Frontier Developments has paid tribute to the late author Terry Pratchett by adding a new space station to Elite: Dangerous called Pratchett's Disc.

The station was added with little fanfare, noted only by a single, short sentence in the Wings Update 1.2.05 patch notes: "Added Pratchett's Disc starport." But Executive Producer Michael Brookes told Eurogamer that the author had a great impact on many people at the studio.

"At Frontier we have a great many Pratchett fans on staff and we were all saddened to learn of his passing," he said. "The sentiment was reflected by our community so we felt it would be right to remember him in Elite: Dangerous."

Pratchett, the author of the long-running and immensely popular Discworld series, died last week at age 66. Chris Livingston wrote a tribute to the author, his work, and his connection to videogames—in 1993, he appeared on the cover of the very first issue of PC Gamer—which you can (and should) read here.

It's been almost three years since Carmageddon: Reincarnation earned $625,000 on Kickstarter, and well over a year since it went live on Steam Early Access. But now the bloody journey is almost over, as Stainless Games has announced that a full and final release will roll out in late April.

The complete version of Carmageddon: Reincarnation will include a career mode with 16 chapters, each with three or four events—50 in total—as well as LAN and online multiplayer support for up to eight people at a time. There will be 24 vehicles (25 for Kickstarter backers, who get a special edition of the Red Eagle), nine maps, 36 race routes, more than 80 power-ups, and a half-dozen different event types: Classic Carmageddon, Car Crusher, Fox 'n' Hounds, Ped Chase, Death Race, and Checkpoint Stampede.

"We're delighted to announce that the game will soon be going gold, and on April 23 it'll be showered in all its Steamy golden glory upon an eagerly waiting world!" the studio said in a statement.

But the real reason we're gathered here today is the "launch announcement" trailer, because you just don't see trailers like this anymore. And probably for good reason, since I don't think anyone would argue that it's not monumentally, almost nobly, silly. But that's really what Carmageddon was, and clearly is, about: I played a lot of the original back in the day, and while I don't know if I ever won a race by crossing the finish line ahead of my competitors, I do recall screaming into a crowded stadium at about a million miles an hour and turning everyone on the field into a sticky, red mucilage.

To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's brilliantly succinct assessment of Snakes on a Plane, you either want to play that, or you don't. If you do, April 23 is the day it happens. Until then, the Early Access version, which includes the Carmageddon Classic Collection, will remain for sale on Steam.

Article by Orestis Bastounis

If you re buying a computer purely for playing games, a Mac isn t the best choice. We always recommend building your own PC. Macs are more expensive than a desktop Windows PC, especially when you add on extra storage, memory or a faster GPU, and there s a far smaller library of games that run natively on OS X, Apple s desktop operating system, than you ll find for Windows. And yet, Macs are hugely popular. They're everywhere now—and that means we should make them the best gaming machines they can possibly be.

Maybe you prefer OS X for day-to-day computing and have a dedicated PC for gaming. Maybe you re a frequent traveler or college student, and prefer using a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air over a Windows laptop. And we all know a few fanboys who buy every Apple contraption as soon as it goes on sale.

Gaming on a Mac may be more restrictive than with a desktop PC running Windows, but if you choose the right Mac hardware, and are willing to pay for it, you ll be able to play most games without issue. That s why I ve put together this guide to gaming on the Mac, covering everything from the best Mac hardware for gaming, to using Windows Boot Camp, to the mice and keyboards you should buy for Mac gaming.

If you don t own a Mac, but are curious about what OS X might have to offer for gamers, I ll explain the available choices, the different product lines, and what upgrades are most beneficial for gaming. I ll look at storage, the GPU options, CPU upgrades and even some of the more exotic upgrades you could make, such as external graphics cards that connect via Thunderbolt, or what you could do to boost your Mac s performance by whipping it open yourself and adding an SSD, more memory or a bigger hard disk.

Take away that shiny aluminum exterior (and bigger pricetag), and Macs and PCs are based on identical Intel-based x86 hardware. By setting up Boot Camp to run Windows side-by-side with OS X, you can play PC-exclusive games which haven t been coded to run on OS X. I ll cover Boot Camp—along with a look at some of the other ways to run Windows software directly in OS X like Wineskin and virtual machines—and their potential pitfalls.

Page 1: Introduction to Mac gamingPage 2: Mac hardware and buying advicePage 3: Mac gaming on OS XPage 4: Running Windows games on a MacPage 5: Keyboards, mice, and gamepads on Mac

Mac hardware and buying advice

There are three separate desktop Mac product lines: the iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro, and two main portable variants, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, with the newly announced Intel Core-M based MacBook joining the family. Each serves a quite distinct set of users, with different hardware, design, pricing and performance depending on the configuration you go for.

As we all know, the key to great gaming performance is having a good graphics card and processor. All Macs come with an Intel Haswell or Broadwell processor, with integrated graphics in the entry-level models. With some Mac models, there s the option of a discrete mobile GPU, from either Nvidia or AMD, but this depends on the type of Mac you re buying.

As with mini-ITX PCs and Ultrabooks, the Mac Mini and MacBook Air are designed to be as small as possible, and therefore the maximum performance they can offer is quite restricted, given there s only so much heat output they can handle from powerful components.

Should you buy them for gaming? Of all Apple s products, the Mac Mini, Air, and new MacBook are the least suited to gaming since their CPUs are clocked fairly low, in favour of long battery life. The processor only runs at 1.1 GHz in the case of the entry-level MacBook, and there are no options for discrete graphics cards. Don t count on it playing anything but old and lightweight games.

The Mac Pro

At the other end of the spectrum is the Mac Pro.The Mac Pro is a workstation and isn t aimed at gamers, but it s without a doubt the best Mac for gaming you could buy. It starts at $2,999—not exactly an impulse purchase.

It comes with dual AMD FirePro professional GPUs, rebranded as D300, D500 and D700 cards. It s the only Mac to offer desktop graphics cards, custom designed by AMD to fit into the Mac Pro s cylindrical shell. The oddly shaped design gives the Mac Pro some really superb thermal efficiency, but also means you can t fit hard disks inside it. Instead, you have to make do with up to 1TB of flash storage, which uses 4 PCI Express lanes for roughly 1GB/sec read and write speeds and external storage for additional capacity.

And since the Mac Pro is a workstation, it s priced as such. The Xeon processor options range from a 3.7 GHz quad-core chip to a 2.7 GHz 12-core processor. For gaming, the quad-core processor will deliver better performance in most cases, as the extra clock speed will affect gaming performance more than extra cores.

The quad-core Mac Pro costs far more than a PC of comparable performance, but you can add a nice upgrade that works out as reasonable value for money. Bump the graphics cards to the D700 option for an extra $1000 and you re basically getting two top-end AMD FirePro cards for far less than the cost of the desktop variants.

Should you buy it for gaming? This configuration will deliver the very best gaming performance of any Mac, but it s still only a system you should be buying if you re doing video editing or design work (or have a ton of money and an unrequited crush on Johnny Ive).

The MacBook Pro

Although integrated graphics are certainly no match for a proper graphics card, Intel s offerings are far better than they used to be. Of course, you won t get anywhere near the performance of a desktop gaming PC out of an entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it s now enough to at least run modern games, probably with the resolution and detail settings turned down and the fancy effects kept to a minimum. 

(Note: that cool-looking aluminium chassis has a tendency to get pretty hot when asked to push 3D graphics around.)

The 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a dual-core processor, while the 15-inch model comes with a quad-core chip. The integrated graphics is better on the 15-inch model, too.

On a 13-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with a dual-core Intel Core i5-4288, running at 2.6 GHz, Intel Iris HD 5100 graphics and 8GB of memory, we not only had Dota 2 running fine in OS X but got Battlefield 4 running at a playable frame rate on a Boot Camp Windows partition, with the resolution set to 1280x720 and the detail settings on low. It might not sound impressive at all compared with what a GeForce GTX 980 can do, but once again, it s enough for gaming if that s the only computer you own or have at hand.

You ll get better results from the 15-inch MacBook Pros, which come with Intel s more powerful Iris Pro integrated graphics, while the $2499 top-end model has an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M. This Mac is still no way as powerful as a dedicated gaming laptop, but will generally run most games with a good frame rate.

Should you buy one for gaming? If gaming is a serious consideration for your portable Mac purchase, a larger 15-inch MacBook Pro is probably the one to go for.

The iMac

The 27-inch iMac received a hefty update late last year after Apple upgraded its integrated display to 5K resolution (5120x2880). With this new model, there was a switch from a mobile Nvidia GeForce to an AMD Radeon card, although it s not clear that it offers significantly improved gaming performance. The standard 2GB Radeon M290X is generally worse or roughly identical to the GeForce used in 2013 s 27-inch iMac, and only the upgraded 4GB Radeon M295X shows a significant improvement over 2013 s offering.

In the iMac you only get a mobile GPU. It s a lot less powerful than a full-sized PCI-Express desktop card but its inclusion is understandable. An iMac is an all-in-one computer, and designed to be thin. It s quite an achievement that Apple has squeezed a gaming-capable computer onto the back of a 5K display and still kept the entire unit as svelte as can be.

This leads neatly onto the subject of the Retina display on Macs. Unless you re playing really old games, you ll have problems playing at native resolution. Even top-end gaming PCs with powerful discrete desktop graphics struggle at 4K resolution in most games, so there s not much hope for the iMac s mobile GPU and demanding games at 5K.

The ideal resolution to go for is exactly a quarter that of the Retina display, so with the 5K iMac, 2560x1440 is certain to fit on the screen properly. If that causes performance problems, dropping the resolution further to a lower 16:9 option should work.

As of last year, Apple introduced a new, low priced entry-level 21.5-inch iMac, although it s closer to the performance of a MacBook Air, with a low-clocked dual-core processor, and really isn t the best Mac around, for the price. It s better to spend a bit more and go for a quad-core model.

Should you buy one for gaming? The iMac definitely can t play games at its demanding 5K resolution, but spring for the best GPU option and do some smart scaling, and it ll deliver decent gaming performance.

Upgrades

A piece of once-great advice about buying a Mac sadly no longer holds true. It used to be easy to open a Mac and upgrade it with third-party memory, avoiding the high prices Apple charges for the same thing. Now, the only Mac that can be upgraded in this way is the 27-inch iMac, while even the MacBook Pro has its memory soldered in, preventing upgrades.

Therefore you should get as much memory as you can afford when you buy your Mac. If you re thinking of gaming, 8GB should be a minimum, and for better future-proofing, go with 16GB.

Storage on Macs works a bit differently from a PC. With the exception of the Mac Pro, all Apple s desktop lines now come with a Fusion Drive as standard, which combines a 128GB PCI-Express SSD with a hard disk, automatically caching frequently-accessed files on the SSD. It works very well and causes no problems with gaming or when running Windows in Boot Camp.

There s the option of ditching hard disks completely and going for just an SSD inside the Mac, once again using the PCI-Express bus, perhaps installing your games on an external disk connected via USB 3 or Thunderbolt, or keeping your entire Boot Camp partition on an external drive. If you don t want to consume the Mac s precious internal storage, you ll get good results from running Windows with a $20 USB 3 caddy with a 2.5-inch desktop SSD inside it. We ll show you how to do that on the next page.

In general, the most useful piece of advice on buying a Mac for gaming is to spend a bit extra and upgrade the GPU to the most powerful one available, above any other possible upgrade. CPU upgrades are nice, but the differences between a Core i5 and Core i7 are far less pronounced in games than a better graphics card, as our benchmarks in the Best PC Gaming CPU article shows.

DIY

Another disadvantage of Macs as a gaming platform is the difficulty in upgrading them later on. Very few laptops in general let you mess about much with the internals, save adding storage or memory, and as we mentioned, it s even harder now with Macs, since newer MacBooks don t allow upgrading of the memory either.

As with nearly all integrated all-in-one systems, the iMac is particularly difficult to upgrade, needing some serious skills and patience to root around inside it. Only people with top PC building skills should even think about attempting to mess with it. Otherwise we definitely recommend talking to a third-party Apple reseller about any modifications you want made.

It s not impossible to do yourself, though. You can upgrade the memory on older Macs, and there are all sorts of storage upgrades you can do yourself. With older (non-Retina) MacBook Pros, you can fit a standard 2.5-inch SSD inside by whipping off the cover, and either removing the hard disk and fitting in an SSD of your choosing, or removing the optical drive and replacing it with an inexpensive caddy that perfectly fits into the space of your specific laptop. This works with standard PC laptops as well. With both a hard disk and SSD inside your customised Mac, you can create your own Fusion Drive by entering a few commands in terminal (the Mac s version of the command prompt). The procedure is explained very well here.

A website called Ifixit offers breakdowns of Apple kit, so you can see exactly how to open them up. And Apple reseller Other World Computing, or OWC, sells custom parts to fit into your Mac, with a whole load of how-to videos, taking you through the process step-by-step.

If you have an iMac, you can access the insides by lifting the glass screen from the front. The preferred method for this seems to be using suction cups. At all costs, you should avoid any damage to the LCD screen underneath it, as even a tiny fingerprint or speck of dust will show up while you re using your computer. But inside you can fit a new hard disk or upgrade the SSD.

It s relatively straightforward to do this with the larger iMacs from 2011 or earlier, but the thinner more recent models have even more delicate screens, another reason to go to a professional (where you ll also get a guarantee they won t break your Mac).

While all this sounds like a hassle, particularly with newer Macs, there s one upgrade that is surprisingly easy to do. Modern Macs have ditched 2.5-inch SSDs completely in favour of very slim PCI-Express cards. You can replace one in your iMac, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with a third-party drive, again from someone like OWC, just by opening the case up. OWC has plenty of guides that show how to do so.

Just remember you need some special screwdrivers for all this. A set of torx screwdrivers is needed for older Macs, and special pentalobe screwdrivers are needed to open modern MacBook Pros. These can be easily found on a site like Amazon or Ebay.

And as a final caveat, note that most of the options discussed here will void your warranty.

External PCI-Express graphics

Upgrading storage and memory won t make a massive difference to performance. For a real boost to gaming, you need a better GPU, but a GPU upgrade isn t an option in Apple s laptops (or in most PC laptops, for that matter). Thanks to Thunderbolt s ability to carry video data, which is a standard connector on nearly all Macs in the last five years, you can purchase a unit which allows you to plug in a standard graphics card and use it to boost your Mac s overall performance. It sounds great: you could buy a more affordable MacBook Air (or indeed, a Windows laptop with a Thunderbolt port), and just plug in the extra graphics when you want to play a game.

But it doesn t work particularly well. For a start, the units are expensive: they can cost hundreds of dollars, or close to a thousand, before you even buy a graphics card to stick in them. Most Thunderbolt enclosures are designed for various PCIe add-on cards other than graphics cards: video capture, audio processing, etc. You could spend nearly as much money on an external enclosure as on a standalone gaming PC.

Purchase planning

One final piece of advice about buying Apple hardware: plan the timing of your purchase carefully. Apple refreshes each of its product lines roughly once a year, always upgrading the GPU, CPU and chipset. Prices usually remain about the same as the previous generation.

For the last few years, new 15-inch MacBook Pros have been released in the summer, and new desktop iMacs, Mac Minis and 13-inch MacBook Pros in the fall.

If you re considering a new Mac around those dates it makes sense to wait a few more weeks to get the updated model and its superior performance. If you need some help with this, a handy website details whether to expect an imminent new Mac update, and whether you should hold off, or go ahead with your planned purchase.

Many people take advantage of the high resale price of Macs on sites like Ebay by selling their computer while it s still current, holding off a few weeks and upgrading to the predicted newer model as soon as it launches. By knowing the right time to do this, the difference in cost between the new Mac compared with what you can get for your existing hardware can be surprisingly slim, and you can can make a further saving by ordering from Apple s Refurb store, where you can get a second-hand model with a full year s warranty and good-as-new quality for a significant discount.

Page 1: Introduction to Mac gamingPage 2: Mac hardware and buying advicePage 3: Mac gaming on OS XPage 4: Running Windows games on a MacPage 5: Keyboards, mice, and gamepads on Mac

Mac gaming on OS X

There may be far fewer games coded for OS X than Windows, but the situation is a lot better than it once was. Since the Mac is now more popular than ever, there s a fairly captive audience for developers who port their games. That said, you re still likely to find there s no Mac version of your favourite PC game.

The main difference between OS X and Windows is DirectX, which is a proprietary Microsoft API, a firm favourite for Windows developers, and not supported on the Mac. Macs have OpenGL, but the implementation in OS X is fairly inefficient compared to Windows. Comparing Cinebench 15 scores on OS X and Windows, you ll see a fairly substantial difference in frame rate on identical hardware.

Apple has recently launched its own highly efficient graphics API called Metal for iOS devices, and the close link between OS X and iOS suggests Metal could be ported to OS X, but your typical DirectX game will likely never make that jump.

The Mac App Store may seem like the first place to look games, and the choice really isn t spectacular. Although there are some modern games—Tropico 5 and Farming Simulator 2015—Sim City 4, Black and White 2 and Doom 3 make the top list, and are all over ten years old. Their popularity among Mac users goes some way to illustrate how few options there are.

Your best bet for Mac gaming is probably Steam, and if you already have a good collection of Steam games for Windows, you might find there s a Mac version in your library waiting to be downloaded. After installing Steam, if you click on a game in your library it will say whether it will work in OS X. Look for the Windows, Mac and Linux symbols on the game s page.

There are plenty of Mac games in Steam you won t find on the App Store, and in many cases, they re cheaper, too. Steam has its own Mac section, and the forums really are a good place to look for tips and troubleshooting on Mac game issues.

Valve strongly supports Linux and OS X, so games like Dota 2, Left For Dead and Portal are all on the Mac.

EA s Origin is never more than a few steps behind Steam, and it too has its own native OS X client. As you d expect, most games are cross-buy between Mac and PC, as with Steam. And likewise, the number of Mac games pales in comparison to the Windows titles. The Sims is well-represented, and there are a few third-party games, too, such as Planetary Annihilation and Empire Total War, but you ll find that prices are often higher than on Steam for these games.

Blizzard is another developer that supports the Mac, with OS X versions of every one of its modern games. World Of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo 3 can all be played on the Mac, and can be installed easily via the Battle.net application.

Some genres are better represented than others. There aren t many first person shooters on the Mac, but MMORPGs are in reasonable supply. Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and so on all have Mac clients. Retro game store GOG has a few Mac games too, clearly labelled with an Apple icon underneath the title. If you like older games, you ll probably find a few on here that are worth playing.

The indie games offered in Humble Bundles, and in the Humble Store, are usually compatible with OS X. If you own a MacBook Air or Mac Mini, these are games you ll typically be able to run.

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Running Windows games on a Mac

Boot Camp

Boot Camp is a familiar friend for veteran Mac users, a feature made possible by Apple s switch from Power PC processors to Intel a decade ago. As with a PC, a Mac s storage can be partitioned; running Boot Camp allows you to have Windows on one part of the drive and OS X on the other, letting you boot into either. But unlike a PC, you can t simply hop into a BIOS, or pop a Windows installation disk into a USB port to install it.

Instead, you have to use Apple s Boot Camp Assistant tool from within OS X to install Windows. Windows drivers are provided by Apple and before Windows can be installed, you ll need to download these to a USB hard disk. It s actually pretty nifty, since it allows you to restore your SSD or hard disk to its previous state with only a single click.

You can install Windows 7, 8.1 or the technical preview of Windows 10 on Mac hardware. Here s Apple's Boot Camp guide, and an easy-to-follow tutorial on HowToGeek.

If you want to install Windows on an external drive, it s best to format it with FAT, since Macs can t write to NTFS drives, and Windows doesn t work with HFS-formatted disks. Ensure it s plugged in, and select it at the point in the Boot Camp process where it asks for you to choose a destination. You ll be able to boot from it in the same way you would choose any alternative OS on a Mac, by holding down the Option (Alt) key after powering it on.

With Windows running on your Mac, you ll have access to a far better selection of games, and they ll likely perform better than on OS X. With Sim City on OS X, we had to turn all the graphics details down for smooth performance on the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro we mentioned earlier, but on the same Mac in Windows, the game looked better and ran faster.

But there are some things to be aware of with Boot Camp. You can t install drivers for your video card or chipset from Intel, AMD or Nvidia, so you won t get any performance updates that come with new driver releases unless Apple releases with new Boot Camp drivers. And with a Retina display, the Windows desktop needs to be run at a higher DPI for everything to look right. That s not really a problem for web browsing, but it might be when running games. We had some odd display issues running the Windows version of Civilisation 5, for example, on a Boot Camp partition, which were fixed when we switched to the native OS X code.

Once Boot Camp is set up with whatever version of Windows you want, your Mac behaves and functions pretty much like a PC. You shouldn t have problems running games, as long as you adjust the resolution and detail settings for performance that matches the hardware you have.

Wineskin and Virtual Machines

There are alternatives to Boot Camp if you want to run Windows software on OS X, but both have their limitations for gaming. A virtual machine requires a portion of the Mac s resources to be dedicated to it, restricting the amount left for the host, and resulting in potentially choppy performance. With 8GB of memory in your Mac, 4GB for a virtual machine and 4GB for OS X is a good split, but hardly ideal. CPU resources might be easily used up too, affecting performance in both the VM and OS X.

There are a few options for virtual machine software. Virtualbox is free but according to many tests, is the least efficient VM software.

Parallels 10 isn t free, but is a long-established name for Mac Virtual Machine software. It offers a nifty coherence mode where Windows applications appear in their own window on the Mac desktop, and it performs quite well, although you might want to turn off support for Retina displays. It s possible to run modern 3D games under Parallels, but performance isn t going to measure up to what you get from Boot Camp. For older or lighter games, though, it should get the job done.

Another option is VMWare Fusion, which says it offers access to a Mac s 3D hardware, but once again, I didn t have much luck running games in a Fusion virtual machine, bar casual titles. Virtual machines really aren t designed for gaming, anyway. They re much better for running word processing software or a Windows email client in OS X. So for gaming, I d recommend just sticking with Boot Camp.

There s one more option for running PC games within OS X. It s called Wineskin. Using a collection of open-source software that mimics the Win32 API and Direct X, along with a wrapper that provides a minimal Windows environment to run games in, Wineskin does indeed work, albeit with somewhat reduced performance compared with a Boot Camp Windows installation. Bonus: it s free.

With the software installed you need to create a wrapper, which is basically a mini virtualised Windows environment. The wrapper creates a folder structure that makes a game think it s being installed on Windows. You re faced with the slightly complicated decision of using the right engine for your game, and there are numerous variables to mess about with to improve both compatibility and performance.

I didn t have much luck with it at first, but eventually managed to get Skyrim installed, although it crashed after a few minutes. That doesn t mean it won t work on your Mac, or with other games, but mileage is going to vary and you may have to seek help. Handily, there s a vibrant community sharing tips and techniques to get specific games working in the support forum.

But like a virtual machine, Wineskin won t give you the very best performance your Mac is capable of either. Once again, our advice is to just use Boot Camp for Windows games. The only disadvantage to going this route is the storage it uses, and the irritation of having to switch between operating systems.

Page 1: Introduction to Mac gamingPage 2: Mac hardware and buying advicePage 3: Mac gaming on OS XPage 4: Running Windows games on a MacPage 5: Keyboards, mice, and gamepads on Mac

Keyboards, mice, and gamepads on the Mac

Apple s multi-touch trackpad and Magic Mouse let you flick through web pages and multiple desktops in OS X by performing various swipes of your fingers. It s a great tool for general computer use but trackpads in general aren t that useful in PC games, and the Magic Mouse is a hinderance rather than a benefit, although there are a select few games specifically written for the Mac that take advantage of it.

To play FPS games, real-time strategy, or anything that needs precision use of the right click or middle mouse wheel, it s better to plug in a standard USB mouse.

If you have a mouse or keyboard with extra functions and buttons, you can be 100% sure they ll work just fine on a Mac in Boot Camp mode. As with game developers, peripheral manufacturers design for Windows first, and OS X is more of afterthought, although the Mac is far harder to ignore than it once was.

OS X support really depends on whether the device vendor has ported support across. The bigger peripheral firms have it covered. Logitech has a version of its Control Center software for OS X. Razer s Synapse software is available of the Mac. That said, there s no guarantee of compatibility.

If you want to play arcade-style games, such as the recent OS X release of Geometry Wars 3, it s fairly easy to connect an Xbox or Playstation joypad to a Mac, as it is with a PC. With a PS4 joypad, all you need to do is plug in the Micro-USB cable it comes with and OS X will detect it automatically, and it should work fine.

Using an Xbox joypad needs a bit more work though. According to useful info on TekRevue you need a third-party driver called Xone-OSX which is found on Github.

Wrapping up

The number of games available on OS X is limited compared with the vast library available for Windows. But as long as your Mac is powerful enough, you ll have just as much fun exploring dungeons in Legends Of Grimrock, mining Veldspar in Eve Online or defending your spaceship in FTL: Faster Than Light, as you would on a Windows PC.

Computing is far more heterogeneous than it was a decade ago, when Microsoft Windows completely dominated the market, and people may be invested in a range of platforms, with iOS and Android as well as OS X joining Windows as viable modern gaming platforms.

Just like PCs, Mac hardware has its positives and negatives, but Apple isn t going anywhere and more game developers are now taking notice of the platform and the new audience it gives them. While there s still some way to go, and OS X could be a lot more friendly to gamers than it is currently, you still have plenty of options for Mac gaming.

Page 1: Introduction to Mac gamingPage 2: Mac hardware and buying advicePage 3: Mac gaming on OS XPage 4: Running Windows games on a MacPage 5: Keyboards, mice, and gamepads on Mac

Llamasoft—which is to say, Jeff Minter—released the Tempest-like TxK early last year for the PlayStation Vita, and it went over pretty well: Well enough to justify a multiplatform release later this year, including for the PC. But Minter revealed today that those plans have been canceled because of pressure from Atari, which he claims has accused him of violating the company's copyright on Tempest 2000.

Minter detailed his troubles with Atari in a lengthy blog post, mirrored on Pastebin (his own site is currently struggling to keep up with the attention), in which he said the matter has actually been going on for some time now. He'd kept it quiet in hopes of reaching a deal with Atari, perhaps for an officially licensed version of the game, but the company "never gave an inch and just continued with threats and bullying," he wrote.

Atari accused Minter of accessing, and stealing secrets from, the Tempest 2000 source code in order to create TxK; also that the TxK soundtrack "sounds identical" to that of Tempest 2000, that the game features an AI droid, and that Minter is attempting to cash in on the Tempest name and "Atari's stellar reputation." The irony, of course, is that Minter is actually the creator of Tempest 2000, a game based on the famous 1981 arcade standup Tempest that was originally released as an Atari Jaguar exclusive in 1994. Furthermore, he said the TxK soundtrack is entirely original, and AI droids have appeared in almost every game he's made since Llamatron, which came out three years prior to Tempest 2000.

Unfortunately, despite that history and Minter's own avowed desire to avoid any connection with the current iteration of Atari—"The last thing I really wanted was for Llamasoft to be associated with the undead Atari responsible for turning Star Raiders into a fucking slot machine," he wrote—he's been forced to yield to its demands. "[The claims are] all abject bollocks, but set up legally so as to be expensive for anyone to contest," he explained. "Even just going back and forth a few times with letters responding to their threats ended up running up a couple of grand in legal bills, and there is simply no way on God's earth I can afford any kind of a legal battle."

In response to the complaint, Atari issued a statement claiming that it actually went to Minter with its concerns immediately following the launch of TxK last year, and has been in contact with him ever since. IT also emphasized that it has not actually brought legal action against Minter.

"Atari values and protects its intellectual property and expects others to respect its copyrights and trademarks. When Llamasoft launched TxK in early 2014, Atari was surprised and dismayed by the very close similarities between TxK and the Tempest franchise," it said. "Atari was not alone in noticing the incredible likeness between the titles. Several major gaming outlets also remarked at the similarity of features and overall appearance of TxK to Tempest; one stated of TxK, 'This is essentially Tempest.' There is no lawsuit. Atari has been in continuous contact with the developer since the game launched in hopes that the matter would be resolved."

As Minter implied, the Atari of today is a far cry from the company it used to be. Its history is convoluted, to put it gently, and last year it announced a new strategy of focusing on "LGBT, social casinos, real-money gambling, and YouTube with exclusive content." More recently, it revealed plans for reboots of Alone in the Dark and Haunted House, an open-world Asteroids game, and Rollercoaster Tycoon World, the recent trailer for which, I think it's fair to say, utterly failed to captivate fans of the franchise.

Atari's claim not only slams the door on the planned PC port, it could also force the PS Vita version offline as well: Minter said Atari is pushing him to remove it from the PlayStation Store and sign papers agreeing to never again make another "Tempest style" game. He didn't indicate whether he intends to agree to those demands, although it's safe to bet that he won't; for now, he's busy posting bits and pieces of Atari's specific allegations—"Tempest 2000 was 'merely an update to Tempest to which I made no contribution' apparently"—on Twitter.

UPDATE: Minter has effectively confirmed Atari's statement that it has been in contact with him regarding TxK since shortly after it launched by posting a June 2014 letter from a lawyer representing the company. It asserts Atari's ownership of Tempest, and describes TxK as a "blatant copy."

"Contrary to your assertion, there is nothing remotely 'original' in TxK and in no meaningful sense can TxK be described as your clients' 'own independent creation. TxK is quite plainly a remake or updated version of the Tempest games," it says. "Indeed, your client made every effort to keep TxK very closely to the visual design, look and feel and identity of the original Tempest game. TxK has been acknowledged by numerous commentators as a sequel to the Tempest games."

Minter, however, denied that the exchange of letters between lawyers counted as contact between Atari and Llamasoft. "Their only contact has been threatening letters from lawyers. This is not a dialogue," he tweeted. "I don't count an endless stream of lawyer-crafted attempts to steal my lunch money as 'contact with the developer.' Speak to me face to face. FWIW we tried to approach 'Atari' in a non-lawyerly fashion via a real ex-Atarian who knew someone inside there and were roundly rebuffed."

Blizzard has announced that it will begin sending out invitations to the StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void closed beta at the end of the month. The studio has also released a video previewing the beta, in which it says that "much has changed" since it was revealed last year at BlizzCon.

Some elements of the game will be missing during the beta, but Archon Mode, which allows two players to share control of a single army, will be available right from the start. The in-game economy has been tuned to provide resource advantages to players who aggressively expand and defend their bases, and the accuracy of units given attack commands has also been increased in order to make them more reliable in combat. The preview video also shines a light on some of the changes and additions made to the Terran, Zerg, and Protoss forces.

"As you are likely aware, we ve been trying to be as open as possible with the status of our development, and strongly believe that the increased cooperation between developers and players is beneficial to StarCraft II. To be clear, our goal for this expansion is to work together with all of you to make Legacy of the Void as awesome as possible," Blizzard wrote. In order to maximize user feedback, Blizzard is starting the beta test earlier in the development process than it normally would, and will let it run longer than usual as well.

Invitations to the Legacy of the Void closed beta will begin going out on March 31. Hit up Battle.net for all the details.

It's amazing to look back at ads from the 80s and 90s and see what kind of PC hardware you could get for $2000. Technology marches on, PC parts become exponentially more powerful, and everything gets cheaper. Today you can build a high-performance budget gaming PC for less than $700. But we'd recommend most PC gamers spend a bit more to get a far more powerful, more future-proof machine. For about $1300, I think you can build an amazing gaming rig that will last at least four years without an upgrade. And I know just the parts that you should use.

This is PC Gamer s guide to building the best mid-range PC money can buy. Really, this is the rig we d recommend to the majority of PC gamers. It s powerful and built to last, but not extravagant. The parts are reliable, high quality, and will get you close to the performance of a much more expensive rig. There are no compromises here, just smart choices.

With this rig, I expect you to be able to play most of today s most demanding games on ultra settings, at 1080p and 60fps. You ll probably be able to handle most of those games at 1440p, too. And three years from now, when games have even stiffer graphics requirements, this rig will still have the power to handle them on high or medium settings (especially with a bit of overclocking).

Here are the parts I recommend for a great gaming build for anyone. And, naturally, you can tweak this build to suit your needs, and save a few bucks by ditching the DVD drive or buying a smaller HDD. Scroll down below the chart for the reasoning behind each part choice, and a few different case recommendations for sizes, styles, and prices.

Processor: Intel Core i5-4690K

Price: $240 on Amazon ( 174)

Ever since the Sandy Bridge Core i5-2500K in 2011, Intel s i5 processor has been the perfect sweet spot for gaming. It s reasonably priced, highly overclockable, and for gaming, not much different from the more expensive Core i7. Since most games are more GPU intensive than CPU intensive, an i5 processor is exactly the right amount of muscle you need.

An overclocked i5 can handily tackle some of gaming s most demanding CPU tasks, like running the Dolphin GameCube/Wii emulator. It s also a great all-around processor for normal PC usage. Intel won t have a new line of unlocked desktop CPUs out until late summer or fall, so until then, the Core i5-4690K is the go-to CPU for a new gaming rig. It ll keep your PC running strong for a good 4-5 years, easy.

Motherboard: Asus Z97-A

Price: $160 on Newegg ( 125)

Motherboards are a nightmare to shop for: there are so many, with such a broad range in prices, it s difficult to identify the features that are important and how much you should be paying. You can easily spend $300 on a motherboard, but you don t need to. The Asus Z97-A is a great example of a mid-tier motherboard with most of the features of a more expensive motherboard. It s just way cheaper.

At $160, the ASUS Z97-A is extremely well-reviewed by buyers (4.5 stars on Amazon with nearly 200 reviews, 4 stars on Newegg with the same number). HardOCP s reviewers gushed about the motherboard, praising its overclocking ability, UEFI BIOS, and saying it s the best bang-for-your-buck motherboard in Asus line. And Asus consistently makes great motherboards.

There are two PCIe 3.0 x16 lanes here for dual-GPU setups, support for high-speed DDR3 RAM, plenty of SATA ports, and even an M.2 SSD slot for a fast SSD upgrade down the road. Asus has also just refreshed the Z97-A to include support for the faster USB 3.1 spec.

Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 1866 MHz DDR3 (16GB)

Price: $135 on Newegg ( 109)

Corsair s RAM is reliable. It s an easy blanket recommendation for reliability, but then there s another factor: price. How much speed are you getting for your money? How much money should you be spending? And how much speed do you really need, anyway?

According to my research into RAM speed ( here s a great article on Anandtech), faster speeds and memory timings aren t that important, especially for gaming. You re not going to see much of a framerate difference as a result of RAM speeds. In fact, you probably won t see any difference at all. RAM speed makes more of a difference in other PC tasks, but Anandtech s bottom-line advice is pretty simple: more RAM is a better upgrade than faster RAM, and RAM faster than 1600 MHz makes a small but meaningful difference.

That s why I m recommending the Corsair Vengeance Pro 1866 MHz RAM: it s a good speed, while still coming in at a reasonable price. Now, why 16GB? It s more than you strictly need for a gaming PC, but I ve been running 8GB in a number of PCs for years, now, and today I d consider it the bare minimum for anyone who uses their PC for more than gaming. If you use Photoshop, or edit video, or like to stream games, you ll see benefits from the extra RAM. It ll ensure ensure demanding games eating up 4+ GB of RAM won t be slowed down by the other applications running in the background. And 16GB is far more future proof: in a year or two, 16GB will likely be the standard. It s a worthy investment.

If you want to save some money, however, we recommend grabbing the 8GB G.Skill Ripjaw X Series 1866 MHz RAM on Newegg for $60.

Graphics card: MSI GTX 970 4G

Price: $333 on Amazon ( 280)

There's still a lot of controversy around the GTX 970. Nvidia messed up and gave out incorrect information about the card, and it took several months for the divide between 3.5GB of VRAM and a slower 500MB to come to light. Despite the controversy, the MSI GTX 970 is still the best price/performance graphics card on the market. It's fast, incredibly overclockable, and should handily deliver 1080p, 60 fps gaming for the next few years.

And there's a reason why the memory issue didn't show up in positive initial reviews of the card like ours: you have to go far out of your way, and run the card at resolutions/settings it's not really capable of handling, to spot any issues with its memory management. If you're still suspicious/confused about the 970's performance, read Digital Foundry's excellent breakdown of the controversy. It's a great, informative read.

Now, why the MSI GTX 970 4G over other alternatives? Simply put, it's a great card: quiet, very overclockable, and much cheaper than other 970 options.

I recommend the 970 over any other currently available card for price/performance, but if you've sworn off Nvidia, the Radeon R9 290X is the only close option. It's much louder, and far more power-hungry, than the GTX 970, but you can get close to the same performance for the price.

Power Supply: Corsair CX600M 600 watt 80 Plus Bronze

Price: $75 on Newegg ( 60)

How much power do you need for a gaming PC? Nvidia s latest graphics cards are more power efficient than ever, but if you overclock your graphics card and CPU, you could easily be using 400 watts of power. A 600 watt power supply offers plenty of headroom for lost power (with a 80 Plus Bronze rating, a PSU is at least 82% efficient) and even a more power-hungry graphics card down the road.

I recommend Corsair s power supplies for their reliability, and the CX600M model in particular because it s modular. You can certainly find a cheaper power supply that offers as much juice, but modular power supplies are far nicer to build with. They leave you with fewer cables to deal with and let you plug in exactly what you need for your rig.

Primary storage: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB

Price: $115 on Amazon ( 84)

Now that it s come down in price a bit, Samsung s 850 EVO is a great buy for a fast, affordable SSD. On sequential R/W speeds it pushes the SATA standard to its limit, and on random R/W it puts up substantially better numbers than last year s competition, the Crucial MX100 and Samsung 840 EVO. For $115, the 850 EVO is worth it.

If you know you ll want more SSD space, you can upgrade to the 500GB model for $190.

Secondary storage: Western Digital Black 2TB WD2003FZEX

Price: $125 on Amazon ( 105)

This is an optional addition to your primary SSD, but it s one I expect most modern PC owners will want. Unless your PC is for games, and nothing but games, you re probably going to want storage space for music, personal photos, movies, PC Gamer fan letter drafts, and all sorts of other files. You may also want to keep most games installed than you have room for on a 250GB SSD. Spinning disk HDDs still have a place in today s PCs, since they re so dang cheap.

The Western Digital Black is the HDD I d recommend to anyone installing applications on the HDD. It s considerably faster than a WD Green drive. While I wouldn t recommend it for storing games where load times really matter (an MMO like Guild Wars 2 or a giant game like Battlefield), smaller, quick-loading indie games will be just as playable on a HDD as they are on an SSD. The speed of the Black drive gives you plenty of storage, still at a good price, without poor performance.

CPU cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO

Price: $35 on Newegg ( 25)

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is our recommendation for a budget CPU cooler, and it s our recommendation for a mid-range CPU cooler, too. Why? It s just that good. It ll give you plenty of cooling for a heavy overclock, it s extremely cheap, and it s easy to install. It s far better and cooling, and quieter, than a stock Intel cooler. It s the easiest choice of any part on this list.

The cooler is also $35 on Amazon with Prime shipping, if you d prefer to buy it there.

Disc drive: Asus 24x DVD-RW

Price: $21 on Amazon ( 13)

Do you need one? Do you want one? What the hell. This one costs $21, and it s probably not going to break. You re only going to put about three DVDs in it a year.

Cases

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to stores like Amazon. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which helps support our work evaluating PC components.

ESL has announced details around its esports in Cinemas series, along with a few snippets around the documentary All Work All Play: The Pursuit of esports Glory, directed by Patrick Creadon.

The documentary will cover behind the scenes events leading up to the Intel Extreme Masters championship, this year held in Katowice, Poland. Tying in with the documentary will also be a selection of five live esports events, produced by... umm... BY Experience.

Creadon's directorial experience is firmly in the documentary camp, with the man being behind the camera of the likes of If You Build It and Square Roots: The Story of SpongeBob SquarePants - so he's got the chops.

Ralf Reichert, managing director of ESL, said these words:

"I think this documentary and the broader partnership is symbolic of how far we ve come. When we started out, I dreamt about us filling stadiums, but I never entertained the idea of filling cinemas.

"Everyone who works with Intel Extreme Masters here at ESL is passionate about esports and I think this documentary and the development of esports series programming in cinemas is a testament to that growth. I m very excited to see esports in cinemas for years to come and can guarantee I ll be the first to buy a ticket."

The first events are kicking off in July - the first one in the US on July 25, and the first in Europe on July 28 - and you can find out about ticketing on this site.

As for the live sporting events, they'll begin in August with coverage from ESL One Cologne 2015, featuring Dota 2 and Counter-Strike.

Most story-driven games are all about the player. They're lovely narcissistic adventure playgrounds populated by supportive digital chums. Even that captain in Call of Duty who shouts at you is only doing it to make you feel powerful and important, and when you blow up the thing or kill the right man he'll shout something nice like GOOD JOB MASON or OOARGH because, y'know, you're the hero.

I love The Last Express because my fellow passengers don't give a damn I'm there. They tolerate me politely as I go up and down corridors knocking on every door and trying every handle. They keep their own times and schedules that have nothing to do with me. It's the only game I've played where I've sat in the corner and just watched people go about their business.

The dining car is the best place for this. The Orient express is full of interesting sorts, and while the rotoscoped figures initially seem primitive, they're more expressive than most NPCs you can hope to meet. In just a few frames they capture tiny humanising gestures that most games wouldn't bother to animate. A couple of women at lunch glance up and smile politely as I pass, then return to their conversation. Another passenger reading in her cabin tries to ignore me standing there for a while, before looking up meaningfully. The look says your persistence has forced me to notice you and now this is weird .

It might sound like I spent my entire time with The Last Express staring awkwardly at strangers, but that's not the whole truth, because after a while I stopped, and started observing my fellow passengers in short socially acceptable bursts instead. The cast of The Last Express tamed my videogame protaganist instinct to fuck with everything relentlessly until something breaks or explodes, all with a series of small but potent social cues. Proper manners are a powerful behaviour modifier.

Let's talk about the very best moment in The Last Express, and this isn't a spoiler, it happens regularly as you explore the carriages. Sometimes a guard or a passenger is going the other way, and there comes a point where they have to squeeze past you. There's the fleeting apologetic moment of eye contact before the necessary invasion of your personal space commences, a nod that says I'm going in , and then the waltz itself as you circle, bellies sucked in.

It's such a human moment, I'm amazed that more games don't use manners and social awkwardness to make their characters more relatable. I'm used to NPCs emoting with the grandiose gestures of a stage actor. The Last Express shows that it's the small things that make a character relatable, even if they're animated at two frames a second.

There aren t many yetis in the Valley of the Yetis. A more accurate title would be the Valley of the Men and Occasionally Some Yetis. The mythical Himalayan monsters are strangely underused in this chunk of downloadable story for Far Cry 4. You spend more time fighting angry cultists who worship them than the beasts themselves. Perhaps this is intentional, to give the moments where you do see them more weight. But I came out feeling like I hadn t seen as many yetis as I expected.

The new map is excellent. It s about a quarter of the size of Kyrat, and a dramatic change of scenery. Gone are the muted, autumnal forests, replaced by the kind of setting I first imagined when I heard Far Cry 4 would be set in the Himalayas. It s a frozen landscape of jagged mountains, frozen lakes, and powdery snow, and it s gorgeous. It s more barren than Kyrat, with less of a human presence, but there s still plenty of life in the form of wolves, snow leopards, yaks, and the odd yeti.

The DLC opens with Ajay recovering from a helicopter crash. He stumbles away from the wreckage and comes across a radio relay station. He calls for help, but bad weather means his rescuers won t arrive for a few days. And as if that wasn t bad enough, an insane yeti-worshipping cult has decided he s a trespasser and wants him dead. This DLC is a standalone story that doesn t tie into the events of the main game in any meaningful way, which is fine. Think of it as a separate mini-campaign.

There are story missions, and they re pretty standard Far Cry fare. There s nothing here you won t have already seen if you liberated Kyrat. You ll be staging ambushes, stealthing your way through enemy-controlled areas, and driving from point to point in jeeps and ski-doos. It s a decent collection of missions, if slightly unimaginative.

The cultists are based around the same enemy archetypes as Pagan Min s army: the one that throws Molotovs, the heavy one, the one with the bow and arrow, and so on. After thirty hours in Far Cry 4 I ve developed pretty foolproof ways of dealing with these guys, and I found the story missions a bit too easy as a result.

The yetis are a different story, though. They re huge, powerful, and disarmingly fast. You have to absolutely pummel them with bullets until they keel over, then you finish them off by moving behind them and hitting the F key to trigger a QTE. When they charge at you, you have to get the hell away, otherwise they ll take off a sizeable amount of health and knock you on your arse, leaving you helpless. They re enjoyable to fight, if only because they offer a different challenge to anything else in the game.

Between story missions you have to defend the station from waves of cultists. To help, you can spend money you ve collected from chests on defences like gun emplacements, explosive barrel traps, and mine fields. It s basically a horde mode, but it s pretty fun. I love watching clueless enemies stumble into my traps. These defence missions get steadily more difficult until, inevitably, you have to fight off yetis as well as cultists. One takes place during a lightning storm, which is pretty exciting.

When you start Valley of the Yetis, your abilities and upgrades are all reset. But don t worry, cause chests filled with animal skins and generous helpings of XP mean you ll be back to full power in a few hours. It compresses and streamlines the character progression of the main game pretty efficiently, so you don t feel underpowered for too long. But, again, familiarity is an issue. There aren t any new abilities, which means no surprises as you advance through the elephant/tiger skill trees again.

There are some standout moments in Valley of the Yetis, like your first encounter with the creatures, which channels the tense stealth-horror of Alien: Isolation. The new setting is an exhilarating wingsuit playground of snowy peaks and icy valleys, and the breakneck defence missions force you to make clever use of all the game s many weapons and tactics. And the yetis are cool, when they decide to show up. But, really, it s just more Far Cry 4. That s totally fine, but I was expecting something a bit more ambitious. And more yetis.

Microsoft has plopped out the announcement that the next edition of Windows - Windows 10, because Windows 9 does not exist—will be releasing in 190 countries this summer.

Another announcement, via Reuters, is that the free upgrades we knew Microsoft was planning on offering will extend not just to genuine, but non-genuine license holders of the OS. That means those who have naughtily pirated versions of old Windows builds will be getting a free update to the new, shiny Windows 10.

This was announced at the WinHEC technology conference in Shenzhen, China, and sounds so far like a very China-centric announcement. The country is known for its astronomical rates of software piracy.  But operating like that in one country and not anywhere else in the world might be a bit of a weird step, will MS offer this free upgrade to genuine and non-genuine users worldwide?

No confirmation of this as of yet, but I've pinged Microsoft an email and will update should they get back to me. Are you ready for Windows 10?