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Civilization Comes to Steam
Gamespot reports that yet another publisher has joined the ever-growing stable of Steam fans. 2K games is working to bring some of their games to the service, with Civilization III and IV coming to Steam this week, and other titles to follow. From the article: "Also included will be the high-seas adventure Sid Meier's Pirates! and the alternate-history real-time strategy game Shattered Union ... According to a statement released today by Valve, Steam currently has some 10 million customers for both its 'core' products--which include advanced shooters such as Half-Life 2--and casual games, such as PopCap Games' Bejeweled and Zuma. "
I've been meaning to buy Civ IV for a while now, and now I don't even need to leave the room.
Civ 4 is $50 and Civ 3 is $30.
The latter seems quite high for a 5 year old game.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
I assume you are reffering to the problems that came about from the launch of HL2 (assuming as you do not elaborate at all).
So again, most of the problems that were there have been fixed. Yes, you can play your purely offline content offline with no problems. Yes, you still need to unlock the game from the start, however I personaly prefer that to other forms of copy protection. Yes, the launch of HL2 was rocky b/c of the steam servers getting hammered horribly.
If you wana bash something, bash it, don't just make random comments.
As for the Civ series showing up on Steam? Nifty, I am always glad to see the library grwoing, admitedly I have no interest in strategy games so this is not great boon to me.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
... right, so after Steam get Railroad, then Industrialization. Then build factories, factories, factories, and start churning out the cavalry and artillery units 50% faster than your neighbours. The rest writes itself...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop. It seems like an ideal situation for Valve; small download sizes, minimal work, and I would think a high demand. As for the gamers, we could get games like the original System Shock running no hassle under WinXP, with possibly some minor graphical improvements (i.e., unlocking higher res video modes in this example).
I know games such as these are widely available on abandonware sites, but I would gladly pay for true support. Referring to System Shock again, I managed to get it to run fine on my old laptop with Windows XP, but my current system is unable to play it reliably, despite trying to use Dos Box, VDM Sound, etc. I would gladly pay for these games if I could easily run them, and would like to support the developers who made them. We could have Lucasarts Adventures, classic DOS games, and older FPSes at our fingertips without delving into a legal quagmire such as abandonware. Is this just a pipe dream?
That it is generally a non-trivial amount of work to update the game to run on modern systems. I mean the way you dealt with things in the DOS was was just totally different from now. For graphics most games would do something along the lines of directly write information to the VGA card's registers then call an interrupt to switch it to a non-directly supported mode (320x240 with multiple buffers was popular, called Mode X often). You'd then directly write to the off-screen video RAM and flip the page when you were ready to display.
Ok so there's just no such thing now in Windows. You don't directly access anything in hardware. You instead call upon an API for it (usually DirectX). This means that to make it directly Windows compatible you have to totally re-write large parts of the code. You aren't just hacking one little thing to be different, it's a different way of dealing with a computer.
The only other option is emulation. You leave the program as is and have something that translates those direct hardware access instructions in to calls to APIs Windows can deal with. That's precisely what DOSBox or the NTVDM do already.
I just don't think you'd find the market to be large enough to justify the development cost of a Windows port.
However, as to the Lucas Arts games, you are in luck. Turns out that all those adventure games they made were designed with the same basic software. It was called the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, or SCUMM. Basically they developed a tool to put together Maniac Mansion. Well when they made another game like it, they started with the same tool and updated it. The upshot is that emulating that engine has become an easy way to make lots of those old games run, and that has been done. See http://www.scummvm.org/ for the project.