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Valve's Gabe Newell on Apple's Gaming Failures
The site Kikizo has up a lengthy interview with Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve and one of the minds behind the Half-Life 2 games. Though their discussion centers around the Orange Box (slated for release soon) and the titles contained therein, the discussion kicks off with Newell's scathing dress-down of Apple's understanding of the importance of gaming: "We tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming'. And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better', and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms."
What about the original XBox? That was basically the same architecture as a PC, but optimized for games.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The new mouse does not "emulate" a right-click. It sends a Button2 (sometimes called "Joy2", for joystick buttons) signal. Ctrl-click (Ctrl-Button1) emulates a Button2 signal in the OS.
Any mouse you want to use, you can. My MacBook Pro didn't come with a mouse, so I went and bought a nice Logitech. Both mouse buttons work fine. Gamers usually have a nicer mouse than the standard Dell/HP/Microsoft mouse that comes with their system anyways. Why should a Mac be different? Don't gripe, go buy a nice mouse.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
While the Slashdot summary focuses on the article's brief discussion of Mac gaming, the bread and butter of the article is about other things. I found this to be the most illuminating quote:
So [Team Fortress 2] tends to accommodate a wider variety of play styles than say Counter-Strike. I mean Counter-Strike is very clear; there's not a lot of variety in that, whereas there's a huge difference between the tactical thinking that an engineer does managing resources versus say the approach that the sniper has playing in that game. So really it's much more accommodating to a wider range of play styles than any game out there.
This is exactly why I haven't played CS for 2 or 3 years, but I've been playing TF2 every night this week. In CS, or Halo, or just about any other multiplayer first person shooter, if you're not good at shooting people in the head, you're not good at the game. But in TF2, there are so many ways to play the game that everyone's bound to be good at something once they find their niche. While I still suck at playing a soldier or sniper in TF2, I'll often find myself at the top of the list when I'm playing as a Medic or Engineer.
The other unique thing about TF2 is the variety of cooperation that it requires. In Halo and CS, sticking together is just about the only required teamwork. In TF2 the level of class specialization demands an incredibly diverse range of cooperation. Switching the balance of power is often as easy (or hard) as finding a combination of classes that can defeat whatever strategy happens to be working for the enemy.
In some ways, the cooperation in TF2 reminds me more of World of Warcraft than any other First Person Shooter.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
The problem is that it does a poor job at having a second button. There should not be a finger anywhere near the Button1 or else the click is treated as Button1 even if the pressure is in the Button2 area. This is due to the fact that they use capacitive proximity sensing rather than pressure sensing. The entire mouse basically has one microswitch.
You're mis-representing his argument. He's not saying "Macs can run games," that's patently ridiculous, seeing as there's so many games on Mac. What he's saying is "Apple doesn't give game companies much support." What's the most Apple's ever done for game companies? They had "Sprockets" for OS 8 and 9, but they never took it seriously-- Bungie did most of the work on it, from my understanding, and Apple mostly just ignored it until by OS X it was completely obsolete.
Apple's historically always been like this, though. Even classic games like Prince of Persia, Uninvited, or even Myst were done with no support or promotion whatsoever from Apple.
Comment of the year
Except it isn't.
A common error people make is to compare the sales of console games for EVERY console platform to PC game sales.
When you compare PC game sales to individual consoles, the PC sells more games than the 360, PS3, or Wii. Halo 3 might be an exception, but that's a blip, a temporary boost that doesn't happen every week.
So of the four platforms, the PC is on top. How, then, is PC gaming dying if it's the leading platform?
Personally, I think console gamers as a group are somewhat prone to fanboyism and thus are extraordinarily vocal in terms of attacking anything that isn't related to the console of their choice. The obvious attack against PC gaming is that it's "dying", even as console companies are working feverishly to turn their consoles into an almost PC-like experience with hard-drives, networked and online gaming, and improved pointing devices like the Wiimote.
To be honest, I'm not sure why so many people feel the need to slag other people's gaming systems. We're all gamers, and we all benefit from the various innovations that come from the various forms of gaming. If one of the consoles makers manages to come up with a system that provides a definitive gaming experience, I won't cling to my PC stubbornly. Conversely, if gaming on the PC offers up something that consoles simply can't supply, console gamers would do well to pay attention and applaud, rather than slag it.
Now, innovation in gaming just needs to continue until I can retire in, say thirty or forty years, having buckets of cash to spend on the new systems and all the time in the world to play!
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Just off the top of my head:
Bioshock
World in Conflict
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Civ 4: Beyond the Sword
Supreme Commander
Crysis
DiRT
HL2: Orange Box
Call of Duty 4
I could go on and on, and the holiday season hasn't even hit yet. You could argue a couple of those are console ports, but the vast majority wouldn't even begin to work on a console.
PC Gaming dying? Uh no.