Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

I am a gamer. I suppose that's somewhat like admitting to any other addiction, just a little less serious. BF:1942 Anonymous? I have spent more time shooting, fixing, allocating, running and dodging in a plethora of virtual worlds than I have spent doing nearly anything else in my life, and it's close to the time I have spent sleeping. Anyone remember Gemstone Warrior on the Apple IIe? I didn't think so. Ok, how about asteroids on the Mac Classic, run in OS 6?

That was back when games were an afterthought, a star on the horizon, out-shone by the business applications so necessary to sell the emerging technology to the corporate world with their risk analysis and labor unit quotas. Small companies made a couple games here and there, hoping to sell enough to break even on the relatively expensive cost of media. Games written in BASIC (aack!), With Color! for those lucky enough or wealthy enough to afford that level of hardware.

And with that segue into the discussion of hardware, I will once again touch on the subject of this article: Star Wars: Battlefront has gone Gold Master. Mac gamers will rejoice, but PC gamers will nod, yawn and go back to their Battlefield: 2 multiplayer havoc. We Mac gamers have been barking about this issue for years, that games are written for PC's and if we're lucky, the successful ones (read: money) are then ported to the Mac. We have been lucky enough to receive the bounty of a few intrepid and talented houses, notably Bungie, with their groundbreaking Pathways into Darkness and Marathon series, and Blizzard with their Mac and PC-compatible Diablo discs.

Even fewer are truly compatible with online play in arenas accessible by PC users as well, and let's not even get into mods-Battlefield: 1942's most excellent Desert Combat mod still doesn't have a stable Final release, whereas the next game in the series is already out on shelves and being snatched off Walmart shelves nationwide.

I look forward to this shift to Intel as a boon to we gamers, who have suffered so long under the "no, there's no Mac version yet" malaise, ridiculed by our PC brethren. Soon, we will have the technology to go with these twitchy trigger fingers to rise and over the barrel of a minigun say, "do you feel lucky, punk?"