Virtualized Game Play on Parallels Desktop 5 & VMWare Fusion 3
With the release of both VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5 over the past 2 weeks I was interested and motivated to create several blog posts and screencasts showing off the differences and features I liked the best. With performance being such a huge improvement both touting Directx 9.0x and OpenGL 2.1 support the only logical thing left to look at was how well the virtual environments played games that would push the VM’s and attempt to use the video cards GPU’s.
So below you will find my screencast noting my experience with several games both good and bad. What this test did do for me was remind me of some of the frustrations I have always had with game playing on PC’s. While I understand the need for copy protection it takes a lot of the fun out of playing PC games, and the configuration issue of games can just be daunting to the novice.
For example after an hour of troubleshooting and research I determined among others on support forums that BioShock will just not run on Windows 7. After 30 minutes into Fall 3 troubleshooting a stumbled upon a forum post that gave me three Fallout.ini settings I had to make to allow the game to play!
The games I looked at were: Sims 3, BioShock, Crysis, Lego Indiana Jones, Fall Out 3, Halo 2
Well I hope you enjoy this last screencast on Virtualization focused on game play.
Skeeter
Nicely done. Thanks for the info. With the exception of Crysys the other games can be played on the ps3 or xbox, so normally I have no use for virtualization when it comes to gaming. With games like Tales of Monkey Island the scenario changes, I need my PC setup to enjoy them. Since I played the first to chapters on xp via VMWARE I am pretty sure P5 (my selection after seeing your previous screen cast) will be more than smooth running it for me. Again, thanks for sharing this.
Diego,
Your very welcome and Thanks! I am glad you found this series of value. As new technologies & software come out of interest or made available to me I will do additional screencasts, etc.
Best – Skeeter
Thanks for your excellent work on this piece. It hit exactly the info that I was wondering about.
Hi Gary – Glad to offer this insight and that you found it useful. All the best – Skeeter
Any advise where you found the ini fix for fallout 3? I’m trying to get this going on a mac book pro with parallels 5 and it keeps crashing on me…
Hey nice done but who knows how play halo 2 on windows 7? i already try on vista and didnt work i need some help!
thank
(sry for my bad english)
No worries on the Bad English. The issue you are going to run into with Halo 2 (at least I did) was that Halo requires that it installs MS Live for online play which on the CD is Version 1. Well the problem is that version 1 does not work on Windows 7, and since you can;t get beyond this step you can not get the game to play. At least I could not and at the time when I did this screencast there were no known updates from Microsoft that addressed this. Good Luck
Dude, what were the ini settings? I’ve tried every tip I’ve found on an imac 27 with parallels 5 and it just keeps crashing on me as well.
The status quo sucks.
Sent from my iPad 4G