Articles tagged with: feral

What the Mac App Store Means for Mac Gaming

mossy_11 on Friday, 07 January 2011. Posted in Opinion

The past twelve months in the world of Mac gaming have been interesting, to say the least, with the arrival of Steam for Mac accompanied by several high-profile releases and greatly increased coverage from the press (somewhat over-enthusiastically, in some cases). All this attention has left some pinning their hopes to the new Mac App Store as the final piece in the puzzle of Mac gaming’s rise to popularity.

Are they justified in their celebration of what is really just another distribution platform? Can the fact that Apple is involved, and, more importantly, that it is built into the Mac operating system, be decisive in proving the Mac once and for all as a viable gaming platform? What does the Mac App Store actually mean for Mac gaming? Let’s take a look.

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News Round-up: November 10 - December 5

mossy_11 on Sunday, 05 December 2010. Posted in News

apple-logoIn Apple and Mac gaming news, iOS 4.2 was released two weeks ago, bringing “multi-tasking” functionality to the iPad; a Steam hardware survey suggests that most Mac gamers are using laptops; Feral Interactive has released a Mac port of popular action-RPG Borderlands; Aspyr’s Mac port of Civilization V has landed; Telltale has released a poker game, Poker Night at the Inventory, with Max (from Sam & Max), Strong Bad, The Heavy (from Team Fortress 2), and Tycho Brahe (from Penny Arcade) as the opponents; id Software’s Rage has hit the current generation of iOS devices; and the Grand Theft Auto 3 trilogy has finally made its way to OS X.


stellaAtari 2600 VCS emulator Stella received a big update last month. Version 3.3 lists around twenty bug fixes, improvements, and additions to graphics display, application performance, debugging, and more. See the official Stella news page for release notes and the main site for the latest download link.


MacifomCycle-exact and Cocoa-native NES emulator Macifom has been updated to version 0.15. This new version adds support for games that use the MMC3 mapper on TxROM boards and games that were designed for SUROM boards, in addition to providing various other improvements. See the official site for full details.

More updates after the break.

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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