Look at the picture to get an idea

Can anyone guess what is on the discussion block for today???


Anyone?????


Hmmmm

Maybe its what I consider one of the best platforms to experience games.

Its Steam (made possible by Valve, who also owns the above image.  Thank you)

I have a closeness to Valve and therefore Steam because of my early days of gaming on the PC.  The first First Person Shooters (FPS) that I ever played all the way through and completely obsessed about was Half-Life.  Made possible by Valve.

Honestly, Half-Life is up there as once of the greatest along side some of the grandfathers of the PC FPS genre (Doom, Duke Nukem, etc.)

Half-Life helped to spawn Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, and other directly.  I can't really think of anyone that plays FPS on PC that has not played Half-Life and its offspring.

I remember back in college I would play Half-Life 2 on my PC as my roommate watched.  It was seriously like watching a movie.  Soo many wasted nights doing that.

Back to Steam though.  I think it appeals to me so much because it allows you to manage your games on PC in one location.  I can buy games off the Steam network if I want to and they will automatically download to my PC.  I can then access them from my Steam client without having to dig around through my HD to find the games.  I can add games to Steam that are not in it's store but I have on my computer so I can load them from Steam, but also take advantage of their cross game chat feature they have for when you want to talk with your friend while playing a game.  Hell, I think its a feature that is the standard and is much better than what the PS3 and Xbox360 have.

There are trophies and achievements as well with Steam, but those don't interest me as much as on the PS3 for some reason.

I think that it comes down to this.  I can keep it running in the background when I am working on the internet, typing a blog ;), or just listening to music.  Then when I am feeling gamey (insert laugh) I just right click on the icon, select my game, and I am off.

Its quite addicting.  Once my new PC is built it will work wonders on that for sure since my current system is quite old (over 10 years) and is chugging along like a Centenarian with organ failure running the Boston Marathon (poor dude ain't even going to make it).

This leads me to another good thing about Steam, which is I can instantly install all my games on another PC to my new one by just installing the client.  It does only support the Steam Store games, but still its amazing.



I know all of that sounded like I am trying to sell a product.  I promise I am not.  I am just happy with my experience with it.