Playing Half-Life 2 on my MacBook Pro works great in Vista via BootCamp, but after seeing the worst promotional video of all time I had to check it out for myself using CrossOver Mac 6.2 on Leopard. CrossOver lets you run some Windows apps/games using WINE technology without having a copy of Windows or rebooting. Sounds nice, but I was a little worried from a gaming standpoint. Half-Life 2 took forever to download from Steam, but after finally getting it up and running I was impressed that it not only worked, but it ran at decent frame rates.

Unfortunately decent frame rates do not equal playability in this case. The game stuttered quite often and every few seconds it would miss a few mouse movements - fairly important for an FPS. After trying it out for a total of 5 minutes it was easy to see that while you could play games via CrossOver, you really don’t want to.

My recommendation is to suck it up and boot into Windows - save the 60 bucks you would have spent on CrossOver and buy an OEM copy of Vista. If you want the best gaming experience on your Mac (or just a usable one) it seems like a quick boot into Windows is the best way to do it.