Thursday, May 28, 2009

A Bit of Despair: The Apple Brand

Warning: This is not about an oldschool video-game. It is more about the utter despair, and frustration I have in cultivating the ability to play the above-mentioned on my lovely, sleek MacBook Pro.

Now, I have no qualms with either of the two elements of this equation, as long as they are kept separated. My mac is wonderful for my designing, and musical desires; it's beautiful looking, and the white laptop has always been a symbol of "hipness" for me (So sue me, I'm a bit brand-focussed). And videogame emulators have never caused me much of a problem except for the occasional virus on my old and beaten down Dell.



However, when combining these two together it starts out as a videogame, and then grows into something awful...something one would never expect. Now, I hear what you're saying, maybe it was just bad emulation, maybe I should just try a different emulator, or a different game. But no, it's not a faulty emulator, and it's certainly not a faulty graphic card (remember: Mac), so what is it?

WHY is it that all the awesome games (even the emulators) aren't built for mac? I mean, I can't even find a ragnarok patch for mac, and I've been looking for one of those since my dog chewed through my PC power supply. It's impossible. In the olden days, and even up until recently some of the most awesome games were never compatible with Mac, and it effects me now, and it effected me then.

All of my friends would be talking about Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit, all the glorious colorful games from when we were younger, and our brains were malleable. And you know what? I could never play them. I never GOT to experience that. I stayed at home playing with snakes and ladders while the rest of my generation pushed forward onwards into the realm of Myst, and other fantastic games that I would never get a chance to set eyes on.

Until now. Now I see all of them, right there before me like an untouchable rainbow. I STILL CAN'T PLAY THEM. My super-powerful-awesome-at-everything-wayyyyy-desired MacBook is still not "qualified" enough to play effing Oregon Trail. Sure, I can get an EMULATOR of Oregon Trail, but then that's an executable file, and I don't have the right patch and blablabla.

I have completely given up. I even tried some linux programs that I thought would allow me to run, but even Wine wouldn't allow me to run them.

So far, the only ones that I've gotten to play are Zelda, and Chrono Cross. Not that I'm bitching, but come on mac. You made the iphone, but you can't even make it so I can reminisce.

5 comments:

  1. Yeah you would think that there would be a bit more of a reach-out for apple. Seeing as how a LOT of the "younger" folks tend to go towards macs.

    However the brass tacks of it winds up being, the serious gamers tend to build their own computers, and that's something you can't do with a mac. The video game companies tend to realize that, so for the more graphics intensive games they know there isn't a market for it for macs.

    The vast majority of the time however, there damn well would be a margin of profit for them to produce games to cross over onto them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's the thing, it's so sad that I can't use my mac for everything that I want to use it for.

    I mean, I'm too scared to sell my PC (even though it hasn't been plugged in since March)because I'm afraid that I won't be able to play games.

    I'm almost just keeping it incase something WICKED awesome comes out. THen I'll go and buy a charger and use it again.

    I'm so lame.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Myst was released for Macintosh first, silly biggly gumdrops.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think that biggly sounds better. And I know that, I played Myst. The graphics sucked though. Ha

    ReplyDelete