I'm totally de-railing your topic here because nobody but you and I care enough to start a new topic. : Valve released almost their entire lineup of games for Steam in the last week. I'm an enormous fan of the Half-Life (and Portal) games and I was thrilled to see that they released betas for all of them last night. I don't know how big of a gamer you are but I think you should at the very least check out Portal if you haven't played it before. It's easily one of the best games I've ever played. (And I've played a lot of games.) steampowered.com
Steam for Linux. I play most games on PS3, though. I don't have a "hardcore" computer so most of the games I play are older or aren't incredibly demanding.
Do you plan to get a PS4? I'm thinking consoles are toast and will be surprised if any further iterations get any traction.
I do. It really depends on how expensive it is as to how soon I will get one, but I certainly plan on it. I've owned 'em all since the original and I really love playing some of the Sony exclusives, like Uncharted and Ratchet & Clank. I don't think consoles are on their way out anytime soon. If you look at the number of people who play on Xbox or PS3 it's not even close to the number of people that play on PC. Sure, Steam has gained a ton of traction and they're hands-down the best way to deliver digital content, but the cost of building a gaming PC and upgrading it every few years is nowhere close to the cost of buying a console and keeping it for ~8 years. Besides, I really think Valve is going to turn "console" gaming upside-down when they release or announce their "Steam Box". If anything, I think the line between console gaming and PC gaming is going to be blurred. The PS4 is more-or-less a PC gaming rig with a proprietary OS, more like the Xbox and a lot less like the PS3 with weird, unique architecture. And I would expect Valve's "console" to be very similar, but likely will run a Ubuntu or Debian-based OS. I'm really excited about (most) all the Valve games being available for Linux now, though. I've never been a huge computer gamer (obviously, since owning all the Sony consoles) but it's fantastic to see such a big gaming company put such a huge push behind Linux.
I hope Steam on Linux takes off too. We'll have to see how sales are as people vote with their wallets.
Well, I bought the Orange Box (again) as soon as it was available for Linux, so here's hoping that others did the same. 8)
I didn't know what the "Orange Box" was until I Googled it. Orange Box: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/ Some of those games look like ones I would be interested in.
$20 for 5 games you can't go wrong! Sometimes you can even find it on sale for $5 or so. Half-Life 2 and it's "episodes" are fantastic games and you don't really need to play the original to enjoy them. Although if you want to the original Half-Life (from 1998) is also available on Steam for Linux. The real star there though is Portal. I can't state enough how much you need to play Portal. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/portal
I hope it does too because linux is much better for everything, IMHO. Would be nice to see some real CAD programs, games like Crysis and such on linux.
I will be surprised if Autodesk and Solidworks aren't looking into porting to Linux since Windows is dying.