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What do you think - is it worth buying the Orange box and paying a few quid more in the hope that TF2 is coming soon?

They've answered my question by adding a 'mac coming soon'. good on them. purchasing...
 
Portal performs perfectly well on my iMac...instead of whining and stupid complaints about Apple's "lack of support" for gamers (which is utter BS, of course), these guys prove that when political will and technological prowess are there, the Mac can be the BEST gaming platform that there is.

Congrats, Valve - YOU ARE DELIVERING.

That's funny since a lot of review sites are showing that these games on the same systems all perform far better under Windows.
 
I didn't read that as updates to the Mac versions you download, I simply read that as updates to Half Life 2 and it's two episodes on Steam itself, ie: changing it from Windows to both Windows and Mac.

It took a restart on Steam after someone posted, "It's here" for the games to show up in my Library.

It's got to be both versions, they're interchangable!

Single-player
Steam Achievements
Steam Cloud
Captions available
HDR available
Controller enabled
Includes Source SDK

They added HDR lighting to the engine, should make it look a lot nicer!
 
servers overloaded

If you planned on downloading... wait until later today or tomorrow. I purchased the 3 releases of HL2 and their servers are overloaded and I can't download. Have been that way for half-hour now.
 
I will admit that has been my experience with Portal when comparing OS X to Windows versions, with Windows 7 on Boot Camp.

Yeah same, it's playable though so I don't really mind. I never played Portal for the graphical fidelity:p

Since I own both a PC and a MacBook though it's my hope that performance can be improved so there is little to no disparity on similar hardware
 
Sorry if this has been asked before,

but if I already own HL2 for PC, do I have to pay again to play it on osx?

thanks
 

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Looks like they updated the graphic engine for HL2, so all those people laughing about an outdated 6 year old game, just got owned!

God what a noob you are. It's updates to the engine, not some miracle graphics overhaul.

GG on owning yourself.
 
God what a noob you are. It's updates to the engine, not some miracle graphics overhaul.

GG on owning yourself.

Source is a lot like the Halo engine. It's continuously updated to keep it current. Halo Reach is the same engine as Halo 2 and Halo 3, and it looks so much better.

It seems that Valve backported these changes to HL2 and EP1 (which was something they had been promising to do), which should make HL2 look much more like a current game.

They didn't backport the higher polygon models they used in EP2, but EP2 should definitely look like a modern game.

Source is a very competitive engine. It's not the same code they had 6 years ago.
 
This is so great!!!

Alright... servers can't keep up... but being able to download Half Life 2 for the Mac.. for free..!!
Bought this game on DVD for Windows all those years ago. Who would have thought back then that it would come to the Mac... native... for free... (wow..!!)

That didn't work for Doom 3... I bought both the Windows and Mac versions... forget any form of discount!
 

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Great news again for mac gaming as three (or one and two thirds) of the best ever FPS games are now native.

I can't wait to do a playthrough with the engine update and achievements, I'll do it on my PC though, and keep OS X for work, I still dare not install steam on OS X as I'm afraid I'll procrastinate too much.

All I need now is Black Mesa and Episode three (I hope both get released this year).

P.S. and for all those whining about this being front page news, or an old game (not many new games get even close though IMHO), with HL2 out of the way you know that TF2, CS:S and L4D 1 and 2 will be heading their way to OS X pretty soon :)
 
Source is a lot like the Halo engine. It's continuously updated to keep it current. Halo Reach is the same engine as Halo 2 and Halo 3, and it looks so much better.

It seems that Valve backported these changes to HL2 and EP1 (which was something they had been promising to do), which should make HL2 look much more like a current game.

They didn't backport the higher polygon models they used in EP2, but EP2 should definitely look like a modern game.

Source is a very competitive engine. It's not the same code they had 6 years ago.

Um, the Halo games probably changed engines much more than any other modern franchise. Halo 2 was built on the unreal engine, I believe, after Bungie realized they couldn't update the old engine with the crazy deadline set for Halo 2. Halo 3 was a new engine that focused mainly on HDR lighting, used again only for ODST. The Reach engine runs on what Bungie describes as a completely gutted version of 3's engine. If you look at the documentary, the changes are pretty drastic, not just a few new effects added in.

What I'm trying to say, is, engines don't look drastically different without a completely new lighting engine, or other completely rewritten system, not just a few added effects, like HDR lighting or better textures.
 
I don't play video games besides Bejeweled and solitaire Mahjongg. Are all modern video games these days glorified murder simulators? It hope this doesn't reflect negatively on Apple's market, which is typically more mature.

Speaking of that, what's with all this "own" and "win" and "fail" talk? Learn to type/speak properly.
 
Good news is that for OS X games performance can go only up. Let's hope.

Apple in general dislikes these sorts of things. When WoW on Mac was underperforming, Apple went to town with optimizing their drivers, and was actually showing Win vs Mac benchmarks at WWDC.

SC2 and Source underperforming will get them off their asses again.
 
Coming down the tubes at around 30KB/sec here - poor considering I'm connected to JANET. Says it's going to be done in 20 mins but there's still >300MB left, so it's not going to happen :(
 
Slow downloaders: Did you pick the server closest to you? I selected the one in my city, so that may be why I'm getting 1.8 MB/sec. If you went with the default download server, that may be why it's so slow.
 
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