Without allowing myself to hope too strongly, I slid the CD into my drive, created the Win98 bottle, pointed it to the CD, and crossed my fingers. Less than a minute later, the screen went black and the old familiar opening Neverhood indicia displayed, meaning I was in like Flynn.

There were a couple of issues: you can't play The Neverhood in a window, for instance. And all the video runs at roughly half-speed with a lot of skipped frames. But for the simple joy of being able, after over a decade, to play one of my very favorite games of all time, I could get used to a ton of even worse issues.

Of course, having successfully installed and played The Neverhood, I was unprepared for when I was unable to install Age of Empires 3, which runs on Windows XP. At some point in the install, I received the message "Error loading the PID Generator DLL. The DLL could not be found!" My tactic of staring at the screen until the message turned into "Oh, nevermind, I found it" completely failed, and that was my experience with installing AoE 3.

Note: If any of my readers understands what this is about, please drop me a line or leave a revealing comment. I fault nothing but my lack of Windows knowledge for this. CrossOver Games is still awesome.

How awesome? Awesome enough that not only can I play The Neverhood, but I can also play Guild Wars without having to restart into Boot Camp, which saves a ton of time. Because CrossOver Games runs Guild Wars, I'm going to assume it'll handle all the subsequent expansions as well; I'll find out sooner or later.

That brings me to something I've been wondering about, and hoping to see for a while now. If CodeWeavers can make Windows-only games run nearly natively on the Mac, is it too much to ask that Apple itself figures out a way to do the same without needing Boot Camp? Isn't this really kind of a proof of concept? What would Apple lose by this? All they'd need to do would be to add this as yet another bullet point in their Switchers campaign: You can run your actual Windows apps directly on the Mac! Steve, I know you're not doing Keynotes anymore, but this would make the ultimate One More Thing.

And there you have it: CrossOver Games is fantastic. It does what it says it does without a lot of muss and fuss. For the completely reasonable price of $39.95, suddenly the old argument of "You can't play PC games on a Mac" carries a lot less force. I mean, come on, you can play games on Steam! I'm downloading the Last Remnant demo as we speak! And now the problem is: do I support Mac game development by waiting for the Braid port, or do I just play it right now on Steam? CrossOver Games for the Mac (also available for Linux) is a game changer, double meaning fully intended. You can download the demo right here on Big Download. Get it, oh get it NOW.