Starcraft II on a Mac – Retro-future style
We have a PC, not because we’re anti-Mac, but because we’re lazy. Macs appear a little bit more complicated, initially, not in actuality but because we’re not used to having something be so intuitive. In a way, many users pride themselves on outsmarting their PCs, making them do what we want when they apparently want to do the exact opposite.
Want to play a game? Here’s Microsoft Word!! Want to save a file? Good luck finding the menu! Want to shut the computer down? Too bad, it’s ignoring you because you said its hard drive looked fat in that case. Whatever the plan, and whatever the reason, PCs tend to not work the way they’re supposed to, and we’re just supposed to shut up and like it.
And you know what? We sort of do.
We’ve come to understand our PC. She’s just temperamental, we tell friends. She’s just misunderstood, we say to our family. She means well, really, she’s just…different.
We had hammered out a working relationship – we did what was necessary to keep her up and running and she let us play Stracraft II. Everybody was a winner.
Then, it got really hot here. Our climate is such that it has two modes – COLD and HOTHOTHOT. There’s really no in-between. In what was likely a combination of temperature, age, and the fact that our computer has never been properly cleaned out, she wheezed out her last graphical breath and bit the bullet last week.
This put us in an awkward position. Oh sure, we had talked about the MacBeta, but we really didn’t want to try it out – our PC was doing the job. But now, we had no choice. Quite apart from our continual posting about SCII, we really enjoy playing the Beta, and are just starting to get to the point where we’re not losing every single match.
We had no choice. The Mac had to be used, the Mac Beta investigated. In what was a feat of ghetto engineering, we used our PC mouse and keyboard to connect to our laptop, and rigged it so that it sat in almost the same position as our PC. The download of the Beta was incredibly fast, and setup and patching process took a very shot period of time. It was odd – there was no real “setup” like on the PC, simply a “drag this folder into this one” option and then we were off and running.
Truthfully, the game did not play as well. The mouse cursor was a bit wonky – too fast and then too slow, and the screen was so small we kept accidentally scrolling up and down when we didn’t mean to. All of the settings were set to “low, low, as low as technologically possible”, but the game still looked pretty good. Oh sure, things were less shiny, and it bore more than a faint resemblance to its predecessor, but it was absolutely playable and still a crapton of fun.
A crapton doesn’t sound like that much fun, but trust us, it is.
We’re glad to see a Mac version, and it looks like its going to be a winner as well. There were no glaring bugs that we could see, and no issues that prevented us from playing the game in any way, shape, or form. As mentioned, the install was actually easier than on a PC, and on a Mac that was set up for gaming, SCII would likely run incredibly well.
It took Blizz a few extra weeks to get a Mac beta up and running, and there’s still no guarantee that that official worldwide Mac release date will be the same as for the PC, but there are certain signs that carry the winds of good fortune with them. One of the biggest is that on May 12, 2010, Steam released a Mac client. This is big news, since a great many games are being downloaded via Steam, and while Blizzard will likely use its own download servers for online Starcraft II purchasing, a partnership with Steam is not out of the question.
The fact is, we didn’t want to use our Mac for SCII, but the Fates seemed determined to have us try it out. In a nutshell it works, and it works just as well (or better) than on the PC.
We’re not going to lie – we have another, better PC on the way and we won’t be continuing to use the Mac for gaming purposes, but for all of those that use both Macs and laptops for gaming, we salute you.
StarKraft dinner, anyone? We hear StarKraft II is ever tastier. We can’t wait.
