tended to be the nine or ten star games, rather than the seven or eights, so this list not only avoided having any dross to choose from, but we even avoided having dilemmas over the great but not spectacular games. Us Mac users may have had to wait a little longer, but we got good games in the end and, you know, our computers worked properly, and intuitively, and without fifty dialog boxes and a paper clip every time you wanted to rip a CD. On that smug note of simplicity, we found the one rule for this list-you have to be able to play these games on a widely available Mac OS. Sorry to those recent PC games that can be played on Boot Camp, and sorry to the wonderful likes of Syndicate which needs a very specific third decimal point version of an old OS, but to come to this party you need to be accessible.

10. Rise of Nations
Given the Mac’s reputation for attracting black polo neck wearing chin strokers, it’s no surprise that our list contains a few click-happy strategy games. Rise of Nations is the first of several entries on the list, and it’s the ideal real time strategy game for those who like things nice and complex-it has all the usual resource gathering, troop management and climb up the technology tree found in most RTS games, but adds in a few items more commonly found in the slower, more complex turn based arena. Your military and cultural strength affect the size of your borders, and armies that cross into enemy territory suffer attrition damage unless kept well equipped by supply vehicles. Offering a staggering array of unique units throughout the ages, ranging from war elephants through to paratroopers, Rise of Nations gives you options aplenty, and only the most capable players will be able to keep their armies from turning into a rabble as you throw your artillery, armour, infantry and airforce into the fray. Or, of course, you could just do what the chap in the video did, and go nuclear...

9. Deus Ex
First person shooters, eh? You can’t get away from them, and they just funnel you where they want you to go, doing what they want you to do, using the almost superhuman powers they give you...except not this time. In Deus Ex you’ll find that you’re picking tactics to suit your style of play or the needs of the moment, and that the game is adapting to those choices rather than simply slapping you down. What will slap you down, of course is the baddies, who are much, much tougher than you, at least until you polish up your skills and weaponry. Wait a minute, genuine player choice? Levelling up your skills? Upgrading your weapons? That’s right, the reason why Deus Ex has been called the greatest game on the Mac and even, according to one magazine, the greatest PC game of all time, is because it takes the tried and tested action formula of an FPS and bolts it onto an RPG. Marvellous.

8. Halo: Combat Evolved
Xbox fanboys may not like the fact much, but it’s well known that their console’s darling was originally developed for the Macintosh. To be fair, it was also intended to be an RTS as well, but that’s by the by. The fact is, Halo on the Macintosh has been a consistently rewarding experience. The clever AI, the wide open spaces, the vehicle levels are all just as much fun on the Mac as they are on the Xbox. On top of that, the age old anti-console cry is true, mouse and keys really are the best way to control a shooter. Finally, there’s multiplayer. As Combat Evolved predated Xbox Live, there was no way for Xbox players to enjoy multiplayer games without setting up a local system link or using third-party packet tunnelling software. Not so for Macintosh users, who got quick, easy multiplayer straight from the box and, until very recently, could always find a good clean or modded game online.

7. Age of Empires 2
Developed be Ensemble Studios and released for Mac and PC in 1999, AoE II used the familiar RTS template of gathering different food and construction resources using villagers, and constantly making decisions about whether to invest those resources into more villagers for increased gathering, into technology that would make your resource gathering more efficient, or into military units, because eventually either you’d be making a grab for the opposing player’s territory, or you’d be defending his grab for yours. So far, so familiar, but Age of Kings had more up its regal sleeves than an economy to micromanage and pretty villages to build. The rock-paper-scissors system that made each type of military unit vulnerable to the skills of at least one other added an incredible amount of fun to the game, as long as you and your opponent didn’t cheat and look up the appropriate counter measures. Ah, the joy of building a huge army of rapid-firing Chu Ko Nu Chinese Crossbowmen and marching them into enemy territory to turn their soldiers, villagers and fields into pincushions, and the yelps of frustration they’d let out as they tried to build an opposing force of skirmishers in time. And with so many unique units, the pendulum could swing back and forth. It took me ages to figure out the rather obvious counter to War Elephants, and until I did all my city building efforts were ground to rubble by the tusks of those armoured Persian Pachyderms.

6. Unreal Tournament
For some strange reason, Unreal Tournament has long been the Mac shooter of choice. We say strange not because it doesn’t deserve to be, but because all the competition it had on PC was still in contention on the Mac, it just didn’t manage to split the audience as much. Instead of competing groups of Quake or Halo fans, all the attention on the Mac, at least back then, went to Unreal Tournament. It’s not just the well known appeal of an arena shooter that makes Unreal a winner, it’s the meticulous level design and perfectly balanced selection of weapons, not to mention the chance to record your best kills.

Part II after the jump...