Crazy summer Steam sale includes some fantastic Mac games
The PC gaming community has long enjoyed the ridiculously awesome Steam sales Valve loves to break out during holidays and at other fun times of the year. The sales deliver game bundles for crazy cheap prices, even on AAA current titles. Steam's summer sale kicked off a couple of days ago. For the first time, Mac gamers get to join in on the fun thanks to Steam's recent adoption of OS X.
While there are hundreds of Mac & PC titles on sale through July 4th, most of the best deals are found on a few select games featured each day. Today's sales have two good selections that Mac gamers may want to check out. For strategy fans Paradox Interactive's deep historical real-time strategy game Europa Universalis III lets the player control a European nation and rewrite history between 1453 and 1820 AD. For adventure gamers, a bundle of all five episodes of the previously mentioned Telltale Games' Tales of Monkey Island is also available at a great price. The clock is ticking -- but thankfully Valve offsets the time for most US timezones so you can get a chance to pick them up in the morning.
If those two games don't belong to any of your favorite genres, there are a bunch of other titles included in the full sale. Right now is a great time to pick up any of Valve's growing list of games released for OS X with first-person shooters Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Portal and Half-Life 2. Better yet, grab the Valve Complete Pack for all of them so you're ready to go when Left 4 Dead 2 arrives on OS X.
Anyone who is a fan of fantasy dungeon crawlers like Diablo I & II or the iPhone game Dungeon Hunter should check out the charming action RPG Torchlight that's half off right now. There are also a number of good arcade and puzzle games to check out; Peggle & Peggle Nights, Altitude, World of Goo and Braid are all worth a look.
More strategy titles include another Paradox Interactive title, the hard-core World War II wargame Hearts of Iron III and the beloved 4x turn-based Civilization IV. That covers a few of the largest titles, but there is still a lot more to see; don't forget you can always jump into Boot Camp to play a Windows-only title you're dying to play on your Apple hardware. Plus, if that Windows-only title later becomes available on Steam for OS X, you can install it on the Mac side for no extra cost.
Pro Tip; if you're going to grab any games that aren't in the daily sale right now, check back every day in case there's a better deal. If not, buy any of them that never made it into the featured selections on the 4th.
It's finally happening: another step toward being able to say: "It's good to be a Mac Gamer."
