Thursday, January 17, 2008

Macs and Games No Longer Mutually Exclusive?

We here at Geekanerd have long been anticipating the release of Spore, Will Wright's revolution of the Sim genre. The game holds the promise of creating new lifeforms that go from spores to spacemen in a manner not unlike the Tub of Life episode of The Simpsons. Today at Mac World, in an exciting twist that completely justifies the lack of a release date, EA Games announced plans to simultaneously release Spore on both Mac and PC platforms. For those of us who kissed our computer games goodbye when we switched to Mac, this is very exciting news.

Or is it?

As every gamer with a newer Mac knows, you can get all the PC gaming you want with a quick reboot into Windows using Boot Camp. Was I planning on sitting Spore out because I don't have a PC anymore? Hell no. The only people that should be excited about this news are the people who haven't even heard of Spore because they don't read video game blogs. That's right, our good friend The Casual Gamer. Spore has the potential to cross over into the mainstream in much the same way that The Sims did, and soccer moms don't want to be bothered with Boot Camp. So that makes this particular case a smart business move, but hoping that we're seeing the beginning of some grand alliance between Macs and game developers is reaching too far. You won't ever play Crysis in OSX because any Mac user who has an interest in "hardcore" games no doubt already has a Windows installation, and it's easier (and cheaper!) for the user to boot up a different OS than it is for the developer to recode and repackage their game.

And just because this news made me watch it for the hundredth time, the greatest video game demonstration of all time (wait for it...):

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