I was getting tired of dual-booting my MacBook Pro with Boot Camp when I wanted to play stuff like Portal or Civilization IV.  Dual-booting is a pain and the laptop fan controls do not function properly when Boot Camping.  So, I experimented with running things under the generally awesome VMware Fusion.  First the WinXP license business got pernickety with me when loading my Boot Camp partition under VMware.  After fixing that, some of the games worked pretty well, but I kept getting show-stopping map rendering errors with Civ IV and that was pretty much a deal breaker.  When I was searching around for a solution to that problem, I ended up stumbling across some information about CrossOver Games.  COG is a branch of the WINE-based CrossOver Mac/Linux products from Codeweavers that focuses on running Windows-based games rather than desktop/office software.  And after trying it out, I must say that I’m a convert.

Since this is a WINE-based solution, COG lacks the traditional performance overhead inherent in emulators (Wine Is Not an Emulator), does not require a Windows license, and does not have the disk space hit of Boot Camp or VMware.  Those are all significant upsides.  On the downside, not every game under the sun is supported.  But, it seems a lot of their recent development efforts have focused on games that run under Valve’s Steam distribution platform.  Ostensibly, supporting the litany of copy protection schemes is one of the big challenges of developing something like COG, but Steam’s consistent distribution method cracks that nut for a bunch of games at once.  Since Steam is becoming more and more ascendent, I’m guessing that this has been a huge boon for Codeweavers’ efforts.

- Installation:

Installation is easy for Steam under COG – there is a built-in option for a Steam installation option in the installation wizard, it automatically creates a WinXP WINE “bottle” and bootstraps in the Steam client for you.  Then you just fire up Steam, enter your account information, and you’re good to go.  If you don’t want to download everything all over again (and are familiar with the Steam file hierarchy), then you can just drag in the content/save files from a Boot Camp partition or from external media to the proper places in the new bottle.  Drag the Steam icon to your Dock and fire it up.

- What works:

It appears that COG game compatibility under Steam depends on a variety of factors.  Some games are officially supported and those will obviously work.  High-performance modern FPS games like Bioshock or Crysis will categorically not.  Some games are not officially supported, but run just fine as-is.  Sometimes (as is the case with Civ IV), only the Steam version of a game works.  Their website has a very good compatibility list that includes hints and reports from users about non-supported games.  So just because a game is not listed, does not mean it will not run.  When in doubt, download the demo from Steam and find out for yourself.  Game complexity is not necessarily the deciding factor either.  I’m running the “unsupported” W40K: Dawn Of War RTS series just fine, but a whimsical download of the much simpler Geometry Wars just plain does not work.  From what I gather, they throw their support efforts behind games that the user base is clamoring for the most.

I am running the following games flawlessly:

- The Orange Box (Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, etc)
- Civilization IV and it’s expansions (note: have not tried Colonization yet)
- Warhammer 40K: Dawn Of War and expansions
- A handful of causal games like Bejeweled 2, Luxor and Peggle

Check out their longer compatibility list for more.

- How it works:

Performance has been pretty good overall.  When initially invoking the Steam client there is a bit of startup lag while wineloader does its thing initially.  After that things run pretty smoothly.  The games are snappy, start up in an acceptable amount of time, and I (mostly) run everything at maximum resolution and have not had to downgrade the graphics settings for performance reasons.  The only game I needed to tune down was Civ IV when I got to the mid-game and lots of things are moving around on the map.  But stuff like Half-Life and Portal are perfectly fine graphics-wise w/out tuning things down.  Things seem happiest running in full-screen mode rather than windowed or the “full screen but you can still see your menu bar and use Spaces” resolution mode.  Occasionally some splash screens will not display – the Valve splash does not.  There are occasional issues like this with startup but when you get to the game itself, things seem fine.  The games perform well, but may take a little “nudging” at install time.

- It is worth it:

It depends on the user.  If the supported games hit your pocket right (Civ IV fans for example) then it is totally worth it.  For me, the Orange Box, Civ IV and Dawn of War hits most of my current non-console gaming needs, so that makes COG quite attractive to me.  The modern FPS fan, who most likely already has a teflon-cooled PC gaming rig, will probably not care about this as much.  The satisfied user will also probably want to have at least a journeyman tinkerer’s badge when using the product as it is a little rough around the edges at times and so may require a little tweeking.  Codeweavers offers a 7 day uncrippled demo that one can install and try for oneself.  The license is only $40 and comes with a year’s worth of “talk to a real person on the phone” support when you are dealing with problems with a supported game.  Their forum support also seems pretty responsive as well.  And hey, supporting a commercial deployment of open-source software is a good thing in my book.

In conclusion, this is a really solid product if you are an Intel-based Mac user, don’t want to bother with dual-booting, and your gaming itch can be scratched by Steam games in general and Valve games in particular.  With the rise of the new Intel-based Macs, I’m guessing/hoping that the need for products like COG will become less and less of an issue as more games see native/concurrent releases on both Win/OS X.

Spore has had a bit of a bumpy launch.  Of course there was the massive shitstorm about the DRM that is deployed with the game (which upon a closer look, may not be as bad as initially thought).  The gameplay has gotten mixed reviews as well – for the people that were expecting “Will Wright’s Civilization 10″, it is a letdown.  As someone who generally agrees with the newly presented “Gamers Bill of Rights“, I do think that they misstepped somewhat with the DRM.  I am also finding that you can progress through the first 4 stages of the game pretty rapidly once you grasp the basic mechanics.  So, I can sort of understand why it got the mixed reviews that it has (I guess I am just adding another one to the mix here).  All that said, I must say:

Spore is a fun game.  Full Stop.

About the DRM: my first taste of non-console games was games distributed via Steam.  Then when I later learned about the long-standing “disc in the drive” model of game authentication I was aghast.  I game on an Intel based Mac laptop and the idea of shuttling around a bunch of media just to play a game on my lapper was unacceptable.  Especially since laptops are, you know, portable devices.  So, the authentication that Spore is using (that is, online registration) seemed somewhat more palatable to me.  I have no idea why they limited your installation to 3 machines, and this is where they screwed up – at least from a public relations standpoint.  The game already has online hooks so why don’t they just use the same “as many machines as you like just not at the same time” model that Steam uses?  Granted, I won’t be needing to install the game on more than 3 machines (current count: 1 – eventual count when I upgrade my desktop to Intel Mac: 2), but the restriction still seems somewhat artificial since we how have the Steam model to lead us to a new era of non-console gaming with sane piracy controls.  So yes, some criticism is warranted, but I suspect that Spore caught an extra heaping helping of blowback just because it happens to be a muchly anticipated/hyped game.  So my verdict on that is not glowing, however, not as evil as evil as presented by the angry masses – especially in the light of the Ars Technica experiment.

About the gameplay: No, this is not the biggest baddest strategy game on the market.  But it is charming as hell.  I’ve never played a Sims game (nor did I ever have a desire to), but the whole business with tweeking your race, and designing your buildings or your vehicles is just fun.  Jamie and I both hit the Tribal phase at the same time and were both sitting there giggling and having a grand old time outfitting our new tribesmen.  I read an astute comment somewhere online to the effect of “the Will Wright games are half game, half toy”, so I fail to see why people are surprised that this is not some hardcore RTS game.  Yes, you can move through the Cell to Civilization phases pretty quickly, but it is sort of the “ride” that’s fun.

I have moved into (but have not yet completed) the final Space phase.  The game sort of hits a blip at that point and turns into more of a proper strategy game.  Since this is my first run-through, I’m playing on easy mode to get used to the game mechanics (and am greatly looking forward to further run-throughs on higher skill levels on different planets).  Even on easy mode, the game hits a perceptible bump in complexity when you progress to Space.  At first blush, it reminded me of an old-school pen-and-paper RPG called Traveller I played when I was a youngling.  Hauling cargo, terraforming, spacecraft combat, colonization, obtaining items, managing planetary resources, etc.  Real time events start hauling you away from whatever you’re in the middle of.  Coming off of a little love affair with Civ IV, I’m totally liking the Space phase.

The game, as predicted, is beautiful, charming, has great music and an amazing amount of polish.  The controls are very intuitive – I love how you move from planet surface to deep space just by scrolling your mouse wheel.  I’ve needed to look at the manual rarely if ever.  Having a single save file per planet keeps you honest, but is not too punishing since you can restart a certain phase without having to backtrack too much.  Is it sort of awkward from the standpoint of some parts being too easy for seasoned players and perhaps too hard for casual/Sims-style gamers?  Probably, but you can just tweek your difficulty to taste.  Moreover, once you’ve unlocked a certain phase, you can just jump that when you want to.  Don’t like creature building?  Grab a pre-made from the Sporepedia and play with that instead of rolling your own.

As a personal aside: one unintended place I think that Spore shines is that it is excellent training fodder for someone (like myself) starting to dip their toes into the world of real-time strategy games.  I’ve played lots of turn-based games (JRPGs, SRPGs, Civ IV) but have been trying to evolve to titles like W40K: Dawn of War and the impending Starcraft II.  Spore is a great starter RTSG.  For me, it is worth it for that alone.  Suck at Warcraft?  Play Spore and come back later.

So, is Spore the game of the century?  No.  Did it introduce a new mature game distribution model the way Valve did with Steam?  Not at all.  Is it the ultimate strategy game?  Nope.  Most consistent in its pacing?  Nay on that mark as well.  Is it a unique game that is fun to play, worth playing if you like video games, and might offer different things to different gamers?  An unqualified Yes.

Oh and they give you this cute and useless little flash deal to show off your goods in your blog.  So why not?