The Mothership

Another game that I’ve recently discovered I have the Mac version of is Quake 3. I knew there was a Mac version of it, but I didn’t know if it was on the discs that I had. I found the CD case and examined it, but it didn’t say *anything* at all about what platforms were supported. So, figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I slapped the CD into the iBook and sure enough, a Mac installer was right there.

I also have Team Arena, since it was the Quake Gold package, but right on the front of its CD it says “Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT4″. Oh well. But maybe… Sure enough, after sticking it in, there was a Mac installer for it too.

Things get even stranger though. The first thing you do after installing any game nowadays is to go and grab the patches, right? Q3 was still running in Classic mode and was a bit choppy, so I hoped there would at least be a native OS X patch. Well, off to idsoftware.com I went, but oddly enough I couldn’t find any Mac patches at all. There were Linux and Windows patches to bring it to 1.31, but nothing for the Mac. Well, maybe the 1.30 included in the Gold package really is the final version for the Mac, I thought.

After poking around a bit though, there was a file named “Patches and Updates blah blah blah.html”, and it had a URL to quake3world.com’s files section. After a quick visit there I could see that they were actually up to 1.32 for the Linux and Windows versions, but there was only a beta version of a patch to 1.31 for the Mac. It was, however, a broken link. Well goodie. Starting from the front page of fileplanet.com I worked down to the Quake 3 files and, lo and behold, there was what I really wanted: a final, official 1.32 point release for Mac OS X. Ugh, it just had to be FilePlanet…

You’d think that the company’s own site would be the place to go for the latest updates. Or that the biggest fansites would have working links to the right places. No wonder people are wary of gaming on the Mac if they’re going to treat it like the red-headed stepchild…

Heh, I only just realized that the Warcraft III Battle Chest I picked up a while back has the Mac versions on the same CDs. Looks like I’ll have more than the default Tony Hawk 4 to play with on trips after all…

The newest member of my little family, ‘ebotona’:

It’s an iBook G4, and although I’ve occasionally used Macs before, this is the first one I’ve actually ever owned. Why an iBook? Well, I always like to have something new to tinker with. My knowledge about Macs is about 10 years out of date, so it couldn’t hurt to get back up to speed on them, especially since I may get nailed with doing our OSX client port at work. I don’t really need a new full-blown desktop system, but I could occasionally use a laptop, so the iBook fills both needs; it’ll fulfill my travelling requirements, and still give me something new to fiddle with when at home.

So what was the first thing I did? Wipe OSX off and install Linux, of course… :-)
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Looking around at a lot of people I know, it seems like I’m the only one *not* using or at least praising the Mac. Why haven’t I taken the plunge yet? Well, it’s not any “OS A sucks, B rulez!!1!” mentality; OSX sounds just great from most reports so far.

I already have two working systems, a full-time Linux server for ‘work’ and a dual boot XP/Linux system for gaming and other CPU-intense tasks, and between them I have pretty much all of my needs covered. Whenever I upgrade it’s almost always to get better gaming performance, not for experimental systems. I don’t really have the room for a new system and I’m not about to *replace* a whole system with a relatively unknown (to me) one. I just don’t have any big incentive to switch or add in a Mac yet.

Except maybe in one spot… The one thing I’m still missing is a laptop. It’s always been a fairly low priority item for me since I don’t travel much, but there’s the odd time it might be useful. Since the tasks it would need to be able to handle would be pretty basic (store files, access USB devices, basic net connectivity), a Mac would cover those basic tasks pretty well while still letting me have one to tinker with.

Will I? Eh, depends on how lazy I’m feeling when/if I ever get around to it. :-P It probably wouldn’t even be a top-end model; something like the 14″ iBook would likely suffice. I’m certainly not about to shell out $4300 for this one…