Halo for Mac

[Betamax001]

I was thinking about getting Halo for the computer and saw the game came out for the Mac. I am 99.99999999999% I am getting a MacBook Pro for college and thought I would wait and get the Mac port. To my surprise the game for Mac is like $70+ on Amazon and it was equally expensive on eBay. Did it only have a limited print run or something? I would imagine that it would be a popular game for the system...

[Ziggy]

The first Halo? I remember a few years back my friends and I all picked up Halo (1) for PC to play online together. It was $10 for PC on Amazon, and my friend had to pay $50 for the Mac version.

[Lokkenjawnz]

I'm not positive, but I think you can get it much cheaper than that. The original Halo is PPC only, but there's a universal binary out to make it work on current Intel macs. I believe you can buy a download of the UB for about $5, then you could just torrent a copy of the original game. You're still paying for the game, but that's definitely a grey area, so you might not be comfortable doing that. You also might try eBay, you just need to find a working serial so you can play online. I definitely think you should get the mac version though, because that was the original platform it was designed for dammit! Damn you microsoft!

[t0yrobo]

I know this might not be the answer you're looking for. But if you intend on doing much any gaming on your laptop just install windows. Playing games in osx by most any means has always been just an exercise in frustration for me.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Okay, heres what happened.

The company that released the Mac port of the game did a little research by checking out the amount of registered and sold copies and found that there were at least 5,000 more pirated copies then had been sold. They immediately stopped production of the Mac version, and started charging $5 for the Universal Binary patch for those who had both purchased and pirated to play it at native speed on Intel Macs.

Short story, pirate it, then pay for the Universal Binary patch.

[Dylan]

Short story, pirate it, then pay for the Universal Binary patch.

But that's what got us into this mess. Not much to do about that now though, I suppose.

[Lokkenjawnz]

Okay, heres what happened.

The company that released the Mac port of the game did a little research by checking out the amount of registered and sold copies and found that there were at least 5,000 more pirated copies then had been sold. They immediately stopped production of the Mac version, and started charging $5 for the Universal Binary patch for those who had both purchased and pirated to play it at native speed on Intel Macs.

Short story, pirate it, then pay for the Universal Binary patch.

I don't think that's actually what happened, what's more likely is that they stopped producing it because it's an almost 10 year old game. I think you're mixing it up with when they patched it to force you to have the disc in the computer. When it first came out you didn't need the disc in the machine, but then several (as in 5 or 6) years later the piracy of the game got a bit bad so they changed it so you had to have the disc in, then after a couple years they went back to not needing the disc.

I do agree though that your best bet is just to pirate a copy, and if you feel you need to you can buy the UB. You might be able to use a windows serial on a mac, in which case you could legitimately buy it, and it would be trivial to get online.

It is pretty ridiculous that it's so hard to find a copy of this game for mac though. I mean 80 bucks for a common, 10 year old game?

[Betamax001]

I'm not positive, but I think you can get it much cheaper than that. The original Halo is PPC only, but there's a universal binary out to make it work on current Intel macs. I believe you can buy a download of the UB for about $5, then you could just torrent a copy of the original game. You're still paying for the game, but that's definitely a grey area, so you might not be comfortable doing that.

Yeah I don't mind torrenting. It beats paying 80 bucks for a game that should be no more than ten bucks.