Tag: Steam

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Nostalgia For Sale

After purchasing a few games on the GOG sale last week, Steam has started up its Summer Sale to entice me into buying a few more games that I probably won’t ever play past tonight. Buying games for me is an addiction and I might need help but, for now, I think I’m just happy that I can catch up with some old favorites and catch up on some games that I have never played before.

I ended up buying Crysis and Star Wars: Dark Forces last week during the GOG sale. Dark Forces got me nostalgic for old Quake engine games so this week I ended up buying Quake 1 and Quake 2 from Steam. I was never much of a PC gamer because my dad, a photographer, always bought Macs and they weren’t meant for gaming, or at least that is what he always told me. I also picked up Abzu and Half-Life 1 during the Steam sale.

I just played about an hour of Quake 1 and it is still fun to be in those old environments. The gameplay is pretty solid and it doesn’t look terrible on my gaming rig. I tried to bump up the frame rate but it didn’t work so I started searching around the Steam forums for tips and it surprised me that people are still really into Quake. People mod that game to make it look presentable on newer PCs, some even have taken to making old mods work on new machines, and I got stuck on one topic reading about how to make the official soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails work on modern machines that don’t use CD audio.

Suffice it to say, Quake is still very much loved by people and that makes me really happy as a person who loves games. I am heartened by the fact that so many people out there are doing the work to make games like this playable for chumps like me who have no desire to put in the leg work. I wish companies would set aside funds to keep their old projects alive or, at least, allow the community to do so without fear of litigious consequences.

Abzu is gorgeous!

Even if I don’t ever play my Steam version of Quake again, I’m happy that I was transported back to junior high once more. I’m happy that I found a copy of the soundtrack and put that in for 20 minutes. I’m glad that the internet is still open enough for me to be able to recreate my past for a few minutes. It seems like with the way things are going things might not always be this easy.  

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Steam Free Weekend: SpeedRunners

I really like the Steam Free Weekend. It gives me a chance to play some games that I probably would never have tried if I had to pay for them. This weeks entry in the Steam Free Weekend is SpeedRunners.

SpeedRunners is a 4 player competitive platforming game developed by DoubleDutch Games and published by Tiny Build. DoubleDutch is based out of the Netherlands (it’s not just a cute name). DoubleDutch also has a free mobile game called 321Tap that looks like it might be pretty fun as well.

SpeedRunners is a couch co-op game for most modern consoles: Xbox One, Playstation 4, Linux, Mac, and Windows. The object of the game is to make your way around circular stages fast enough to eliminate the other players while not getting eliminated yourself. The way you get eliminated is to get caught offscreen, so keep up. The game boasts a co-op mode where you can play 2-v-2 online and thousands of user created levels to keep the game fresh.

I had some fun playing the single player campaign and I tried a few multiplayer matches online. As you can assume, for a game that came out on Steam in 2013, I got my ass handed to me online.

SpeedRunners has a healthy online community and is also an ESL-supported e-sport, which probably helped lead to me getting decimated online. Tiny Build had this to say about their player-base on their homepage for SpeedRunners:

What was a humble platformer is now an ESL-supported e-sport with over a million players!

It sounds like SpeedRunners has taken hold of a whole lot of people and I am glad that Steam’s Free Weekend allowed me to have some time with this game. I’m not sure if I would buy this game, it all depends on if I can get a regular game group set up in my new town. For now, I’ll stick to Nidhogg as my go-to couch co-op game but SpeedRunners definitely gave me a peek at a fun 4 person competitive platforming game that is easy to pick up and deep enough to spend countless hours perfecting.

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Really? You’ve Been Waiting for the Mac Version of Modern Warfare 2 and 3!?

aspyr logo
lego model of call of duty setPolygon’s Jenna Pitcher wrote an article on the announcement of Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for OSX. I was completely flabbergasted when I read this article. Who are the diehard Mac fans who have been waiting for this release?
I am a hardcore Mac user, but I gave up the platform to Boot Camp long ago. I know that Aspyr Media has been doing god’s work (porting games to Mac) for years now, but isn’t it a little too late? Does Aspyr recoup the cost associated with converting these games? They must or else they would have been flushed long ago.

When I contacted Aspyr Media, Sales Manager Michael Blair told me that the company housed a nimble staff of 50 Mac developers and QA staff. Just for context, Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, said in an interview with Polygon that Gearbox employs between 100 – 300 people. So, Aspyr have a pretty small staff of Mac evangelists and, since they have been in business for over ten years, they must be making enough to keep them in the Mac business.

steam plus mac
Steam + Mac = True Love

Even with Steam’s push to make games playable on many different operating systems through Steamplay Mac has not been able to branch out much. They still have Civilization and there are tons of indie games and casual games that need to be distributed on every platform imaginable to make a buck, but they have never really been able to stand up next to the PC as a gaming platform. (They might be closer to Ouya.)

aspyr logoI am glad that Aspyr Media is out there porting games to Mac. Even with the Intel chipset becoming standard in all Apple computers and Boot Camp being a completely viable option to run Windows on a Mac, can they really sustain this kind of business model?

Mr. Blair thinks that his company’s business will continue making games for the Mac platform for the foreseeable future because of the hardcore Mac community that won’t play games on a Window PC.

Mac ABSOLUTELY is a viable platform and I urge you to launch Steam again to see the myriad of AAA titles now on the Mac along with a great number of impressive indie titles.  Sure, its hard to see a future where Mac is as big a platform as the PC, but like many other Mac users, I can’t see a future of me ever using a PC.  So there will always be an opportunity for gamers like you and myself.

Modern Warfare 2 and 3 were released 3 and 5 years ago respectively for other platforms. I would assume that their release for the OSX platform would be moot at this point. But according to Mr. Blair there are a lot of Mac gamers who have been waiting with bated breath for these games to be released.

I asked Mr. Blair how many concurrent players were playing Modern Warfare 3, the newest of the two games, he wrote back saying, “Usually, there are about 6-7k concurrent players on MW3 thanks to cross-platform multiplayer with the PC.” So, even if we forget that many of those people could be PC players, that is only 6000 – 7000 people. I know that many people do not even go online with many games, but that still seems like a pretty low number.

mac xbox
“Nuh uh! _______ is way better,” said every fanboy ever.

I am truly in awe that there are developers out there porting games to the Mac platform. As a long time Mac addict, I am always excited to play games in OSX, which in my opinion, is a superior operating system to others on the market. But, in the end, I am just too avid a gamer to wait for games to be released on the Mac.