I don't claim to know anything about the technical underpinnings of Parallels, or the wizardry that allows it to do what it does. I haven't spent time benchmarking each process, much less comparing those benchmarks against those of other virtualization apps like CrossOver, or VMWare; I shouldn't have to. One could reasonably argue that these programs exist to help out non-techie guys like me, who just want their PC stuff to work on their Mac without having to sacrifice a chicken to the gods of the cross-platform. When you shell out money for something like Parallels, you shouldn't have to care how difficult it is to get these things working, or how many more features over its competitors it offers. You just want it to work, period.

You could also argue that the main reason for any Mac user to buy Parallels is to be able to play PC games without needing Boot Camp. There are enough alternative applications out there that offer the same functionality as the leading PC apps do that you don't really need virtualization to run them. Really, the only thing a Mac user wants is to be able to play the same games the PC guys get to, without having to wait a year for the Mac port to arrive.

So in this light, I have to say that Parallels is not worth the purchase. For different reasons, the games that I tried either failed to work at all, or had some element that annoyed to enough of an extent that continued play was no longer enjoyable. Here's how it started:

The first thing I did after Parallels had installed my copy of Windows XP was to root around in my folder of CDs for old Windows games, legacy of the time I used to own a PC box. I wanted to run something that took advantage of 3D graphics without being too intensive. First-person shooters was right out; no Halo for me. So I settled on Age of Empires 3. I figured there was enough going on with that that it would make a good test subject without overtaxing the virtualization engine.

See, I'd heard that the biggest problem with games in Parallels was the redrawing issue -- what lets the engine update and refresh on-screen graphics to show movement. The number-crunching involved in total 3D, with full fly-around, zooming, etc., I thought might be too much for Parallels to handle. So I settled for the much more sedate AoE3, which has a lot less activity to redraw. Turns out that troop movement wasn't the problem at all.