sourceninja
Diamond Member
I thought I would take some time to post a mini review of spore on a mac.
As you might know, spore uses cedega's Cider technology to port windows games to mac. These games are not native, but they appear as if they are. I was very skeptical knowing the performance of wine on a mac. In any case I dropped the 49.99 on spore at best buy.
Before we go any further, my system:
Macbook Pro 2.5gz 2 gigs of ram 8600 256meg, 250 gig hard drive.
The game comes on the same disk with the windows installer. The install is fairly typical of mac installers. It requires a CD key and require you to make an account with EA (for DRM and content downloads). For testing purposes I put the game on the highest grapical settings and used my external monitor (dell 2001fp at 1600x1200 resolution).
The game runs very well even maxed out, there was some lag in high tree and creature areas, turning the graphics down slightly (shadows, level of detail, rendering distance) improved the speed in a huge way. It was almost impossible for me to even tell the game was a windows game running though cider. There were a few complaints however
1) No way to run in a windowed mode. I have multiple displays and I like to run games in a window on one display so I can keep chatting and working on the other. There was no way to do this. This brings me to point 2.
2) No way to select which screen to display the game on. This is another major annoyance.
Gameplay wise the game is a lot of fun. It has a lot of replay value, especially in creating unique species. The 'stages' themselves are a little too short and I really wish they were more in depth. I am not a fan of the creature or tribal stages. I find them very repetitive. The pond, civ, and space stages are a lot of fun and I can see myself spending time there for a few months.
I'd give it a 7/10. You could do much worse in buying a new game.
Corrected your title for spelling. 🙂
- apple mod aphex
As you might know, spore uses cedega's Cider technology to port windows games to mac. These games are not native, but they appear as if they are. I was very skeptical knowing the performance of wine on a mac. In any case I dropped the 49.99 on spore at best buy.
Before we go any further, my system:
Macbook Pro 2.5gz 2 gigs of ram 8600 256meg, 250 gig hard drive.
The game comes on the same disk with the windows installer. The install is fairly typical of mac installers. It requires a CD key and require you to make an account with EA (for DRM and content downloads). For testing purposes I put the game on the highest grapical settings and used my external monitor (dell 2001fp at 1600x1200 resolution).
The game runs very well even maxed out, there was some lag in high tree and creature areas, turning the graphics down slightly (shadows, level of detail, rendering distance) improved the speed in a huge way. It was almost impossible for me to even tell the game was a windows game running though cider. There were a few complaints however
1) No way to run in a windowed mode. I have multiple displays and I like to run games in a window on one display so I can keep chatting and working on the other. There was no way to do this. This brings me to point 2.
2) No way to select which screen to display the game on. This is another major annoyance.
Gameplay wise the game is a lot of fun. It has a lot of replay value, especially in creating unique species. The 'stages' themselves are a little too short and I really wish they were more in depth. I am not a fan of the creature or tribal stages. I find them very repetitive. The pond, civ, and space stages are a lot of fun and I can see myself spending time there for a few months.
I'd give it a 7/10. You could do much worse in buying a new game.
Corrected your title for spelling. 🙂
- apple mod aphex
