There are very few of you who will actually care about this, but I got Team Fortress 2 running on my shiny new Macbook today. Granted, it runs in 800x600, with none of the fancy effects (the medic ubercharge, for example, just applies a blue shading to the models, rather than the shiny metallic thing that goes in in DX 8 or 9, and water is just a flat blue splotch, rather than anything with translucency and/or texture), but it runs.
This whole process was substantially easier than I thought it might be.
First thing I did:
I got a Macbook. Had I not done that, I would not be writing this blog post, and you certainly would not be reading it. It has the aluminum unibody, and it also has "Pretentious Hipster" written all over it.
In invisible ink.
The second thing I did:
Downloaded "Crossfire Games" from Codeweavers.com (the trial, at least - still making up my mind on whether I want to give it an outright purchase... it's only $40, but I already *have* a PC on which I can play games). The install was painless, and it had a pre-set link to download Steam from the internet (as well as an option to install "The Orange Box" from the CD or DVD or whatever it is that it comes on... I bought it from the internet back when it came out, and as such, I have no disc).
From there, I did the usual Steam thing, and installed TF2.
Easy as pie.
Delicious, team-based combat pie.
Like I said, the graphics aren't too hot, but as stunning as TF2's art direction is (really - they did a fantastic job), I don't play it so that I can gawk at the graphics (well, I do, but that's what my PC is for).
Now, TF2 is a monster battery suck, which limits the options a bit (I'm okay with this...if I'm not somewhere with a convenient plug-in, I probably shouldn't be TF2-ing), but that too is easy enough to deal with (apparently we can plug in our laptops now... who knew?).
I'm still not fully sold on CrossOver Games, as I'm not sure if it's worth $40 to play games that I've already purchased, and which I can already play (on my desktop). The portability is nice (I spend most weekends either in Colorado Springs or in Lincoln), but I bought my laptop mostly for productivity purposes (I like to pretend that I'm a writer, and apparently I do this "teaching" thing as a profession, plus my work with the Nebraska Writers Collective), rather than for gaming purposes.
But if it can run Left 4 Dead (which, by the way, has my vote for "Game of the Year"), and if I can get Fallout 1 and 2 running on it (I bought them from GoodOldGames.com, but haven't yet spent more than 10 minutes on them, which is simply a damn shame), and perhaps a good Doom client (some of my fondest memories of childhood are of running a serial cable between the mouse ports of my computer and my dad's computer, back in the days before any type of reasonable networking, and playing co-op through "Knee Deep in the Dead"... I still get the E1M1 theme stuck in my head from time to time, which is really pretty awesome), then it's like that I'll have accomplished 2 things: 1) written a really, really long sentence, and 2) set myself up to never get anything done ever again.
Now if only I can get rid of this nasty little habit I have of not being able to sleep if I don't feel that I've accomplished enough on a given day, I'll be absolutely golden.
For now, though, I'm off to rage silently against the holiday season some more. And to rock as a Heavy in "Dustbowl".
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