https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm
This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.
> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used
This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.
https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
How does anyone enjoy playing AAA games these days? Literally feels like a chore. This coming from a previous gaming addict.
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
GORILLA.BAS
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
So probably still in line with what you remember.
Sometimes our tastes change as we age, or vice versa: our tastes remain the same and the world has moved along.
Just to say we all have nostalgia and the good old days are never coming back.
There's a whole movie about Golden Age thinking / Golden Age fallacy by Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris." Worth a watch.
What do you mean by these days? Do you think the games are different? Or just you not enjoying the danger type of content any more?
Games are significantly different, shittified, and dumbed down these days
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I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
Mainly console games. I play some games on Mac but maybe only like 10-15% of Steam library is supported on Mac.
I’d love for games to work on a Mac too. I just can’t justify paying through the nose for a PC when I hate using it for everything else.
Linux is pretty great these days
It still sucks to need another machine to play games that a MBP should easily be able to handle.
Especially give how good recompilation projects are anymore.
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The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
I'm very excited for the future.
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm
This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.
> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used
This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
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Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.
>Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
"windows is the most stable ABI"
https://github.com/NotProtonNot/NotProton