How to play GridWars on Mac

PlatformsPlatform, Computer

Game summary

GridWars is a video game inspired by Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars by Canadian developer Marco Incitti. The first version of the game was released as freeware on December 21, 2005 on Marco Incitti's Blitz Creations website. Although other freeware games similar to Geometry Wars exist, GridWars eventually became so popular that Bizarre emailed Incitti and asked him to take the game down, citing that they were "beginning to feel the Geometry Wars clone's effects on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property". The link to the download was pulled from the site on August 8, 2006. The game was subsequently released on a German website dedicated to Flash and freeware games and is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. Unlike Geometry Wars which eventually plateaus in difficulty facilitating high scores in the range of hundreds of millions of points, GridWars 2 has an exponentially increasing difficulty curve. Eventually, the enemy spawn sites become so large that they nearly envelop the entire grid. Another important difference from Geometry Wars is the ability to "farm" black holes. Besides distracting and swallowing enemies, the black holes can net points (and thus bombs/lives) based on the square of the number of enemies they have swallowed.
First released: Dec 2005

Play GridWars on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play GridWars on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

GridWars installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install GridWars like you would on any PC.
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