Steam on OS X: Nice But Certainly No Nirvana

Last Wednesday, Valve officially released Steam for OS X. Along with the release was the promise of the release of essentially the entire Source library for Mac eventually.

To date, only one Source game is available - Portal, but it has been offered free for a limited time. Portal is a pretty great game, so Steam + Free Portal is pretty decent gift to the Mac community. And honestly, I'm still optimistic - but having played around with it for nearly a week now, most of my original feelings about Steam haven't changed.

For one thing, Steam is buggy. I can't speak to the PC version anymore - but I never knew it to be terribly stable. The OS X version likes to do things like block you from closing Steam because a game is running - even though a game is not in fact running. The browser Steam uses shows an almost interesting lack of performance considering how basic most of the pages are constructed. It will lock up. It will zombie.

Also, Steam is just poorly designed. Essentially one large custom browser with a lot of access rights, Valve didn't bother to actually coordinate your Steam account with your community account, forum account or support account in 2008 - and they apparently haven't bothered to add such things by 2010. The end result is a decent browsing experience, a relatively robust checkout experience and a a lackluster everything else (at best).

Partially because of that - Steam is quite possibly the most user unfriendly gaming product in the history of gaming. It's not just that their support section feels like a bad PHP script bolted onto the side of an online store, but rather that is the support for a product which can at any time update code on your hard drive without any control on your part, completely trash your game, and then simply walk away.

And remember people, Steam does not offer refunds (unless you feel like reporting them to the BBB it seems). So if Valve forced an update on you and it broke your favorite game - well, tough. And I've had Torchlight less than a week and guess what? That very thing has already happened. I don't think there is a Mac user on the planet right now who can play the game.

And has Valve responded to any of the many forum posts about it? No. Have they sent out any tweets from the Steam twitter account? No. Have they bothered to respond to any of "Ask A Question" support tickets (I could go on for some time about how annoying that they frame support issues as me asking questions. I shouldn't have to ask Valve why their QA sucks)? Not that I've read and certainly not mine.

So yeah - Portal for free running natively on the Mac? That's a nice thing. And if down the road I can play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead off the MBP as well, then that will be a win. But Steam is still Steam - it's a buggy mess and does nothing to empower users when things go wrong. So remember Mac users - Steam is buyer beware for the digital age.

Could Valve Return Me To PC Gaming?

And by PC, I mean Mac.

I had just gotten done complaining about the lack of Portal 2 for the PS3 when Valve drops the hammer down. And by hammer, I mean glorious news for Mac users - the Source library of games and Steam? Interoperability with PC users? Kinda the best thing to happen to Mac gamers since Romero admitted he once used one.

I started to abandon PC gaming around the time Bioshock was released. I'm actually struggling to think of the last game I finished on the old CheapBox++, but I think it might have been Oblivion. I had been a gamer on the PC since ... ok, technically I guess since playing Parsec on a TI-99. Or Wizardy on an Apple? When you get this old, the memory is a bit fuzzy, people.

My point being - I don't have the old CheapBox++ around anymore not because I was some console fanboy nut raised on NES games. I stopped playing PC games because they started being too much of a pain in the ass. I've gone on and on at length in other posts so let me sum it up with: too much instability, too much playing with video settings, too much dependence on buying increasingly powerful hardware.

And folks, you can agree or disagree with my logic - but I've been pretty happy with it. Even with what might have been a karmically induced PS3 bricking which caused me to restart Fallout 3 not once, but twice ... I'll take that over fighting with a video card installation or getting booted off the Sony forums for complaining about PlanetSide any day.

So let's look at those key points, in semi-random order.

Too much playing with video settings
What video settings? Resolution? There's a total of like two video cards you can get for your Mac. Not to mention my current Mac library consists of a MacBook Pro and a Mac Mini. Video drivers on the Mac? They work. They work well.

Too much instability
The Lenovo Thinkpad I used before my trusty MBP would lock up like Fort Knox and occasionally require a 20 minute head start before it really get to work. The MBP has occasionally bouts of flakiness, but in part because of the reason above ... it is a damn solid machine.

Buying increasingly powerful hardware
This one is mostly self-defeating ... because it is not going to happen. I'm not likely to enter the desktop world again anytime soon (I don't know where it would go). Truth is, this MBP is in the "from my cold dead hands" arena for me. I don't even technically own it, it belongs to the office ... but I snarl at IT anytime they come near it.

So it comes down to the following questions:

How well will Steam run on OS X?
My issues with Steam are a matter of record. Literally, I think, since I contacted the Better Business Bureau when Valve refused to offer a refund. I've also frequently admitted that my many problems with the service appear to be abnormal and there are many a PC gamer who swears by it. I don't know how many technical problems Windows caused for Steam ... but it will be interesting to see.

Is Steam more consumer friendly?
Even if you love Steam, you should realize that it is wildly consumer unfriendly. You get billed for goods before delivery. Delivery? Not guaranteed. Technical support? Last I looked it was an utter joke. Some of this is the difference between digital and disc based goods, but some of it is just Valve being overly protective of their own ass. If that has not changed, and I honestly doubt it has, I'll probably only dip my toes in the Steam water for special occasions like Portal 2.

I'm optimistic ... though not wildly so. I don't see how it can be a bad thing, assuming it will be a good to great thing - but guessing the vast majority of my gaming will still be done on the old plasma TV.

Spore To Get Expansions, Lack Of Shock Thunders Nothing

Ars Technica gives a brief rundown of Creepy & Cute Parts Pack and a Space Stage expansion for EA's Spore.

Nobody is exactly surprised at this move - it's EA and the guy who made The Sims so the math was pretty obvious. Sadly I don't think either are destined to exactly reinvigorate my interest in the game. Oh, I might hop back into the game from time to time but there's an odd lack of variety to the gameplay (outside of the Creator itself) and the space stage doesn't need an expansion, imho, it needs a rewrite.

I hold out some hope that future expansion will give the twist, update or improvement the game deserves - and I may be judging the space on too quickly. Just have to wait and see.

Microsoft Advertising Spirals On Downward

Now it seems that those "I'm A PC" ads? Created with Macs.

Don't even know where to start.

Spore gets patched

You lucky PC users get an updated version of Spore, we Mac people will have to wait a bit.

Of interest:

* Creature phase: Improved the pacing towards the end of the game, and increased the challenge in Normal and Hard modes.
* Tribe phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Civilization phase: Increased the challenge in Normal and Hard difficulty modes.
* Space phase: Made Empires in Easy and Normal modes demand reasonable amounts of money in exchange for peace and adjust the level of punishment if the player doesn't pay
* Space phase: Made disasters less likely to occur in Easy and Normal modes and increased the time between each attack from the enemy empire when the player is at war.

-- Official Spore Patch

It always worries me a little when games need to tweak things like this. It eludes to the "maybe this is the patch that adds the fun" joke which I'm sure has only been uttered about a billion times today alone.

But seriously - war in the Space stage is a broken down mechanic, plain and simple, and I don't know if just adjusting ransom money and frequency times will fix it. The real problem is that my one spaceship versus their entire army isn't really a war - it's annoying losing battle that doesn't seem to ever stop.

Game Play: Spore

Let's get right to it - Spore is a good game. It's fairly engaging and fun. I haven't had time to finish the Space Stage yet, but it was entertaining enough to completely grab me for pretty much the entirety of last night.

I can't however, call Spore a great game. I would liken it to trying to compare Portal with BioShock. It's not entirely fair because BioShock is a great game because it does so many things we expect from a game really, really well whereas Portal does some things we don't expect really well and the rest kinda average.

Spore has a lot of average stuff in it, some even subpar stuff - but all of it gets nuzzled into enough stuff we don't normally expect from a game that it might take awhile to notice.

For the first two stages, Spore plays like an mashup of indie hit fl0w and The Sims only without any ability to wall in annoying creatures or hip spellings with numbers. Much of the reward for playing involves unlocking new pieces to construct your creature with and playing with how the changes interact with the environment. This is exactly the kind of mechanic which keeps Spore going. Actually clicking around and ramming other things? Not that interesting. The creature creator and the options it provides to the user? Pretty interesting. In fact, I'm not sure I can say enough good things about the creature creator - it works exactly as the hype machine said it would.

However I'd say that even fans of this game will hit a point after their creature has crawled on land where they'll wonder what else is worthy of the years of hype we've had to endure on this game. The Girl stopped by to see a group of my creatures dancing with another group of creatures and when she ask why I was dancing I responded "well, because that's what the other group did."

And then she does what all married people do from time to time: looked upon me as if I was insane. The second stage certainly stumbles a little with the fact that the core of the gameplay is a mutated version of Sims talking to each other.

Only without Simlish. But at least in Spore you can maul the heck out of the others if you want.

Plain and simple this is just a framework to hang your creation around and wander the world. Which again, not that bad of a thing. The mechanics of playing with your creature are rich and there's tons of replay to be had. Also, we can't ignore the online aspect here. Watching out for other creatures created by random humans around the net has a very unique charm to it and provides a glimpse into the kind of user orientated content creation most games could only dream about. I wouldn't call it a deep addition to the game, but it is definitely a noticeable perk.

With the third stage, Spore begins to diverge. No longer responsible for the genetics of your creature, you begin to concern yourself with the evolution of the group. At the Tribe Stage you organize your home turf and basically divide between basic exploration, gathering food and determining if you should go all native on your neighbors or get some instruments and win them over with song. Especially the Tribal stage feels like a natural evolution of the mechanics you've gotten used to playing. Sure, you can command multiple creatures now and need to worry about buildings and with the Civilized stage, vehicles - you are still basically bouncing around a world into other things and deciding between wooing them or beating them into submission, taking their stuff and using it for your own.

Now there is a lot to critique about those stages. They aren't particularly deep and if the powerful customization mechanic weren't in play we'd be looking at a very different story. The controls and interface for both the Tribal and Civilized stages have much to be desired and the overall simplicity at work here doesn't allow for a lot of strategy. That said, I got a great amount of joy last night when I decided to design the holy flying avenger from hell, built a small army of them and smited my foes with a decent amount of force.

So while flawed, I think these stages have a lot of merit. By the time Civilization Stage moped up the competition with what essentially the equivalent of a flying gun show, I felt like what had started with a tiny creature had evolved into something more and despite some stumbles on the way - you could see an interesting chain of events from point A to flying gun show of doom. The little history chart that is generated is actually pretty fun to read.

So I was pretty ready for the next step. And here I'm going to acknowledge that I'm probably going to be a bit alone in this opinion.

But what the hell is up with the Space Stage?

First off, after two stages of working up to the mechanics of handling multiple units, Space goes back a few generations to where you controlled just the creature and sqawked at friendly types to join your cause. This single design decision nearly cripples the entire stage for me. If I have to travel half way across the damn galaxy one more time because my home planet is getting raided I might just scream. To aggravate this, the controls - especially in combat are completely abysmal. In defending my home planet last night from a warring race I basically just left the ship in one spot and clicked around wildly. And of course since the other races don't share this fundamental strategy of only sending one ship out into deep space at one time - they're coming in droves.

I died.

I died quite a bit.

No longer am I customizing anything based on loot I'm grabbing off of others - the core mechanic which holds true for every other stage in the game. Now I'm plunking around the galaxy trying to figure out who has what color spice for what price in the hopes of selling it to another race for a higher price. This is when I'm not busy poking around the map trying to figure out which planet what random mission is sending me towards because apparently nobody in this entire universe ever decided to draw up a damn star chart. The best you get is "we think it's close to that red star over there."

Sorry? I'm stuck in a galaxy with a group of starfaring races whose best attempt at navigation resembles a bad joke from a Bugs Bunny cartoon? This is evolution?

It's almost as if Maxis' answer to the lack of depth and complexity in the previous stages was to stock so much depth and complexity into the last one that reviewers would call it a wash. And while many seem to have done just that - I can't exactly wrap my head around why my home planet is sending me on a mission to paint a planet a different color instead of sending out a second ship.

When I was attacked by a larger creature in the first stage, I could customize myself in a defensive manner.

In the second stage, I could run to allied nests and try to find bigger claws.

In the third stage, I could wait for the tribal chief to be somewhat alone and jump him with my entire posse.

In the fourth stage, I could manufacture an army of steel and death.

In the last stage, I'm clicking like around like a crazed squirrel waiting to die. Suddenly, I feel less powerful and less in control of my situation than when I was swimming around lonely in the primordial ooze. Sure, you can make your spaceship look as you please - but it doesn't really do anything different ... another fundamental departure from every other stage.

And I'm just going to come right and say it. There are better Elite clones out there. Space Stage doesn't entirely cut it for me. It's not all bad and there's some interesting bits to it - but as icing on the cake it's just ... well, for one thing, it is the cake. For readers unfamiliar with the game who might have thought I had spent the last thirty hours playing up to the space stage ... think again. You can blow through the first four stages in a few hours if you're aggressive enough. Space? I have no idea long that is going to take me. If spend as much time saving the collective asses of my race as I am right now, probably another week or so.

Thankfully the allies you can make fight much, much better than you. And turrets in every possible location helps as well. The mechanics of discovering new races and communicating with them is pretty spot on. Trading and controlling trade routes is somewhat interesting in its own right, and I haven't had a chance to really get a full grip on colonization yet - but it looks like there are some interesting angles there. It's not a loss, but it's not the ending I would have hoped for ... or more to the point, expected.

For the record, I've had no bugs or installation woes with DRM. That might be because it's on my Mac of course, but I so far I'm carefree with the experience of loading and getting the game to run.

At the end of the day, Spore earns a location on my hard drive. For one thing, it's hard to find good modern titles for the Mac in general, so my hat off to Maxis for including us on day one. Also, there's a cerebral side to the gameplay which you can feel is where the design is really trying to tickle you. I expect it will be fun to pick up, play a bit, save and return to later.

It's not going to change the world of gaming, but it will probably enter in the discussions which might change it down the road. I recommend it, but with the reservation that the option to walk on water has been left out. Spore is not the second coming of The Sims - it's just Spore.

Channel Flip Helps Get Your Mac Game On

Katharine is either a Mac geek or plays one on TV, and does a wonderful job of covering major issues with gaming on that "other" platform. She covers the basics, gaming on a Windows partition and even gaming gaming with Crossover. And all this with an English accent.

On a side note, I'm quite excited that Blizzard in continuing a tradition of Mac dedication by having an OS X version of Diablo III ship with the Windows version. It is a lot more than I've come to expect than some other companies I might mention...

Elgato's Copy Protection Is (Not) Stupid

I'm trying to move the Elgato 250 The Girl got me a way back from the Mini into the living room, to kinda consolidate things media related. Actually, since work blessed me with the MacBook Pro - I'm not entirely sure what to do with the Mini except perhaps somehow convert it into a jukebox or something.

Anyway, it's already been a long, busy, complicated week of barely getting things working and when I get home all I really wanted to do was setup up the Elgato onto The Girl's laptop before Battlestar so that I could see if we could record it.

Hooking the hardware up is easy enough and then I put the install disc in and copy the stuff over to Applications and launch the setup assistant.

To which - I get asked for a serial key. I look on the disc jacket, which I'm rather amazed I still have as usually after installing software I fling discs into a vast wilderness where they must fight for survival. There's no serial key. I pop the disc out. No serial key. I go back to the old computer to look up the serial key.

It's obscured.

I poke around online and apparently the only place in existence which has this key is some tiny card that came with the original hardware. Which undoubtably got placed into a box and that box got faithfully stored until the study was cleaned X number of times and then I probably asked myself do I really, really need another box laying around and pitched it.

So this isn't that odd of a tale of copy protection woe except we should remember one thing. The EyeTV software is essentially useless without a big honking piece of hardware next to it in order to convert TV signals into the Mac. All EyeTV does is hook up to TitanTV for listings, record the feed and then translate the feed. It doesn't even do any useful translations as EyeTV stores everything initially in it's own evil format (which takes about ... no joke ... 34 hours to convert into anything else).

In other words, Elgato already has one of the best kinds of copy protection in the world - that being that if you don't buy their expensive hardware pirating the damned thing won't really do you any good. And yet they don't even use a simple downloadable activation key like virtually every other modern software company these days ... they put the damn thing on a card which for all intents appears to be designed to get lost.

In theory all I have to do is email them and provide some kind of proof of purchase. They suggest a receipt which clearly shows the mode of thinking they put to consumer behavior. Ah yes, the Elgato receipt is clearly labelled "E" and "M" and "T" for "Elgato, Mac and Television" and you can find it in the yellow folder in the third drawer to the left ... right next to the freaking activation card. Seriously, if I was anal enough to still have a receipt (which, now that I think of it, I never had since it was a gift) - I'd probably still have the card. And if I was spending that much time organizing, I'd probably have no time for television.

Update: Nick from Elgato offers this very useful info:

The activation key card does state that it should be kept in a secure place. In the future, we should also have options for users to keep their key on our servers for easy access - that's not ready at this time.

If you copy your 4 EyeTV preference files from the old Mac to the new Mac, that will authorize EyeTV:

They can be found in the following locations:

In /Library/Preferences/

com.elgato.eyetv.devices.plist

com.elgato.eyetv.plist

com.elgato.eyetv.world.plist

In /Users/(YourUserAccountName)/Library/Preferences/

com.elgato.eyetv.plist

The preferences keep a copy of the key, so moving the preferences moves the key.

Thus, your problem can be solved by moving preferences, or by contacting us for key replacement.

See the rest of Nick's salient points in the comments...

iPhone Game Development

Another aspect of iPhone development that won praise from many Mac game developers is the App Store, Apple's method for offering users iPhone applications. Steve Jobs indicated that developers will be able to sell their games or applications through the App Store for a 70/30 split -- Apple will retain 30 percent of the revenue, and won't charge developers anything additionally for bandwidth, credit card processing or marketing.

"I'm amazed they're giving developers that much," said Bruce Morrison, a producer at Freeverse Software, which has already sketched out in broad strokes its initial plan for iPhone games. "Other systems like that aren't nearly as generous."

-- Game Developers Rev Up for iPhone

It's so ... dreamy. Mac developers have a solid SDK, audience and a marketplace for games? Now I really want one.

Thinkpad Meets HP Printer - Hilarity Ensues

My stepmom came through town this weekend and wanted to print out a boarding pass. Considering we have three laptops, a desktop PC, a Mac Mini and a printer - this really shouldn't have posed much of a problem.

Except that when I plugged the HP printer into my Lenovo Thinkpad (my work computer) - it didn't want to recognize. Fine, no problem, obvious fix, right? Install the correct driver and go a printing away.

I downloaded the installer from HP's site, except it wasn't an installer but an installer for the installer and eventually the installer the other installer installed started performing some kind system updates which pretty much crashed everything moments later. I tried to reboot the computer, but it refused to log off - so I just shut it down.

Upon reboot, the installer uninstalls everything - which wasn't entirely what I had mind, so started the installer (the installed installer, not the downloaded installer) up again and we went to go eat some brunch. An hour later I have a prompt for some kind of license agreement so I figure it's more or less done. Except it's not done, it starts updating some files again and then asks me to plug the printer into the computer.

Which, it already is.

So I unplug and plug the thing back in and the Thinkpad starts to try and talk to the printer. The message suggests this might take several minutes and in fact does take several minutes. Fifteen minutes later, actually, there's a big red X over the message and the installer is preparing an error log and then precedes to uninstall itself and all of the lovely updates it had previously installed.

At this point I got The Girl's MacBook Pro and plugged in the USB cable. The MacBook said it had some kind of printer, looked like an HP model and would I like to use this driver? I said it was and I did and five minutes later I had a boarding pass printed out.

When people wonder why I hate Windows, this is why. I'm not sure, honestly, whether to blame the Thinkpad - which I have to say Lenovo has really done a fine job of butchering that fine lineage of hardware, HP software design - which still manages to lock up modern computers, or Windows.

But I'm willing to blame all three.

Xbox Live "Friendz" On Your Mac

On Mac Freeware and Free mac Software for OSX:

Friendz is a software that allows you to connect with your Xbox live friends
without having to turn on your Xbox. Friendz allows you to see what friends
are online, notifications when you get new messages or friends come online,
the ability to send ...

Read Full Article, Friendz

Why Safari For Windows

Wired's Cult Of Mac asks who would really want Safari on Windows since the OS X version, as they say, "sucks".

The answer is simple: Apple does. They want it for the same reason they put iTunes on the platform - to increase the size of a demographic with better access to a consumer device. Can you imagine the iPod's success without iTunes for Windows? Safari for Windows may certainly not be nearly as instrumental, but since it will be your testbed for writing iPhone widgets - why wouldn't Apple put it out there? They don't care about getting a few more browsers hits here and there, they want access to the deep pocket of Windows based web developers.

Granted Safari's beta crashes at the sight of a proxy and may snap a few widgets - but the rational seems clear.

I just wonder if they'll port Dashboard. Imagine being able to write a Web 2.0 widget for Windows, Mac and iPhone.

Even More Hardware: Elgato EyeTV

In honor of dismissing the Cyberhome DVD burner from active duty, The Girl sprung my birthday gift early: the Elgato EyeTV 250. This sweet piece of hardware connects a coax to your Mac and turns it into that PVR that you always wanted. We really just started playing with it but so far I've got nothing but raves to report. The installation is insanely easy - just hook it up, load the software and run the wizard. There's a bit of juggling to be had between it and TitanTV - but once you see a fully functional TV guide which you can record from with just a few clicks ... it's all worth it.

We haven't actually hooked up a recording to the big TV yet, so we'll see how the quality holds up there. We were using it to watch TV while running to the kitchen to get dinner going - which was deliciously fun on it's own.