Favourite Computer Games

The great four-player car racing game Pitstop kept the Bradley Street crew occupied for hours at a time. It's still one of the best driving games ever.

Other favourites were Time Pilot, Pitfall, Cosmic Avenger, and War Games.

The original Coleco contollers were just about useless for most games compared to a joystick. We broke several joysticks during heavy use.

The ColEm emulator program for Mac (Classic) and PC helps to bring these old games back. It takes a while to set up the gamepad buttons to match the old controlers. (Especially the more complex games that use a lot of buttons, like War Games.)

There is also Mugrat Coleco Emulator for Mac OS X. It's shareware, and pretty crippled when unregistered.

Various Atari magazine floppy disks were a good source of games. The freeware Nova was a great shoot 'em up. The Skate Tribe demo was a big hit with the kids.

The Civilization demo (left) used many hours.

So far I have been able to run only a few of these successfuly in Atari ST emulators for Macintosh. Haven't tried very hard though.

The NoSTalgia emulator works for some games, but is a bit awkward to use.

No problems on my early Macintosh 6360/160 PPC with 32MB RAM and OS 8.6. Even better with more RAM and a video card and OS 9.1. The G3/400 upgrade rocks!

If you have a reasonably modern Mac PPC, the unofficial Carbon MacGLQuake 1.1b3 is great looking, and fast.

The multi-player game over the internet is even better. Once experienced, you'll understand what all the fuss is about. Internet "lag" is a pain. A fast modem helps. There are still a few servers around the world. The GameRanger application can help you find them.

I really like Capture The Flag (CTF) style team play over the 'net. Special add-on modules for Quakeworld like Team Fortress (left) and Arena add even more interest to the game. Try playing as a Soldier with the double-barrelled shotgun instead of a rocket launcher for a challenge.

Quake 3 Arena is something special to look at, but you'll need a fast machine with heaps of RAM and a 3D video card to play.

The Quake 3 Demo doesn't work on my new iMac G5. Fortunately OpenArena for OS X works really well.

The balance between resource gathering/upgrading and fighting was just about "right".

It took some time, but I eventually won both the Human and Orc Campaigns on the hardest level(s).

Additional maps from the internet are challenging.

Internet play via GameRanger was good in the day. I was usually killed quickly.

Not so many people play online these days.

The emphasis is on the fighting.

There are lots of plug ins to download for different styles.

Many like the internet game, but I never really "got" it.

Project Magma people have updated Myth II to run on Mac OSX using OpenGL.

There are still some copyright issues, so you have search for your own game ROMs.

Now the MacMAME arcade emulator allows me to play some old favourites on the Mac. Newer games like Mortal Kombat didn't run so well on my old machine, but Street Fighter just made it.

Most things run with no problems on the new iMac G5 with Mac OSX Tiger and MacMAME Ver 0.103u2. I haven't got a USB controller yet.

Great old shoot-em-ups like Time Pilot or 1942 will break your joystick! Tiger Road (left) is a current favourite. Pole Position and Metal Slug are pretty good too.

Get MacMAME from: www.macmame.org.
More info from the newsgroup: alt.games.mame.

There are lots of weapons including tanks, submarines, and aircraft to master.

Sometimes the computer enemy is a bit stupid. Internet play agianst humans is much harder.

Various plug ins can be downloaded for other campaigns. Some of these are huge downloads, but worth the trouble.

The Road To Rome deals with the Italian campaign in late WWII.

I like the Vietnam Conflict mod Eve of Destruction.

The Desert Combat plug in includes modern warfare scenarios in Iraq.