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Inside Mac Games has posted the next article in Justin Ancheta's continuing series of guides. The articles offer detailed instructions for running Windows versions of game titles which either never made it to Macs, or have Mac versions incompatible with recent OS releases. This week Justin turns his attention to Sacrifice from Shiny.

Here's an excerpt:

Sacrifice's design looked as if Shiny was trying to aim for creating a game like no other. Ostensibly, it was partially a third-person action game in the same general vein as Tomb Raider. Instead of a gun-toting grave-robbing archaeologist however, you were a powerful wizard struggling to wrestle with the demons of his past, wielding powerful, and arcane magical abilities. Sacrifice was also a real-time strategy game as well: you had at your command a host of powerful ground and air units with unique abilities to command and control in real-time, á la Command and Conquer, but like Myth, it was strategy on a tactical scale, where the loss or key deployment of units at the right time, at the right place marked a razor-thin line between a glorious victory and a disgraceful defeat. Resources weren't merely minerals or gold sitting around on the map waiting to be mined; they were nothing less than the souls of your vanquished enemies, harvested to feed into your growing army. Victory or defeat rested on reaching and defiling an enemy altar - before your opponent did so to yours. The game even threw in some role-playing elements in that wizards gained experience with their battles, gaining access to more powerful spells. All of this was tied together by a strong plot involving a pantheon of gods embroiled in a struggle for power in the wake of a cataclysmic event - gods which each had their own unique spells and creatures to offer to the player, in exchange for their allegiance. Combined with a colourful, graphically gorgeous visual style, it was a game that, had it been released today, would have surely been hailed as a masterpiece.

Crossing Over: Sacrifice

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