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Codeweavers’ Crossover Games Rules (and so does Team Fortress 2)

After being a computer game fiend for almost all of my childhood up until early college, since moving exclusively to using a Macbook, I have been absent from the gaming world for quite some time. A combination of not having enough time (not that I have enough time now…) and just lack of interest had me disregarding computer gaming in favor of console games when I lived with a roommate who decked our apartment out with a huge flatscreen TV and an XBOX 360 and.. Call of Duty 4 and Soul Calibur 4.

Anyway, recently I stumbled across the wonder that is Wine, an open source software application that allows Windows applications to run on your Unix-based operating system (such as Mac OS X and Linux) by implementing the Windows API and running the applications natively.

Being the lazy nerd that I am, I got frustrated while attempting to get some games running through Wine binaries and eventually stumbled on the wonder that is Crossover from the talented crew at Codeweavers. Crossover is a third-party application that strives to make your Mac-Windows experience super easy.

As you can see, the Crossover UI is very easy to use. The software comes with a pre-filled list of software that installs automatically and also gives you the option to install unsupported Windows applications manually. Steam is running without problem in the background. Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 ran flawlessly, but those games are on the older side.

My new favorite game (aside from Machinarium, of course) is Team Fortress 2. I used to love Team Fortress Classic, which is fun but also happens to be one of the ugliest games I have ever played. TF2 on the other hand is attractive in its awesome cartoon style. The character modeling reminds me heavily of The Incredibles. TF2 offers a few different gameplay modes: capture the flag, arena (team deathmatch), control point maps (along with a King of the Hill variation like Halo), and payload maps (where on the offensive, you and your team must push a cart full of bombs across the map through different waypoints, eventually into the enemy base. defensive is you attempt to prevent this from happening). There are also nine character classes, all with different weapons and strengths and weaknesses: the scout, soldier, pyro, demoman, medic, heavy, engineer, sniper, and spy.

TF2 doesn’t run perfect on Crossover, I find the game crashing every so often, but when it’s not crashing the game itself actually runs quite well. I had the game running with all settings on high, and while the game ran fine (with quite a good frame-rate), it would always run into a hiccup and simply crash. Toning down the high-dynamic range lighting and water reflections seemed to solve this problem mostly. Settings jacked up to their highest on Counter-Strike: Source and HL2 led to no similar crashes, however.

It’s a charming experience to have a PC game running on my Mac without having to actually run Windows via Boot Camp or Parallels. A license for Crossover (or its games-specific version Crossover Games) is fairly priced at $39.95, and includes a year of support and updates. Codeweavers’ tool is sweet and I applaud their programmers’ efforts at making these games playable! I recommend buying Team Fortress 2 on Amazon as it comes in at just under 10 bucks, while digital download through Steam is, for whatever reason, $19.99.

Here’s two more screenshots… none too exciting, was too busy playing to take any intense action shots, but this gives you a rough idea of how the game looks on Mac. Very nice! The guys over at Codeweavers have gone great lengths to make games playable and I look forward to more updates to get this game up and running at higher visual settings.