So Steam for Mac came out 3 weeks ago, and so far I am kind of let down with it. I base this mostly on the lack of Source games at launch as well as the consecutive Wednesday releases. Valve stated they would be releasing every Wednesday and each week I waited with baited breath for TF2 or any of the Source Multi-player games to come out. Alas, at the time of writing there is still no Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, or Day of Defeat: Source and this makes me sad.

For the longest time I was playing Steam games on my Mac prior to the Steam release using Crossover. This App worked really well, with the occasional bugs here and there. None of these games were native to OS X. When I heard Steam was coming to the Mac, I immediately dropped Crossover and deleted all my PC Steam apps in anticipation of the Release. Rumor was it would have TF2 at launch. No dice. Portal and CivIV were the only games available at launch. Civ IV did take a day or two to finally make it to the store.

The interface is much the same as it is on the PC. Friends are listed on it’s own window and has voice chat along with the normal text chat. Being that there is a lack of multi-player games I have not been able to test the in-game voice chat like what’s available in CS:S and TF2.

Overall installation was a snap, drag the steam app to the apps folder and run the app. It then proceded to download and install the rest of the application. For the first week it seemed like everytime I opened steam it would redownload the app. That’s 22-30 megabytes depending on the sice of the update. Anyone with dial-up(if there are still people with dial-up) would be pretty upset. They were most likely fixing bugs.

Steam is still a must for any Mac owner. Finally there is a decent gaming platform for us Mac owners.

No related posts.