Parallels and Games

N

NewMac

Junior Member
Although I am a relatively new mac user, purchased my mac book last year I was before that a dedicated windows user for 25 years. I changed to mac because of the robustness of the mac operating system and the overall quality of their hardware. I spent some time looking at my computing requirements and recognised there were some windows programs i needed to still use and hence my decision to buy Parallels. I have now used Parallels for 6 months and had no problems whatsoever.

I did recognise however that Parallels is at the bleeding edge of software development and made the decision to have a dedicated windows gaming machine and use my old windows computer for just that.

I have always used the Parallels forums to find the information I needed and found them and the people who post there always really helpful and knowledgable.

After reading them for the last few days I guess i have this one comment to make.

Why on earth if you are a dedicated gamer would you expect all these games to work with such bleeding edge software and innovative technology .That is akin to going to the moon and expecting there to be a Mcdonalds there. It just aint going to be.

Surely it is better to run your games on proven and operative platforms.

I know this may seem a bit harsh but people, try to understand what your computing needs are going to be and then get the appropriate hardware and software to get the most benefit. That way we can take some of the vitriolic and negative feedback out of these forums and get back to being part of a group of people that is helping to continually develop a highly innovative and technically smart program
 
Seconded.

I'd love to know why anyone needs to run games in a VM. I use a VM so I can run my niche windows software, side by side with my Mac software and gain the advantages of the Mac without losing access to the software I need.

However, when playing games I don't need anything else open. In fact, it's better if nothing else at all is open. Why game with all the overhead of Virtualisation but none of the advantages? Why not just kick over to Bootcamp and game in the native environment. It's not a huge time hit, unless you're Windows install is clogged up.
 
The children of Gen X.

What do you want? I want it all!!
When do you want it? I want it now!!!

I built my first computer from a kit. It was simple and lacked peripherials, memory, and everything taken for granted today. That was in 1963. It was a wonderful computer. It started a lot of new stuff in my life. It was a Heath Kit analog computer and it was magical. What it started is still going strong 40 + years on.
 
Well, for some games it's better to have nothing else open, sure.

But if I'm playing a four-year-old strategy game that takes a couple of hours at a stretch, I'd much rather be able to pause the VM and go check my email or respond to work requests or go look at something without having to save, quit, and reboot first.

I also find the general "why did you expect this to work?" attitude on these forums frustrating — people aren't really asking for magic here, they're asking for what marketing either directly promised or implied.

Call it "akin to going to the moon and expecting there to be a Mcdonalds there" if you like, but if it's really that impossible, marketing just shouldn't be promising it.

The "well, marketing always lies" response is pretty unconvincing too. So because lots of marketing departments lie all the time, it's totally fine if SWsoft seriously overstates what their product is capable of? That somehow makes all the people who didn't carefully check all of the fine print and look up the DX version details of the games they're interested in saps?

Yeah, software is hard. Accomplishing really cool things is hard. Code doesn't always work as well as you'd like in the first version. I write code all day in my day job; I'm familiar with this.

However, if it's so flat-out impossible for a program to do something, don't advertise it as capable of doing that. It's really that simple.

I don't understand why people are missing this.

And yes, I expect things will get better in the future. That's not really the point — the point is that SWsoft took people's money now for a product that doesn't really do what they said it would now.
 
dkp said:
The children of Gen X.

What do you want? I want it all!!
When do you want it? I want it now!!!
Click to expand...

dkp, do you really expect that insulting people is going to help convince them that they're wrong?

Wanting it now when it's released now is not unreasonable.

Yeah, expecting every game in the world to work wouldn't be reasonable, but I do think SWsoft could have done a much better job of managing people's expectations.

The upgrade mail I got was a pretty breathless hard-sell, and while I didn't expect it'd do 100% of what the mail promised, I'm still fairly disappointed by what I got.

If you want to declare that that makes me some kind of immature whiner, you go right ahead. Do whatever makes you happy.
 
They have been very up front about what games have been tested and work. Those not on the list may or may not work. They have also released the hardware they emulate and if a game requires something beyond what they emulate it probably won't work. They are offering full refunds for disappointed users so that can't be a problem. So what the hell is the problem?
 
mjankor said:
Seconded.

I'd love to know why anyone needs to run games in a VM. I use a VM so I can run my niche windows software, side by side with my Mac software and gain the advantages of the Mac without losing access to the software I need.

However, when playing games I don't need anything else open. In fact, it's better if nothing else at all is open. Why game with all the overhead of Virtualisation but none of the advantages? Why not just kick over to Bootcamp and game in the native environment. It's not a huge time hit, unless you're Windows install is clogged up.
Click to expand...
The thing is, the game IS THE NICHE SOFTWARE I want to run.

1. The pain and wasted time of rebooting. I might as well just STAY in one OS if I had to switch back and forth oh so many times just to play a game. So.. uh, that means I'd be either stuck in Windows or forgo all my games and stay in Mac OS X for most of the time. I was sort of stuck in the latter situation.

2. In booting to a different OS, it stops any multitasking stuff I was running on the original OS (e.g. file transfer, web server, IM). If I want to keep those back running, I'd need a counterpart installed and running in that second OS - a waste of space, and not to mention unnecessary downtime, plus they add to the reboot time.

3. I don't need to have the game running full screen. Due to the nature of the games I play, I am able to switch back and forth other tasks even while gaming.

Parallels and VMware now both offer all the advantages of the side-by-side virtualization with the cost of some performance even for games. The performance hit I see in the current release isn't exactly as minimal as I would have liked, but I like where this is eventually going.
 
dkp said:
They have been very up front about what games have been tested and work. Those not on the list may or may not work. They have also released the hardware they emulate and if a game requires something beyond what they emulate it probably won't work. They are offering full refunds for disappointed users so that can't be a problem. So what the hell is the problem?
Click to expand...

Well, to be honest, part of the problem is the apologists here flaming the hell out of people who are upset.

SWsoft offering refunds is good, but I don't think telling people to shut up and take refunds if they're unhappy is particularly reasonable.

I really do think the aggressive response by a subset of the people who are happy with 3.0 is making the problems worse, not better. Lots of people are upset. They feel let down and misled, and yelling at them won't really fix that.

Again, I'm happy that SWsoft is offering refunds to the people who demand them, but letting it get to the point where paying customers are demanding their money back is a pretty serious failure.

Where's the "yeah, we're sorry, we should have been more clear; stick with us and we'll try to make <x>, <y>, and <z> work in the next release" response?

Where's the "here's how to troubleshoot games that don't work and let us know about them" support pages?

I think what happened here is primarily a marketing failure due to over-promising. More careful support could fix that, but right now the impression many people seem to have is that now that SWsoft has their money, they're not really interested in talking to them anymore.
 
ncl said:
I think what happened here is primarily a marketing failure due to over-promising. More careful support could fix that, but right now the impression many people seem to have is that now that SWsoft has their money, they're not really interested in talking to them anymore.
Click to expand...

If you are not gullible you cannot be oversold. Ever. Really - it's that simple. And with the refund policy that is in place it's a stretch to say SWSoft has their money.
 
dkp said:
If you are not gullible you cannot be oversold. Ever. Really - it's that simple. And with the refund policy that is in place it's a stretch to say SWSoft has their money.
Click to expand...


Man you are dense. Or do you work for SWSoft?
 
please stop

I know Bootcamp is better for gaming, I really do. And so do most of the rest of us. Posting Just use bootcamp and shut up it just pointless. If I wanted to use bootcamp I would just go without PD all together but I like the use of my mac. I even have 2 screens so I can play on one and do the rest on another. The use mac native is a completely valid arguement but the "stop using parallels" for any reason is stupid considering the forums we are posting this in.
 
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