Although I haven't played recently, I played for several months after the initial release. Aion does have some features that set it apart:

• Flight: all characters can "fly" from an early level. In many places, you are only allowed to glide, and your flight time is limited (and can be increased with equipment and potions). This can still make getting around much faster, or at least more entertaining. No mounts are required, but there are "wing" upgrades that get pretty pricey.
• Flying combat: you can fight in the air, and attack others from ground or sky. This gets interesting when you take into account limited flight time - not only do you have to try and win the fight, but you may have to pop potions or maneuver to avoid falling to your death when your wings get tired.
• Crafting system: the addition of NPC work-orders allows you to trade money and craft time for leveling up, and there is always a work-order recipe available for your current level. This avoids the problem of having to find a new recipe and adequate ingredients every time a certain craft skill goes up a few levels. The system also allows any player to reach very high levels in all crafting skills, if they're persistent enough and willing to spend the money. There is also an interesting mechanic that causes random craft attempts to create improved items (but crafting can also fail, depending on skill level). The main downside of the crafting system is that it's very grindy. If you want to max a skill, prepare to spend a lot of time and money.

One of the strongest aspects of Aion is the PvP gameplay. Some things worth mentioning on that topic:

• Fighting in the air, as described above.
• A large, 3-level, dedicated PvP zone, essentially a bunch of floating rocks in space.
• In the PvP zone, there are several fortresses (on each level) that become attackable at semi-random times. The two player factions can own fortresses, and a third, NPC faction (that swoops in in a giant spaceship) will sometimes attack as well. Attacking the fortress involves coordinated groups capturing artifacts that bestow advantages, breaking down fortress defenses and killing NPC defenders, and finally defeating a powerful boss to complete the capture. The faction that captures a fortress gets to use the NPCs there and the dungeon. When I was playing, there were some lag problems due to the quantity of players participating, but this may have improved since then. Even with the lag, it was still a lot of fun.
• A PvP currency used for buying PvP equipment and consumables. This can be gained from defeating enemy players (anywhere) and completing quests and killing monsters in the PvP zone.
• Portals: Each faction has several zones geared more toward PvE and leveling, and these are mostly separated. However, portals appear randomly, but pretty frequently, and these allow players to cross over to the enemy zones and attack. There are a few quests that specifically require the player to go through portals and mess around with the opposing side. Personally, I found this mechanic more interesting than just having shared zones where the factions clash (although that is also present in the PvP zone.

Overall, Aion had some interesting features, and I felt like it did stand out from the crowd more than most games. Castle defense/capture is a great mechanic, and I had missed it from my days playing Ragnarok Online.

What ultimately caused me to stop playing was the level grind. Like many (most?) games originally from Asia, grinding monsters is the main activity, and leveling is pretty slow. There are quests, but the effort to reward ratios get pretty unimpressive as you get closer to the level cap. The PvP zone was fun, but not fast leveling. Organized dungeon raids may be the way to go, I never really got into that while I was playing. I have also seen announcements that say the exp grind has been improved, so my info may be out of date.

In the general case, you normally can't expect to go to your favorite game shop, pick up a PC game, take it home, and expect to be able to put the game on your Mac and have it run. However, it is possible to play PC games on a Mac. When attempting to play a Windows game on a Mac OS-based machine, you have several options, each with its drawbacks and strengths.

Please note: This is intended as general advice to a non-technical audience. This is not indented to be a "catch-all" answer to "how do I overcome game X's difficulties when running under solution Y." The existence of this answer does not mark every other MacOS gaming question on this topic as a duplicate. It is further not meant to be a full and complete overview of WINE/Virtual Machines/dual booting/etc. The intent is to generally summarize the solutions to allow people to choose a direction to invest further effort.

Get the Mac Port

If it exists, getting the Mac port or playing it natively on your Mac is almost always the best way to play any game on a Mac. With the advent of things like SteamPlay and the rise of independent game houses, more and more games are coming out for the Mac. Don't assume that the game is Windows-only until you've done the research. More and more games are now showing up in browsers, which can also sometimes make them platform independent. Whenever you can, invest time in researching the Mac version of a game, as playing it typically produces the best experience.

Pros

• Support Mac publishers and encourage more Mac games.
• Usually the best possible experience, designed for your OS.
• Better support for 3D acceleration and other advanced hardware features.
• Some features that you want may be platform-specific and only available on Mac.

Cons

• Not all games have a Mac port.
• Sometimes can be expensive to re-purchase a game if you already own it.
• Some features that you want may be platform-specific and unavailable on Mac.
• Sometimes the Mac port is bad, or is actually a version of the game ported using one of these other methods (see Emulation).

Virtual Machine

With desktop virtual machine software, you can run a copy of Windows as a "program" under Mac OS. Several software packages exist, such as VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMWare Fusion. Once you've installed the virtual machine software, you can follow a simple wizard to create a file on your hard drive to hold your Windows installation and applications, and then the system will walk you through setting up Windows from the install media.

Pros

• Setup is generally fairly easy - if you can install OSX programs and Windows programs, you can probably install a Windows virtual machine with little trouble.
• Integration with your existing OSX applications tends to be fairly seamless.
• Run a wide array of Windows apps without having to do any sort of complicated setup per-app.

Cons

• VM software is a resource hog, and will eat large chunks of your RAM, CPU, and disk space.
• The guest operating system (in this case, Windows) won't have full access to your hardware, so performance is going to be poorer than some of the other solutions on this list.
• 3D support and performance are generally fairly poor compared to the Mac Port or Dual Boot approaches, although this area is evolving.
• Cost - you need to own a license to Windows, and in most cases you will also have to purchase a license to the virtual machine software.

Dual Boot

With Apple's BootCamp software, you can install Windows into a separate part of your Mac's hard drive, and then you can choose to start either Windows or Mac OS on your Mac when you start it up. Apple provides technical manuals for properly installing BootCamp on your Mac, which are easy to follow and thorough.

Pros

• Windows is actually running on your hardware, so installing/playing Windows games is generally a breeze. Install them on your Mac just like you would on any other Windows PC.
• Windows has full control of your hardware, so 3D support and game performance are as good as comparable non-Mac hardware.

Cons

• Rebooting to switch between Mac OS and Windows is painful and time consuming.
• Requires that you have a valid, licensed copy of Windows, which can be expensive.

Emulation

Virtual machines emulate an entire PC, but oftentimes this solution is overkill. Emulators (and similar programs) only fake part of the device or OS in question, which can yield better performance with less overhead. Many different types/classes of emulators exist that emulate a wide variety of platforms and systems, for example:

• Darwine and CrossoverGames are based on the WINE project which attempts to reproduce Windows API calls on Linux/Mac.
• DOSBox emulates a DOS environment for older games.
• XNA games (such as Terraria) can be played on OSX via MonoGame.
• Console versions of games can be played on Macs with the appropriate console emulator, of which there are too many to list.

Pros

• Many emulators are free, and do not require a Windows license/install disc.
• Emulators generally require fewer resources than a virtual machine.

Cons

• Emulation can produce unstable results.
• Not all games are compatible with emulation.
• Emulators generally have poor support compared to other solutions - expect to experiment and invest time to get your game running properly.

Cloud Gaming

A fairly recent development is "cloud gaming" where the game's video is "streamed" to your computer in a fashion similar to how Netflix works, as opposed to your computer's OS and hardware rendering the video data locally. OnLive, one prominent player in this space, offers a wide library of games to choose from and supports playing games on most modern Macs.

Pros

• Larger library of games than traditionally offered as Mac ports
• Compatible with a wider array of hardware than other solutions (ie, Intel integrated graphics Macs aren't limited by what runs on an Intel chipset)

Cons

• Requires a constant, high-speed broadband connection in order to play.
• Pricing structure may not be appealing.
• Game selection may not be as broad as the selection under "Dual Boot" or "Virtual Machine" solutions.