Product ReviewsGames and Leisure
Early in his keynote speech at WWDC in June, Steve Jobs announced that EA was coming back to the Mac 'in a big way'. He quickly moved on to preview Leopard and launch Safari for Windows, leaving little time for any clarification of what precisely EA's return would entail. Several months later, and with the games having arrived, we can see what Mac gamers have to look forward to. On the one hand, EA's Mac titles come from some of the firm's biggest franchises and cover a wide range of genres. So we have Need For Speed Carbon, a racing game, Battlefield 2142, a team-based first-person shooter and Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the latest iteration of the real-time strategy series. Joining these are two sports titles - Madden 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 - along with the tie-in game for the latest Harry Potter movie. That's the credit column, but on the debit side, while the latter three are all current, Carbon, BF2142 and C&C3 are all nine months to a year old, so keen gamers may well have already played them on other formats. However, the most questionable aspect of these new Mac titles is that technically, they're not Mac titles at all. They run using Cider, which allows Mac OS X to execute code that has been written for Windows. It's not an emulator, but a compatibility layer, and it translates the game's calls into instructions that the Mac OS can understand. In an ideal world, this translation would be invisible to the user. In our experience, we had mixed results, with some games the translation was barely noticeable, while in other games the translation was comparable to a five-year-old telling you to close your eyes to make them disappear. Despite the fact the underlying code is Windows-based, all of the games install in the usual OS X
While Apple keeps up to date with Intel CPUs for its machines, it's nowhere near as competitive in its selection of graphics cards, and when it comes to games, it's the graphics card that has the biggest impact on performance. This means that even when the games run, Macs can't max out the graphics options and as a result, they're not as good looking as they are on a PC. Still, this doesn't mean they should be completely written off. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars There have already been more than three sequels to Command & Conquer, but by giving Tiberium Wars dibs on the official number '3', EA is signalling it's a return to the core concepts of C&C. The result is a game that might lack originality but is an extremely polished and finessed take on a rapid real-time strategy game. Once more Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod are seeking to use the cancerous growth of the Tiberium crop to destroy society. In single-player mode, you can take command of Nod to make this happen or opt to fight back with the Global Defence Initiative (GDI). Full-screen videos set the scene between each mission, which while cheesy, have a decent cast (you'll spot actors from House, Battlestar Galactica and even Lando from Star Wars) and it keeps the stakes for the missions high. The mission objectives are varied: you're still commanding from an isometric view and in most you need to build up your base, and then decide which attack and defence units to build. The developers have added a few options to make combat more tactical - you can now garrison units inside buildings - but it's still adrenaline and speed that win the day rather than deep thinking. Not that this matters too much; the game's slick presentation make it plenty of fun. Two patches are available for the Mac too, showing the developers are taking this version seriously - unlike BF2142. By Alex Watson
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