great but its this a emulation of windows version of the game i hear something about it...

Damn it. Forget that other crapware and just give us the Command & Conquer already.

Humm I wonder what the performance will be like since those games will be sort of emulated using something equivalent to WINE or Cider on linux. However if the id tech 5 engine really takes off you could potentially have lots of cutting edge games on OSX running natively.

Why do people still call Macs Macs and everything else a PC? Macs are just PCs manufactured by apple that run on their OS.

Yay, Apple! Boo, EA.

@Moonshadow101: IBM. Thats what did it. Before IBM convinced everyone that a Mac was not a "PC" all home computers where Personal Computers regardless of their manufacturer (of which there was more than just Apple and IBM at that point in time). Then when Microsoft started pushing Windows, they ran with it. Eventually what was called a IBM PC compatible turned into PC once IBM basically stopped making personal computers.

Good to know that when I finally get my fingers on a Mac Pro, my gaming needs will be covered. The problem is that they're being covered by EA, who is a nothing but a front for the Borg.

@Moonshadow101: Because for the longest time their hardware was different. No one is ready to accept that theyre the same now. Minus the lockout that Mac OS has to keep from being installed in PCs.

I would rather be a PC gamer becauseI don't have a Mac. Maybe this will add to the Mac gamelist that is only Photoshop (And thats not a game lol).

My Mac and FCP may be what pays the bills, but I'm glad to hear it may now consume my free time as well.

Here's to hoping the vague November-January Mac Pro refresh comes with a graphics card from this century, or at least a price break on the old crap.

Oh, and keep 'em coming EA.

Aren't all of these just winelib 'Cider' games? It basically means they build the games using the WINE support library, which provides a WIN32 API for UNIX/Linux platforms. In other words it's pretty far from ideal. In fact you can't have native 64bit games and lots of other technical limitations.

I use WINE directly to play Windows games under Linux that don't offer native ports. Sometimes I have to alter things a typical user wouldn't understand for optimal performance still. WINE's HLSL to GLSL shader translation, lightweight API facade, etc preform well for sure. However it would still be much better as a native port. One guy could port these games in a fairly short amount of time for OSX/Linux. In fact that's how most games are ported now anyway. Shout out to Ryan! I come to expect disappointment from EA, so it's not a huge shock. ^^

I heard CCP is using winelib for Eve as well. More developers seem to be jumping on the bandwagon. I guess it's better to have hamfisted support than no support at all.

I should also note OS X is improving GLSL support for 10.5, and it might even catch up to Linux this later year. Apple should focus on third party OpenGL driver support, and quit pussyfooting around with their half-ass inhouse driver.

Breaking retro news! According to Wikipedia EA has supported Atari Jaguar, CDi, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, and MAC platforms since 1985.

people knock apples drivers because they tend to perform poorly compared to pc counterparts, but people assume they're like this because apple can't do better. In a lot of ways, that's not the case. In certain areas, such as gfx, its done to segregate access and increase stability. Not to say that that makes everything ok, but at least you'll know what you're complaining about, instead of assuming something else. That is, they want their drivers to be crap.

You know theses game are not native MAC game but running via a EA emulator ;)

It's official: Harry Potter is on every system known to man.

@ludwigk:

You have to gimp any game or 3d application you make for OS X due to the horrible driver support. As a graphics developer it's like a slap in the face. I have to scale down all the nice features for OS X, and even PS3Linux does a better job with *software OpenGL on a few features. That is not acceptable.

If we got RSX access for Linux then the Open Source community would be able to run laps around OS X OpenGL and GLSL support in short order. The bar is so low it would be hard to fail. Actually, I'm trying not to break into a cursing rant it's such a farce. Apple has a lot of making up to do. Hopefully they won't drop the OpenGL 3.0 ball like they fumbled '2.1' support.

great, their re-releasing old games!

tell me when they release new games at the same time as they release them for other platforms. even better, make some original games for the platform.

Oh man i thought this was a joke at first.

Oh, I love Kotaku. Except here.

This press release surfaced about a month ago, at Apple's WWDC conference, EA promised these games, in fact Battlefield 2142 was already supposed to be on Mac.

Dated June 11th:
[www.macnn.com]

Naturally, I can't find it anywhere.

And recently, when Madden '08 was released on every platform known to man, including the NES (ha), EA said it was delayed on the Mac. Sad, really.

August 17th:
[www.appleinsider.com]

@mphz: Dude, why you gotta hate on the Borg like that? At least they're efficient!

@glaeven: EA makes original games for just one platform? Why was I not informed of this development?!?

Isn't it just a little pathetic for the apparently swarming thongs of people who love PC gaming to abuse another group of gamers for being smaller in numbers and games than them? Makes me want to go find some people playing MUDs on their UNIX terminals and kick sand on them.

I would love to see what your favorite games would look like today without Macs to push the envelope of graphic design, not to mention 3D. Photoshop just to begin with, not to mention a consistent focus on true WYSIWYG color matching and print/screen consistency that Windows still has yet to demonstrate. Adobe among others have done a remarkable job of making XP an OK platform for graphics development, but none of that happens without the Mac platform creating their company in the first place. Thats separate from gaming engine development, one of the few areas where MS has demonstrated that it understands the role of games as loss-leaders for general PC sales and Apple simply hasn't. My point is just that all those textures and other pretty things come from somewhere, and many of the best come from Macs.

Not to mention if you like Halo you owe Alex Seropian, the man who (and I can't find my M1 strategy guide w/the interview to double check it so I'm paraphrasing) once said the only way Apple could improve its PPC machines would be to put Marathon in the system rom.

But go ahead, and enjoy your jokes at our expense. I'll always run some form of Mac OS, I don't care what it takes to make that happen going forward, until something better actually comes along. Being in a minority doesn't make that more or less right than if I was in a vast majority, its just how it is.

@Forcepowered: Yeah, we posted the news within minutes of the announcement in June.

See? --> [kotaku.com]

EA just wants to remind you of the good news!

@Mongoosekun: Aren't all the "good" PC games using DirectX and not OpenGL? So is it really fair to compare Apple's subpar support of an Open Standard (not a good thing, don't get me wrong) to something MS develops in-house and hand-in-hand with the top (only, Intel really doesn't count) two GPU manufacturers? As ludwigk said the OS and the way it handles graphics is designed differently. If you get a chance sometime try manipulating graphics in a Core Image enabled App on a really nice Mac (G5 or Pro), then you see where Apple has been spending their non-OS software R&D time. I'm sure if Apple had the pull MS has with Nvidia and ATI and thought people would actually code for it they could do something equivalent to DX10, but for better or worse Steve Jobs doesn't think Gaming is important enough to make a priority. If anybody had doubts about that before the gimped GPUs in the new iMacs are further proof. Contrary to popular opinion all Mac users goose-step in time to everything Steve says and does, many of us feel games are quite important....not EA games but good games.

Feel free to correct me as you obviously know more about coding games than I, sorry to double post but I missed your comment which was probably the most interesting of the first 20.

@DaiMacculate:

"Contrary to popular opinion all Mac users goose-step in time to everything Steve says and does"

I think you meant "not all Mac users" dumbass ;)

@DaiMacculate:

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERDD RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE
Seriously mate, I don't care what I hypotheticaly owe apple when I start world of warcraft or dawn of war. The only person to blame for the sorry state of gaming on apple's platform is apple.
You're not a oppressed minority and you're a computer owner, obviously a computer owner lucky enough to spend thousands on a machine.

So quit with the dramatics, this is a company we're talking about. You don't actualy have a personal stake in this.

"All four games will be available at retail within the next two weeks."

Available at what retail outlets? The Apple store? I can honestly say I have never seen a boxed copy of a Mac game at any retail store I've been in otherwise .. it's hard enough finding the PC version of most titles, and that's even at gaming stores.

@hvnlysoldr: I LOL'ed!

@DaiMacculate:

OpenGL is the only game in town on OS X. In fact you translate D3D to OpenGL for said games in case you didn't understand my post. This means if your OpenGL support is horrible you're really in for it. The infamous issues with DOOM3 are well known by now. Games ported to OS X have to use workarounds due to lack of shader support, or worse just drop graphics features. The crux of the problem is Apple doesn't have good drivers. Supposedly 10.5 addresses this, but I no longer have a mac to even bother with the beta. A lot of people just wrote off the platform.

A 'good' OpenGL 2.1 driver would be nice before OpenGL 3.0 is upon us. Hell the Geforce 9 GPUs will be out by the end of the year if the engineering tweaks are finished soon. They are more than likely going to be the primer OpenGL 3.0 GPU for a while. Apple has a lot of catch up to do more or less. A lot of magic will be starting to happen in 2007 Q4. It'll be fun and scary with the first major OpenGL release in a while, so keep an eye out for shiny demos. ;)

@ShepherdDog: I think you read alot more "rage" into my post than was actually there, I was just pointing out how pathetic the attitude is. Did you not find my comment about kicking sand on Unix nerds humorous (or at least an attempt)? I get tired of having to constantly put smilies on things to make myself clear. It makes me sad that people are ignorant, thats all, and since I've been around and playing games for awhile I added my two cents.

Also, didn't I make the point (albeit vaguely) that I'll keep using MacOS regardless of what the future holds? If Apple announces tomorrow that they are selling their whole Mac division to MS to focus on iPods and MS is killing further OSX development you'll still find some version of Mac OS running on my machines 10 years from now. I'm not passionate about the corporation or its employees, but about having a computer that works the way I think it should more than 25% of the time. I spend alot of my personal and professional life using one, why shouldn't I care alot about how it works?

@Mongoosekun: Heh, I did a bit of reading on what you're talking about between posts (and I was never disagreeing that OpenGL for Mac sucks, which I think you knew), now I see where I was confused on your post before. I still think it just comes down to Apple not trying hard enough to do their own 3d game API back when it would have mattered, but you're right that ship has sailed and now we're down to hoping for a better implementation of what we have in OpenGL.

@DaiMacculate:

First, I have a Mac. I like it a lot. I will probably always have one.

Second. PC gaming owes NOTHING to the Mac platform. The evolution of 3D video cards has nothing to do with Photoshop or Pagemaker. Companies like Matrox and Trident made excellent 2D cards for those programs. Companies like PowerVR and 3dfx pioneered daughter cards for playing PC GAMES. NVidia and ATI have their roots there, not in Photoshop.

Third. The MacOS was always a piece of crap. Buggy and Broken. Did you realize that Windows 98 had a better multitasking model than MacOS (how sad is that)? My theory is that since hardly anyone owned Macs, this was a dirty little secret that the "faithful" kept to themselves.

Apple tacitly admitted this by junking the whole buggy mess and basing their OS X (not MacOS) on Free BSD. I give Apple credit for that though. It's not until Apple went Unix and started using Intel chips that a Mac was finally better than the competition.

It's OK to say you like Macs without claiming they have super powers.

@Warren DeMontague:

From my original post on this topic: " Thats separate from gaming engine development,"

I think I made it clear I was talking about the evolution of computer aided graphic design, not 3D graphics engines. I even tried to give MS credit for that, sorry if that wasn't clear but its one of the areas where they have definitely whupped Apple's ass. Thats part of why I made a separate post to Mongoosekun about that topic. Of course macintosh didn't pioneer 3d graphics acceleration in video games...of course apple was the first computer manufacturer to offer 32-bit video onboard as a standard, and had rudimentary hardware graphics acceleration back when 3dfx was still on the drawing board, but yeah I agree that past that they didn't do much.

Please tell me you actually used Mac OS when it was concurrent with Win 98? I was working in a university IT department when 98 rolled out and, while a massive improvement on 95 in many ways, it still wasn't as stable as OS 8/9, hell most of us preferred NT, it couldn't do as much as a desktop but it was rock solid compared to 98 (perhaps that was the OS you meant to hold up as being better?). Having a theoretically better memory management system does little if you're still having to support thousands of different hardware configurations and retain backwards compatibility. Again MS deserves some props for making the best of a shitty situation, but thats about it there. I'm sure we could go back and forth on this but its not worth my time-well neither is this post but I'm in a mood for some reason ;)

Finally, while I've gotten used to OSX its a complete misinterpretation and simplification to state that they "junking the whole buggy mess" simply because OS 9.x/Copland sucked, there were a ton of factors not the least of which was the gross mismanagement of the people who ran the company while Jobs was gone. There are still UI things that OS9 does better than OSX, and since OSX is apparently based on the UI Jobs wants I don't see it changing.

OSX is actually a powerfull OS that can run games faster than our lil windows boxes can. Everything runs 10FPS faster software or hardware. And since Macs uses the same hardware our PC's are using theres no longer this hardware barrier that plagues the Mac Gaming scene. Though now that the macs have PC hardware they got all the hardware power with out the baggage of Windows (VISTA in particular). But then again if you want to play PC games with in OS X you might aswell play it with Parallels or just dual boot. So damn I should have bought that Mac.

@Warren DeMontague: "My theory is that since hardly anyone owned Macs, this was a dirty little secret that the "faithful" kept to themselves."

And my theory is that MS intentionally engineered the 360 hardware to be a POS because they are so used to their software running on cheap, crappy hardware and they had to offset their good choices at CPU and GPU with crappy ones in other places to insure the proper balance.

Isn't it fun to pull "theories" out of one's ass in the wee hours of the morning?

Disclaimer: I like my 360 when its working.

I can't see me buying games for my MacBook Pro. This is not a gaming machine. And I doubt anybody who owns a Mac secretly weeps that he cannot play 98% of newly released games on it. If he cares about this, he wouldn't have bought a Mac in the first place.

When I game, I use my 360 or DS. When I work or surf, I use my Mac. And when there is something I absolutely have to play under Windows, I use BootCamp or Parallels.

I don't see ANY reason for special versions for Macs.

What bothers me is that these games are just using the Cider technology and I've yet to hear anything positive about it, I know a few people who have HOMMV on Macs and it runs really slow (like unplayable) compared to the Windows version on the same Mac. I would like to play C&C3 but it's just gonna be too expensive and not work well enough so I guess I'll just stick with the PC version and dual boot...

@Shinto:

Parallels uses WINE for D3D wrapper as well, but it's no where near as good as WINE for Linux still. The reason? Linux has excellent GLSL drivers. If you don't believe me read up on the Parallels web site. It's saying something when OS X is trying to catch up with Linux gaming. ^^

C&C YES!! *squirt*
//checks Amazon.ca
//Mac section still empty
Well damn. Looks like I'm buying retail.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the whole "Apple Stores have a 90-day exclusive on selling these games" thing yet.

[www.insidemacgames.com]

Since when does Mac run HALO?