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FPS games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament S.O.S.

A

awcopus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 19, 2003
3
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NYC
I used to play these games with friends and loved them. Flash forward a couple of decades, my son is now interested in playing games like this and I'm looking for options like these that would run well on relatively new iMacs (pre M1). It's very sad that Quake 3 Arena appears to be unavailable, and the plug was pulled like a week ago on UT from what I gather.

Any and all recommendations greatly appreciated!
 
Quake 3 Arena is still available for sale on GOG, and ioQuake 3, the open-source modernized port of Quake 3 Arena/Team Arena, now supports Apple Silicon through a new set of universal binaries.

It is unfortunate that the classic Unreal games have been pulled from sale - likely in the near future Epic will re-release them for sale as "Remastered" editions exclusively on the Epic Game Store.

In the meantime, depending on how desperate you are, you could possibly try to find a copy of the Unreal games for sale on eBay, or Steam/GOG keys for the games on sale on places like G2A or Kinguin. (If you're willing to risk potentially getting scammed by an unscrupulous key reseller.)

If you're looking for free Quake-ish competitive twitch-style shooters, OpenArena, Rexuiz, Xonotic and Warsow are all based off of various flavors of Quake's underlying engine technology. AssaultCube and Red Eclipse are based off of the open-source Cube engine.
 
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rampancy said:
Quake 3 Arena is still available for sale on GOG, and ioQuake 3, the open-source modernized port of Quake 3 Arena/Team Arena, now supports Apple Silicon through a new set of universal binaries.

It is unfortunate that the classic Unreal games have been pulled from sale - likely in the near future Epic will re-release them for sale as "Remastered" editions exclusively on the Epic Game Store.

In the meantime, depending on how desperate you are, you could possibly try to find a copy of the Unreal games for sale on eBay, or Steam/GOG keys for the games on sale on places like G2A or Kinguin. (If you're willing to risk potentially getting scammed by an unscrupulous key reseller.)

If you're looking for free Quake-ish competitive twitch-style shooters, OpenArena, Rexuiz, Xonotic and Warsow are all based off of various flavors of Quake's underlying engine technology. AssaultCube and Red Eclipse are based off of the open-source Cube engine.
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Thanks for helping me get started!

I remember loving these games, so I'll definitely check out the Quake links, though it looks like the GOG link is specifically for PCs. I'm on a Mac. Not knowing what's come out since, are there Mac compatible games similar to the look and feel of unreal tournament and Quake that you would recommend for their diverse PvP arenas? I'd be playing over my LAN with my son, but I'm sure he'll get sick of kicking my ass, so maybe some games with decently active servers?

Thanks again!
 
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awcopus said:
Thanks for helping me get started!

I remember loving these games, so I'll definitely check out the Quake links, though it looks like the GOG link is specifically for PCs. I'm on a Mac. Not knowing what's come out since, are there Mac compatible games similar to the look and feel of unreal tournament and Quake that you would recommend for their diverse PvP arenas? I'd be playing over my LAN with my son, but I'm sure he'll get sick of kicking my ass, so maybe some games with decently active servers?

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

When you buy the game on GOG, you get a Windows installer, yes. But you can run the installer in the demo version of CrossOver to get the data files you need for ioQuake 3, or use PortingKit to install and run the game.

All of the games I linked to earlier, to my knowledge, are online arena PvP shooters with various other game modes (TDM, CTF, etc.), including single player matches with bots, and are available on the Mac.
 
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I'll throw in another recommendation for ioquake3. It's just an open source version of the engine – you buy the game and drop in the data files. (There is also OpenMW, an open source engine for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that works the same way. It's not a FPS, but a great single player RPG from around the same era.)

I also remember Unreal Tournament 2004 running natively on Intel at one point, maybe after a patch.
 
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Nygaard said:
I also remember Unreal Tournament 2004 running natively on Intel at one point, maybe after a patch.
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UT2k4 did indeed run natively on Intel; the only way you could do that was to either get a copy of MacSoft's original port (long out of print and not available on Steam or GOG) and apply the Intel Universal Binary patch, or run the installer in Wineskin/CrossOver and essentially copy over the data files on top of the Intel demo of the game, basically turning the demo into the full version.

I don't think the app was 64-bit though, so it likely won't work on 10.15 and up.
 
rampancy said:
UT2k4 did indeed run natively on Intel; the only way you could do that was to either get a copy of MacSoft's original port (long out of print and not available on Steam or GOG) and apply the Intel Universal Binary patch, or run the installer in Wineskin/CrossOver and essentially copy over the data files on top of the Intel demo of the game, basically turning the demo into the full version.

I don't think the app was 64-bit though, so it likely won't work on 10.15 and up.
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I'd be very interested to know if the Unreal Tournament 2004 "Mac binary + Intel 64 patch" is actually working with UTM ...
 
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Just FYI Unreal Tournament '99 is also available natively for M1 & modern Intel Macs! https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

Epic haven't released the source code publicly, but they *have* entrusted it to a dedicated modding community who have added proper support for modern platforms + lots of quality-of-life improvements. All you need are the game assets, there's a video linked in the README that shows you how to set it all up on macOS.
 
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