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Hullo EGers; bit of advice required, please. Background: I think I've made the decision to invest in a gaming PC this year, rather than a PS4, which is the way I thought I was going to go. In order to get one step closer to this, I've just created a Steam account. My current desktop machine at home is NOT a gaming machine by any standards. I have an Apple iMac, not new, with the following specs:- Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 2.4GHz 4GB DDR2 SDRAM memory, 800Hz ATI Radeon HD 2400 graphics card (VRAM 128MB) As operating systems, I have Mac OS X 10.6.8 and Windows XP Home running on Bootcamp. This setup seems to run the original Baldur's Gate II and various Sinclair Spectrum emulators, etc. flawlessly. Serious question: given the limits of this current machine, are there any gaming titles currently available on Steam that I am likely to be able to run properly? I know it's a long shot, and that almost all 3D stuff will probably be out for a start, but I wouldn't mind taking the next step on this journey and just having a bit of a splash around on a few titles before the big build-up to speccing out a proper gaming machine. Many thanks for your time spent reading, and, in advance, for any advice that might be offered. |
Bit of Advice on Mac/Windows Gaming, Please
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My friend reckons the GOG free offer of Dungeon Keeper might be worth a shot.
More advice most welcome though, please EG.gif)
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Phattso 27,426 posts
Seen 1 hour ago
Registered 17 years agoPlenty of games on Steam have a demo, might not be a bad idea to start there.
Most of the 2D/2.5D indie titles will most likely run OK. A surprising amount run on OSX now as well, so Bootcamp is less of a requirement. -
Dirtbox 92,595 posts
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Registered 19 years ago -
Excellent, chaps: thanks for the encouragement
Will start as you suggest, and will no doubt get my head around understanding any minimum system requirements that are published soon enough. -
Dirtbox 92,595 posts
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@Dirtbox Cheers -
ansionnach 28 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 8 years ago@EMarkM That's not too bad a setup. I had a similarly-specced machine until my last laptop died last year and was perfectly happy with it. Maybe I had a better graphics card chip, though. You just have to limit yourself to the thousands of titles that'll run on your machine. Don't discount 3d games, either. 3d has been around for a long time on PC (since the early eighties). Your machine meets the minimum requirements for Fallout 3 and is above the recommended ones for everything barring the graphics card, for example.
As Phattso said, check out demos where they are available. Otherwise check the system requirements (internet search). As a rule of thumb, you probably don't want to try any cutting-edge 3d games released beyond 2008. Undemanding 3d games and 2d ones that have been released recently may work perfectly well (e.g. Fez, The Swapper, Hotline Miami). Looking at the top-rated PC games for 2013 on metacritic, I'd say over half of them will run quite well.
You could consider picking up a better graphics card if you want to play more modern 3d games. Since the one you have isn't very good at all you may even find you can pick up a much better one for free in a recycling place. It's quite easy to game on the cheap with a PC and if you don't mind being five years behind cutting edge you can often upgrade by scavenging bits from machines people are throwing out. It's not as if the last five years can match all the preceding ones when it comes to the sheer volume of top-quality, unmissable games. -
@ansionnach Thanks for taking the trouble to reply
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to swap the graphics card on the Mac, but you've put some encouraging detail in there for me to experiment with.
Hopefully it won't be long before I get my new PC -
Beetroot_Bertie 553 posts
Seen 2 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoI was looking at some Mac stuff earlier and there's a nice looking shoot em up called Jets 'n' Guns Gold which looks like it would run on your Mac. I'm thinking about giving it a punt at some point.
Demo Here
I'm currently playing Little Racers Street which is great fun, and should also work on your iMac. It's a bit buggy and requires the Mono framework to run (the 3.2.6 MRE version works better than the stable 2.10.x version) but it's really enjoyable to play.
Edited by Beetroot_Bertie at 16:42:47 15-02-2014 -
@Beetroot_Bertie Cheers. I'll look into it.
Tried the Braid and Stanley demos earlier.
Braid seems to run, although with an un-fixable screen rotation of ninety degrees (I've checked drivers and everything; no joy), and The Stanley Parable got irretrievably stuck on the loading screen
Still, early days! -
ansionnach 28 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 8 years ago@EMarkM Oh yeah, that's an important detail! I find that the better gaming-focused (or any focused) machines allow for expansion. Building from inexpensive but decent quality parts for most things can be a good idea and leaves you with more to spend on important things like the graphics card. There are plenty of websites that'll build both desktops and laptops to order from parts id you don't want to go to the trouble yourself. -
@ansionnach Cheers. Overclockers.com are actually really local to me, so they're top of my list of potential suppliers at the moment.
A friend of mine (the one who recommended Dungeon Keeper, which works fine on both the Mac OS X and Windows partitions, BTW) has just had a new gaming machine from them, and is very happy. -
ansionnach 28 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 8 years ago@EMarkM Sounds good. Since you got DK for free, some other good freebies you could check out are System Shock Portable (action/adventure in 3d, not an RPG like the sequel), The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control II), Race into Space (formerly "Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space", a pretty realistic turn-based strategy game based around the space race - need to like reading manuals for this one), Ultima IV (also free on gog - a pretty old-skool RPG but with refreshingly unpunishing, fair gameplay and largely freeform, complete-in-any-order progression) and the first two GTA games (although I think you have to sign up to the Rockstar mailing list to get these for free). I haven't played them (so I can't vouch for them) but the Marathon games on mac always sounded interesting to me. Bungie did these before moving on to Halo. Might be worth a look as they were mac-only (and it might be nice to appreciate this rare part of mac heritage). The trilogy is now free with source ports available for mac, windows and linux.
Looking at paid-for games, I don't think I've enjoyed anything as much as Hotline Miami in ages. Some other good titles that are quite uniquely PC-ey and might be worth a look are Planescape Torment, Ultima VII, The Longest Journey, Alpha Centauri and Machinarium. More difficult to find, but great puzzlers if you can get them, are Lemmings (pretty much any of them, my favourites are the first one and 3D) and The Lost Vikings (both of these). If you like graphic adventures then Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is about the best one (it's on Steam). It can be bought in a pack with three other adventures (Loom, The Dig and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Last Crusade is a dud, the other two are excellent and well worth a look since their gameplay is kind of non-standard in adventuring terms.
If after all that, you just want to blow shit up, you can't beat a bit of Threat or Phobia II (both free).
I could go on all night. If you haven't played many PC games before maybe you should hold off getting that new machine until you clear some of the backlog! -
Dirtbox 92,595 posts
Seen 20 hours ago
Registered 19 years ago -
@ansionnach Wow, thanks again. Seems like I have a lot of work to do -
@Dirtbox Early nineties sounds right to me too: my first "FPS" was something for my Amiga A1200, which would have been around '93/'94. -
Got the OS X version of the Braid demo running absolutely perfectly first time. Looks and sounds great.
Still no joy with the Windows version, though. The whole screen is rotated 90 degrees and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it.
Dimly remember something similar with Baldur's Gate II when I first installed it, but either updating the drivers or fooling around with dxdiag fixed it that time. No such luck today
Still, I've made a start, thanks to your advice, everyone -
Phattso 27,426 posts
Seen 1 hour ago
Registered 17 years agoAs I say, with the number of games that now support OSX there's precious little reason to BootCamp for games. It was always more than a little bit shonky whenever I did it. -
nickthegun 87,711 posts
Seen 4 hours ago
Registered 16 years agoYeah, my steam library on the mac isnt that much smaller than the one on my pc. -
Ah, cool. I'll concentrate on delving through the Mac stuff for now, then.
Will no doubt be asking for new build advice over the next few months.
Thanks again for all your input, everyone. -
ansionnach 28 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 8 years ago@EMarkM Your screen rotation problem could be a "feature". Some graphics cards automatically install shortcut keys along with their driver for flipping the screen. Whoever the "engineers" were who thought this should have a keyboard shortcut should probably be strangled. I came across this myself last night when testing the maximum resolution on the PC version of Tomb Raider (the highest 4:3 resolution your monitor supports). Pressing control and alt with an arrow key flipped the screen in whatever direction you pressed. I've seen my nephews manage to do this on other machines. Confuses the hell out of everyone, how could anyone ever have thought this was a good idea?!? If it is something like this you should be able to disable these "helpful" keyboard shortcuts. -
ansionnach 28 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 8 years ago@Dirtbox Eh? They may have been expensive when released in 1981 but games did come out in the early eighties (by which, I mean up to 1985) and some of them had 3d vector graphics. I was thinking of the likes of Ultima III, Voyager I (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/voyager-i-sabotage-of-the-robot-ship) and 3-Demon (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/3-demon). Polygonal games didn't come along until around 1985 with Jet (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/jet). Flight sims increasingly used polygonal graphics after this (still in the eighties), e.g. Falcon (1987), Falcon AT (1988). Elite for PC (released in 1987) also had polygonal graphics. When other games followed suit they were sometimes described as flight sim technology since they'd been using them for a while.
Sure, the likes of the Apple II (Wizardry and Ultima, 1981) and BBC Micro (Elite, 1984) beat the PC in terms of early games that used 3d graphics, but the PC did have some.
My point was that 3d games don't necessarily mean that they need a cutting-edge machine.
EDITS: Added and removed hyperlinks, only one seemed to work per post.
Edited by ansionnach at 12:34:58 17-02-2014
Edited by ansionnach at 12:42:22 17-02-2014
Edited by ansionnach at 12:43:30 17-02-2014
Edited by ansionnach at 12:45:07 17-02-2014
Edited by ansionnach at 12:47:49 17-02-2014 -
@ansionnach Re: screen rotation, I did try using the usual keyboard shortcuts to correct things, but all to no avail.
Not to worry: there are plenty of Mac games to go at, as has been suggested, and my plans are now taking place for a £600-ish new build
Edit: I did also look for a place to disable them, but couldn't find one. I might try again later. Thanks again for the advice.
Edited by EMarkM at 13:24:52 17-02-2014 -
Dirtbox 92,595 posts
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ansionnach 28 posts
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Registered 8 years ago@Dirtbox The fact that you consider them "shit" is irrelevant - don't redefine what you meant with your nit-picking. I merely stated that such games existed. Polygonal graphics (surely what you mean by 3d in a "modern" sense) extend back to at least 1985 on PC and several popular games, including Elite and the first two Falcon games used them in the late eighties. Vector graphics extend back further and would have required rudimentary 3d calculations (what 3d graphics are about).
The original poster mentioned he'd tried Dungeon Keeper for DOS (a game that did 3d using software rendering in the gog version) and this heritage traces back as far as I've gone. Your statement that 3d games for PC only stretch back to the early nineties is factually incorrect. I don't consider this a big deal as this is a friendly advice thread, but you seem to have made it into one.
Edited by ansionnach at 13:50:16 17-02-2014 -
Not to worry, chaps: I'm still very grateful for all the advice and information.
We can let this one lie for now, I reckon.
I'll join in on a proper PC gaming thread on the site here when I'm closer to building mine; probably in May -
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