Tetsuo Time

 
 This was a suprise for me tonight. After years and years of wondering if the croteam is ever going to suppor the Mac they have announced their latest title.. Serious Sam 3: BFE is coming to the Mac. The previous games all ran well in WINE but it's always good to see a developer step up to the plate and announce official support for the Mac platform. The only thing not known about this is who is porting it and how. I'm just glad it's official now as I don't have to futz around with it in WINE and possibly trigger their DRM scheme with the invincible pink scorpion or anything.

Previously they had an outside contractor named Ryan C. Gordon port the first and second encounters to Linux. But they didn't port those to the Mac although that guy does do Mac ports too from time to time so he could be doing this one too. There's also the possibility that they paid for a license to transgaming's cider technology which is pretty much the same as WINE.. sort of fooling a game that it's running on windows when it really isn't. 

There may be more details later though. Apparently this is going to be on Steam and "Get Games" although I've never heard of the latter.

{Joystiq}
{Shacknews}
{VG247}

If you want to play a game that has good COOP for 2-18 players I suggest you check out Serious Sam First or Second Encounter.

The reason why is each level is huge and there is plenty of room for multiple players. The players can also be in different sections of the level. So three could be in one section, three in another and so forth then they can all meet up in a different section. There is plenty of ammo to go around so you never have to worry about ammo just blast as many monsters as you can and see who can kill the most... and the battles are wild with hundreds of baddies and the big boss battles with multi-story bosses are wild too. Another thing that makes it ideal for COOP is there are no jumping puzzles so players that aren't good at those won't get left behind. At one time I used to play Quake COOP with my sister and she used to get stuck on areas that required a lot of jumping this is especially true in Quake II in a level like the strogg processing plant I used to have to go on ahead without her and complete the level while she waited before the jumping parts.

The characters are in Serious Sam for multiplayer pretty funny too. It is funny to me seeing some 70's afro dude running around the level in a game.

Serious Sam also supports split screen but I'm telling you playing multiplayer with multiple computers each person getting their own screen is a whole lot better than sharing one screen especially since you can do this over the internet and you can find dedicated COOP servers so you can get the best connection possible. COOP in Serious Sam is so awesome I can't imagine wanting to play deathmatch.

One other thing I like in is in a COOP game such as this the players are too busy killing the monsters together to be jerks to each other.

The only thing is I have to play it on my laptop and that's not very ergonomic after a while my keyboard hand goes numb. I wish they had made a Mac version.