EA gives Apple Mac's games

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 19 August 2007 15:54

Your IT - Entertainment

Electronic Arts are coming through with their promise of shipping games for the Apple Mac platform; time to ditch the Windows box?

Apple users can order from the Apple online store both Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix along with Need for Speed Carbon, Battlefield 2142 and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars.

This completes three quarters of the EA announcement made at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June this year.

The other two games announced at the WWDC, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 and Madden NFL 2008 are yet to see store shelves in an Apple format.

All of the new games have been developed for the Macintosh using Cider, a technology developed by TransGaming that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows games inside a translation layer running on Mac OS X. They are not playable on PowerPC-based Macs.

"Over time, as EA gains experience in completing and shipping Mac games, the gap will narrow. This is a huge leap compared with past launches. We've shorted the gap between the Mac launch and other platforms to just a few weeks," said EA spokesperson Tammy Schachter.

These EA titles join a small but ever growing library of serious gaming software for the Apple operating systems. 

They also make a significant statement by being relatively newly released software titles that have made the cross personal computer leap.  Up until this point, it would be true to say that the vast majority of gaming software available has been around on PC's for some time.

"It is our intention to ship the games as close to other platforms as possible," said Schachter.

If you are a true hard-core gamer after the most up to date technology and titles available, it is not time to switch to a slick looking Mac, still if the biggest games publisher and developer in the world feels it wants to sell more up to date titles for the Apple platform, others will follow soon enough.