Product Reviews

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 way. As you're essentially playing code written for desktop Windows PCs, the games' hardware requirements are, in Mac terms, steep. For starters, they all require a Mac

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with an Intel CPU, so if you're still using a PowerPC machine, you can stop reading right now. Same goes if you've got a Mac mini, a MacBook or an older, low-end iMac - none of the titles will work on the integrated Intel graphics chips they use. Some of the titles require a minimum of 1GB of Ram as well.

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.

Battlefield 2142

There's no way round this: Battlefield 2142 is a shockingly lazy port. It's a team-based first-person shooter (FPS) with a heavy focus on online multiplayer scenarios and, like many online games, it has been frequently patched to optimise performance and keep play balanced. When it starts up, the game checks to see if it needs to be patched and promptly tells you that you need to visit the EA website to install the EA Link. Of course, you don't have the EA Link - for starters it's been replaced by the EA Store, and secondly, it's PC only, as are all the patches for BF2142. Since patched versions are not backwards compatible, you'll find there's only a handful of servers that the unpatched Mac version of the game will play on.

FPS games are usually the most graphically demanding PC games to run, so unsurprisingly, most Macs will need to run the graphics in their lowest settings. Aside from resulting in an extremely ugly game, this also drastically reduces the viewing distance, so you're at a significant disadvantage to your opponents.

The game itself is still largely the same as 2005's Battlefield 2: two teams of soldiers battle to control a level by dominating a series of control points. As you play, you can win medals, and unlock more guns. In Titan mode, your objective is slightly different: the destruction of the enemy team's 'Titan', a massive flying warship.

BF2142 feels stale and dated compared to more recent multiplayer FPS games such as Team Fortress 2, and frankly, if you want some team-based FPS action, you're better off getting Bootcamp, a copy of Windows XP and downloading Team Fortress 2 over Steam. It'll work better on more modest Macs, and it's had far more care and attention paid to it than BF2142.