A Funkaoshi Production

Intel iMac Notes: Warcraft III

   25 April 2006, lunch time

Yesterday, after work, I picked up a copy of the Warcraft III Battle Chest, which has the original game, the expansion, and some strategy guides for the two games. I had played through part of the game with my cousins while in Sydney, and thought it was pretty fun. I hadn’t played Warcraft in a long time. Warcraft II wouldn’t run on my 486 (with 4 megs of RAM). There is this whole of computer games I missed out on since I replaced my 486 with a Powerbook 5300cs. I think my iMac looks like it could be a good computer game box, were it not for the fact it’s a Mac. Mind you, Bootcamp may change the Mac gaming landscape — by letting Mac users revel in the Windows gaming landscape. I digress. I was quite impressed with how well the game ran on the iMac, despite it not being a Universal Binary. (Mind you, the game is 3-4 years old now.) I can run the game with all the video settings maxed out, and at my screens native resolution of 1680 by 1050. The game play is very smooth. I have noticed one hiccup, however: In most (all) cases so far, switching from the game to a video works, but you can see the finder flash in to view; switching from a video back to the game leaves the game in windowed mode, not full screen mode. Despite this, the game runs great, and has been fun to play thus far. Anyone else have Warcraft?

Update Jan 23rd: As pointed out in the comments below, a new patch lets the game run natively. You can get the patch by logging into BattleNet, or from Blizzard’s FTP site. (You will want to download War3TFT_121a_XXX.bin, where XXX is the language you want.)

Intel iMac | Video Games