Posts tagged mac gaming
The cake is a lie: Steam comes to the Mac
May 14th
If you consider yourself a gamer and a Mac user, your world became instantaneously better on Wednesday. Valve officially released the Steam client for Mac. Through today, you can actually get Portal for free. Portal is Valve’s unique and challenging first-person puzzel shooter: it’s a great way to introduce yourself to the Steam platform. We spent a couple hours and hammered our way through Portal so we could get back to our achievements. Most of the more modern games have been updated with Cloud syncing (game progress is saved no matter what computer you’re on) but it had been so long since we’ve played Portal that there was no record of our saved games. Our achievements were thankfully still there.
Portal, Peggle Deluxe, World of Goo — those are just some of the titles that we purchased a while back on one of the PCs in the house. They are guaranteed to work with a new feature called “Steam Play.” If you purchase it on one platform it will be free for you on any other platform as long as the game is compatible. We picked up the Indie pack of games, a great buy for $20… we also picked up Braid (a completely unique platformer).
Things haven’t been completely smooth with the software: we have noticed a few weird glitches with overlays, some strange browser-like errors, a few crashes and a game install error that had us restarting our machine and trying again. Not too shabby for Valve’s very first release on the Mac. Most of it, we’re guessing, is the fact that Valve’s moved everything over to a webkit-based system… one that probably hasn’t been tested rigorously. Either way, it’s not stopping us from playing our games — the games have been completely flawless. We’ve spent several hours playing Braid, Portal, World of Goo, and Galcon Fusion… none of the games have glitched at all.
Each Wednesday, Valve will be releasing new games into the Mac-compatible section. If you don’t see something you want right away, give it a few days… it just might show up. We can’t wait to get some of the other Valve software ported over: the Half-Life series, Team Fortress… gaming on the Mac just took a u-turn on the road to perdition.
If you do end up playing Portal, just remember that the cake is a lie.
Steamy hotness you can’t resist
Mar 9th
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No, it’s not anything above PG… it’s the fact that Valve is officially bringing their Steam platform to the Mac in April (in beta). They’ve also acknowledged that every new Valve game will release simultaneously on the Mac and PC. We’ve already voiced our opinions about this transition in previous posts but here’s a quick recap.
- Steam will be the first major game distribution platform to come to the Mac.
- It currently dominates the PC gaming world.
- Games like Half Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Portal will all be making their way to the Mac.
- This opens up tremendous development opportunity for all of the companies who have been hesitant. Valve’s commitment to release cross platform will help convince other developers to do the same.
- This will finally bring mainstream quality games to the Mac… yes, there’s been some, but Mac gamers have had very limited choices in games for quite some time.
Thank you, Valve. Now we can use our 27 inch iMac screens for something besides creativity. 
Steam: coming to a Mac near you… eventually.
Feb 25th
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Steam, it’s a game distribution platform that has revolutionized the way PC users purchase, play and share games. Each user has an account that can be accessed from any machine, and thus you can play any of your games on any machine. By machine, we mean PC. The titles are always current, and the Steam platform streamlines the shopping process for you. I’ve actually purchased games I had never seen at the store because they were featured on Steam and they looked great.
My gaming days are nearly behind me, but I still get caught up in a great game every now and then… and when I was a PC, Steam was my platform of choice. I grew up building, repairing and gaming on the PC… I eventually switched to Mac for my music endeavors about 6 years ago now. True gamers have always been disappointed with the gaming abilities of the Mac: unless you want to play older titles, World of Warcraft or niche games similar to PopCap’s offerings, there’s really nothing here for us. I’m the owner of a Mac repair shop (check it out in the sidebar) and I run a blog devoted to Apple products… but I still game on the PC, using Steam’s distribution platform.
Gizmodo reported this morning that a few members of the Steam forums found several references to OS X in the latest beta release of the software. They specifically found Mac icons related to the close, minimize, and maximize icons of OS X windows. There has also been discussion about the replacement of Valve’s web engine Trident with the very mac friendly WebKit. These two facts don’t mean that Steam is definitely coming to the Mac — WebKit can be used on any platform, and pictures are just pictures — but it’s still encouraging to deem it a possibility. Not too long ago, Steam and Apple discussed bringing their games to the Mac and it really wasn’t the result we were looking for… both parties went their different ways.
Even if we do see Steam come to the light, we probably won’t see the popular gaming titles follow suit right away. It is up to the developer to make their games OS-independent and not many of them have been so keen on that up to this point. Realistically, the Mac market share is still rather small compared to the PC counterpart… and the people who want to play these games know that the PC is the only way. We’re hoping that Steam’s inclusion of the Mac will give developers a better option for Mac distribution. In the end, gaming has never been a priority for the Mac. I’m sitting here with a brand new, awesome 27-inch iMac and it only has a 256MB video card. That’s pretty sad, and it definitely wouldn’t play Crysis at a decent FPS.
