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Posts tagged with "games"

CES 2024: More Gaming, Laptops, Hybrid Computers, NUCs, and Smart Home Devices

Source: CES.

Source: CES.

After what already feels like a week of CES, it’s the official day one of the conference. There have been a ton of announcements already. As anticipated, gaming is very big this year, with new handhelds, laptops, and other devices announced. Interesting new approaches to hybrid computers, ASUS’s first NUC, and a handful of smart home devices have been announced already, too, so let’s dig into the latest.

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CES 2024: Gaming, Laptops, TVs, AR and VR, Batteries, and a Couple of Oddities

Source: CES.

Source: CES.

Every year, I dig into the press releases and reporting coming from the CES show floor, so you don’t have to. The pandemic took the wind out of CES’s sails for a few years, but the show and interesting gadgets have made a comeback for 2024, with a wide range of announcements made in the days leading up to the show, which doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow. I’ll be back with more updates throughout the week, but here are some of the announcements that have caught my eye so far.

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The M3’s Potential to Transform Mac Gaming

Raymond Wong has an excellent story on Inverse about the Mac and gaming. Wong spoke to multiple Apple representatives about its push to build Macs that can handle the most demanding PC and console games, exploring the impact of Apple silicon on the company’s efforts. In that vein, Doug Brooks, a member of the Mac product marketing team, told Inverse:

Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design. Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory.

That integrated, console-like approach has the added benefit of bringing the iPhone and iPad along for the ride, greatly expanding the potential size of the market for game developers. According to Leland Martin, one of Apple’s software marketing managers:

If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs. That can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad.

With the introduction of the M3 family of chips, Apple’s gaming story continues to evolve by adding hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and Dynamic Caching, which determines on-the-fly the amount of memory to make available to the M3’s GPU for improved performance. Those chip enhancements are paired with new developer tools designed to make it easier to bring games to the Mac.

There are a lot of variables at play, and whether Apple can compete head-to-head with PC and console games is far from certain. However, what’s clear is that Apple is doing more than at any time in recent memory to make a run at the top end of the videogame market.

Some of the fruits of those efforts are beginning to appear on the App Store. Capcom’s Resident Evil Village debuted on the Mac in the fall of 2022 and more recently on the iPhone and iPad. As Wong notes, Lies of P, one of the top releases of the year was released on the Mac at the same time as other platforms, and Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on Steam for the Mac just a couple of months after its debut on other platforms. Plus, Capcom is back with Resident Evil 4 on every Apple device, and Death Stranding is slated for early next year. That’s a lot of top-notch games.

I’ve been playing many of these titles across an original M1 MacBook Air, M1 Max Mac Studio, and, most recently, on M3 Max MacBook Pro that Apple sent me, and the early results aren’t surprising. The M1 MacBook Air struggles, while the M3 Max MacBook Pro looks stunning. That may not make any Mac the best choice for gaming today, but with the M3, the technology to make it competitive with PCs and consoles is emerging and will inevitably trickle down to more affordable Macs over time.

Whether that happens fast enough and whether Apple can attract the biggest games are just two of many open questions. However, as we head into 2024, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far and plan to share more of my ongoing exploration of Mac gaming in the new year.

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Big-Name Netflix Games Releases, Mac Game Stats from Developers, and Resident Evil 4 and GRID Legends Released in Time for the Holidays

A scene from GTA: Vice City. Source: Rockstar Games.

A scene from GTA: Vice City. Source: Rockstar Games.

There’s been a lot of gaming activity on Apple platforms, with several big announcements in recent weeks.

First off, Netflix continues to nab some big titles for its growing catalog of games on iOS and iPadOS. In October, it was announced that one of my all-time favorite games, Dead Cells, which won a MacStories Selects award in 2019, would join Netflix Games.

More recently, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which includes GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, was released simultaneously on iOS and iPadOS as part of Netflix games. According to Kotaku, these Netflix versions of the games, which are also available as separate App Store purchases, have been updated to fix visual glitches and spruce things up a bit, too.

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First Look: Stray for Mac

Source: Annapurna Interactive.

Source: Annapurna Interactive.

Stray, a high-profile and well-regarded videogame that debuted in 2022, is now available on the Mac. Initially launched on PlayStation and Windows, followed by an Xbox version this past August, today’s Mac release is available on both the Mac App Store and Steam.

The game, created by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive, is set in a neon-lit, post-apocalyptic cityscape where you play as a cat. Thrown into an unfamiliar environment, your goal is to solve the mysteries of a dangerous rundown city aided by a flying robot named B-12.

Stray was generally well-received by reviewers, who appreciated how BlueTwelve imbued its cat protagonist with personality and captured life-like cat movement and behavior. As a result, it’s unsurprising that the number of systems on which you can enjoy Stray’s feline adventures has continued to expand.

I played Stray when it debuted on the PlayStation 5 and enjoyed it. The game’s controls are relatively simple, and the story isn’t terribly long, but the puzzles are challenging, and the cyberpunk visuals are stunning. It’s been a while since I last dipped into Stray, but the game was one of my favorites of 2022, so when I got the chance to play it a day before the launch, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ve only had time to play Stray on the Mac for a few hours, navigating through the introductory scene and the early part of the game, so this isn’t a review. However, as someone familiar with the console version, I thought I’d share my early impressions playing on my M1 Max Mac Studio and my M1 MacBook Air.

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MacStories Unwind: Streaming Games at Home

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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and I follow up on AppStories experiments with our thoughts on the Sony PlayStation Portal and the best ways to stream videogames from a console or PC on your home network.

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Introducing the New MacStories Setups Page

Federico's setup (left) and John's (right).

Federico’s setup (left) and John’s (right).

Setup optimization is a never-ending journey at MacStories. We’re always looking for the fastest, most efficient, and often, most portable way to do everything in our lives. The result is constant change. Hardware and apps are swapped in and out of our systems and workflows frequently.

We write or talk about our setups in a bunch of different places, which we realize can make it hard to keep up with the most current version of what we’re using. That’s why we’ve dedicated macstories.net/setups/ to our setups. That way, the next time you wonder, what was that pair of headphones Federico mentioned on AppStories or that giant battery pack John wrote about for Club MacStories, you’ll have a place where you can quickly find the answer. You’ll find a link to the new Setups page in the navigation bar at the top of the MacStories homepage, too.

Our new Setups page is what Apple might call ‘a living document.’ We’ll update it periodically throughout the year with changes we make with links to everything that’s still being sold somewhere.

Speaking of links, many of the ones you’ll find on the Setups page are affiliate links. If you buy something using those links, MacStories, Inc. will receive a small commission. You can learn more about how MacStories uses affiliate links in our privacy policy.

Also, if you have any questions about the gear and apps listed on the Setups page, feel free to reach out on Mastodon using @viticci or @johnvoorhees, or ping us on Discord.


I Tried to Run Cities: Skylines 2 on My M2 MacBook Air via Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit… And I Discovered A Great App Instead

I have always been a huge fan of city-building games. The first video game I ever played was SimCity 3000, on my uncle’s bulky PC running Windows 2000. I then went on to play SimCity 4 throughout middle and high school. Sadly, EA’s reboot of the franchise in 2013 was a sizable disappointment, and has lead fans to love Cities: Skylines instead, a newcomer to the genre.

Cities: Skylines was released in 2015 simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I have fond memories of playing the game on my newly purchased 13-inch MacBook Pro. It was my companion during numerous train trips I took across France and Germany that winter. Although the MacBook Pro’s battery would probably have been depleted in 20 minutes if it were not for the presence of power plugs in most trains, the fact that it launched and ran on my Mac without compromise was impressive.

I was eagerly looking forward to the release of Cities: Skylines 2 this year. After reading a number of positive reviews, I knew I would want to play the game as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Paradox Interactive threw a wrench in my plans: Cities: Skylines 2 is currently exclusive to Windows, and the company has not yet announced any plans to release the game on macOS.

This year at WWDC, Apple released the Game Porting Toolkit, a software translation layer that can help game developers easily port their Windows games to the Mac. It seemed the toolkit was allowing users to launch their favorite Windows games on their Mac with surprising ease. Intrigued, I wanted to test it out to see if I could play Cities: Skylines 2 on my M2 MacBook Air.

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Apple Announces Close to 40 App Store Awards Finalists

Today, Apple announced the finalists for its App Store Awards, a selection of apps that the App Store Editorial team picks each fall to recognize “their excellence, inventiveness, and technical achievement” in ten categories.

Introducing award finalists is a departure for Apple from past years when the company only announced the winners. The change is carried over from the company’s annual Apple Design Awards that are revealed at WWDC every year and is one I like. Today’s finalists include nearly 40 apps and games that span a wide variety of categories and range from creations by solo developers to big companies. It’s an eclectic mix that captures the breadth of the App Store well.

Apple says it will reveal the winners of the App Store Awards later this month. If past announcements are any guide, the last week of November is a good bet on the timing. In the meantime, we have the complete list of finalist apps and games from Apple’s press release after the break.

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