SB Recommends Mac Games

Cycle: Now this is a very special game to me. When most people think of Ambrosia, they think of Escape Velocity. I think of Avara. I'm slowly putting together a wiki for this game right now, but there is so much I could write as I was part of the community for about six years. It was a first person shooter - you were in a robot, but it wasn't a mech game. It also wasn't really a FPS, I guess. It was very unique, and required smart use of every game mechanic to win a battle.

Cycle: Now this was one awesome shooter. It had a (kinda) unique visual style which focused on vector graphics, the techno soundtrack is one of the most awesome I've ever heard and the gameplay… man this game was fun. It could be most easily described as a mix of Roboton and Sinistar. You had to protect CPUs from programmers while fending off other enemies. If too many CPUs were captured, a big boss would be summoned. Really, one of the best arcade games I've ever played and still holds up well today. There was actually a windows version which seems impossible to track down.

JChastain: Forget-Me-Not is really fucking good.

galaxyghost: iPhone game of the year for me.

Intentionally Wrong: Playing this feels more like I'm trying to overcome myself than my opponents, since I've noticed I tend to win any match where I spend at least 5 minutes simulating before I send in my orders, and only lose if I get careless and don't take the time that I need. Perpetual vigilance and attention to detail is rewarded.

JoeX111: I love the asynchronous multiplayer. It's like chess by mail with gunfire.

Dracko: You should be playing Frozen Synapse anyhow if you've got nothing better to do than completely miss the grotesque irony of a cyberpunk tale about violent corporate warfare using proxy soldiers.

Ymer: I think you might like it actually. It's XCOM style turn-based combat only both players turns take place at the same time after they've been planned and engaged. You can even simulate whatever move you think your opponent might make during the planning phase but you're of course in all likelihood gonna guess completely wrong about it. The multiplayer is also asynchronous similar to Words with friends/Wordfeud so you can have multiple games going at once and not have to make your move in any of them for days if you so wish.
Also a campaign with a real weird GitS-like storyline or something.

The Blueberry Hill: Tight, turn-based tactical game. Really great as a play-it-when-you're ready asynchronoous multi thing, with lots of options for your you people, and for simulating the behaviours of your opponants'.

Sawtooth: It's truly a unique game. It's an exploration/adventure of the same general format of a top-down shooter, except there's a large emphasis on careful movement and manoeuvering. The player controls tank-style except that it obeys the physics of a swivel chair; You press back to push off with your feet, forward to inch ahead with your toes. Kick off a wall or certain objects to gain a boost of speed, or interact with objects like soda machines.

Cycle: I really liked all the little comments your co-workers made as you swivelled past them. It felt like a pretty accurate depiction of office life. Thus the first few levels are my favourite, before it became more action heavy.

Infernarl: I have like a deep body eroticism when I think about playing Jaunt Trooper.

Sniper Honeyviper: I feel this embodies the entire pre-iPod Apple experience the best. It's like if MS Paint dropped acid and stopped caring, or if Jackson Pollock had designed it. “OH NO!”

Slonie: It was a side-view action/platform game with very nice animation, vaguely Prince of Persia-ish but also with KUNG FU. Also there were two characters to choose from with different moves (and special moves too). I think one of them was bald. Man, I loved that game.

PFG 9000: What fantastic levels. The game just seemed so much more real than other FPS's at that time. My Halo-loving friends have gotten used to me making comparisons between the bits of Halo that I see and the classic moments in the Marathon games.

Cycle: A very Ultima inspired RPG. I loved the structure of it all. You would land on an island which you could explore, find secrets, kill monsters, chat to people in towns. Each island had it's own problem. For example, the first island had two towns at war, and you had to make the first steps to unite them. Once you solved an islands problem you went to the next. I think I liked this one so much because you tried to help people instead of just killing things all the time and most of the problems would be solved without lots of violence (but you'd be killing lots of things on the way). This was new to me at the time and I just liked helping the people I came across. It has also recently become freeware.

Cycle: I put together a rather small wiki on this game. So probably best to read that to get the gist of it. I tell you, it is insanely addictive. No matter how many unfair deaths the game threw at me, I always came back. Interestingly enough, I won the game for the first time a few months ago — only ten or so years after first playing.

dessgeega: A fantastic adventure game, with monster hacking and puzzle solving. and a very interesting implementation of death.

Cycle: I love how it was so completely unserious and yes… I thought the death implementation was very clever. AND entertaining, despite being so hilariously mundane. A friend told me there was a way to bypass the tasks but I can't remember how…