PC Games Go To Boot Camp

1up has taken several of the more popular recent PC titles to Apple Boot Camp, and report back on how they handle the MacBook Pro hardware. From the article: "With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen. Annoyingly, F.E.A.R. offers a really pitiful selection of resolutions, all of which are constrained to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio -- meaning that play on the MacBook's widescreen is stretched, and kind of ugly. That's not a hardware issue so much as limited programming, and presumably anyone with a widescreen PC is in the same pickle."

Re:Kind of offtopic...

[Krach42]

... But why should the widescreen folk have a better view than the 4:3 folk? Imagine playing a game online, and you have a 4:3 screen. It's great, it looks good. But then someone else you are playing against has a 16:9 widescreen and he sees not only what you are able to see, but more (on the sides). So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?

Blame the industry for lack of foresight, meanwhile, me and my widescreens will enjoy the extra peripheral viewspace.

To note though, I have a PowerPC Mac with widescreen, and got the Doom3 demo, and I had to bump up the POV in order to not get a "stretched" image. Meaning the resolution was widened but the angle of view was still the same as an unstretched monitor.

In this case, everyone is able to set the POV to the same values that I am, and the Doom-engined games have long allowed servers to restrict POV ranges, since people could set these to very high values, adjust to them, and thus end up being able to see out the sides of their heads.

Having the widescreen stretch the view out seems like less of a programming issue and more of a gamer-fairness issue.

If one is actually concerned about this "fairness" issue, then Macs have offered for a long time a resolution where it is not stretched, but rather the standard resolution centered in the middle of the screen. This looks a HECK of a lot better than a stretched resolution, where people look fat, and distorted.

Also, again the same point as above, anyone can adjust POV angles in the games that support it, so if you're willing to deal with a distorted image, you can have the same POV range as I do.

Re:Hmm

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop.

LAN party. You know, a dozen guys and gals go to someone's house. We usually have about three desktops and about nine laptops for a typical night. Who wants to lug a desktop and a monitor over to a friend's house? Just buy a USB keyboard (maybe a gaming keyboard), plug into your laptop and go.

Oblivion on iMac

[odhinnsrunes]

I installed Boot Camp last week, and other than some issues with some older games running too fast or not correctly measuring the speed of the processor, it worked great. I ran out and bought Oblivion, and it installed and runs great. I found the same issues as those in the article, but they are easaily resolved with some very minor tweaking. I don't really consider myself a gamer, but I was inpressed with the distance cueing limits, etc. and the frame rate was good. I was able to play four several hours and the only problem I found was that if you have anti-aliasing on the Oblivion Gates slow the framerate right down when they are on screen. Keep it on the default HDR setting and everything is fine.

widescreen gaming

[gEvil (beta)]

Handy link to the Widescreen Gaming Forum [widescreen...gforum.com] website. It includes a listing of games that work with widescreen monitors, including hacks, patches, and workarounds to get games that don't natively support them to work.

Half-Life 2

[aftk2]

Cabel (of the Mac software shop Panic [panic.com]) has put up a quicktime video of Half-Life 2 running on his Intel iMac. In two words, it looks friggin sweet:

http://cabel.name/ [cabel.name]

(With apologies to his hosting provider.)