Warning, this post is written by a filthy Mac user. For those of you who don't like hearing bad things said about PCs, move along... have a hot chocolate... download the update to your firewall and virus software... say hello to the spybots... For the rest of you, a rant follows...
So Jarrod came into work today to make a purchase and we got to talking about City of Heroes. He's absolutely enamoured with it. I have to admit, the idea of an MMORPG that lets you be a super or villain certainly has its appeal.
But it suffers from one fatal flaw - it is only available on PC.
It's EVE online for me all over again. A game I would happily spend large amounts of money - as would many other mac users - if it were on mac as well. WoW has shown that there is no excuse not to go dual platform. Blizzard manage to keep updates for both systems regular, and consistent. In fact, the mac version of WoW is graphically superior to the PC one - so suck on that! I remember when I saw friend playing WoW and I said "what game is that?"
He said "WoW. Don't you get this effect when you die?"
"Nup. We get all this phasey ghost lighting, and fancy sky effects and wisps and stuff."
And that was me using WoW on the medium graphic effects.
So when the single most successful MMORPG is going dual - why aren't others? How do they think that Blizzard makes so much money. There are a lot of WoW playing Mac users.
Further more, Macs are the fastest selling home computer these days. Recent figures showed that the pick up rate of mac-users is beginning to out-perform PCs.
Now I could go Boot Camp, and run CoH and EVE native on my duo-core Intel mac. But that would require me to get Windows XP, partition my drive and load up anti-spy and virus software.
Why the hell would I do that?
Macs enjoy a built in hard-wired Firewall, minimal virus risk, and a nice security system that keeps the OS nicely bug free. Sure, it's not perfect, and as macs increase in popularity the risk of viruses will increase. But Apple has shown time and again that they know how to keep their system secure.
So why the hell would I waste my time getting my mac sullied with stupid Windows software? Hell, even Office for Mac is better. :)
We still get some great games - Sims 2, Civ IV, Age of Empires III, The Movies - there are some great companies who do exemplary jobs of porting games over to mac. (The Movies port ended up being better graphically and operationally to the PC version)
Macs enjoy superior design and graphic software. The native Mac operating environment is even better for games than PC - as many Mac ports have proven.
The only benefit PCs have is that they are cheaper and have more games.
On the converse - the environment is shoddy and prone to inexplicable operating errors, spyware galore, viruses out the wazoo - oh - and there is the wonders of the new Vista OS. Ripped off the Mac OS X, by the way. Except without the security or bug free operation.
On the rare occasion I find Mac OSX might get a glitch. Reboot - and it disappears forever.
I have had my G4 Macbook inexplicably crash on me twice in two years. My new imac has yet to do anything other than work beautifully. It also loads up faster than a PC. The time between turning it on and going surfing on the net is pretty darn fast.
So screw you EVE online. City of Heroes. You will not see any of my money until you get with the times and go dual platform. Macs are a great operating system, and I am not about to spoil that with a sub-par OS!
Oh - and for those who claim that Windows allows them to have more control over their computers - MacOS comes with direct access to coding as standard, along with an automator for those of us who aren't good at programming. What this allows is for us dirty mac users to reprogram the entire OS to suit our personal needs. Kind of like a Linux lite. Furthermore, Leopard is going one step further by allowing us to programme our own fancy three-dimensional graphic interfaces in the same manner.
That means I will be able to open a folder and have all the contents spin around the screen while I chase them with my mouse to select the file I want, then the file can dance up to the front of the screen. If I was so pretentiously inclined. :D Best of all, it wouldn't have nearly the amount of memory consumption that Vista suffers just doing the fancy little line-up. (Which my mac does with less hassle. :P)
End of rant. :D
Love and Huggles
Conan
Currently Reading: Burning Empires
Currently Playing: REIGN, WFRP
Mood: Taking on MMORPGS that can't handle a REAL operating system! :DSo Jarrod came into work today to make a purchase and we got to talking about City of Heroes. He's absolutely enamoured with it. I have to admit, the idea of an MMORPG that lets you be a super or villain certainly has its appeal.
But it suffers from one fatal flaw - it is only available on PC.
It's EVE online for me all over again. A game I would happily spend large amounts of money - as would many other mac users - if it were on mac as well. WoW has shown that there is no excuse not to go dual platform. Blizzard manage to keep updates for both systems regular, and consistent. In fact, the mac version of WoW is graphically superior to the PC one - so suck on that! I remember when I saw friend playing WoW and I said "what game is that?"
He said "WoW. Don't you get this effect when you die?"
"Nup. We get all this phasey ghost lighting, and fancy sky effects and wisps and stuff."
And that was me using WoW on the medium graphic effects.
So when the single most successful MMORPG is going dual - why aren't others? How do they think that Blizzard makes so much money. There are a lot of WoW playing Mac users.
Further more, Macs are the fastest selling home computer these days. Recent figures showed that the pick up rate of mac-users is beginning to out-perform PCs.
Now I could go Boot Camp, and run CoH and EVE native on my duo-core Intel mac. But that would require me to get Windows XP, partition my drive and load up anti-spy and virus software.
Why the hell would I do that?
Macs enjoy a built in hard-wired Firewall, minimal virus risk, and a nice security system that keeps the OS nicely bug free. Sure, it's not perfect, and as macs increase in popularity the risk of viruses will increase. But Apple has shown time and again that they know how to keep their system secure.
So why the hell would I waste my time getting my mac sullied with stupid Windows software? Hell, even Office for Mac is better. :)
We still get some great games - Sims 2, Civ IV, Age of Empires III, The Movies - there are some great companies who do exemplary jobs of porting games over to mac. (The Movies port ended up being better graphically and operationally to the PC version)
Macs enjoy superior design and graphic software. The native Mac operating environment is even better for games than PC - as many Mac ports have proven.
The only benefit PCs have is that they are cheaper and have more games.
On the converse - the environment is shoddy and prone to inexplicable operating errors, spyware galore, viruses out the wazoo - oh - and there is the wonders of the new Vista OS. Ripped off the Mac OS X, by the way. Except without the security or bug free operation.
On the rare occasion I find Mac OSX might get a glitch. Reboot - and it disappears forever.
I have had my G4 Macbook inexplicably crash on me twice in two years. My new imac has yet to do anything other than work beautifully. It also loads up faster than a PC. The time between turning it on and going surfing on the net is pretty darn fast.
So screw you EVE online. City of Heroes. You will not see any of my money until you get with the times and go dual platform. Macs are a great operating system, and I am not about to spoil that with a sub-par OS!
Oh - and for those who claim that Windows allows them to have more control over their computers - MacOS comes with direct access to coding as standard, along with an automator for those of us who aren't good at programming. What this allows is for us dirty mac users to reprogram the entire OS to suit our personal needs. Kind of like a Linux lite. Furthermore, Leopard is going one step further by allowing us to programme our own fancy three-dimensional graphic interfaces in the same manner.
That means I will be able to open a folder and have all the contents spin around the screen while I chase them with my mouse to select the file I want, then the file can dance up to the front of the screen. If I was so pretentiously inclined. :D Best of all, it wouldn't have nearly the amount of memory consumption that Vista suffers just doing the fancy little line-up. (Which my mac does with less hassle. :P)
End of rant. :D
Love and Huggles
Conan
Currently Reading: Burning Empires
Currently Playing: REIGN, WFRP
6 comments:
Hmmm... you'll never guess where I am as I type this. Sitting at White Wolf HQ in Atlanta, having just interviewed with them for a Games Programmer job... should I pass along your comments on EVE?
;)
Ha ha..
- Craig.
I would say - yes please! :D
Best of luck, Craig! LOL
Hate to break it to you, but in the real world a $2k custom built pc (not talking about the rubbish that dse, harvey normans etc try to pawn off to the unsuspecting sucker) will beat out an equivalent priced premade mac in most areas (graphics card, hdd size, monitor size, processor etc). Macs are great for browsing the internet, or as a graphics tool, but for games PC has always been number one. Think this little link sums up the virus thing nicely:
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20060513
I always find this amusing. What a lot of PC users don't understand is that Mac OS uses less resources - thus it is able to produce better graphics with less processing power. They are also upgradeable, so an equivalent Mac is going to run more efficiently and effectively than a PC. The PC as superior games machine is a myth.
LOL and the reason nobody makes viruses for macs is because it is more trouble than making viruses for PC language - which has more breaches and holes.
Because PCs are cheaper, buggier and easier to program viruses for - they are a better target. Why go after the high-end products which require more work to breach and produce less results when you can screw over all the people who just got the latest computer in a can.
PCs are fine if you want them - but don't fool yourself into thinking they have some sort of superior standard. They don't.
> LOL and the reason nobody makes
> viruses for macs is because it is
> more trouble than making viruses
> for PC language - which has more
> breaches and holes.
Sorry Conan, but this just isn't true. There is nothing inherently more (or less) secure about a Mac - the core OS's of both are just as secure as one another these days - the key difference is the Software that runs on the machines - each platform will have different pieces of Software that are more or less secure.
The real difference in viruses is that PCs still have 95+% of the market share, and hence 95+% of the virus writers concentrate on finding weaknesses in the PC platform (and, more importantly finding the weaknesses that exist in the Software built for that platform). If all those virus writers suddenly concentrated on the Mac platform instead of the PC, you'd see an explosion of new viruses on the Mac, and the PC suddenly becoming the "most secure" platform you can buy...
But that's never going to happen, because most virus activity these days is the result of organised criminals (trying to steal passwords and banking/credit card information) and spammers (trying to create zombie machines to automatically generate spam), and neither group really has much to gain by creating viruses for such a niche market as Mac users. Not when the same amount of effort can target 15 to 20 times more people...
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