Spore for Mac! Sort of...

Well, after Sam's post about Spore the other day, I did some investigating to find out if Spore is coming to Mac, my platform of choice these days.

The answer is yes. And no. Mostly no.

Allow me to explain.

According to this EA press release, "Spore for the Mac will be made possible through TransGaming's Cider Portability Engine, with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles."

Without getting too technical, Cider is basically a Windows emulator. "Portability Engine" is code for "Software we use so that we don't actually have to port the game to another platform."

And what all THAT is code for is that Mac users get a third-rate product: Third-rate compatibility, third-rate performance, and if their track record with "past EA Mac titles" is any indication, third-rate support.

The performance issue is one of my biggest pet peeves, and will probably stop me from buying the mac version. Basically, the game will need all the memory, graphics, and CPU power the PC version does, PLUS all the resources needed to run Cider, the 'emulator'.

This means that on a Mac and PC with exactly the same specifications, the game will run much slower on the Mac, just because EA didn't feel like the Mac audience was worth the time and effort to make a real port, but is happy to take Mac user's money just the same.

The third-rate support problem really seals the deal for me. If I get this game, I'm getting the PC version and playing it in boot camp. See, when EA put out Battlefield 2142 for the Mac, they did it on Cider.

The first nasty surprise I got is that it ran about the same on my brand new mac and my four year old PC.

The second nasty surprise I got is when EA released a major patch for 2142 for the PC... and then waited a month to release the patch for the Macs... *EVEN THOUGH THE MACS WERE RUNNING THE EXACT SAME PROGRAM AS THE PCs, ONLY THROUGH CIDER*. So it wound up that all the PCs, and most of the install base, were on the new version... and so none of the Mac people could play on any of the updated servers. For a month.

(And, actually, they're charging more for a worse product. At the time of this writing the PC version is $19.99. The Mac version is twice that. Oh! And I almost forgot. The expansion, Northern Strike, which is required to unlock all the weapons, is not available for Mac and there are no plans to bring out a Mac version - even though it's just a map pack.)

I eventually complained enough that EA gave me a refund... But the fact remains that Cider ports of PC games are phoned-in half-assed products that don't work nearly as well as fully ported software that runs natively on your OS. So when EA says they're releasing Spore using Cider "with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles," don't believe them! As long as they're still using Cider, they haven't gained enough experience.