Game On - An introduction to "Slim Gaming"

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Games and Mac. Those two are worlds apart, and never the twain shall meet, if you follow the conventional wisdom of the internet. Certainly, during my pre-Apple days in Germany, I was a firm believer in this dogma as well, and as an avid PC gamer, and therefore a member of the PC master race, I really didn't have to worry about hardware specs that much. My gaming rig was pretty damn powerful, certainly more than enough for all pre-2015 games. Things began to change after I started working for Apple, though. While I was initially loathe to buy into the hype about my employer's products, the horrible update policy for my trusty Asus Eee Pad Slider eventually led to it being replaced by a MacBook.
As someone, who has traditionally been drawn to light, portable computers, I decided on a MacBook Air 11", while financial reasons dictated that I would invariably have to go for a device that didn't offer much more than the base-line configuration that was available back in October 2013. Consequently, I was left with a 1.3 GHz Intel i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD. Three and a half years later, I still love that MacBook! It is a brilliant blogging machine, and even hardware hungry tasks such as editing HD videos in Final Cut Pro, or advanced image processing in Adobe Photoshop are no problem for my MacBook Air. Granted, you can cook a steak on the bottom of the machine after you're done, but still the power that this machine is able to draw out of the rather meagre HW specs is pretty impressive. However, one thing that I was never sure about was the gaming performance of that little machine. Sure, I did some tests with games like XCOM - Enemy Unknown, but I never used the MacBook as much as I did my gaming PC.
Games? On this? Oh, absolutely, I kid you not.
The main problem for me was to find out whether a certain game would run on a MacBook Air over extended periods without frying it. Most of the websites dealing with gaming on a Mac focus on the more heavy duty MacBook Pro or on iMacs, while the MacBook Air, and the 12" MacBook are rarely mentioned. Also, while a large and ever increasing variety of games for Mac is nowadays available through platforms like Steam, or GOG, the hardware specs the manufacturers provide there are often less than helpful. So, since there's so little reliable information out there, I decided to start my own listing, with games that I have tested myself. Now, I still don't play a lot of games on my MacBook Air, it simply can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Elite: Dangerous, or Cities: Skylines, and it is still primarily a blogging machine, so don't expect hundreds of games to appear here overnight. I'll take this step by step, an expand this series over time, so be sure to check back regularly or sign up for email notifications to never miss an update.

Before I get going, there's a few more things I'd like to mention. It should go without saying that I'll be writing down my personal opinion of games, their usability, and their apparent effect on the MacBook. I'm not going to be throwing around FPS stats, or using benchmarks, this is all about how I as a player experience those games. Also, while I had originally planned to exclude "vintage" games such as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, or Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, I will include them in this series, because as old as they may be, they are still absolute gems and as fascinating to play now as they were when they came out, back when EA was still a decent company.

Finally, just in case you missed the data further up in the article, here's the specs of my machine, so you know just what kind of hardware I’m running

MacBook Air (Mid 2013)

  • CPU: Intel i3 1.3 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 2.6 GHz
  • Graphics Card: Intel HD Graphics 5000
  • RAM: 8GB PC3-12800 (1600 MHz) LPDDR3
  • Storage:             128GB Flash Storage
  • OS:                    Mac OS Sierra 10.12.5 Public Beta

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