My First Steam experience

As a Mac user Steam used to be something from another planet, until recently. I am happy Steam comes to the Mac, bringing lots of great games for me to play. The news that Portal is free (for a limited time) was the trigger for me to actually get started with Steam. And my joy went away fast.

First of all, I don’t like the fact that if I actually want to play Portal I have to:

1. Download Steam (a few Mb).
2. Download the actual Steam files within Steam.
3. Download several Steam updates.
4. Download Portal.
5. Ignore a warning about the minimum system specifications and my windows video driver having an unknown version. Now that says something about the native OS X version they build…
6. Wait, because even tough the download isn’t complete and won’t resume there is a “play” button which cannot start the game because their servers are too busy.
7. Whatever the future may bring…

Second, I have less trust in a native application that doesn’t feel native (misaligned button labels; buttons, and worse, hyperlinks with no feedback weather I clicked them; custom colors, themes and icons; windows sometimes not showing up after switching applications; a crash when I press Command+Q), especially when it doesn’t work smoothly the first time I use it. Little inconsistencies like one window telling me it went wrong and the other it went fine does not help in gaining my trust either.

But, since I know I like Portal and because I’d like to be able to play more games on my Mac I’m just going to keep on trying. It is a good move to make an extremely popular game free to boost the number of Mac Steam users, because it makes users like me accept the rough patches and keep on trying.

Update: After deleting all local files and downloading Portal again everything went fine, except that the warning about minimum system requirements turned out to be meaningful: Portal does not work on my MacBook (2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo).