Steam & AudioSurf
I remember when Valve first launched Steam with Half-Life 2. I remember what a cluster fuck that was as well. Sure things don’t always start off smooth, but the hoops you had to jump through to get the game you bought from the store was absolutely ridiculous. And that’s not even taking into consideration all the technical glitches that the system had in the face of the release of a major triple-A game title. Needless to say it only stayed installed on my PC for as long as it took me to finish Half-Life 2 and then it got removed without so much as an inkling of regret.
However, I recently purchased The Orange Box so I could finally get my hands on Team Fortress 2 and Portal. And since it’s Valve, that meant having Steam loaded back onto my system. As much as I wanted to play the games, I was not looking forward to having that back on my computer. Well, it’s installed and it’s actually not so bad now.
I’ve played through and finished Portal. If you like first-person shooters, original gameplay, warped humor and puzzles then you must play Portal if you haven’t already. Portal alone was worth the price of admission for me. Which is a good thing because out of the six games that come in The Orange Box [Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and the Asia region bonus of Counter-Strike 1.6] I was really only interested in Portal and Team Fortress 2. I’ve played more than my fair share of Counter-Strike in the past and I’ve already finished HL2. I may play Episodes 1 & 2 but I’ll probably end up holding out till Episode 3 is getting ready to release so I can just finish them all and complete the story.
But one nice thing about Steam now that its worked out all (?) of its old bugs is that its a nice way of checking out new games. Currently I’m downloading a demo for a new game called AudioSurf that just released yesterday. Take a look at the link for game info, but it’s an action game that deals with music and you can use any MP3 or other format of music file to play it. I’m not sure how that works, but if I like the demo, I may pay the $9.99 USD charge for the whole game and give a proper review of it. Considering my love of other games that are dependent on or revolve around music [Rez HD, Lumines Live, Guitar Hero 1,2 & 3] its very likely I’ll like this one though.
And remember: The cake is not a lie. You just aren’t allowed to have any.
February 16, 2008 10:46 pm 3 Comments
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By yoshi, February 17, 2008 @ 3:14 am
I want pie. I’ll have to check Portal out I think. I guess I have to get the Orange box to play it? lame.
By cybrpunk, February 17, 2008 @ 10:04 am
You don’t have to get The Orange Box to get Portal. You could also go to Steam’s website (linked in the post) and download/sign-up for Steam (which I think you already have an account) and buy it for $19.99 USD.
By Nominimom, February 18, 2008 @ 1:07 am
Strangely enough, my hubby just bought the orange box yesterday. Now I want to play it. :-)