Articles tagged with: blizzard

Growing up Mac: Windows to Another Dimension

mossy_11 on Wednesday, 05 May 2010. Posted in Opinion

When Windows 95 came out, I didn’t care. Sure, I was just a kid, but I could clearly see that it was inferior to System 7.5.5. Years later I learned this isn’t strictly true -- although the feature gap was almost non-existent (despite what Windows’ marketing suggested), they each possessed different strengths and weaknesses. But all I saw was an ugly interface, a continued reliance on the dated DOS back-end, and the infamous blue screen of death. And games still looked better on the Mac, even with the aging hardware.

It was like a window to another dimension, where somehow everything bad reigned supreme over all that is good. I didn’t like it. I wanted to close the shutters and pretend there was no other dimension. But there was no escaping Windows, and I soon came to terms with my aversion for the OS, thanks in large part to a game called Civilization II and a little thing called the Internet.

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The Current State of Mac Gaming: Commercial Reality of Today

mossy_11 on Sunday, 07 February 2010. Posted in Opinion

Last time, I wrote about history of gaming on the Mac.  We took a look at how it came to be in such a sorry state by the time Apple announced the move from PowerPC to Intel architecture.  We left off with the reaction to the Intel switch from developers, commentators and users. Some predicted the transition would be the final death-knell of Mac games, since there was no longer a barrier to playing Windows games on the Mac. Others suggested it would kill the porting industry, but only harm rather than destroy business for the few surviving developers of original Mac games. The more optimistic types thought it might be a boon for Mac gaming, as both porting and multi-platform development would be significantly easier now that Macs were built from the same parts as their PC brethren.

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