First of all: I always have been a casual gamer. Yes I had some massive online fragfests in previous companies after work with colleagues, but I’ve never been especially skilled at any of the games.

I used to play a lot (Hey in the days before the Internet, I finished Ghostbusters on the C-64 at the second attempt, I also solved The Secret of Monkey Island without cheating, etc.), but now that I have a life (or almost none due to work), I personally prefer games that can be played casually without a lot of preparation:

1-on-1 martial arts games

From Way of the Exploding Fist on the C-64, via International Karate and Body Blows on the Amiga to Virtua Fighter (Saturn) and all incarnations of Tekken on consoles – I loved them all – yes these are all ancient, as am I.

First person shooters

Yes, I played the original Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D (free version here):, Quake (all versions), Unreal and I also dabbled in Bungie’s (now of Halo fame, but originally a Mac only developer) ground-breaking Marathon 3D shooters series (open sourced version Aleph One), not to forget Oni, which was also quite innovative. I never developed much interest in so-called “realistic” combat simulations, because I found it much more amusing to blast your opponents into pieces with absurd effects and weapons in a more comic-like over the top fashion as in Doom, Quake or Duke Nukem. But that’s just me.

OS X – the good: first person shooters visually stunning

So far I’ve been running the best sellers on the App Store which are Modern Combat: Domination, N.O.V.A. 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight II, (downloading Call of Duty 4 right now), and also all the cool free/open source stuff like: War§ow, AssaultCube, Sauerbraten, Red Eclipse, Quake, Open Arena, Nexuiz, Wolfenstein ET, World of Padman.

They all are equally playable and guarantee hours of fun. I have to admit the level of graphic detail in Games such as Modern Combat and COD is stunning. I remember when I was playing Wolfenstein, I was dreaming experiencing this kind of detail some day when I was 60, reality ends up being 20 years early. Not bad.

OS X – the bad: hardware demands

With some Mac games, however, you might have a hard time running them smoothly even with a fairly fast and up-to-date MacBook Pro. E.g. X3 Terran Conflict even at its lower detail setting and reducing screen resolution on my MacBook Pro to a non native 1440 × 850 pixels does not run smoothly. You really want a desktop Mac for that, so anything below an iMac might not be able to give you a good experience for this game.

OS X – the ugly: rip-off ware

You can also buy Quake Open Arena on the App Store, which is an open source game available for free from http://www.openarena.ws/ there are several games you can buy there which are actually free and open source. This is such a cheap way to get your money, please check online before buying games, whether you’re not about to pay money for something you could get for free in the first place. Of course other open source games are offered for free on the App Store as well (e.g. Hedgewars).

iOS – the good: FPS

On iOS I tested: Modern Combat 2 – Black Pegasus, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Archetype. I am very impressed by the quality of the graphics on these devices considering they cannot afford having graphic cards or CPUs sucking up even partly as much power as their counterparts on any Mac model. Despite the restrictions given by the hardware all games are smoothly playable, because the devs of course develop exactly for this hardware and this hardware only (I wonder what the situation may be once iPad 3 or 4 comes out).

iOS – the bad: playability with gyroscope

My biggest gripe is really the playability. Due to the lack of external input devices on iOS you end up having to steer your character/vehicle/vessel as one option via the gyroscope (by tilting the screen towards the direction you want to move/watch etc.). The essential biggest flaw with this is neither Apple’s nor the iPad’s, but this type of control will never be very accurate, simply because of you.

Unless you are some Shaolin super fighter (in which case you get your fragging in real life, rather than on an iPad), your body is just not capable of remembering the perfect position of your hands in mid-air, so steering will always be somewhat “wobbly” and inaccurate compared to “proper” input devices which have several default positions (centre, left, right, up, down) that are 100% accurate due to the physical nature of these devices. Also because you are tilting your device looking at it at an angle most of the time, it’s harder to follow what’s happening on your screen.

iOS – the ugly: playbability with touch controls

The other option would be to use on-screen touch based controls. This option might give you more precise controls over the movement, but has one big disadvantage: you always end up with your fingers covering part of what you actually want to look at.

You might think this is really just an obstacle for iPhones, because the screen is so tiny there, but the iPad screen is by no means large either, so still your hand(s) can cover larger parts of it.

And especially with first person shooters there’s important stuff going on in the corners of your screen/sight – you really want to have an unobstructed view on the whole screen.

For other types of games I can imagine having a touch based interface might be a revelation, but for fast paced first person shooters I highly recommend to either “get a Mac” or think about switching your favourite Game genre to something else. Fragging on iOS probably ends up with you getting fragged all the time.