Isn’t steam a kind of Victorian power source that people like Trevithick, Stephenson and Brunel used? I see the word “steam” and think of such things, not some gaming platform.

Edit:

iVor

Sorry. Had to be done.

The definition of Lemmings as a game is the act of listening to "Oh No!" "Lets Go!" and "Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh!" not to mention the legendary soundtracks. The pair of paw-prints denoting the pause button was another stroke of genius

Even without the sound the soundtrack was coming back to me and I was humming along to the soundtrack in my head

Tunes I haven't been able to remember for years came flooding back to me as soon as I started playing

pssssshtakw?

i love steam, but i dont think its a tool many of the mac users here would be interested in, being as its all super-modern games and such. i wouldnt imagine many of you have heard of Gordon Freeman, or the events at Black Mesa Research Facility?

You may be surprised. I am not a gamer but many Mac users are. Most are console gamers of course but there are some good games available under OS X for the Mac and of course you can run Windows natively on a Mac and simply boot from the Windows partition. Many Mac users do just that.

I just pick games that have been ported or written for macs. I have a couple of consoles but do not use them as much.

I'll bite. The cake is a lie!

The problem with the Mac as a gaming platform is that you can't upgrade the graphics card on the models aimed at consumers.

I can see many opengl-based games being ported, but I wouldn't hold my breath for any based on DirectX.

Why is that a problem? It's a limit, but that's up to the designers as to how far they push it. Give us the game play instead, that's what makes a game stand or fall.

The problem is that DirectX is a MS technology and you can guess as to whether or not it'll ever get ported to other platforms. I can't imagine many games houses rewriting their games to run on less than 10% of the market.

But that's not a GFX card issue, is it? That's software.
Although, I do take the point that the Apple GFX card offerings aren't exactly bleeding edge.

The thing is though, "gaming" graphics cards accounts for a couple of percent of the market.

The largest seller of graphics processors is Intel, they dwarf both nVidia and ATi.

And nVidia and ATi probably sell 100-1 of their low and mid-range cards, compared to their high end cards.

Most games are written with incredibly underpowered machines in mind. Look at Modern Warfare 2, it is designed to run on a 1.6Ghz Athlon X2, with 512MB RAM and a nVidia 6600GT or ATi Radeon 1600XT or better graphics card, hardly cutting edge. Okay, you won't be able to play it with all the graphics settings switched on on a 30" monitor, with that set-up, but you can still play the game.

The cards used on the Mac are the same as those that are used on Windows machines. They will need to rework the DirectX routines (and that goes for sound, input and a host of other activities, DirectX is a complete API for the whole system, not just an API for graphics cards), but it is perfectly possible to port the games.

That low number of high end users helps to drive development, which eventually trickles down to the majority of users.

Having said that, I'm quite happy to be a late adopter for financial reasons, but very happy that people pay over the odds for me.

I wasn't saying that is a bad thing. I was saying, that most game developers take that into account, hence the incredibly low specs to be able to play Modern Warfare 2, a 4-5 year old computer could probably still play it...

Given that games these days are being written for consoles with the PC as an afterthought, I'd imagine even a toaster would run MW2. Quite why it would want to, I mean, it's the most over-hyped P.o.S. released in the last 12 months but that is besides the point. A high end GPU is way more than anyone playing the current stream of lazy console ports needs.

The horizon isn't that bright either. The Bit-tech website is all over the ATI 5870 and its ilk, plus the Geforce GTX 480 will be out soon, but until the consoles get refreshed it's all a bit pointless. There is nothing I can't play at decent framerates on my GTX 275.