With a new MacBook Pro and newly-found non-trivial amounts of available hard disk space, RAM and GPU memory comes the urge to finally experience Portal. Thus, in goes Steam.
I don’t like DRM, as you probably know, but Steam honestly looks designed to take advantage of what “boxless gaming” should be all about. Download everything: from trailer to demo to manual to actual game to patch to episodic content (which is newspeak for “short sequel that costs about the same as a regular sequel, is in development for as long as an ordinary sequel and has lower expectations”). We have competent broadband wiring, so the concept is sound.
I’m not sure that I agree with Steam’s graphic design, but I know that tacky wonders are par for the course as long as gaming GUIs go. (Excluding most HUDs, which need to be effective.) What bugs the hell out of me is that the text is non-antialiased 8 pixel Tahoma (Tahoma’s a great screen font, it’s just even better in ClearType), and that exotic characters like “ä” aren’t allowed when entering personal details, because even in 2008 Steam can’t allow display of Unicode characters using a system font, or storage of Unicode characters using their own software in all tiers, or whatever. Or maybe it’s due to one of the few unequivocal weaknesses Windows has; the concept that if you can’t find that odd glyph in one font, you’d rather display a box than, you know, look in another font.
The payment screen was a bit of a travesty: the wizard was fixed height, which led to one page with a popup menu, excuse me, dropdown list containing the payment methods, then about 350 pixels of white space, a page with the credit card’s first/last name and vast white space pastures, a page with the credit card number field (bonus points for silently accepting but surpressing spaces into this field as I’m never quite sure whether I should leave them in) and expiration date and lots of white space and finally a page with the CCV code and enormous amounts of white space. This could have fit in one page easily. Jiminy, as they say.
Oh well — let’s not lose track of what’s important. I expect cutting-edge game design from Valve. Game designers are part of the old guard as far as great “non-immersive” UI goes. The experience has been fairly smooth so far, and the concept is solid.
I have enabled VMWare Fusion’s “experimental” DirectX support, Portal is currently downloading, and I await this experiment in glee. (And should it fail, I guess it’s off to Boot Camp, which I’m told Fusion can also do. And I think I know what sort of performance I can expect there.)
I didn’t even think to try HL2 or Portal from within VMware. I know for a fact that they kick ass in Boot Camp, and VMware pretty flawlessly handled the Boot Camp partition (on the second go-round…the first time wouldn’t boot in VMware and had to reinstall).
By Christopher Bowns · 2008.03.15 15:32
I’ve tried Portal within VMware, and it sadly didn’t work. If you have better luck, tell me. It’s really awesome in Boot Camp, so go ahead and do that.
By the way, when VMware came to our campus, one of the devs said that support for Portal was coming soon, so maybe it’ll work soon.
By chimney · 2008.03.15 19:35
So yeah, the entire VM practically blew up and down popped a sheet telling me about log files having been written and to drive safely. I immediately burned my (legitimate) Vista ISO to a DVD (see, this I couldn’t do a few days ago), removed my Windows partition, restored the main partition and ran Boot Camp.
Then I installed Vista and Boot Camp drivers (Windows Experience index: 5.1; the RAM is the sinker, the GPU climbs to 5.9 which bodes well). Then I rebooted into OS X, started up Fusion, tried to create a new VM to mate with the Boot Camp partition and was incredibly bewildered until I realized that there is in fact no selection to create a new Boot Camp VM for the very good reason that it automagically creates that VM for you. (Parallels, I hope you’re taking notes. This sort of stuff goes right below “Cocoa-based GUI”.)
The reason I rebooted back to OS X to run Fusion again is so that I could be sure that Fusion did still work (because I’m not going to be dual-booting unless strictly necessary) and so that Portal could begin re-downloading in the background while I goof off and reply to comments.
It just ticked up to 97%; time to finally play this soon enough.
By Jesper · 2008.03.15 20:28