Shogo: Mobile Armor Division Forum

First of all, for reasons I don't fully understand, this game actually works slightly better on a Core Duo MacBook and a Core Duo MacBook with Intel GMA 950 graphics than on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with a 128 MB Radeon Mobility X1600; on the MacBook, the intro video played perfectly; on the MacBook Pro, the intro video got garbled five seconds in.

On the whole the game is quite playable; don't change the graphic settings from the defaults through the main menu though, or the game will crash; the only reliable way I've found of changing the graphics settings is through the pre-game setup menu.

The main issue is that, in playing both the GOG version of this release and the original demo, the game will crash at random, occasional moments; in my opinion, they don't happen too often as to make the game unplayable, but they happen often enough that you should remember to save a little more often than usual.

Edit: On the same MacBook Pro I referred to above, the game doesn't work well when using the Direct 3D renderer; it works much better in software rendering at 640 x 480 resolution (it gets choppy on 1440 x 900), and when using that mode, the menu graphics and the intro movie were no longer garbled. D3D hardware rendering seems to work better on the GMA 950 on a MacBook, likely due to driver differences. The MBP and CD MB was running 10.6.1; the C2D MacBook was running 10.5.8.

Edit 2: On the MacBook, hardware rendering also yielded random crashes - for best stability, running in software rendering mode is also recommended.

As an add-on to my original post, here are my findings for CX11: In general, the GOG release of this game works, as does its sister game Blood 2: The Chosen (which uses roughly the same version of the Lithtech engine). Here's a general breakdown of what I've seen; the results are pretty much the same as what I've seen for Blood 2:

MacBook (GMA 950) - in all cases, hardware acceleration does not work, even with the DirectX runtime installed in its bottle. Works in fullscreen with 10.6, but needs a virtual desktop in 10.7. (Otherwise the screen becomes garbled.)

MacBook Air (GeForce 320M) - works with fullscreen, and with hardware acceleration turned on in 10.6.

MacBook Pro (Radeon Mobility X1600) - works with hardware acceleration supported, but fullscreen works only in 10.6; in 10.7, a virtual desktop needs to be enabled or else the screen will become garbled.

Unlike Blood 2, rebinding keys works without issue in this game.