The first Wednesday has hit since the launch of Steam for Mac, and as promised, Valve has put out some games. Probably not as big as you’d be hoping, but they are cross-platform multiplayer titles with Killing Floor, Altitude and Madballs in Babo: Invasion.
Edit – Here’s the list of new games:
Madballs in Babo: Invasion
Killing Floor
Altitude
Europa Universalis 3
Hearts of Iron 3
Sam & Max Season 2
Sam & Max Season 3 – Ep. 2
Chains
Simplz Zoo
Caster
Eschalon Book 1
Windosill
I haven’t played an FPS game in quite a long time, let along an online FPS game. For some reason I felt like playing one today, but being away from home means I haven’t got any setup discs with me – and also being on my Mac means it’s not easy to even get a game in the first place although I have quite a few games I’ve collected over the years at home.
Somehow I then remember about Quake Live. I thought let me see what’s going on with that. I remember it being called Quake Zero when it was first announced and loved the idea of a browser-based game. So without further ado, I went to the website and signed up. After installed a plugin for my browser, I was in there!
More online games should definitely be like this. It’s amazing how all I had to do was register, install a plugin (a wide range of browsers are compatible, for me that was Safari for Mac, but Firefox is in there which is what most people use anyway) and get into the game! I spent some time relaxing to playing some games after I got a friend into it too. Boy have I missed FPS games! I can see myself playing this in short bursts for a long time to come! 
I’ve had a chance to play around with Steam a bit more since it’s release on Wednesday. It’s been fairly buggy and quite disappointing due to the bugs. I know that Valve will constantly update the client to ensure that it’s as bug-free as possible, but I was expecting a solid application to launch in the first place.
The games available are pretty limited. Even though there are in total about 50-60, the majority of these are pretty small titles. Torchlight is one of the bigger titles, and that has a lot of crashing issues when changing video settings, which makes it a nuisance to tweak around with.
The only games that I’ve kept on my Mac on Steam are Peggle Deluxe and Bejeweled 2. I’m awaiting for the Half-Life series to come over, and hope that will be soon. I’m also eager to see if I can try Left 4 Dead on my MacBook. I don’t have high hopes, but it’s a game that I absolutely love so even if I have to turn the video settings down all the way, I’d take the hit to be able to play it.
For now though, it’s definitely early days for Steam on Mac. Valve will be releasing new games every Wednesday, which is extremely promising. Steam will definitely encourage developers to be multi-platform (Windows & Mac) and hopefully we’ll see more games available for both at launch.