free portal

get it while it's currently free:

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

finally!

mac support launched today, linux on the way.

<3 you valve.

Thanks for the info, will download.

valve are the last remaining mainstream game developers with souls.

this is awesome

i'm pretty clueless with this stuff, but i would like to spend more of my life playing computer games.

is this a service that we'll have to pay for once the free period ends? any game recommendations? i'm not really into the fps genre... does that rule everything out?

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:00 PM, ms-dos said:

i'm pretty clueless with this stuff, but i would like to spend more of my life playing computer games.

 

is this a service that we'll have to pay for once the free period ends? any game recommendations? i'm not really into the fps genre... does that rule everything out?

if you're referring to whether Portal is still free after 24th May, yes it is.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:00 PM, ms-dos said:

i'm pretty clueless with this stuff, but i would like to spend more of my life playing computer games.

 

is this a service that we'll have to pay for once the free period ends? any game recommendations? i'm not really into the fps genre... does that rule everything out?

portal is perhaps the best game of the last ten years imo

so it's a good starting point, trust me :)

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:02 PM, kaini said:

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:00 PM, ms-dos said:

i'm pretty clueless with this stuff, but i would like to spend more of my life playing computer games.

 

is this a service that we'll have to pay for once the free period ends? any game recommendations? i'm not really into the fps genre... does that rule everything out?

 

portal is perhaps the best game of the last ten years imo

so it's a good starting point, trust me :)

that's the problem. if you start with Portal, you're gonna be in for a bit of a disappointment when you find out that not every game is as brilliant as Portal.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:05 PM, oscillik said:

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:02 PM, kaini said:

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:00 PM, ms-dos said:

i'm pretty clueless with this stuff, but i would like to spend more of my life playing computer games.

 

is this a service that we'll have to pay for once the free period ends? any game recommendations? i'm not really into the fps genre... does that rule everything out?

 

portal is perhaps the best game of the last ten years imo

so it's a good starting point, trust me :)

that's the problem. if you start with Portal, you're gonna be in for a bit of a disappointment when you find out that not every game is as brilliant as Portal.

that's when you start working your way through the HL2 series and get TF2 :)

Is HL2 or the Too Orangey for Crows Box or whatever it's called available for mac yet?

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:16 PM, baph said:

Is HL2 or the Too Orangey for Crows Box or whatever it's called available for mac yet?

probably next wednesday... Valve are releasing more games every following wednesday

I love portal

4gig, fucking hell

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:26 PM, verticalhold said:

4gig, fucking hell

you probably have to download components of the source engine too?

if you have other source games installed, will probably be less.

I'm very curious to see what they are going to do for a linux version of Steam. Ports of source-engine games would be utterly amazing. Should be possible since they apparently got the source engine running on OpenGL now. Valve is doing great things to keep PC gaming alive.

Heh, I don't even know if I can run portal on my late '07 MBP. Such is the state of mac gaming that I no longer remember what discrete nvidia card I have, although I think I maxed everything out (or rather, those things that were sensible to max out via apple.com). This is going to be a slow afternoon until I can get home and open System Profiler.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:32 PM, baph said:

Heh, I don't even know if I can run portal on my late '07 MBP. Such is the state of mac gaming that I no longer remember what discrete nvidia card I have, although I think I maxed everything out (or rather, those things that were sensible to max out via apple.com). This is going to be a slow afternoon until I can get home and open System Profiler.

i could run it on an older celeron computer so i bet you can.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:32 PM, baph said:

Heh, I don't even know if I can run portal on my late '07 MBP. Such is the state of mac gaming that I no longer remember what discrete nvidia card I have, although I think I maxed everything out (or rather, those things that were sensible to max out via apple.com). This is going to be a slow afternoon until I can get home and open System Profiler.

probably Nvidia 128MB or 256MB card, can't remember which one though. it'd probably run, although i've heard reports of having to dial down graphics options even on the latest portables

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:29 PM, Ego said:

I'm very curious to see what they are going to do for a linux version of Steam. Ports of source-engine games would be utterly amazing. Should be possible since they apparently got the source engine running on OpenGL now. Valve is doing great things to keep PC gaming alive.

i'm imagining similar to what iD did for doom 3 linux - the map files remain the same. doom 3 linux just required you to purchase a pc copy and then you could download the linux engine for free and copy the map files over. i reckon it'll be a sort of similar setup with steam. can't see them open-sourcing jack shit though, lol. so possibly something like only red hat and debian derivatives supported?

oh shit, i was confusing portal and steam. i'm going to give this a shot.

  On 5/12/2010 at 9:56 PM, vamos scorcho said:

valve are the last remaining mainstream game developers with souls.

 

this is awesome

I don't know about that, waiting for HL2:EP3 is damn near killing me.

nice.. downloading now.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:53 PM, tec said:

  On 5/12/2010 at 9:56 PM, vamos scorcho said:

valve are the last remaining mainstream game developers with souls.

 

this is awesome

 

I don't know about that, waiting for HL2:EP3 is damn near killing me.

at this point i'm more looking forward to Portal 2. i can't believe they announced it so fucking early.

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:36 PM, kaini said:

  On 5/12/2010 at 10:29 PM, Ego said:

I'm very curious to see what they are going to do for a linux version of Steam. Ports of source-engine games would be utterly amazing. Should be possible since they apparently got the source engine running on OpenGL now. Valve is doing great things to keep PC gaming alive.

 

i'm imagining similar to what iD did for doom 3 linux - the map files remain the same. doom 3 linux just required you to purchase a pc copy and then you could download the linux engine for free and copy the map files over. i reckon it'll be a sort of similar setup with steam. can't see them open-sourcing jack shit though, lol. so possibly something like only red hat and debian derivatives supported?

I'm hoping it would be a little more seamless. It's rumored (or maybe confirmed?) they'd bring Steam to Linux so that takes care of distribution and installation of the games. Sure, closed-source binaries are largely not distributed through the official repositories. But something like Steam would certainly be added to repositories like Medibuntu or AUR in a matter of hours. And if they're working on getting the source engine working on a wide variety of platforms I'm sure they'd be able to cope with a generic X/ALSA and Nvidia closed-source drivers.

I'm reading some reviews of the OSX port and am very impressed that it is visually equivalent to the DirectX version on Windows.

EDIT: Yeah it is confirmed. This is amazing.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1