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

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.

Need For Speed Carbon

The Need For Speed series has been running for more than 10 years and has survived due to its adaptability. The most recent versions have reacted to films such as The Fast and the Furious and focus on illegal street racing and car customisation. Carbon's story carries on from NFS: Most Wanted, but it's not too hard to pick up the gist of what's going on: you're a racer trying to make a reputation for yourself and need to put together a crew to race other drivers for control of territory.

Winning races translates into having cash to spend on 'pimping your ride', with taste being the only limit on what you can do - if you want to paint your car pink and stick a spoiler on the back that looks like a giant Gillette razor, you can. As well as tweaking your car, you can also buy new ones from a vast range of muscle cars, Japanese tuner mobiles and exotic supercars, along with hiring street racers for your crew. These 'wingmen' can be used in races to block your rivals and scout out shortcuts.

There's an enjoyable variety of race types, from long blitzes through the night-time city to speed trap races, where the victor is the driver who records the fastest average speed through a series of speed cameras. The game's biggest weakness is the simplistic AI in the races - tangling with the police is much more fun, but it's only a peripheral activity for progressing your career. Carbon is best played with a USB gamepad, and graphically, while it lacks widescreen support, on most Macs it will look as good as the PlayStation 2 version.