Exor's Dungeon - Book Reviews - The Macintosh Bible Guide to Games

The Macintosh Bible Guide to Games
Publisher: Peachpit Press (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company), 1996
Authors: Bart Farkas and Christopher Breen
Pages: 508
ISBN: 0-201-88381-3

A spin-off of the "Macintosh Bible" series, The Macintosh Bible Guide to Games is the definitive book of 1990s Mac games. Most (if not all) of them are available through the Macintosh Garden (not all games are linked) and even better if you have your own classic Mac to actually fool around. Otherwise, there's emulators, though some games still have compatibility issues.

After an introductory Chapter 1 that briefly explores computer gaming history as a whole and interactive fiction, it's off to Chapter 2, "Classic Games". This is not so much "old Mac games" (but it has some of that) but games based after older arcade games. So there's straight ports, like how Digital Eclipse released an authorized emulator of early arcade games (Digital Arcade Series featuring Defender, Joust, and Robotron), or clones of classic arcade games. There's stuff like Defender clones (such as Glypha (credited as "Glypha III"), Centipede clones (like Apeiron, always a classic and a great take on the antiquated title), Tempest clones (Arashi), and so on. There's also a few others related to stand-up arcades (a dismal port of light gun game Mad Dog McCree) or pinball games. In addition, this is also where they threw in Dark Castle (the Delta Tao color version), and Zork Anthology (the Activision compilation of classic Infocom games).

Chapter 3 is "Traditional Games", which is where the board & card genre fits in—crossword puzzles, card games, Scrabble games (like early Facebook game Scrabulous years later, the "official" one is the worst one, and yes, it was owned by Hasbro back then through Milton Bradley), chess games, and others. Of note is Mario's Game Gallery by Interplay/MacPlay (Interplay had a whole series of licensed Mario games and the first to use the voice talents of Charles Martinet). Naturally, the game isn't great, but the reviewers really seem to dislike Mario as a character, though, as if playing Super Mario World on a Mac wouldn't be an enjoyable experience. Chapter 4, Sports, has a lot of stuff that's forgotten, even if it was published by big names and came in a large box. Stuff like Club Racquetball, 4D Boxing, and PlayMaker Football. The next one is Chapter 5, Arcade Games, which are really just action-type games. Some of these are memorable titles (Prince of Persia, Power Pete, and Out of this World) and some of them are not (Jump Raven, Eat My Photons, and Deliverance). Glider PRO also shows up here (which is not really an arcade game). Chapter 6, Brain Games, is the more puzzle-based games. The top rated game of this chapter (and tied with Marathon for the entire book) is a puzzle title called Ishido (they really adored it for some reason). Other stuff here includes Tetris and its spin-offs (handled by Spectrum HoloByte, they did the computer versions), Blobbo, and Lemmings.

The entirety of Chapter 7 is dedicated to Maxis, which at the time had almost its entire library ported to Mac (and pretty much the entire library available on Mac at the time was reviewed, even SimTown and Widget Workshop...and while older titles like SimLife, SimAnt, SimEarth, SimFarm, and SimCity Classic were reviewed, RoboSport was not, nor the rare SimIsle). There's a small interview with Will Wright. Of interest, it refers to SimRefinery (not by name, just mentioning a simulation made for Chevron) and how they spun off the group as Thinking Tools. They also mention a new group led by Ihor Wolosenko that will be "doing some very non-Sim titles for us", yet the only thing I can find that he was involved with in Maxis was SimGolf.

The Adventure Games category (Chapter 8) included both graphic adventure titles (Myst, Return to Zork, and The 7th Guest) and WRPGs (World of Xeen, Ultima III, and SSI's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series). Additionally, under Adventure Games, there's a sub-section for "Digital Environments", like The Voyager Company's The Madness of Roland, which could best be described as a sort of an early visual novel made by Westerners with no Japanese influence. Still, they DO consider it a game, so take that, "visual novels aren't games" naysayers. Science Fiction (Chapter 9) could've been combined with the previous chapter. With the opener of Spaceship Warlock (getting a bit outdated by then), I couldn't help but noticed how they absolutely hated The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum (basically a joke review that consisted little more than "It stinks, don't buy it" and System Requirements of "Who cares?") but were wowed by The Daedalus Encounter, a FMV game that relied more on the video than the actual gameplay; in reality those games are probably more alike than they'd care to admit.

"First-Person-Perspective Shoot-'Em Ups" (FFPSEUs) was the next chapter (10). More commonly known as FPSs today, the books seems to have been released in the timeframe where Doom II was released for Mac but the original Doom wasn't. The book also mentions The Colony, which wasn't quite an FPS as we know it but was an innovative 3D adventure for the Mac, even a black-and-white one (the framerate, of course, leaves much to be desired). The Mac bias shine through, Marathon was rated notedly higher than Doom II, though Marathon would be forgotten about for years until Bungie resuscitated the name years later for a reboot.

Chapter 11 is "Conquest Games" covering both the famous ones (Civilization, Populous, etc.) and others like Spaceward Ho!, a then-popular networkable space conquest game for the Mac. Chapter 12 is War Games, a lot of tile-based movement and other oddities, like U-BOAT (based on HyperCard?!), and Chapter 13 is Flight Simulators. Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 is mentioned as another bad game with a joke review, just about a rant about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Chapter 14 is Hardware, and mentions DOS compatibility cards, specifically made for the PowerMac 6100. Chapter 15 is "Network Games" and weren't exclusively multiplayer; for instance Spectre and its semi-sequels are here, as is Super Maze Wars by Callisto. Chapter 16, "Online Gaming" is pretty irrelevant as far as play goes, and stuff you can't get anymore (CompuServe, America Online, eWorld). Notably it mentions MUDs (basically text-based social worlds), and even off-handedly mentions a "genre of MUDs in which you must adopt the character of an anthropomorphic furry creature" (FurryMUCK being the biggest and oldest, for those interested), and that was even before people really started to become aware of them.

1990s Mac games are definitely something else. The Mac was somewhat underutilized for games, partly due to its small market share and lack of support of Apple as far as games went, which is a shame. Sure, the Mac had higher resolution than its DOS or console counterparts, and it always sounded better and installed easier out of the box, but between the sheer availability of DOS/Windows games that never made it over and the compelling library that the Genesis and SNES had between them, the whole thing comes off as a bit anemic.

The book originally included CD-ROM (find a copy here along with the PDF of the book) contains demos, shareware, and utilities. I got the book used without the CD, though even finding the CD contents I wasn't too impressed. I guess you had to be there.

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