Crossover Games for Mac

Playing games

Playing games in Crossover Games is oddly intuitive. Simply click on the "Programs" menu in your menu bar and you'll be greeted with a list of all available programs in all existing bottles. Click your program and watch it run!

Unfortunately, this is partially where the pavement of an objective review starts to change to the dirt road of a subjective observation. See, there's very little actual method to test frame rates inside of the games. Things like FRAPS (at least to my knowledge) don't really work, and it's hard to trust the in-game rates because it's not a sure thing that the report is accurate. Is it measuring the actual output, or the output it thinks it is giving because of the middleware?

What I can offer is an honest opinion from an avid gamer about whether things are running slowly. The test system is as follows:

MacBook Pro 15.4"

• CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz;
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB;
• RAM: 2 GB Corsair 667Mhz DDR2;
• HDD: Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB.

As you can see, I'm not running Apple's top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. As a mid-range laptop, it should give you an idea of what you could expect from anything that isn't an Intel-integrated system that's running Linux or OSX.

Supported games

I fired up my copies of Half Life 2: Episode 2, Guild Wars, Call of Duty 2, Prey and Team Fortress 2. All of the games ran with no issues out of the same bottle, and actually every one of them performed very well. I noticed no slowdown compared to playing on my full desktop which sports much more admirable specifications.

The one thing that you will definitely notice is a bit of a load time for the executable to begin its magic. Loads are considerably increased compared to an equivalent Windows installation, and there's not really any good indicator that it's doing much at all. This can be quite misleading when you think nothing is happening but the system as a whole is behaving quite sluggishly.


Games actually do something better in Crossover Games than most do in normal Windows – they can run as a windowed mode instead of full-screen. Because of the high-end virtualization technology present in Intel processors and the excellent mutlitasking of 'Nix based operating systems, it's easy to play a game at three quarter size and do work around the edges.

So, these all run great. But what if you want to play something other than Half Life 2 or Guild Wars?

Unsupported games

Unsupported games are a broad topic on Crossover Games...mostly because there are so damn many. Anything that is not specifically listed and advertised is considered 'unsupported.' Does that mean they don't work? Absolutely not.

However, caveat emptor. Several games actually don't work, and that's putting it lightly. What I'm quite surprised about are the games that do work – and I'd dare say that the list is bigger than those that work in Vista!


Functional games are pretty much anything that's been made from 2005 or earlier. These engines are all using stable code and standard API calls from DirectX 9.0c or previous. Pretty much anything that runs DirectX 8.0 or older runs with no issues, even many Windows 95/98 games that did not play well with XP or Vista without serious tweaking.

"New games" really depend on the engine – anything based on the Source or Doom 3 engine seem to run without a hitch. Games with their own high-end engines are quite hit-or-miss - Bioshock did not run at all, while Neverwinter Nights 2 did not run due to a possibly fixable problem with the .NET Framework 2.0. I've not had the opportunity to actually fix that problem, but it is indeed reportedly fixable.

This seems to be one of the biggest problems – tinkering still exists, which one does not expect to pay top dollar to still need to do. Unreal Tournament 3 didn't run, but it was again tantalizingly close – Crossover Games seems to install optionals like the Ageia engine into the "Default" bottle, whether or not that is the bottle which you're installing your software in.