14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has officially released Steam, a free game-delivery platform, for Mac OS X. The gaming service debuted yesterday with games such as Portal, Torchlight, and Toki Tori. Best of all, in light of the big release, Valve is offering its action puzzle game Portal completely free of charge until May 24th. Hurry up and grab it!
"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," Gabe Newell, president of Valve, said. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services." "We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," John Cook, director of Steam Development, stated.
"The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal is a single-player, first-person, action/puzzle video game developed by Valve. The title, played from a first-person perspective, consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character using a gun-shaped device that can create inter-spatial portals between flat planes. Small objects can also be teleported. Challenged by an AI named "GLaDOS," the character has to complete each puzzle in the "Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center" using the portal gun. Portal has been touted as one of the most original games in 2007, despite being considered short in length. Those who like the idea of playing with the laws of physics are particularly encouraged to give this title a try.
Download Steam for Mac here and download your first Steam game for Mac OS X completely free. Existing Steam users running Windows can also benefit from this offer. Also note that Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. The game is scheduled to launch this year.