In celebrating the launch of Steam for Mac today, Valve Software has put out an enticing promotional campaign differing from their usual free weekends for content pack updates to their other games, such as Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. This time, they will offer Portal for free, for everyone to keep forever, as long as they respond by May 24. Both Windows and Mac OS X gamers can once again play the much loved puzzle shooter of 2007's The Orange Box that has won nearly 70 Game of the Year awards. Portal is a first person puzzle shooter that allows players to control a "portal gun," more appropriately named the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The players are "lab rats" guided by a mysterious voice known as GLaDOS who seemingly offers helpful advice to the player, but ultimately exposes much sinister motives as the game progresses. Players create "portals" that are used to transport themselves or any objects from one point to another, as they work through the Aperture Science facilities to solve puzzles. The game's official trailer gives a nice quick overview of the game's mechanics: [ame=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w&]YouTube - Portal Teaser Trailer[/ame] To get the game, simply download a copy of Steam if you haven't already, and visit the landing page on Steam. Source
Most Mac owners appeared to be more excited about this free Portal release than the fact that Steam is released for their beloved MacOSX platform. Most gamers already had a non-Apple PC running alongside anyway. However, everybody is looking forward playing Team Fortress 2 on their Mac(book), so I wonder when they're going to release that.
This is why I like Steam. When things are free they don't whisper about it and secretly have it free, they pretty much shout from the top of their lungs saying "GET THIS WHILE ITS FREE." That is something that hasn't really been done on console gaming (360, PS3, Wii). They may release something for free for a certain amount of time but they by no means really tell you that its free, its more of a figure it out yourself and if you don't sucks for you.
I agree with Dark Scyth. I wish that more companies did this promotion when giving away free things. I always seem to be the one person that misses out on say free games or DLC for example. Then you're forced to pay for it afterwards and sometimes it just doesn't seem worth it.
One example was Undertow for XBLA. It was secretly made free for almost a week but only a minority of the Xbox LIVE members downloaded it. It's only because Microsoft was forced to give something in return of the server usage problems during Halo 3's launch.
So did i, although I have a second Steam account which has a few games on so got Portal for that. Might come in handy some day!
Steam <3. You've got to love deals like this. Downside is, I got an account full of games I haven't played yet.
I also do that with The Orange Box, playing Team Fortress 2 regularly, while finishing the Half-Life games at times when I've got nothing else to do. Steam is the ultimate anti-boredom machine!
Hehe tell me about it, often I have wanted to buy one game in the various Steam sales, however the entire back catalog of games in that series has been available for next to nothing so ive ended up with so many games on Steam. Off the top of my head I think I own the ID software mega pack, Epic games mega pack, The GTA / Rockstar pack and everything Valve has done too plus many indie games.
I know what you mean, I'm trying to play and finish all those games I got but haven't really played yet. Finished the quake 1 and 2 expansion packs and even Wild metal country. I doubt many people actually played that last one.
Nope ive never played that , I think it came free with the Rockstar pack? it never looked that interesting when I Googled it up so I ended up playing the classic GTA's.
Yeah it wasn't very interesting. All you do is collect all 8 crystals or whatever they are and get them to a ring. That's all you do for 30 levels. And the maps get rather big so it gets tedious after a while. There's no story or whatever behind it either. 20 years ago it would have been a good game, we've gotten too spoiled I guess.