It’s here. It took awhile, but it’s here: Nearly eleven months after its lauded debut, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is on the Mac. The game is intense, immersive, fun and rewarding. From the moment I saw a trailer for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare I couldn’t wait to fire it up and play it. I loved the idea of taking a break from the period epics and diving into some modern battles with the latest weaponry and modern bad guys. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare delivers in spades.

So, I couldn’t wait. I took my Christmas money from last year and bought an Xbox and Call of Duty 4. Heresy, I know, but in fact, at the time I had no idea that much later in the year Aspyr would be putting it on my computer as well. After a week of testing it on my Mac I can say the experience is excellent. I enjoy the higher resolution of having it on my 30″ monitor, and the controls, while a bit disorienting at first, are great.

Installing the game couldn’t be easier. Just a good old-fashioned “drag to your hard disk”. That’s just what I did and it worked like a charm. Note: You do need the actual DVD mounted on your hard drive to run the game, unless you purchase the downloadable version.

With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare the experience is top notch. The graphics are just astonishing. Even if you’ve played a bunch of video games and think you might not be impressed when something good comes along, trust me, you’ll be impressed. Whether it’s sunlight catching on the dust particles in an abandoned building, or walking through the smoke from someone’s smoke grenade, you’ll feel like you’re there.

The other part of that immersive experience is the sound design. The sound in this game is among the best games I’ve ever played. I  highly recommend donning a nice pair of headphones when playing this. The explosions and gunfire may startle you, the tanks rumbling by will feel very real, and the voice acting is excellent. They also used a nice soundtrack that adds ambience while not detracting from the game play.

In Single Player mode, you do about as you’d expect. Going through and accomplishing missions, saving the world of course. Unfortunately there’s no way to go through the campaign in co-op mode, which is a bit of a shame because the possibilities for teamwork are definitely enticing. You do get a team, but they are all just fellow soldiers controlled by the game. The good news is that the AI in this game is fantastic, both the bad guys and the good guys are smart, reactive, and add to the experience.

There are some extremely memorable moments where everything in the gameplay comes together, such as this time when I had to sneak through a field, as a sniper, and moving ever so slowly as a tank rumbled slowly by with a group of bad buys walking with it. It was intense, and I’m sure my pulse was racing and my jaw clenched. I could hear their footsteps and I knew if I was discovered I was a goner.

The Single Player game could stand to be longer. One could get through the game in a matter of just four or five hours. There is some replay value, and you can certainly try your hand at playing in a harder mode to extend the experience.

Where you get a ton of replay value is the multiplayer version of the game. When I say “version”, I mean it. It’s actually an entirely different application you launch. If that isn’t weird enough, the multiplayer game doesn’t even import your settings. I had to reconfigure the display settings and all my custom control options when switching to multiplayer for the first time. Aspyr should be sharing the settings between modes.

Nonetheless, once I was up and running, I was playing online with ease. Connecting to games was simple and gameplay was exactly as I expected. Well, not exactly. I think I’ve been spoiled by my experience with Xbox Live. I know, I know, I’m praising a Microsoft product on The Apple Blog, but I did find things I was missing from Xbox Live. For instance, in the Xbox version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, it’s simple to just set up a private match with people with whom you’re already friends. Additionally, when joining other matches, you can always make sure you and your friends are on the same team. These things are missing from the non-Xbox versions of this game (or at least they’re so hard to find that I didn’t come across them in testing).

Despite that, multiplayer is fun and extremely rewarding. Players start out with a few preset classes of weaponry, including a primary weapon, sidearm and some perks. As you gather experience, you unlock new weapons, and new perks, soon allowing you to build your own custom classes. As you get more experienced with specific guns, you unlock mods and scopes for those guns, such as a red-dot site or a silencer.

The perks I mentioned are especially handy. Each custom class comes with three custom perks. Perks include a radar jammer, making you invisible to the enemy’s radar, special grenades, extra health, more deadly bullets, and “Last Stand” (with this perk, as you’re about to die, you pull out your pistol and get to squeeze off a few rounds before you expire). There are plenty more, but I’ll let you find them on your own.

Imagine how versatile these custom classes are for the player. Perhaps you come across a map with lots of good hiding spots. Maybe a class with a good sniper rifle and the radar jammer is in order. Is everybody hiding behind walls? Pull out your big gun with the “deep impact” perk, which makes your bullets travel further through solid objects. You can reconfigure your classes between rounds of play, and any time you die you can switch between them.

As you rise through the ranks, more and more options get unlocked, making it extremely rewarding. Alas, it also makes for some late nights as you decide to just stay up a tiny bit longer to unlock the next thing.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has set a new standard for gameplay, and having it on the Mac is an excellent thing. At $55 Aspyr could stand to make things a little more full-featured for the multiplayer, taking some cues from Xbox, but in the meantime, it’s still a fun, rewarding, and marvelously designed game.

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The Story So Far…

You start off the game as a simple peasant ready to take part in the harvest festival. This backdrop serves as an effective training tool to help new players become adjusted to the intricacies of the user interface and some of the subtleties of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules which the game is based on. Unlike the original Neverwinter Nights where your companions were all AI-driven, you also learn how to control individual members of your party. If the thought of keeping track of every movement of three additional characters is a bit daunting for you, then you may let the game’s excellent AI do its best to keep everyone alive in the heat of battle, though you may find that the spells and potions you’ve collected along the way are gone since your companions will use every item at their disposal if you let them.

After working with the townsfolk to save West Harbor you venture out, ultimately visiting Neverwinter itself. This is where the adventure kicks into high gear. Thieves & thugs lurk in every corner, wizards launch surprise attacks and the city guards cannot all be trusted. Deciding whom to trust is no small task, especially with the secrets that you carry with you…

The Forgotten Realms Never Looked So Beautiful

Having played D&D as a lad with good ol’ pencil & paper, eventually moving to text-based adventure games and then classics such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, the original Neverwinter Nights was a bit of disappointment. Prior to that title, your imagination was given fodder to wander and fill in details that the games left out. NWN 1 seemed to deliberately get in your way, literally begging you to basque in the 3D world they created. Thankfully, it did set the stage for add-on adventures and this successor.

The graphics are just amazing in NWN 2, even with the tweaked-down settings on my MacBook Pro (Fall 2007 edition). NPC creatures and characters are animated and engaging, fields are flowing and buildings are rendered with great detail inside and out. Spell effects – one of the hallmarks of modern fantasy RPG’s – come alive on the screen, and the cut-scenes have even caused family members to come over and watch.

Party Rules

As previously mentioned, you are able to control the individual actions of your party members during combat (if so desired) and tune their characters as they achieve higher skill levels during the game. You can get a great feel for what it’s like being a spell-caster, healer, fighter or rogue (or more) this way and come up with some unique character configurations.

You can share items you loot with any of the NPC’s in your party provided they have the skills to use them. Be careful how you distribute thing and don’t be too surprised if your magic-aware thief makes a last-ditch effort to survive by using wide-area damage wand you gave her. It is a good idea, though, to keep your party well-stocked with healing, disease-curing and restorations potions/spells; you never know when they may be necessary.

While they may be NPC’s, your traveling companions all have stories to tell. All you need to to is talk to them and you’ll be able to discover new information about their past or what their current plans/motives may be. While no game will ever come close to replacing Minsc & Boo, the party characters in NWN 2 do manage draw you in to their stories a bit, which gives the game a more solid feel.

Can I Play The Game?

To play Neverwinter Nights 2, you’ll need an 2.0+ GHz Intel Mac running Tiger (10.4.11 min) or Leopard (10.5.1 min) with at least 1 GBM RAM and 6.5 GB hard disk space & a DVD player. While you can run with a Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 graphics card, Aspyr suggests more robust ones for the best visual experience. Complete specs are available over at Aspyr’s site. The game also supports Internet/LAN play, though I have not tested that yet.

A Great Diversion

The Neverwinter Nights 2 storyline has plenty of activity to keep you engaged for 40-60 hours and there is definitely decent replay value since you can choose a different main character and make alternate decisions which will have a real impact on where the game takes you as you progress.

Manipulating the camera took a bit more fiddling than I had expected and I was a bit disappointed that I needed to disable so many graphics options to make gameplay less choppy. Even with these compromises, NWN 2 has been engaging enough to steal my attention away from EVE ever since I purchased it (thankfully I have a long skill training going!).

You can expect to pay between $40.00 & $50.00 USD for the title which is available online at the usual suspects and also in better gaming shops. I have yet to see it at either of the two Apple Store’s I frequent in Seattle, but that may just be temporary.

If you’re playing NWN 2 or pick up a copy and try it, let me and all the other TAB readers know what you think in the comments.

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Anything rock ‘n roll related makes my ears perk up, so when I heard Guitar Hero was coming to Mac, I was quite stoked.

Overall the gameplay is just about what you’d expect. You can rock out in freestyle mode and just play for the fun of it, or you can start up your own band and have a full-scale career.

I fired up career mode and sent my band, Weak Sauce, on the road pure rock ‘n roll mayhem. After a couple of days of moderate playing, I was able to beat the game on Easy. Unfortunately there is still Medium, Hard, and Extreme to conquer.

Guitar Controller

I had never played any of the previous Guitar Heros so the actual “guitar” controller was new to me. I attempted to just pick the thing up and start playing, but found out quickly I didn’t have a fat clue what I was doing. Going through the tutorials on how to use it was actually quite helpful.

The guitar that comes with the game is actually the same guitar that comes with the Xbox version…it just includes a USB converter so you can plug it in to your computer. Seems a bit cheap to go that route, but it does the trick.

Something worth noting here is that the game is still functional even if you don’t have a guitar controller. I actually found it easer to play with the keyboard than with the guitar.

Game Play

There are quite a few different “extras” thrown in the game, but the core of it all is just playing songs. The money you earn from playing gigs lets you “upgrade” your guitar, outfit, and other things but there didn’t seem to be any real benefit to doing that.

On my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 3GB RAM), the graphics were quite smooth. I did find the video response to be better when I disabled some of the effects in the game and calibrating the guitar to my computer was beneficial.

Overall this really is a fun game and doesn’t require too much time to get the hang of it. Be sure to read up more of the details and system requirements on the Aspyr site. You can purchase the Mac version for $80.

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