Why Can't My Friend Play These?

Ok, I have a bunch of cool games that I play in cycles, if I am in a Half Life 2 cycle I will play HL2 only for weeks, then go into a Far Cry cycle, then into a DOW WA(in right now since I just got the game) cycle and not play the others. I told a friend if he wanted to borrow one of the games I wasn't playing(Far Cry) he could. he said he wanted to but he couldn't because of his computer. He has a nice computer, a Mac G4(I think, he sold his Mac/Apple G3 to buy this and he won't buy Windows) with all kinds of cool features, yet he said his computer can't play Far Cry or Half Life 2 or some of my other cool games. Why?

If your versions are PC based, he can't play them on Mac. Have to buy Mac versions.

Originally posted by RANT
Have to buy Mac versions.

Or a PC Emulator such as VirtualPC, but I definitely do not recommend that for playing high-end video games.

There's two main reasons why you generally can't run a PC program on a Mac or vice-versa, the OS itself and the processor architecture. Without getting into the gory details of either of those, all Mac OS's (from Classic 7.5 all the way through whatever feline version of OSX they're on now) read program instructions--executable files--differently than Windows. They expect different instructions, and they process the instructions differently.

The same goes for the processor. While there are a handful of hacks out to allow one to run OSX on an Intel-style processor (Pentium, AMD, etc.), the Mac computers use a different processor that requires different instructions from the OS.

One way to look at it is like this: you have someone who speaks one language (the processor), while you--the program or video game--speak a different language. So, you need a translator, the OS, and you need one who speaks both your language and that you need to translate to. If you find one, that's great, you can perform your task (kill the baddies, process a spreadsheet, whatever.) Given that example, you can think of it as a Pentium processor speaks Chinese, and Windows speaks Chinese and English. A Macintosh processor speaks Japanese, and Mac OS's speak Japanese and English.

Make sense of some kind?

Yea, and unfortunately not very many games have Mac versions. The most common or popular was WC3, the only other like shooter game I've played with a mac version is Ut 2004.