Nice overview but I don't need or want a hackintosh myself. I love my whisper quiet, elegantly designed 27" iMac with its beautiful display. The 6970m GPU is plenty for my needs which do not require everything on maximum all of the time. I have not personally played it but from what I've read, Skyrim for example on my system can run with high settings. That is plenty good enough for me.
You don't need a three thousand dollar gaming rig with a five hundred dollar video card to be a "hard core gamer" in my opinion. Hard core is more about how much you love playing games and spend time doing it than it is about the hardware you do it on. When I was a windows user my machine was never better than midrange for gaming purposes but it was always good enough for me to enjoy them and enjoy them I still do, very often. My relatively new iMac is much nicer than my old PC was and more capable for gaming than it was.
It is awesome we have ways to play whatever we want to on a Mac. I personally have come to greatly prefer playing games in OS X without rebooting. I'll do it for something special like Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas when I get around to them but I'd rather never leave OS X.
Fortunately, Feral and Aspyr keep turning out great titles that are going to be enough for the most part to keep me entertained in the future. It'll be a rare case going forward that I'd buy a windows title with so many cool Mac titles to play.
Right now a lot of my gaming time is consumed enjoying World of Warcraft and its new Mists of Pandaria expansion. I love the game and have a lot of fun with it. It runs great with settings cranked at native resolution on my system. What more could I ask for? I also have StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, a bunch of great games from Feral, some from Aspyr and a lot of old classics from gog.com that being older, all run inside a Parallels Windows XP virtual machine, again with no rebooting.
Can you tell I dislike rebooting and leaving OS X? ;-)
Anyway, I am grateful to have the option and will use it for Bethesda RPGs and some other stuff but I am really thinking the next Mac I own I won't even bother with windows. There is so many hours of high quality entertainment available for Macs now that I see no need to bother.
What I should do is become familiar with Wineskin so I can just run Skyrim, the Fallout games, etc. also without leaving OS X. I've admittedly been lazy here but I am becoming more motivated by wanting to just stay in OS X. I do not like windows nor microsoft.
Thanks for the comments Dirtyharry50.
Don't get me wrong, the idea behind my article was not to convince people to get a Hackintosh (perhaps I am not very clear on that part) as I 100% agree with you. I used to have an iMac and had a hard time deciding whether to get rid of it or not.
I ended up getting the 27" Mac cinema display as a compromise (they are just gorgeous to look at)
Anyway, in this situation, the advantage of a Hackintosh is that you can build yourself something similar (but no as powerful) to a Mac Pro with 1000$. That may sound like too much but we all have our priorities
Otherwise, I have the same "problem", so many games to play natively that I just don't see a reason to launch windows anymore
Thanks for the comments!
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You obviously have interest in what you are writing. You have done a great job with selecting a theme for the website that makes this article easy to read. The article is a good start. What parts of what you said are you planning on expanding? You've basically covered what is already well known. There are great Mac games out there and if you are an avid gamer you'll likely need one of the two ways to run Windows (why did you leave out virtual machines)...
What I didn't see was anything new. Did you find out what the first game was that was a Dos or Win/Mac crossover (available on both platforms). Why don't more studios spend money on developing for both platforms? If OS X and iOS are in an inevitable head on collision (with only one survivor), what will gaming look like because of it? Any interviews with indie developers that develop on both platforms (I bet if you asked you could find ONE person that would be happy to interview)?
You have started, now continue, and improve.
Thanks for the comments kd5jos, I appreciate the kind words AND the constructive criticism.
As you see I'm barely starting but yes, you ask very interesting questions and they are all going to the "post ideas" list! I will focus next on the future, what games are coming? are there more studios thinking about the mac? etc.
I will also make some experiments and compare performance between the same game running on windows (native / virtual machines) and mac.
The interviews are something I hope to be able to do, but I need a little more experience, and specially, an actual reader base
(developers have to have a reason to spend time doing the interview ....)
PS: The Mac /iOs likely to collide is a good catch.
Do you blog?
