Canada and Australia, Mac and PC: What can we play together?

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Hello! Right. Straight to the point then.

I'm living in Canada, and my girlfriend is living in Australia. I have a PC, and she has a Mac. As you can probably imagine, this makes things difficult sometimes. Mainly, what the hell video games can we play together?

I've heard Blizzard is pretty good for this. Neither of us play WoW, nor do we have any interest in it. But Starcraft 1 or 2, or Warcraft 3 (preferable) would be great. Does anyone know if we could connect on the same servers somehow?

She's not much of a gamer, but she wants to play with me so we can have more activities together. If you have any recommendations at all, especially games that are fairly beginner friendly (although not a necessity), I would be grateful!

Thanks in advance.

EggyToast

Most anything on Steam you can both play. There's fewer games for the Mac on Steam, of course, so maybe have her look first. You can play Portal 2 together.

Arivia

All Blizzard games, including the ones you mentioned, will work. You can buy keys on battle.net and connect to the same servers and play together no problem. (Except in Starcraft 2's case, where one of you might have to use something called a relocator to join the other's region.)

Essee

Oh boy, this is basically my thread! Fiance is from Norway, I'm from the US.

I don't have experience with the online aspects of Starcraft or Warcraft 3, but seeing as how I've been playing WoW on the EU servers from the US/Canada 90% of the time since my fiance bought me the EU version, you can totally play together. Just make sure you both have the same region version of the game, and you should be alright. For WoW there's only US and EU versions (if you don't count the totally seperate version for China), and Australians have to deal with kind of poor ping a lot of the time no matter where they play, so you're probably (I believe) good to go even if you buy copies in two seperate countries. Just make sure you sign up for Battle.net accounts using the same links (again, pretty sure there're only US and EU sites). I don't even know if Starcraft/etc. have the same sort of seperated server system WoW does, in the first place, since that's mostly peer-to-peer multiplayer. Whatever you guys are playing, for best ping I would recommend following these instructions to try and bring down your ping to distant servers, probably even each other. Ignore that the stuff is being recommended for WoW; both Leatrix Latency Fix and the Mac instructions are settings changes that have nothing to do with WoW, since they affect your internet traffic in general. The fix has brought me from 300-500ish ping to the EU servers down to 150-180, so it can be a pretty big improvement. There are other ping-reduction options out there targeted at Aussie gamers, but I have no personal experience with them so I have no further recommendations on that front.

I'll let you know if I remember any other games you should check out... Diablo 3 is coming out in May, as was just announced, and my fiance and I are pretty stoked to play that with each other across the Atlantic (since we're about to move temporarily). Diablo 2 might be a good option, since it's actually fairly simple. Oh, Saint's Row 2 and 3 have pretty awesome co-op without being complicated games (and you can turn on cheats like "never die" and "infinite ammo" to make things less annoying for both of you, which is even better). [Edit: It occurs to me that these two games probably wouldn't work on a Mac without Bootcamp or a similar solution, though... dang!] I think that works over the intarwebs as well as LAN (we played over LAN since we were in the same room), but there are options out there to connect to somebody over the internet as if it was a LAN connection as well if that's ever a problem for you. Hamachi is the usual recommended solution for that sort of thing, but I don't have personal experience with that as of yet. Other than that... yeah, check around on Steam.

Oh yeah, and for a general resource on "what can we play co-op?", this is a pretty awesome site. You should go flip through it for some other recommendations!

P.S.: I also very much miss your previous, glorious name, OP. I just lurk for the most part, but who on earth could ever forget that beauty after seeing it? What a shame that it was too beautiful for Vanilla.

KafkaAU

If she bought an Oceanic version of SC2, she can create an account on the US servers for free, along with her Oceanic one. You do it through the battle.net site, and should be fairly self explanatory. You select which servers you are logging into when you log in to the game.

And yea as has been said, anything on steam that is labeled as "Mac" can be played with you on a PC and her on a mac. Civ V might be a good one (although you just missed a 75% off sale).

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Shit yeah, this has been very helpful! Seriously, thanks so much everyone.

I hadn't even considered Steam. There is a specific cross-platform section on the Mac page. Am I not limited to that section, or just any multiplayer Mac games?

I think we're going to start with Warcraft 3 as it's pretty cheap. But I've been meaning to try out Starcraft 2, so I'll see if she's interested in spending that much.

@Essee I'll definitely check out Co-Optimus. Looks like a good resource. And I hadn't even considered Diablo games! (what the hell is wrong with me?) I'll see if there's any interest in that sort of thing.

I miss the old name. It was a gift from Tube himself, and I'll cherish it always. The new name, like most sequels, just isn't the same. Although everyone just calls me Marcus anyway.

Voro

In addition to those mentioned, Dungeon Defenders is on both platforms and is free to try until Sunday on Steam. If that's also available in Australia, then this is the perfect time to check it out. I have some issues with the recent balancing, but it's great fun as long as you're not going near Insane/Nightmare difficulty (and it doesn't sound like you would be).

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Okay, quick confirmation. If we both buy Starcraft (the original anthology) off Battle.net, we can play together? Is there anything I should know? Does it matter which battlenet we download from? (as in US or EU) Any tricks?

Shimshai

Regarding Starcraft, you should ask in the Starcraft thread over in G&T, they should get you an answer pretty quickly. I lurk there a bit, and it's a pretty fast moving thread so you should get a quick response.

Molybdenum

There's always play by email games, or similar games that don't require instant feedback.

As she's "not a gamer" her interests may be more in just doing, you know, stuff. together. Get her a headset with a mic and play Minecraft together while babbling your adoration for each other's... ahem, cobblestone architecture, on Vent.

Essee

2 Marcus 2 Ravens wrote: »

Okay, quick confirmation. If we both buy Starcraft (the original anthology) off Battle.net, we can play together? Is there anything I should know? Does it matter which battlenet we download from? (as in US or EU) Any tricks?

It should be tough to end up on the EU site without TRYING to get there, so it should be pretty straightforward. I doubt you'd both want to buy from the EU site at any rate, since US (even if you pick Australian servers or something) will give at least one of you better ping. Going to Battle.net should, for both of you, redirect to us.battle.net, but you might as well just click that link I gave you. As long as you buy from the same place and pick the same server(s), you should both be able to connect with each other.

Also, from a quick googling... if you pick up Starcraft 2, you (probably not your girlfriend) miiight possibly want to pick up the Australian copy of it, since I guess some fellow Australians might be on the "Southeast Asia" servers and you get access to both North American and Australian/Southeast Asia servers. I guess @KafkaAU touched on that before. But that's only if you care about playing with the locals, since I bet you the game is pricier where you are. :P Plus, from the same bit of googling, I guess allegedly most people still play on the US servers anyway because a lot of people trying to connect to the SEA servers get routed through the US first ANYWAY because Australian ISPs are dumb. So it's probably not terribly important to you. Maybe. Dunno.

Edit: But, obviously, you can always ask in the Starcraft thread as well. Never hurts to be sure!

Organichu

i skimmed and havent yet seen it posted but: the windows gpu drivers for macs are actually quite good. you say she isn't much of a gamer. if that's the case, maybe she could install windows on the machine for the express purpose of playing with you.