The Sandbox

Here's one of several articles out about gaming on the Mac. With John Carmack at this year's WWDC keynote, showing off id Software's latest engine, id Tech 5, and Electronic Arts declaring a renewed love for Macs, people are singing hosannas about games coming to the Mac again.

Nope. Not going to happen.

Someone named Tuncer has a blog on Inside Mac Games, and he has entered an opinion in the recent, very minor dustup between Valve and the Mac gaming community over HL2. Gabe made some comment to the effect of, "Apple is hard to work with," to which Tuncer says that Valve made an "outrageous" demand of $1m upfront for taking the project on, that the only thing here is greed greed greed.

Um, yeah. Tuncer, the clue phone is ringing, and I think it's for you.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

The news about the new MacBook Air cannot have escaped anyone reading this: if you're online at all, you have seen effusive mentions of this new, incredibly tiny, laptop. And it is pretty cool, if you don't mind sacrificing almost everything on the altar of size.

But for gamers, the sacrifice is large. Integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics with 144mb of shared video memory is a poor display driver, very poor, and games from six or seven years ago can tax it. While obviously Apple has no intention of targeting gamers with this road warrior laptop, it is another sign that Apple never targets gamers. Which I find odd: the Aqua UI and technology like Quartz Extreme run better the better your video card is. If you please gamers, you'll please everyone with your performance. And you'll be able to run the most lucrative consumer software outside Microsoft Office.