Portal and Steam games

[RedRock]

My youngest said she got Half-Life 2 for $5 or something really cheap. Turns out Steam was having a holiday sale, and I opened a Steam account and got several Half-Life games and Portal and Portal 2, etc. for cheap (like $7 total for the Portals). And these are Mac versions I can run. So I played Portal and couldn't quit. I really enjoy it. I got to the Test Chamber 18 or 19 or whatever, theoretically the end per the female voice-over, where you're about to be burned up but have to escape, and then for the next 3 hours I was going and going and going following that trail for the elusive cake, and then I had to get some sleep. But arrrrggggg, somehow my saves were over the top of each other, and my final save was in a spot where I'm dying and can't survive when I respawn, so now I have to do all that over from the beginning of the escape from the fire!
I had never heard of Steam before this.
Anyone have any words of advice/caution/etc. about Steam for me?
steampowered.com

[Lamron]

If you think Portal was great, wait until you play Portal 2! The first one was really more of a demonstration of the concept, but the second one is much longer with a lot more story and background.

Have you become emotionally attached to your "Weighted Companion Cube" yet?

[Major_A]

As far as Steam goes....the Download place....It's the worst place to ever get things from I've read.....ALOT

I could list all the reasons I've seen, but honestly, I read something in their download thingy that there was a VERY good reason I would never do it......

Also some of the major issue was if something broke you had to re-download or something....I don't remember everything, but I can tell you I was looking into IL2 BOB and things didn't work out very much for people, and that was the second game I ran into that people had issues with.....mostly if you got it through steam, it didn't work unless you had their proprietary installer and ID checker thingy...NO THANKS...eeeFFFF them!

My thing is if I don't have a hard copy on cd, I won't bother giving them my bank info, but that's just me.
Just sayin'

[RedRock]

Yeah, Major, you have to have the steam account and be connected to steam via the internet to run the games from them. So yes, I don't have a hd copy I can move around and use anywhere and anytime, sort of, but likely I'll play the games once, maybe revisit a level once or twice in the next few weeks, and then never do it again. I'm more of a multiplayer guy, heck, I've never even done the actual game version of cod:uo or cod2, yet I played/play those online as my favs. I did do the MOH and MOH:SH and :BT versions, but back then, I didn't even have TeamSpeak/Vent and had a slow computer, so I regularly got whipped at online games so it didn't mean much to me. Once I got better, and got TS and a newer computer, I basically started playing only multiplayer online games. So, for $2.50, I'm willing to play the Steam version of Portal, and maybe I'll look around for a stand-alone used version of Portal 2 for the Mac if it's as good as Lamron (and everyone else) says! If I like any of the Half-Life games well enough to play multiplayer, and assuming there is anyone doing that, then I'll get the stand-alone version. And I know there are CounterStrike multiplayer servers, but I don't know how full they are these days, so we'll see about that.

[Major_A]

Nothing wrong if you go that route, it's just not for me is all I ment.
I probly managed to find the posts about everyone's bad experiences
with steam anyway. It just sort of gave me the why take the chance feeling.
But the price for those games does make it quite enticing.
I do know what you mean by fiddling with a few things for a
while then move on. I had a few games like that.