Forced mac user here...

I'm a college student and as you can tell by my handle, I like to game. Unfortunately, I'm at school most of the time, and don't really have the time to fire up my desktop. Last week my laptop fried while playing Counter-Strike Source. I told my folks about my laptop dying on me, and they agreed to send me the cash for a new one. Yesterday though, after talking to a friend's daughter, who loves macs btw, they just ordered a macbook for me.

2ghz core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram, 160gb HD. Unfortunately, It's gonna be a little difficult to play games on it.

But I was wondering, if I ran bootcamp, how well would games such as GuildWars, Civilization 4, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike Source run?

tl;dr : will bootcamp run some older games halfway decent?

They'll run perhaps at low to medium settings. The Macbook has integrated graphics, so you can't really expect stellar graphics on it. However, I'm fairly certain you'll enjoy it as an everyday work computer while using your desktop for gaming (that's what I do and it's been great)

That's the problem. I don't have time to use my desktop for gaming. During the week I'm out the door at 6 in the morning, and I don't get home usually till after 10 at night. I use the breaks between classes and projects to get a small gaming session in.

iprefergaming said:

I'm a college student and as you can tell by my handle, I like to game. Unfortunately, I'm at school most of the time, and don't really have the time to fire up my desktop. Last week my laptop fried while playing Counter-Strike Source. I told my folks about my laptop dying on me, and they agreed to send me the cash for a new one. Yesterday though, after talking to a friend's daughter, who loves macs btw, they just ordered a macbook for me.

2ghz core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram, 160gb HD. Unfortunately, It's gonna be a little difficult to play games on it.

But I was wondering, if I ran bootcamp, how well would games such as GuildWars, Civilization 4, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike Source run?

tl;dr : will bootcamp run some older games halfway decent?

Click to expand...

Well I hope you didn't sound TOO disappointed when that family spent money they didn't have to and helped you with your lack of computer problem.

Anyway, those are all fairly "light" games in terms of the requirements (even my PowerBook G4 was able to play Civ 4 to a very choppy extent, which technically didn't support the hardware and was only supposed to be played on G5's and higher; I also played WoW on that machine comfortably with ~medium settings), but on the other hand, the MacBook doesn't have a dedicated video card (though the X3100 is certainly an improvement over the GMA950...). If you're fine with the lower graphics settings, you should be able to get playable framerates out of them. Boot Camp will run the games just as they would on any other laptop with the same specs. Just make sure you make the Windows partition large enough that you won't get low on HDD space. Possibly make it as large as you can and set it as the default boot, since it seems like you're not very interested in using the Mac OS anyway.

EDIT: Also, don't push the computer too hard by going for really high settings it's clearly having trouble with! This may be what cost you your last notebook!

iprefergaming said:

I'm a college student and as you can tell by my handle, I like to game. Unfortunately, I'm at school most of the time, and don't really have the time to fire up my desktop. Last week my laptop fried while playing Counter-Strike Source. I told my folks about my laptop dying on me, and they agreed to send me the cash for a new one. Yesterday though, after talking to a friend's daughter, who loves macs btw, they just ordered a macbook for me.

2ghz core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram, 160gb HD. Unfortunately, It's gonna be a little difficult to play games on it.

But I was wondering, if I ran bootcamp, how well would games such as GuildWars, Civilization 4, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike Source run?

tl;dr : will bootcamp run some older games halfway decent?

Click to expand...

Gee you are right - that is just too big a problem for a person as young as you to have. Tell you what: when it arrives, leave it in the box and mail it to me that way you won't have to suffer!! ;D

I'm not sure about boot-camp running those games and such, but I can tell you that Civilization 4 is out for Macintosh computers and it happens to be one of my favorite games. I have the same computer as you and let me tell you it runs pretty great. So you could always grab that

@iprefergaming
You are definitely going to like your mac
For gaming, well I tested a view games

Directly from mac:
Age of empires 3 - Runs fine Medium-/-High settings
Sim City 4 - Runs fine Low-/-Medium settings
Postal 2 - Runs fine high settings
Bootcamp:
GTA SA - Runs fine medium settings
GTA VC - Runs fine max settings
Battlefield 2 - Runs fine medium settings

Hope this gives you some image what the macbook is capable of