Portal free for Mac & PC (until May 24th)

Post #326,085 by SpiceWare 5/12/10 3:36:10 PM 5/12/10 3:47:21 PM Reply	Portal free for Mac & PC (until May 24th) Steam is now available for Mac http://store.steampo...d.com/freeportal/ Edit: just finished installing Steam - their list of Mac games has 63 items. There's fewer than 63 games though as some of those are compilations, such as the Steam Play Indie Pack which includes 5 games that are also available separately. Portal's 8% downloaded :D Edited by SpiceWare May 12, 2010, 03:47:21 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #326,111 by mvitale 5/12/10 10:45:45 PM Reply	Go figure.... Steam servers are too busy to allow me to download Portal. It's probably for the best, anyway, since I'm really too busy to play Portal as it is. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #326,119 by Bman 5/13/10 12:32:11 AM Reply	OMG this is going to take forever "Pictures are better then words because some words are big and hard to understand" Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Post #326,122 by Bman 5/13/10 3:04:29 AM Reply	DAM YOU.. Now I'm Hooked on this game DAM DAM DAM "Pictures are better then words because some words are big and hard to understand" Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Post #326,126 by crazy 5/13/10 7:55:45 AM Reply	The boy showed be the demo a couple of years ago Good thing it made me sick, or I'd be hooked.
Post #326,144 by SpiceWare 5/13/10 11:55:59 AM Reply	I was surprised I didn't get sick If I play a FPS, after 15 minutes I get ill, and then will be woozy for the rest of the day. The concept of Portal really intrigued me, so I planned on playing it 10 minute at a time - something that's not feasible for a typical FPS. I was happy to discover I could play it for hours with no ill effect. I tried the other games on Orange Box and quickly got ill.
Post #326,142 by SpiceWare 5/13/10 11:51:34 AM Reply	don't worry - it's a very short game I finished it in a 3 days on the PS3, and that wasn't full time gaming. There might be some extra maps with this one. I'm not sure as I'm playing thru it again as it's been a while, plus the controls are a little different than the game pad. Hmm - wonder if I can use a game pad, will have to try that tonight. If you've not see anything about Portal before, I suggest that you NOT look up any info about it as it could spoil the most excellent ending. Portal is based on a student senior project, Narbacular Drop. Valve hired the entire student team. https://www.digipen....s/NarbacularDrop/ Portal 2 is coming out at the end of the year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_2
Post #326,145 by Bman 5/13/10 12:31:55 PM Reply	2 hours in still in test mode NOT SHORT GAME and I'm HOOKED BAD SpiceWare "Pictures are better then words because some words are big and hard to understand" Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Post #326,158 by pwhysall 5/13/10 2:32:22 PM Reply	Don't go looking at the Indie Pack, then. And especially don't spend fucking hours playing Osmos. I never thought Valve would deliver on this. They have. Hurrah!
Post #326,174 by static 5/13/10 7:23:44 PM Reply	D'you think they'll have the Linux client ready before then? I'd like to try Portal, but I don't have anything that Steam will run on. :-( Wade. Q:Is it proper to eat cheeseburgers with your fingers? A:No, the fingers should be eaten separately.
Post #326,181 by Bman 5/14/10 1:15:26 AM Reply	STILL PLAYING "Pictures are better then words because some words are big and hard to understand" Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Post #326,189 by malraux 5/14/10 9:19:48 AM Reply	grumble Video card isn't up to snuff. So if I wanted to play it would be a $300 "free" game. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #326,196 by mvitale 5/14/10 9:41:19 AM Reply	sux2bu It's purty. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #326,221 by pwhysall 5/14/10 12:29:13 PM Reply	Innit just. 100fps at 1920x1080.
Post #326,214 by folkert 5/14/10 11:47:25 AM Reply	Re: grumbleIts what you get for buying... Fanboi stuff. <BSEG>
Post #326,223 by SpiceWare 5/14/10 12:32:53 PM Reply	Why $300? It plays fine on my dad's MacBook Pro which has the GeForce 9400M. Tiger Direct has various 9400 models starting at $35. It shows more detail on my MacBook Pro, which has the GeForce 9600M. TD has the 9600s starting at $75.
Post #326,232 by malraux 5/14/10 2:23:06 PM Reply	I have a 7800 Needs at least an 8 series; the 8800 GT is the one the NVidia site had listed for 1st edition Mac Pros. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #326,234 by SpiceWare 5/14/10 2:53:50 PM Reply	Gotcha guess the small market for Mac video cards is one of the downfalls of there not being a non-Pro Mac tower.
Post #326,255 by Meerkat 5/14/10 9:12:39 PM Reply	Pleasantly surprised by performance of my MBP's 8600M GT My MacBookPro's a late '07 model, but still runs Portal quick enough. Only downside is the portals themselves are 'black' and don't show what's on the other side of them. Ah well, any excuse to upgrade...! It works a treat on my iMac, well, I started playing it a few months back via Bootcamp. Oh and I TOTALLY agree with Spiceware - if you haven't played it, don't google ahead for spoilers! :) They said I was gullible ... and I believed them
Post #326,260 by SpiceWare 5/14/10 10:07:20 PM Reply	That's a recently introduced bug when I ran it this evening it downloaded an auto-update and the Portals turned black. They were fine before the update. There's a topic about it at Valve's forum: http://forums.steamp...ead.php?t=1265578 rbarris on page 2 has this to say We saw this bug and thought we had it fixed. One thing that affected this bug's behavior in our sleuthing was whether or not the game started up in windowed mode. Please try this - right click the "Portal" title in the Steam game list, and select Properties. In that dialog click the "Set Launch Options" button. Then in that text field just put this text: -windowed This will cause the game to start up in windowed mode (which you can then change back to FS using Options->Video tab) the -windowed trick worked for me. On page 7 alfred posted We have a fix for the black portal issue in testing, we hope to have it out real soon.
Post #326,261 by Meerkat 5/14/10 10:32:01 PM Reply	Yay, thanks! They said I was gullible ... and I believed them
Post #326,491 by SpiceWare 5/18/10 2:18:47 PM Reply	Played it last night and it looks like they fixed it.
Post #326,292 by Ashton 5/15/10 9:40:07 PM Reply	About these new exotic video specs To wit, in my Newegg flyer du jour: http://www.newegg.co...m=N82E16814125320 I understand the numbers game and the mega-transistors/mm-boardspace carrot for gaining the $$/ (gaming the wallets?) Got a chuckle out of This one being named for (Enrico) Fermi! -- who might revolve in grave over the triviality of his physics being here cited, er orthogonally. But, what with over-clocking, water-cooling and 17 speed-controlled fans dispersing the Heat/KW-hours of energy expended in the lifetime of one of these Gamer boxes(n) -- can anyone 'rate' this particular mere-$350 specimen, in relation to oh, any comprehensible sort of spec -- via which The Next Model, in 2 months or so: shall eventually (eat-it-for-lunch?) I mean, if it's about frames/sec @ resolution-X -- is that All ye need to note, in these abstruse matters? (Just curious; far as I'm concerned, my Spring '08 20: iMac is Magic-enough. Still. And of course, this card likely wouldn't surf in a Mac Pro, if I comprehend the Mac/Beast bus differences -- and iMacs don't do either bus,at all; not to mention limits of X-res in that non-replaceable display.)
Post #326,295 by Another Scott 5/15/10 10:15:45 PM Reply	I believe the latest buzzwords are related to "physics". The games are trying to incorporate things like realistic bounces, ray-tracing for reflections, depth of focus in viewpoints, by incorporating F=ma and so forth in the underlying engine. Hence "Fermi" for nVidia's latest. http://en.wikipedia....ki/Physics_engine The graphics hardware is continuing to get more complicated, so they're starting to hit a wall. Fermi was late and heat can be a problem with them, apparently. Of course, MS's DirectX drivers continue become more and more complicated and to be late as well, so there's the usual issue of the software and hardware rarely being in sync. Unfortunately, one can't simply take the winner as being the card with the most RAM, most transistors, highest clock rate. It's complicated and depends on what you want to do with the card. E.g. http://www.maximumpc..._and_power_hungry - a 250W graphics chip... I think it's nuts to spend more on a graphics card than on a CPU, but I'm not a gamer. :-) HTH. Cheers, Scott.
Post #326,298 by Ashton 5/16/10 1:02:31 AM Reply	Thanks, most illuminating So the Fermi connection has a basis, in Fact. 800 WATTS !?!!?!1111!!!!!!7-11 A pair overclocked [!!] off a KILOWATT main PS. ... I buy an efficient reefer; this guy cancels out about 8 of them. Shades of the Veyron 250 (mph not watts) road test, wherein, "tires are good for 15 minutes; that's OK though because the fuel runs out in 12." Unusually informative -pedia article re the high-precision designs and the game Real-time purposes. Love. It. One expects such cognitive dissonance in Times like these (as have never Been, before. Planetary Peril being generally only One-per-Planet, I wot.) And a commenter at Newegg got it right too: Cons: These cards run at higher temperatures, especially when they're under load. But....Wait for it! They were designed that way, and therefore tolerate higher temps. Also, manually increasing the fan speed helps to keep the GPU cooler. Answer: Electronics never Likes 'hi-temp' and those items that tolerate [mil-spec] a bit more of that.. do so at reduced MTBF, for all reasons Sig. Fermi could elucidate, while peering at the Periodic Chart and the 2p/2s electron shells ... and how far they can oscillate before they forget their Momma -- OK, that's a too-technical answer. But fun. Thanks, as so often, you pointed to exactly what I wanted to grok about this sport, including the usual clash twixt real-time CPU, software with a few buffer overflows and: voracious Gamers, lusting for an Authentic Vicarious <sic> experience of causing The Big Crunch; jes watchin the Universe, femtosec by femtosec: heading for Everything ÂÂÂ···> Nothingness. Bloody Power freaks!
Post #326,264 by Bman 5/15/10 3:18:48 AM Reply	Only 10 Hours I'm done (and I got my cake) "Pictures are better then words because some words are big and hard to understand" Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Post #326,495 by SpiceWare 5/18/10 2:27:05 PM Reply	see, short game :) Most games I play take around 50 hours to complete. I was surprised to see that they changed the ending. The "Thank you for assuming the party escort position", followed by being dragged, wasn't in the original ending.
Post #326,600 by SpiceWare 5/20/10 4:05:49 PM Reply	Played thru with the commentary it was quite interesting to hear about the design challenges, such as why the room you start out in was designed that way. Steam's now listing 90 items for the Mac! I've been playing the StarCraft 2 Beta and Blizzard's taking it offline at the end of the month so I'll check into the other Steam offerings then. http://forums.battle...sid=5000&pageNo=1
Post #326,637 by Meerkat 5/21/10 8:26:26 AM Reply	I've managed to get myself addicted to Torchlight. Not so much Diablo II, as Diablo New. They said I was gullible ... and I believed them
Post #326,654 by SpiceWare 5/21/10 10:26:11 AM Reply	I'll check it out, thanks!
Post #326,678 by malraux 5/21/10 6:24:36 PM Reply	I have to second Peter's rec of Osmos Very peaceful and engaging. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #326,849 by SpiceWare 5/25/10 2:54:03 PM Reply	Totally missed this trailer http://www.youtube.c...tch?v=BDj1fYlwR00 Found the video via this: http://arstechnica.c...-at-stability.ars Mac OS X has never been the preferred platform for gamers, despite its support for the OpenGL 3D graphics framework. Part of the issue is that graphics hardware drivers for Mac OS X just aren't as well optimized as they are on Windows. ... Also, said Newell, "what's sort of surprising is how much more stable our games are on the Mac." Looking at the early data available from the Steam client, "the Mac is five times more stable than Windows" when using the metric of minutes played versus number of crashes. Hmm - looks like the Indie Game Pack is gone, I'll have to pick up Osmos stand-alone.
Post #326,850 by malraux 5/25/10 3:24:16 PM Reply	Machinarium is good too If you liked Samorast. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #326,851 by SpiceWare 5/25/10 3:41:51 PM 5/25/10 3:42:32 PM Reply	I did Hmm, Steam's search isn't very good. Type in "mach" and get just Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Have to type the entire Machinarium for it to be found. On top of that, it doesn't support copy/paste in the text field. Wonder if the Windows version does. Edited by SpiceWare May 25, 2010, 03:42:32 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #326,853 by malraux 5/25/10 4:14:52 PM Reply	Steam is dodgy. I've had issues with it not being able to shut down, crashing, etc. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #328,554 by SpiceWare 6/24/10 6:43:25 PM Reply	it's on sale Steam has a bunch of things discounted thru the 4th for their Perils of Summer sale. http://store.steampowered.com/ I picked up Machinarium, Osmos and Torchlight for $25. They're downloading now.

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