Once we’d configured everything correctly, CrossOver Games let us play Portal within a window, with good framerates and sound.

Mac users have traditionally drawn the short straw when it comes to games. The Mac has plenty of good titles, but not nearly the variety as Windows. With Macs gaining popularity and market share, bigger game publishers like EA have been releasing games for Mac OS X, but many others are holding out. This is where CrossOver Games comes in.

Developed by CodeWeavers, CrossOver Games is a commercial, game-optimized version of the Wine project (www.winehq.org), whose goal is to allow non-Windows systems to run Windows software without installing the OS. CrossOver Games is not an emulator, and it needs to run on an Intel Mac; it won’t work on a PowerPC-based machine. Like any gaming environment, it benefits from more horsepower; we tested it on a MacBook Pro maxed out with 4GB of RAM. While looking through CodeWeavers’ list of supported games, Valve’s titles stood out as ones that Mac gamers have been yearning for. Our tests focused on Portal and Half-Life 2.

Installing CrossOver Games was easy, but game installation was fraught with more difficulty than we would’ve liked. We had our install disc ready, and everything seemed to be going well, but after the installation completed, we couldn’t find the installed games in CrossOver’s menu. We had to quit and relaunch CrossOver Games for the titles to appear. But once we launched Steam, Valve’s gaming client, it immediately started downloading updates to the installed games, and generally behaved as it should have. The only other significant glitch was that it took some work to figure out how to run games in windowed, rather than full-screen, mode. It turns out that for most of Valve’s games, you have to set the in-game preference and then quit and relaunch CrossOver Games to make the change take effect.

Having installed and set up Portal, we were able to play it through to the end and found it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, one that would’ve otherwise been impossible on Mac OS X. Similarly, our forays into Half-Life 2 met with success and good gameplay.

VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta

We played Portal using the beta of VMWare 2.0 and got reasonable, but not earth-shattering, performance.

At press time, VMWare had released a public beta of version 2.0 of its Fusion virtualization app, which included graphics-related performance improvements. Unlike with CrossOver Games, we first needed to install Windows XP before we were able to install Valve’s games. VMWare can also launch Windows from your Boot Camp partition, obviating the need for a full reboot unless you’re really performance-sensitive.

Once Fusion 2.0 was installed and configured, we tried both Portal and Half-Life 2 and were pleasantly surprised at how well they played, although the performance was perceptibly slower than with CrossOver Games.

Fusion is not primarily a gaming-oriented product, but if you’re already a Fusion user and were wondering whether you can use it for games, the answer is a qualified yes. We certainly wouldn’t expect high-framerate 3D-based twitch games to perform that well, but in our testing, Fusion comported itself better than we expected.

If you crave playing a particular Windows-only game, and you don’t want to buy a full version of Windows to play that game using Boot Camp, and the game is on CodeWeavers’ list of supported games, CrossOver Games is an affordable way to make it happen

COMPANY: CodeWeavers
CONTACT: www.codeweavers.com
PRICE: $39.95
REQUIREMENTS: Intel-based Mac, Mac OS 10.4 or later
It played the Valve games we tested well.
Intel Macs only. Game installation and configuration are unintuitive at times.