There probably aren't too many Mac gamers here, but I've been eagerly awaiting a Mac port of Civilization 4 — a game, alongside of Nethack, I could spend practically the rest of my life idly playing in between writing posts — so I'm pleased to see that it's now finally available for anyone using OSX.

One surprising thing is exactly how beefy the system requirements are: a 2.0 GHz processor, a gig of RAM and a beefy video card. These requirements are actually higher than the ones for Doom 3 for the Mac. Macs are definitely getting more and more powerful and with Boot Camp, Mac owners can happily game by just loading up Windows XP. But it defeats the point of a port entirely if a game running natively on OSX requires twice the resources that it would require if you installed the XP version. Florian Eckhardt

Edit: Ooops! My bad. Eric Duncan over at Aspyr Media wrote to inform me that I'd quoted the recommended specs, not the minimum, which are a 1.8 ghz processor, 512MB of RAM and 64MB of video RAM. He assures us it plays pretty well even at those. Swell!

Civilization 4 for Mac [Apple Store]

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