Prepare Mac owners, as you shall experience games for the first time ever! Valve (after a series of teaser images that made it obvious) has officially announced Steam for Mac. And I’m quite impressed, it’s much better than I had expected.
Most notable is that it will come in April, including Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series which will also be available in April.
“This Isn’t A Big Deal” “Mac Can’t Play Games”
What a lot of people are saying. I’d just like to take Steam out of the equation for a moment and look at what we’ve had up to now, and yes, I’m going to talk about torrents. Right now we can play PC games on Mac, you can do Boot Camp, or use Crossover games, or Parallels. And while all that is fine, I don’t like the idea of having to boot into Windows or run a (crappy) virtual machine.
So right now, you can make your own Cider port, or download them off a torrent, which I have no issue with if I have bought the game. Cider ports work pretty dam well, I have Shaun White Snowboarding here running great on Mac. Then there’s the CXZ engines, Black Diamond being my favorite. Right now I have HAWX using CXZ Black Diamond running better than it was on W7. “Are you high?”. No I’m not. It looks just as good (if not a bit better) and runs perfectly. Same goes with L 4D2.
The problem is that although we have the games on Mac, at the end of the day it’s frowned upon since it is at the end a illegal download, even if you own it for PC. And there’s also no multiplayer or anything. That’s where the news of Steam comes in.
Steam On Mac – CROSS PLATFORM BI#@$!!
This is probably the best thing about Steam Mac. I’m just going to copy from the PR:
“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”
Isn’t that awesome?! So basically we’re going to get all these games, legally, WITH multiplayer, and we can basically just transition from where we were on PC to Mac. That’s just freaking awesome. I’m expecting a gold rush for Valve and other devs, because most Mac users have never played anything but Peggle on their Mac.
My Reaction:
I’m very excited (hell, there’s no Cider or CXZ port of Portal that really works, and now I’m getting it officially). But my reaction can be summed up in one picture:
Yep. What do you think?
This is currently the 7th most talked about thing on the hole of Twitter... as a mac owner i am sooo happy!
