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First Impressions of Steam for Mac Including Portal and Team Fortress 2
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What is this valve thing? Are there any free games, or is it basically like an online store where you have to buy all the games? If thats the case ill just stick with Pirate Bay thank you very much.
Steam is better than Pirate Bay. While you have to pay for the games, they offer deals where you can get games in a bundle for a discounted price. I don't personally use it, but a few of my friends do. It's quite impressive.
Valve is a game company. Steam is a distribution channel like iTunes/music. The big deal is, there are tons of great games not available on mac systems, and valve/steam are bringing them very soon.
You currently can't get them on PB so good luck with that. Steam is decent with deals and promotions, so it's worth checking out. Weird that you think the idea of buying a game is outrageous and you wont stand for it. Paying for a game is normal, and I don't know why you think you're entitled to free games...
now all we need is Microsoft to bring their damn games to the mac.
MS developed games? Like what, Flight simulator?
No thanks.
I'm very interested to see how the performance stacks up between the Mac and PC versions running on the same hardware. I currently run WoW via bootcamp on my MBP 15" (nvidia 9600) because the frame rates are 2-2.5x what I see on the Mac port.
I wonder how my loly ATI 2400 XT will perform?
I can always play on my Windows desktop but some Steam love on my iMac would be lovely.
I can always play on my Windows desktop but some Steam love on my iMac would be lovely.
Wow...
I would be excited for this if I didn't just drop $1119 on an Asus G73! 6 gigs of ram, an i7 and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870! It complements my i5 15 inch MBP well. One for work, one for play...
Still, I wish I could get a MBP with that kind of power..
Come on Apple! Make a gaming laptop!
I'm thinking about adding a HP ENVY to my collection. The ASUS G73 is an extremely affordable powerhouse though.Wow...
I would be excited for this if I didn't just drop $1119 on an Asus G73! 6 gigs of ram, an i7 and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870! It complements my i5 15 inch MBP well. One for work, one for play...
Still, I wish I could get a MBP with that kind of power..
Come on Apple! Make a gaming laptop!
They are installed in a "Steam Content" folder in your documents. From within steam, you launch the game. You can also create a shortcut and put it wherever you want.
I can't wait. It's been so long since I've played TF2, I was just getting OK at it when I moved to Mac.
oh man I am really looking forward to CS:S. I can finally stop dual booting. Not too worried about the performance on my MBP, dont' really expect maxed out gaming, but my hackintosh will fare excellently with valve games.
I totally agree. That's like one of the reasons I still have XP installed. Just a quick game of CS to satisfy me.
As expected, Apple's choice of pathetic GPUs across it's entire Mac line is showing it's effect on native gaming.
I can only hope this will further pressure Apple to get it's act together graphics card-wise, everything else about their computers is cutting edge and good value for money but their GPUs are literally humiliating in comparison to PC counterparts many times cheaper. This has to change, the latest MBPs, for example, were utterly laughable.
Or, as has been said before in this thread, release a gaming MacBook Pro. I guarantee you, guarantee you, it will sell more than the AppleTV, Mac Mini and Xserve combined per month. Come on, you know that, I know that, Steve knows that, there's no reason to keep our heads in the sand about it anymore.
I can only hope this will further pressure Apple to get it's act together graphics card-wise, everything else about their computers is cutting edge and good value for money but their GPUs are literally humiliating in comparison to PC counterparts many times cheaper. This has to change, the latest MBPs, for example, were utterly laughable.
Or, as has been said before in this thread, release a gaming MacBook Pro. I guarantee you, guarantee you, it will sell more than the AppleTV, Mac Mini and Xserve combined per month. Come on, you know that, I know that, Steve knows that, there's no reason to keep our heads in the sand about it anymore.
According to this report and to the report from Apple insider, the performance is really disapointing. These old games should really run very fast on such a sophisticated OS and although the tested GPU was not dedicated it is faster than the fastest dedictaed GPUs from when these games were released years ago. Additionally I used Geekbench to compare the performance of Windows to the performance of OSX (on my MacBook Pro) and OSX was always significantly faster. So a properly coded OSX title should always yield higher framerates then the same Windows coded title on the same hardware under Windows. Lets hope the performance will at least double towards the end of the beta!
Valve is practically the only non-evil PC game developer/publisher left -- it's best to support them any way you can. Plus, others are right, they often do some absolutely crazy deals on their store, and almost every week you can find some outstanding Midweek Madness deal or Weekend Deal where a relatively recent game is ~50-75% off.
The default way is to access it via steam client (sort of like IM / store), you can probably make alias which you can put in your application folder / dock.
Microsoft pays them to put MS name over their games. Way different than Microsoft "developed" products.