Games

I really enjoyed the first Portal video game, it was a much needed break from the first person shooters I had been playing that were focused on violence. Portal did not disappoint, the levels grew progressively harder as the game went on and the payoff at the end was spectacular. The GLaDOS song at the end of the game is fantastic. Now we have Portal 2, I played it using Steam from Valve on a MacBook Pro. There were no slowdowns, frame-drops, or stutters during the game, and the audio was great. ...

I played this game on a MacBook Pro using OnLive and had no technical difficulties. This first person shooter has a lot of problems, it starts out slow, takes a long time to get going, and then at the very end throws some odd control issues at you. It is definitely “on a rail” and appears to only offer one pretty flat story to tell. Maybe its biggest problem is that it is trying to tell a story. It may have been a better game if there was more than one way to get to the end and something in all the dialog that let me know that the end was coming. ...

I bought this game on Steam and played it in Windows 7 in Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro. There were a lot of crashing with the game initially; apparently the default install is a horrible experience full of crashes and blue screens for many, many players. It took a lot of searching and a lot of fiddling around to get the game to play for more than 10 minutes without crashing but eventually I found the right combination of settings and the game played great. ...

I played this game using a MacBook Pro and OnLive. It took me 33 hours to play it through on the medium setting; I earned 2,050 of 5,000 points and 28 of 49 achievements. I really enjoyed the original Deus Ex back in the day, at the time the idea of “augments” that allowed you to update your player as you went along was pretty unique feature of the game. In Human Revolution the augments are brought to a new level. ...

Recently Onlive had a special offer to play Red Faction: Armageddon and Homefront for the 4 day Thanksgiving weekend. I didn’t like Homefront very much, the violence was a to much for me, but Red Faction: Armageddon was more to my liking. Unlike Red Faction: Guerrilla, this version of the game is pretty much on rails with very little chances for the player to choose his own path. This is partly explained by the change in location, Armageddon takes place mostly underground instead of on the surface. ...

I bought Trine as part of the Humble Bundle 3 and played it on a Mac using Steam. I really enjoyed Trine, it is my favorite game from the Humble Bundle 3 package, it is the only one I have had enough interest in to play all the way through. The game is a side scrolling fantasy game with 3 characters, a fighter, a thief, and a wizard. You use only one of the characters at a time to complete the puzzles, fight the bad guys, and make your way through the maze of world. And what a beautiful world it is. ...

I was thinking about it this week and even though I am a casual gamer I have been playing a lot of different games. Between playing Steam games on both Mac and Windows, OnLive games on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad games I realized I have been playing a lot of different games. Here are my thoughts on some of them. Trine I bought Trine as a part of the latest Humble Bundle and play it on the Mac through Steam. ...