First off, I probably haven’t endeared myself with the title of this piece. In fact, you’re probably wondering where you put your torch and pitchfork, and how quickly you can Google my address and come egg my house.

And I can more than understand your sentiment.

Still, the fact remains that the grass can look fairly green and healthy on the other side. So after years of listening to the smug kids at Best Buy and GameStop talk smack about gaming on the Mac, we went looking for -- and found -- five excellent Windows PC games that not only are dirt cheap, but perform amazingly well under Apple’s Boot Camp technology.

That being said, fire up the Boot Camp Assistant, carve out a Windows partition, install Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the Windows 7 beta, and get your game on. These incredibly fun titles will level the playing field between you and those friends of yours who are always rubbing it in when a hot game isn't available on the Mac.

Left 4 Dead

Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Price: $27.99 at Amazon, or $29.99 at Steam
ESRB Rating: Mature
Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 1GB of RAM. 128MB graphics card.

Battling zombies in Left 4 Dead -- click to embiggen.

You know, that Romero fella may have been on to something. One of the most fun games in recent memory, Valve’s Left 4 Dead puts you in the middle of an abandoned city filled to the brim with zombie-like Infected, undead mutants more than willing to tear you and your group of three other survivors to pieces. Complete with fast first-person shooter survival elements, incredible physics, clever AI, and enough varied gameplay to ensure that almost no position is truly defensible for long, Left 4 Dead gathered up lots of Game of the Year awards last fall -- and with good reason.

Even with a fine blend of zombies, it’s the extras that put it over the top. While it’s inevitable that you’ll face swarms of attacking undead, it’s also easy and fun to set traps, defend your teammates, and lay down enough cover fire to sprint for the next safe room, which functions as a save point within the game’s four campaigns.

Zombie-based first-person shooters have been done before, and something needed to come along to keep the genre fresh. Valve thought of this and implemented special zombies, this group consisting of the Boomer (a slow-moving, obese zombie that vomits Infected-attracting bile to you to signal the Infected to attack you en masse), the Smoker (a unit that will attempt to drag you across the map with its long tongue and will then constrict the life out of you), the Hunter (a ranged unit that can pounce your character from long distances, shredding you with its claws once it pins you down), the Witch (a crouched, sobbing female Infected that will chase after you, tearing through anything in her path to pin and shred you if disturbed by bright lights or sound), and the Tank (an enraged, almost bulletproof hulking pile of muscle capable of crashing through anything to attempt to crush your group).

Left 4 Dead's Infected zombies soft-shoe on rooftops until we give 'em the proverbial gong.

Where multiplayer is concerned, the title has only gotten better. A Versus mode allows you to play the part of both the human survivors as well as the Infected hunting them, a Survival mode allows you to see how long you cooperate online and live and cooperative co-op play lets you take on the four standard campaign levels with the help of friends online.

For under 30 bucks, you can’t go wrong. Snag it, play it, and love it.

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Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 

Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: 2K Games
Price: $19.49 at Amazon
ESRB Rating: Teen
Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 512MB of RAM. 128MB graphics card.

Oblivion's role-playing is easy enough for newbies, and its storyline will suck you in. Click to embiggen.

While role-playing titles can be seen like a fair amount of work to someone outside their immediate fanbase, this one can draw in nearly anyone. In Oblivion, you're an escaped prisoner trying to thwart a plot involving opening gates to a realm called Oblivion and unleashing its horrors on the mortal world. The game's open-ended environment allows the player to travel almost anywhere in the world at any given time, while taking on almost any role or class imaginable and consistently gaining new skills and feats along the way.

If beautiful graphics, terrific lighting and modeling, and voice acting by Patrick Stewart don’t haul you into this game, nothing will. Oblivion combines a great storyline with a convenient interface that proves helpful to both new and experienced alike. Not sure where to go to complete a mission? Follow the red arrow on your display to reach your target, and the game points out possible side missions along the way.

Oblivion's open-ended world is rendered beautifully.

The customization quickly becomes interesting, and players can craft their characters with almost any weapons, armor, items, and spells imaginable. Even with its depth, Oblivion remains inviting, gently pointing out how to play without demanding the player to have memorized half the game’s manual before sitting down for the first time. The main story is solid, you get plenty of room to explore, and even after a dozen hours of gameplay, we felt we'd barely scratched the surface.

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BioShock

Developer and Publisher: 2K Games
Price: $19.99 at Amazon
ESRB Rating: Teen
Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 1GB of RAM. 128MB graphics card.

BioShock's first-person shooting is just so satisfying. Click to embiggen.

It’s strange. It’s weird and only gets weirder -- but man, is it fun. One of the best and most surreal first-person shooters on the market, 2K Games’ BioShock takes place in an alternate 1960. After surviving a plane crash, you must explore the underwater city of Rapture, survive attacks from mutants and robots, and discover exactly what happened to turn the city on its head.

Combining the best elements of role-playing and survival-horror games, BioShock has a surreal environment and a continuously progressing storyline. You must use both conventional and biological weaponry to stand a chance against progressively tougher enemies. A one-two punch of shooting fire, ice, or electricity from your hands, and then blowing the stunned enemy away with a shotgun blast often succeeds.

Die, alterna-60s robots!

BioShock needed some scaling down to run well under Boot Camp -- the game requires a graphics card with 128MB of VRAM, but recommends 512MB of VRAM instead. Lower-quality settings produced significantly better framerates. Still, this title gets its hooks into you and draws you in. A good AI system keeps the battles interesting. The environments blend art-deco, comic book sci-fi, and touches of steampunk in the enhancements to your weapons.

It’s dark and creepy -- probably not for your kids to play. But if your Mac has a beefy graphics card with 512MB of VRAM, BioShock is hard to ignore.

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Battlefield 2

Developer: Digital Illusions CE
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Price: $7.99 on Amazon
ESRB Rating: Teen
Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. 1.7GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 512MB of RAM. 128MB graphics card.

The multiplayer mayhem of Battlefield 2 -- click to embiggen.

As intellectual and refined and dignified as video games have become, sometimes you've just got to shoot something. And if it’s your friends online, who’s to complain?

Despite being four years past its initial release, Battlefield 2 remains as fun as ever. You play as a United States Marine, Middle Eastern Coalition soldier, or Chinese soldier, choosing a class (Assault, Support, Anti-tank, Special Ops, Sniper, Engineer, or Medic) and entering the battle. Once the game has begun, two teams must capture control points and/or wipe the other side out to whittle the number of tickets down to nothing and win the game.

It may not have a deeper plot, but Battlefield 2 represents the first-person military shooter genre at its best. As in the original Battlefield, players find themselves rushing to attack or defend a control point, grabbing whatever vehicles or weapons are nearby, and laying waste to whatever they can before being killed and either being resurrected by a medic or waiting until the game lets them back in. The models, lighting, and terrain still look great, and the realistic physics provide an immersive feel.

Ah, relaxing tank warfare.

Battlefield 2 offers amazing multiplayer action, with experience points unlocking new weapons, items, ranks, and abilities. Take on the Commander role for your team and you’ll be able to easily call in airstrikes, drop equipment and supplies to specific locations, and issue orders for squads to follow. Finally, a cool co-op game mode allows you and your team of friends to take on dozens of computer-controlled opponents, with a customizable difficulty setting.

This isn’t the game equivalent of Shakespeare, but for its low, low price, Battlefield 2 is worth snagging, installing, and seeing just how much destruction you can create with a tank, some explosives, and a few sneaky thoughts running around in your head.

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Portal

Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Price: $27.99 on Amazon (includes Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and Team Fortress 2). $19.99 on Steam.
ESRB Rating: Teen
Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. 1.7GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 512MB of RAM. 128MB graphics card.

Hmm, puzzling. Click to embiggen.

One of the best titles of 2007 and proof that there’s still something original and amazing in the video game industry, Valve’s Portal is a perfect combination of a first-person shooter and a puzzle title. Here, you play a female prisoner who wakes up in the headquarters of a scientific corporation and must escape by solving a series of puzzles with the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (also known as the Portal Gun), a device that can create an inter-spatial portal between certain flat planes.

Along the way, you're continuously taunted by an artificial intelligence named “GLaDOS”, who continuously offers you delicious cake as a reward for completing the puzzles. Good graphics, terrific sound, realistic physics, and a wry sense of humor make the title work. Even if puzzle games aren’t your thing, it becomes incredibly fun to figure out how to create a teleportation portal on the fly while falling to what should be your doom.

Your character has lots of tricks up her sleeve, such as using the Portal Gun to drop attack robots onto each other or to help increase your momentum in order to boost a jump across a pit. You’ll find yourself wanting to keep playing to see what lies ahead.

Perhaps it’s the constant taunting from the computer, the seemingly empty promise of cake, or just the sheer challenge, but Portal becomes the perfect way to waste about 10 hours of your life. Even when you hit the wall and take a break from the game, it’s rewarding to come back and try out a new series of ideas in order to get around the challenge that was previously driving you crazy.

Portal runs like a dream under Boot Camp, but must be purchased along with Valve’s Orange Box collection (which also includes Half-Life 2, and Team Fortress 2), or snagged on its own from the Steam online store. Portal is clever and original, fairly nonviolent, totally addictive, and one of the best games for any platform, hands down.

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