Valve has started displaying a warning to users of its steam platform that users that have updated their systems to OS X 10.6.4 are having serious performance problems with some games. As a user I only got the message after I had updated my system, or I might have considered holding off until Apple had some information and a fix to give us.  The warning is delivered in a manner that you cannot help but to see it, as you can’t really run any games until you’ve dismissed the fullscreen message. This leads me to believe that the issues people are encountering must be of the...

Today Valve released the much expected Mac version of its Team Fortress 2 game.  Interest in the game seems to be really huge as the Steam client  was intermittently display a message indicating it was unable to start the download due to the servers being too busy. After insisting a couple of times I was able to start downloading the game at a good pace, but after about 30% was download complete the download slowed to crawl.  All that is left to do now is wait and see how long it will take for the download to complete, as it stands right now it will go well into the night.

To kick off the game related posts on Macs & Apps I decided to take Half-Life 2 for a spin and see how it played on OS X.  This game is a classic and is now almost six years old, having been originally released on November 2004. This title is generally rated for mature players and in some countries it is not recommended for those under 15. Half-Life 2 is a first person shooter where you play a scientist that must fight against extremely unfavorable odds in an Earth that has been conquered and in which humans are enslaved by a multidimensional empire called the Combine. The graphics are pretty good...

Just last month, Mac gaming got a huge boost when the Steam digital distribution platform for OS X was released.  Steam has been evolving on Windows since 2003 and now offers  online services for games, centralized (cloud based) storage for saved games and the ability to quickly move your games with their play history between computers. When it was made available for OS X, Steam offered a bit over 50 titles and several additional ones have already become available in the intervening weeks taking the total up to 96 titles at the time of this writing. The Steam service requires a specialized client...