Sam Parker PC Editor	Now Playing: Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield (PC) Most Wanted: Rise of Nations (PC), Deus Ex: Invisible War (PC, Xbox)

Are Ports a Fact of Life?

I recently had a long talk with a Mac gamer friend I knew from a stint writing about Mac games in the late '90s, and I came away realizing that PC and Mac gamers have more in common than ever before. Forget about the hardware and OS differences, or whether Microsoft or Apple is a more worthy recipient of your hard-earned cash. Those subjects have been the source of enough fanatical debate, and most of us can agree on at least a few things: Apple makes some expensive but cool-looking hardware, Intel's processors are much faster than anything available in a Mac, and there are many more games that run on Windows than on OS X. The last point is an important one, but the startling fact is that the gulf between the platforms' game libraries may actually be dwindling, as the PC is seeing fewer new original projects and more ports of games first released for consoles.

Better late than never--quite a few quality PC games make it to the Mac, but often many months later.

It's been hard to see PC gaming lose a lot of mindshare and business momentum in favor of the consoles, and I worry that the going may be tough enough to push good veteran developers out of the business. Some game studios that rushed to switch over and sign console projects in the last year or two may not see much financial success in the crowded console market, but at least they're getting publisher backing for projects that way. Developers with long histories on the PC that try to simultaneously develop games for both consoles and the PC can find the console audience to be a tough sell, since at first they might be regarded as new studios, for lack of name recognition. That said, despite a slight downtick in 2002, the PC game market has been pretty steady over the years, and EA, for one, is making loads of money with its PC products. I'm glad to see Sim City 4, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Battlefield 1942 doing well, because at least that will keep EA investing in PC games.

If cost-cutting leads to Russian-developed games, I don't mind, if they look as good as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

It's one thing to develop a game for multiple console platforms and quite another to make the jump between console and computer platforms. Xbox gamers might take affront at the fact that a game developed with the PS2 in mind doesn't take full advantage of the Xbox's hardware features. And Mac gamers have had plenty of room to complain over the years of PC ports with glitches and with interfaces more similar to the Windows environment than that of the OS they're most familiar with. Sloppy ports get knocked in reviews and can be punished with disappointing sales. But apart from the shortcuts that generally make gamers feel like ports aren't really at home on their platform of choice, some kinds of ports don't match up with the gameplay expectations native to a platform, which is a fundamental problem for first-person shooters and role-playing games.

EA is making distinctly different Medal of Honor games for the PC and for consoles, but the console team did the most preproduction research.

Although we might be seeing less cheerleading in favor of the PC platform, the reality is that the platform has made some real improvements since the rah-rah early days of Windows 95 and DirectX, when Microsoft was putting enough money into promoting the platform to get the general media to take notice. This E3 may set the tone for how the PC and consoles compare for the rest of this generation, and I'm expecting some big-name sequels to hold their own. The big trends don't have to get in the way of how much you enjoy a particular game, just as the Mac's 4 percent market share doesn't make Civilization III or Warcraft III any worse. But the shape of changing markets and the interests of corporations do have an impact on the type of entertainment available to us.