Everyone who knows me here knows I’m a Mac girl. While I do use a pc for work at my new job, I have my trusty OSX machine by my side, with an interface that I know and love.
The funny thing is, half of the games I’ve been playing lately are PC games. Not explicitly “PC” until very recently – I’ve been gorging on Mac versions of the latest Humble Bundle (mostly Limbo, though I’ve tried my hand at Super meat Boy as well). Yes, 2009 is calling and, it wants it’s indie explosion back. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m kinda, sorta becoming a PC gamer – and I’m running without a PC.
Finally, I got my grubby little hands on a copy of Resonance, the Beneath a Steel Sky-looking indie adventure game that I wrote about a couple of weeks back. Its PC only, and I needed to play it. So I jumped down the rabbit hole of Wine and here I am, still alive to tell the tale.
It’s not the only hoop I’ve jumped through to play something lately. I recently had a rather unsuccessful run in with a wired xbox controller (I have one that works now, thanks), and a truly epic, 3 week saga involving a scratched disc from LA Noire that took no fewer than 3 separate trips to different Gamestops across the city of San Francisco to remedy. But I’m finally on to Arson now, and hoping to actually finish this thing before the end of the summer.
But I digress. Wine is a neat little application that lets you run PC apps on your Mac without having to spring for Parallels or get into the dirty business of partitioning your drive, so it’s awesome. It takes quite a bit of setup, and it’s not perfect, but well, whatever.
I’ve finally spent some time with it, and the game is wonderful so far. I’m really loving the aesthetic – this is pure mid 90s-level point-and-click goodness. The writing is particularly strong – and the central caveat – that you play as four different characters with intertwining storylines – makes for a fun blend.
I’ll have more thoughts – and a proper review – shortly. Until then, I’ll be enjoying my excursion to 1995 and Wine-land.
I am really enjoying it as well.
The main characters all have unique and well-done voices, and while the memory system is a little gimmicky (STM is really bad, long-term makes far more sense), they use it well.
Figuring out how to get into the lab was hard but I felt so damn clever when I got it.
The way the story criss-crosses is very neat and shows off the strength of the writing.
Rather than using the plain WINE release, I bought Crossover. It contains a number of specific changes to work with Mac/games and be easily setup without muss and fuss which is nice, as the largest user base of WINE is obviously the linux community.
I’ve really enjoyed using it on a number of games. Some of the ones I’ve played on it more recently include Borderlands,STO, LOTRO, GW, the beta weekend event had GW2 running decently as well.
So if you want an easier time working with it in the future I’d get it a try.
codeweavers.com
I think you may be right — do you actually need to purchase Windows to use crossover, though?
Nope, it’s just a commercial version of WINE with some tweaks and usability stuff thrown in.
This is a very good site to know about. The content of your site is very informative. Thanks…