How to play The Irritating Maze on Mac

Game summary

The Irritating Maze quite literally lives up to its name. It's a maze, of sorts, and it's one hell of an irritating game. In fact, it is one of the most irritating games that most will ever come across. But it does have its charms, namely its offbeat gameplay. The graphics are bright and colorful, with a lot of eye candy everywhere. Depending on your point of view, this may or may not be a good thing, as all that coloring and eye candy has been designed specifically to distract you from beating the level. All that glitter is isolated to the areas immediately surrounding the track, and if you look off the beaten path you'll notice that the graphics there are quite sparse and simplistic. The sound and music are passable, though not particularly good. The Irritating Maze's songs sound like generic puzzle game music and are generally pretty forgettable, but they do fit the game's mood. You'll hear an announcer's voice at certain points of the game telling you that you've passed a checkpoint or something like that. The announcer sounds reasonably excited, though if you listen you can hear a little bit of electronic fuzz distorting the voice clips. One sound clip stands out above the rest though, and that's the electric zap effect that plays when you lose. When this clip is combined with the associated graphics, the effect is literally shocking. One of the biggest reasons why the game is so irritating is that you have to control your character's conducting rod with a trackball. For most people, the trackball is not an ideal input device for precise control, especially when put under the stress of time limits. A digital joystick or D-pad would actually allow you to have more precise control, but then having to deal with unfamiliar controls is part of the "fun." At first you'll find the innovative gameplay to be a lot of fun, much like Marble Madness. But unlike Marble Madness, The Irritating Maze's gameplay gets old relatively quickly, and you'll find yourse
First released: Sep 1997

Play The Irritating Maze on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play The Irritating Maze 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).

The Irritating Maze 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 The Irritating Maze like you would on any PC.
Did it work?
Help us improve our guide by letting us know if it worked for you.
👎👍