What Multiplayer Games Can Macs Run

11-05-2021 admin

The weekend's here and if you're worried about being bored, here are some great FPS games you can play on your Mac.

Oct 29, 2019 If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows. There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. This list contains 2434 video game titles released for Classic Mac OS (1 through 9.2.2) and MacOS (MacOS X). 1 This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

This time around I'm focusing on some of my favorite first person shooters (FPSs) that are currently available for the Mac platform, ranging in price from free to not free. Locked and loaded? Good. Here we go...

Borderlands 2

$39.99 - Download now

Every once in a while a sequel comes along that completely eclipses the original game. Such is the case with Borderlands 2, which took everything that was good about the original Borderlands and made it better.

For the uninitiated, Borderlands 2 drops you on the surface of a hostile alien world called Pandora. You're essentially a treasure hunter on a mission. You can choose from one of four different character classes, each with unique abilities, and in a nod to role playing games, you can develop special abilities by assigning skill points that you gain through experience. Borderlands 2 also features a weapons randomizing system that produces an almost unlimited number of variations on handguns, rifles, grenades and other weapons.

A hilarious script and great voice acting provides you with constant laughs through the 30+ hours of single-player fun your first time through (and you will replay this game to get experience with each character class). Add to that fantastic cooperative multiplayer gameplay and downloadable content to extend the game, and you've got a potent mix that will keep you coming back again and again.

Aspyr makes the game available through the Mac App Store and Steam (which we've linked above). Our recommendation is to go for the Steam version so you can get cross-platform multiplayer - Mac App Store downloaders are relegated to Mac-to-Mac play only through Game Center.

BioShock 2

$24.99 - Download now

Few recent FPS's have had the impact of the BioShock series. The game struck gold for its detailed storyline involving Rapture, a Randian utopia far beneath the surface of the ocean, run amuck. A survival horror game, BioShock 2 puts you in the role of a Big Daddy - a genetically altered human encased in a heavily armored diving suit. Rapture is filled with psychotic and dangerous people who have been altered by a substance that can record their genes, granting them superhuman powers (and, unfortunately, driving them mad).

The game sports multiplayer action too, but unlike Borderlands 2 isn't available from Steam, so the Mac App Store is a safe bet. BioShock 2 is the sequel to the first BioShock, and if you haven't picked that one up, it's definitely worth your time as well, especially at $19.99 price. Both should wet your whistle until BioShock Infinite shows up for the Mac this summer.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

$29.99 - Download now

Short of having its superlative sequel on the Mac, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the next best thing. Sure, it's been around for a while, but this game stands up to the test of time: it's a phenomenal FPS that puts you in the role of U.S. Marines and British SAS commandos as you travel to the U.K, the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine on the hunt for international terrorists who plan to detonate a nuclear warhead.

COD4: MW takes a break from past COD games by bringing the action to the modern era, instead of focusing on World War II, which means you have plenty of modern weapons to choose from. It also sports great multiplayer capabilities with plenty of challenges, unlockable perks at matchmaking to make sure you're paired with players of similar abilities.

Team Fortress 2

Free to play - Download now

What Multiplayer Games Can Macs Run On Tv

A team-based multiplayer first person shooter available through Steam, Team Fortress 2 is almost six years old and still going strong. The game pits two opposing teams against each other in a variety of different modes: Capture the Flag, Control Point, Territorial Control, King of the Hill and more. The play maps vary from the ridiculous to the sublime, and you can choose from nine different player classes, some with offensive capabilities (like the Scout), some better on defense (like the Heavy), and some best for support (such as the Medic).

The game's fun to play not only for its varied gameplay modes and different character classes to master, but also for its cartoon-style art. And it used to be you had to pay for TF2, but Valve made it free to play in 2011. (The company makes money through in-app purchases players make to buy unique equipment and character outfits.)

Counter Strike: Source

$19.99 - Download now

The original Counter Strike took the world by storm when it was introduced as a mod for Valve Software's legendary game Half-Life. Valve reworked CS as its own independent game using the Source engine (hence the name). It's a team-based first person shooter that emphasizes accomplishing objectives - kill your opponents, rescue hostages and so on. What makes it a bit different than the rest is that when you're shot, you stay dead until the end of the round - no instant respawning.

Twelve years since its first release, Counter Strike still has a huge following and remains ridiculously popular. Last year Valve released Counter Strike: Global Offensive (seen above), so if you've gotten tired of the original, you can immerse yourself in a new game that features updated content from the original, along with new maps, characters and weapons.

Special Mention: Pathways Into Darkness

Free - Download now

Before Halo, before Myth, before Marathon, way back in 1993, Bungie Software made a name for itself with Mac gamers with one of the most innovative first person shooters we'd ever seen (and really, we hadn't seen a lot of them, but we knew this one was cool). That game was called Pathways Into Darkness.

Man Up Time has resurrected this 20-year-old masterpiece for modern Mac and they've made it absolutely free. Not 'freemium' - there are no in-app purchases you need to make to keep playing. Free. The game traps you in a mysterious pyramid in the Yucatan that threatens the very survival of the Earth. You must descend into its innermost recesses, battling fearsome monsters to save the world.

PID is a game of its era. Its graphics are quaint and primitive, its interface is awkward by modern standards, but it stands out as a period piece worthy of remembering and enjoying. It's a bit of Mac legend. And it's free, so you have nothing to lose but some download bandwidth.

Your go-to first-person shooters?

Those are my favorite FPS games on the Mac right now, but if there are any other can't-miss shooters on your short list, let me know in the comments below. You can never have too much of an awesome thing!

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The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

What Multiplayer Games Can Macs Run On Windows 10

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

Death Run Game Multiplayer

You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.