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Starcraft 2 Mac Beta Woo!

This is an amazing thing to see on your computer screen. After months of waiting… the Starcraft 2 Mac Beta Client ready to launch!

Okay, we’re all suited up and ready for some 2v2’s! It’s really an amazing thing to be playing the Starcraft 2 beta on a Mac… the game runs flawlessly on a Macbook Pro with medium to high settings at 1280 x 800… it looks really nice and runs really smooth! I’m impressed, Blizzard!

Nothing like spamming tons of hydralisks. Look at those pretty explosions!

And more hydra destruction!

Lonely zealot wanders around early on in a match.

Anyway, after only playing Starcraft 2 for about 4 games I think it’s safe to say this game is going to rock. For any Starcraft nerd the gameplay will be super familiar, but there are some new shortcuts and different units and buildings that are confusing me a bit. I love that you can zoom in and out of the battlefield, it really helps when it starts to look like your base is getting ridiculously cluttered.

With the SC2 mac beta and the imminent May 12 release of Valve’s Steam for mac, I do believe Mac gaming is going to take off in a direction that it hasn’t for what… 15 years? Woooo!!

The game is beautiful and the amount of detail in each unit is pretty cool. I’m happy to see that the game runs great on my Macbook Pro and am looking forward to playing the single player campaign!

EDIT: I added links to the screenshots – these screens were taken at medium quality textures and terrain, etc. – I later upped a bunch of the options to high and the game still ran great… but I got lost in playing the damn thing. Later on I’ll get some nicer screens!

http://www.starcraft2.com

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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.

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Machinarium – Making Adventure Games Cool Again

Brought to you by Czech independent game studio Amanita Design, is Machinarium, the coolest adventure game I’ve played in years. This game brings me back memories of old LucasArts classics like Full Throttle, Sam and Max: Hit The Road, and the Monkey Island series. The game also draws a lot of similarities to my all-time favorite adventure game, The Neverhood, which I’ll have to devote a whole post to at another time…

Machinarium won the award for “Excellence in Visual Art” in the 2009 Independent Game Festival and it shows. You find yourself immersed in the game’s beautiful hand-drawn world. You control a little robot, thrown out with the trash, to rescuing his girlfriend and thwarting a terrorist attack. The music is also amazing and really adds to making the world feel complete.

The game features no text and the story unfolds through series of animated speech bubbles with cute and emotive robot grunts, showing you flashbacks and giving you ideas of what to do next. To get through each stage you need to solve a series of puzzles, and thankfully, most of the items you need to solve each puzzle are contained within the levels. The puzzles are fun and challenging, save for one nearly impossible game of Gomoku, or Connect-Five. There are only a few instances where you need to use items from other screens, so the experience is a lot less frustrating than some of the LucasArts games that got you caught missing one item from who knows where.

That being said, aside from certain puzzles taking a long time to figure out, the game felt a little short once it was all said and done. Machinarium’s world is beautiful but we don’t get to see enough of it! My only other nit-picky issue is that you can only bring our hero to specific walking points, meaning when you click an area, you are stuck waiting for him to get there, or hoping he can hurry back fast enough. There is no in-between. This means that every point you can take the robot is an important point, which helps in a way, but becomes a little cumbersome. There is also one instance where an action item is stuck to a ceiling and because it’s so dark, it’s hard to notice it’s there! Anyway, very little gripes.

Beautiful art, great music, fun puzzles, cute robots- I want a sequel.

Get it now – if you buy it digitally you get the soundtrack, too! If you’ve got a PC, nab The Neverhood while you’re at it.

More screenshots after the jump… (more…)