8 August 2007 in Tools | Comments enabled

First off, apologies if you were drawn to this post thinking I was going to be talking about the benefits of hot vaporised water

Some of the gamer audience that tracks my blog will know Steam as an game delivery platform created by Valve software. Users can sign up, and the buy games and download them directly through the Steam application, the upside to this is that now when I purchase games I don’t need to worry about losing the installation media or about keeping them up to date with patches as Steam takes care of all of this for me.

I had my first brush with this service a few years back at Intergen with a game called Counter Strike (a game I’ve played for 5 minutes, didn’t like and never played again). The service was slow, painful to get up and running and I never looked back at it until a few days ago when Newt mentioned the id Super Pack. I was super impressed – just about every game and add-on that id software has ever released in one convenient purchase (from Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Hexen and Heretic). What makes this work even more beautifully is that it’s already configured with DOSbox so, as a Vista user, I can still happily run Commander Keen as if I was back on my 486 without having to muck around with EMS memory and configuring the IRQ of my sound card. Nice!

All of that cost about 65 US dollars – so it is a very efficient way of getting a heap of games (perhaps if you have children and don’t mind exposing them to some first person shooting action this would make a fantastic gift and keep them busy for months). It also helps that our dollar is as high as it is right now.

There are far more than just id software titles on Steam, if you’re interested check out: http://www.steampowered.com/.

Now all I need to do is find a service where I can purchase time to actually play some games again.

– JD