Valve sticks boot in on El Jobso

VALVE'S GABE NEWELL has taken the time out of his busy Half-Life development schedule to stick the boot in to Jobs' mob and his hardware.

In an interview to discuss the upcoming Half-Life 2: Orange Box, Gabe is asked if a Mac version of the engine is planned, given the Counter-Strike is still one of the most popular online games ever created and Mac fans have long lusted after their own version.

"Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years," Gabe laments. "We meet with them, people there go "Wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything."

Sounds like the fruity folks to us - too busy drinking the Cappuccino to question the rule of El Jobs. We suspect that Newell is not happy with the level of hardware going into most new Macs - the iMacs, in particular, sport graphics cards that aren't really up to powering games at the kind of display sizes they ship with. Indeed, Apple's portable MacBook has Intel integrated graphics, which isnt up to much at all.

However, there may yet be hope. EA, Valve's retail distribution partner, has already partnered with Apple to release some of its PC titles via the Transitive code conversion technology, so it could be that Valve gets a little slice of that action in the future.

Until then, Mac gamers are going to be Boot Camping their way to City 17. µ