January 6, 2019 Search IMG's Top Ten Casual Games for the Mac IMG's Top Ten Casual Games for the Mac July 27, 2006 Pages: 1 Switch Casual gaming, and the casual gamer, are relatively new concepts in the world of video games. As the industry slowly realizes that not everyone has the time, skill, or desire to go on massive missions with other avatars from around the world, or take days and weeks to conquer the Roman Empire, or walk the dark corridors of an abandoned space station and blow up anything that moves, we are seeing a new type of game evolve. And its popularity is gaining in leaps and bounds. A casual game can be loosely classified as a game, generally a puzzle game of some sort, that takes very little time to learn and get into, generally requires a limited skill set, and can be very addicting. Arguably the earliest example of the casual game is the venerable Microsoft Windows classic Solitaire.
Aug 24, 2017 - For more brilliant Mac gaming options, read our roundup of the best Mac games, and our guide to the best free web browser games for Mac. Alpine Crawler. Beneath a Steel Sky. Doodle Hangman Free. Dwarf Fortress. The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Mar 19, 2009 - I am looking for some fun and free casual games for the Mac. Any good ones? Perhaps a tower defence?
Next in the lineage would be the grand-daddy of all puzzle games, Tetris. These games exemplify the best aspects of a casual game, and are some of the mileposts that other casual games are continually measured. The Mac is a comparatively new player in the casual gaming scene, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some real bang-up games available.
Let's take a casual stroll through the land of gaming for the non-hard core gamer. Number 10: Tetris ElementsThis title is one of the only officially licensed Tetris games available for the Macintosh, which is the main reason this title makes it on the list. Although it isn't the best of the Tetris games released, it is a kick to play, and still quite addictive after all these years. Building on the classic Tetris formula, Elements throws in different gameplay variations based on the elements of nature.
Earthquake Tetris brings the fun of Tetris Cascade to the Mac, while throwing in the added element of tremors that will drastically change the game board when they strike. Tempest is one of the harder variations, forcing you to play two separate Tetris boards. The raging storm switches the player between the boards, and it is up to the player to hold key pieces to get the maximum points from each board.
Stratosphere, Fire, and Ice round out the game modes, each bringing an interesting twist to the classic game. Unfortunately, as fun as Tetris Elements is, it suffers from a common malady found in early casual games on the Macintosh. In order to keep it cross-platform, the developers ignore the advanced graphics available on the Mac, and instead seem satisfied with simple Flash graphics and play mechanics. Luckily, game developers soon learned their lesson. Number 9: Super GameHouse SolitaireGameHouse was one of the first developers to start supporting the Macintosh with their casual games. Not only are the play experiences identical from the Macintosh to the PC, but the graphics are of high quality and no longer look like an old online Flash demo. This attention to quality with Super GameHouse Solitaire lands the game in the number nine spot on our list.
Super GameHouse Solitaire includes ten variations of the classic solo time-waster. The games chosen for this volume are fairly popular, including variants such as Klondike, Pyramid, Tri-Peaks, Golf, and all-time favorite Free Cell. The selection certainly isn't as large as some solitaire games available for the Macintosh, but I think that is what helps to qualify this as a true casual game. By selecting a smaller number of popular, easy-to-grasp variants, you can attract a much larger audience.
And if the large number of solitaire games following this one from GameHouse is any indication, they have been able to attract a large audience. Super GameHouse Solitaire is available from Macgamestore. Number 8: BejeweledIf you haven't heard of Bejeweled, then you have chosen to completely ignore the casual gaming genre. Much like any popular original game, Bejeweled has been cloned and referenced more than nearly any other game in the genre. This is due not only to the popularity of the original, but to the simplicity of the concept: swap jewels on the board to create lines of at least three like-colored gems. Once created, the matches disappear, allowing more gems to flow in from the top of the screen.
This was one of the first games that I played that made me completely lose track of the time as I was playing. Before I knew it, I was 20 rounds in and out an hour of my life.
To this day, I find it hard to put the game down once I start. This alone is enough of a reason for the game to take the number eight spot in the list. As a genre-defining game, this one will go down in the history books, as well.
Bejeweled is available from Macgamestore. Pages: 1 IMG's Top Ten Casual Games for the Mac.
I'm all for celebrating slack on a weekly basis here at PC World, but there's something more tangible that I like just as much: free games. Now a little confession before I go any further. In my past life as a video-gaming journalist, I was a bit of a freeloader-that isI'd be ferreting out freebies that were just addictive fun. And today, I'm giving you my personal Top 10 free games that I'm playing right now-with a bonus eleventh game, to boot-and links to hundreds of others). The Best Free Games (This Week), had a simple concept: Shoot a warp hole in one wall and create the exit point in another.
Easily one of my favorite puzzle-solving games in years, it was brilliant, but waaaaay too brief. To keep me going, I've played on lunch breaks but that still isn't enough. Ready for another 40 levels of brain-bending puzzles? These days, I'm making my way throughwhich plugs into the original PC version of Portal.
Jimmy's Lost His Toilet Paper-and you have to recover it.This next game is really the touching story of a boy and his toilet paper, which has rolled away from home. So what's a kid to do? Follow it all over town, apparently.
In the appropriately named, it's up to you, playing Jimmyto run through a series of levels and try to collect all the loose tp and, according to the instructions, 'find love and meaning to his life on the way'-and maybe a free stall. Shift-3-can you navigate through all the rooms to the exit door? In the same way that I got a kick out of playing Portal: The Flash Version, two other site-based games keep me coming back to play. The first is.
The general idea is that you've got to navigate rooms and make it to the exit door. You do that by hitting your Shift key to invert the world and change your perspective on each puzzle. Trust me, you'll want to play it.
The other is a platform game called.wait for it. You play through 33 levels of running and jumping to reach the end. It's a little old, but I still come back to it on occasion. Sometimes you don't need an elaborate story to enjoy a game. You just want to tune out for a minute.
In that case, allow me to introduce. You control a ball and need to bounce off other balls while avoiding ball-seeking missiles. It's actually a little hypnotic once you start getting into it. If you dig that, also explore the creator's site for a taste of, his iPhone game that will launch at the iTunes store in July. Streetwise-you have just 2 minutes, using the spacebar, to get past obstacles.Hit the spacebar.
And there is your walk-through of how to play. This goofball game is one big timing puzzle. The object: You have 2 minutes to see how many cutesy obstacles you can get past. Yep, and those 2 minutes will seem like the longest of your life. Dirty Split-a murder mystery game in cartoon style.As a huge fan of classic graphic adventure games, I loved playing.
Only problem for me is that while trying to crack this murder mystery, I got too distracted by how professional this freeware game looks. It has tons of style (it looks like a mod 1960s cartoon) and even has great voice acting while you interview suspects. The real crime here is not trying this game. Once upon a time, there was this classic game series called Star Control. It was an action game, a space-trading and exploration game-and then it was gone. Is a full recreation of that classic experience, and now playable on just about every platform.
If you've ever fancied yourself as the next Captain Kirk (or Picard, or whatever), you need to try this one out. Clffall - Treasures of the Lost Cave will give you Atari 2600 flashbacks.If you don't get Atari 2600 flashbacks the second you start playing, I don't know what to tell you. While the game is a lovingly low-fidelity tribute to the ancient Pitfall, there's enough new polish here to enjoy swinging through this digital jungle. Then there's from Nexon America. It's a competitive, online-only first-person shooter game squaring off two squads with modern gear. And it won't cost you a dime.
Well, at least if you don't want to pay. Nexon, the company behind Combat Arms, has made a business out of making gratis online games and then charging a little here and a little there for items (see its MapleStory or Kart Rider). Oh, sure, plenty of other great free FPS games are around, like Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, F.E.A.R. Combat, or America's Army.
But Combat Arms just happens to be in open beta right now. That means you can get in early and learn all the maps before every other gaming savant shows up on the scene to master it. 8bit Killer-an old-school throwback to the early first-person shooters.Don't need the high-end graphics to have a good time?
It may not look like much, but is an old-school throwback to the birth of first-person shooters. Collect a variety of weapons across several levels; open doors and shoot anything in your way.
Now mind you, nobody's confusing this blocky FPS with Crysis, but it's got enough style where it counts. So go forth and shoot pixelly bad guys while grooving to. 303+ More Free Games Only ten? Yes, there are easily hundreds of equally great games out there if you know where to look. I mean, the above-mentioned titles are only the games I've been playing this week. Also, I wanted to get you all warmed up for a couple more that didn't make our initial list-namely, the pending free releases of Runescape HD and Battlefield Heroes.
Has been around for ages. Its hook: you can play a free MMO in a browser or pay $5 per month for the full experience. Starting next Monday (July 14), the game gets a graphical overhaul with RuneScape HD. Among the big-deal promises: full-screen gaming and procedurally generated graphics that could fly on most modern computers. That still isn't exactly high-end graphics, but it will at least bring the game up to this millennium. Not too shabby for a browser-based game., on the other hand, launches a little later this summer, and I, for one, can't wait. The game offers amazing cartoony graphics and great team-play action-kind of like a cleaned-up version of the original Battlefield.
The difference is that the new version requires no money to get in, but you can pay for some upgrades and extras along the way. Okay, I've got a plane to catch. Casual Friday will be taking a week off-but not because of summer vacation. Stay tuned as Senior Associate Editor Danny Allen and I brave the wilds of LA to bring you the latest developments from the gaming world at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Senior Writer Darren Gladstone geeks out over gadgets, games, and odd uses for humdrum tech. In other words, he's a nerd-and he's okay with that.