Whither Mac gaming?

I've played loads of games on my Mac, my girlfriend loves those Diner Dash type games, I've played most of the Star Wars games, Call of Duties, Halo.

To say you can't play games on a Mac because you ought to be 'creating' is just snobbism.

More games would be great, I don't want a console or use boot camp.

World of Warcraft smokes on my Macbook Pro... I can even go into windowed mode and multi-task with very little impact. It blows away my Windows gaming desktop I made a couple years ago... which is sad.

I'm an occasional mac gamer, but with my desktop windows system laden with games (some, like Myst 5, which have mac versions) I tend to just reboot my MBP to Windows and use shared folders to play games instead of reinstalling them to OS X. The one thing I do play solely on the OS X side is WoW. I can run it solidly with 6xAA and most things turned up, and with Virtue I'm able to easily switch between WoW and other apps, thus making it a must to play in OS X.

Basically the break down for me, thanks to the Intel Core Duo, is Mac = work and creative, windows = games. Also, I've noticed that games run slightly better in Windows XP than they do in OS X, I've heard this is partly due to Apple's handling of OpenGL. for many games this isn't a deal breaker, but as you approach the more recent releases eeking out a few more FPS becomes important and the choice tends toward XP.

Oh yeah! Regarding the boot camp argument... I had an XP partition on the MBP from when I got my MBP in September till a few days ago. It was there pretty much exclusively for the win versions of Myst 4/5 (my girlfriend had a myst addiction but her crappy compaq could only handle up to Myst 3) and I hated logging out of OSX to play a game.

First of all, Windows power management is horrible. I know you can't expect much battery while playing a game, but OSX gets about an hour and a half of gameplay to Window's hour or less while running off battery. Secondly, I'm the type that likes to leave web pages up for reference that I don't care to bookmark and keep chat windows up in the background. Stuff like that. It ruins everything when I have to log out of OSX just to spend a little of my wait time playing a game.

I used to be a big console gamer... but now that I'm commuting to school early in the morning and late in the evening, I have very little time actually at home to play consoles... or time to dedicate to something like WoW. My Core Duo Macbook Pro has become my main gaming console. Course I don't play many games to start with anymore, but for some nice time passing while out on the road, the MBP does great. Mostly just Civilization IV and Puzzle Pirates at the moment, but Civ 4 and Call of Duty 2 run better then they ever did on my old self-built amd 3500 tower. There's definitely going to be a continued mac market for games for people like me: the mobile gamer.

Yea, I play some nice games in a emulator, what's it's name? hmm... bootcamp. =P

I think this is one area that Apple seems to have forgotten. When someone's bragging about Windows being better than OS X, I can refute every single one of their arguments EXCEPT Windows' much larger game library. I think that the "Get a Mac" ads should highlight the fact that Macs can play games just as well as PCs, and that there is a decent-sized game library available for the Mac. This is what a lot of people don't realise, and hopefully it would generate more demand for Mac ports of PC games.

Been playing World of Warcraft - works wonderfully on the Mac. Other than that, I hadn't played any games on the PC for about a year or two, before switching. So, I didn't miss them when I switched. But I do hope the intel transition and recent growth will lead to more games to choose from on the Mac.

Hey, Starcraft still works. It accounts for pretty much the only Windows or Mac gaming that I have done recently (I play consoles much more, even though I have a Windows PC that is pretty nice).

Amazing enough, the reason I play SC is that many of my friends are still addicted to it.

At work I'm in a sea of PCs, my coworkers play Call of Duty 2 on the LAN. Now with my new MacPro I play the Mac version with them, at the highest possible resolution.