Does anyone have experience getting Windows only games to run on a Mac under the various VM products? Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox, others?

The majority of games I'm interested in aren't super heavy graphically. They usually revolve around point and click adventure games.

My initial thought was to try VirtualBox, and then move on to Parallels if that didn't really work out.

Thoughts?

Can't you use WINE under Mac?

boot camp is nice, offers the most performance and compatibility--as you're really just using a Windows machine at that point.

boot camp is the easiest and the most versatile with the most compatibility cause all your really doing at that point is running a windows machine in a fancy apple case yes kinda sorta
https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX

or this

https://www.codeweavers.com/products

there's an echo in here. You're should really consider hanging a few pictures, perhaps some nice window treatments. You can't live like you're in college forever, you have to grow up, eventually...

There are a good few Windows games that run very well on Wine. PaulTheTall.com is one of the best resources for those.

As for VMs I'd recommend Parallels over VMware. I've tried VMware's offering on numerous occasions to see if they had improved, but Parallels still appears to be the better product: More intuitive to use, less compatibility issues (as far as I could tell), and it generally was snappier. That said VMs can take a heavy load on system resources no matter which one you may end up using. First and foremost you should have an ample amount of RAM.

Ok is really easy (don't use a VM if not necessary... I only use a VM windows xp for the longest journey).

To port a game that is windows only you just need wine.
to use wine the easy wa it's to use wineskin (the same that use gog).
with many games you just use a ready wrapper already made by other people, you can find many wrapper here:
http://portingkit.com/en/
http://paulthetall.com/
http://portingteam.com/files/category/1-game-ports/

Also you can use:
http://playonmac.com/
to port you're game with wine but no wineskin.

If you want to make you're wineskin port the easy way it's to just download wineskin:
http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/
and to know what winetricks to use just watch:
http://winehq.org/

I have 86 games here on gog... 53 are mac native games so I don't need to do anything, 32 are ported with wine (wineskin or playonmac), 1 (the longest journey) is on a windows xp VM.
I don't really need bootcamp.

I want just to warn you about the witcher 3, since it use directx 11 there is no way to port it with wine, and since it is a heavy game you cannot use a VM to play it... but if you have a really good mac (with a discrete graphics better than nvidia 650m) you can play it on bootcamp.

Like this? ;P

You beautiful bastard.

I KNEW someone had meme'd this, I simply could not find the appropriate image. Well-played goodsir.

Thanks everybody! These are great!

bootcamp is free
it comes with your macintosh

all you need is a windows xp sp 2 vista 7 or 8 disc

that is not free.
you also need to use internal SSD space.
wineskin is 100% free, you can make a .app that use less space on disk and can be put on external HDD if you want.
I think that if you are not lazy use wineskin is a must.

I use Parallels. It works surprisingly well, though restricted to DX10 right now.

An awful lot of games these days are becoming Mac native, though. And for the point & click adventures, are they possibly DosBox? If so, you can use Boxer to run them natively.

i said BOOTCAMP is free

not that windows it self is free

Loved this comment.. damn, just loved it. Haha! Thanks, champ!