By way of their Team Fortress 2 blog, Valve has taken the time to answer some of the more pressing questions the community has had about Valve's Mac transition.

Q: I own TF2 on the PC. Do I have to buy it again on the Mac?
A: No. If you own TF2 on the PC, you own TF2 on the Mac (and vice versa). You don't have to buy the game twice. In addition, the Steam Cloud will automatically propagate your configuration settings and custom sprays to your Mac for you.

Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2?
A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren't getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.

Q: Hmm, that all sounds pretty good. But I'll bet I can't play with my friends who own Macs if I'm on my PC.
A: Mac and PC users will all play together, on the same servers. We're not creating two separate universes. We're all going to be one big, happy family with guns locked in a bloody, never-ending struggle for cap points.

There you go. Undoubtedly there are still more questions buzzing around some of your minds out there. Feel free to voice your opinion and maybe we'll see if we can squeeze a few more answers out of Valve!

Many members of the community had started to notice some similarities between the DigiPen student creation, Tag: The Power of Paint and some new features being added to Portal 2. In case you missed the list of Portal 2 details, a new game mechanic, "Paint", will coat surfaces in the game and various colors will result in different physical changes to the surface. For example, one paint color will cause Chell to rocket forward at extreme speeds, while another acts as a trampoline.

Needless to say, those who heard the details about Portal 2 immediately claimed that Valve was stealing the idea of the paint from the students at DigiPen and their work on Tag. In Tag, the player uses a paint gun and various paints to change the properties of surfaces, much like what was just described for Portal 2.

To clear up some of this confusion, I sent and e-mail to Valve to see what the truth was and a reply was received.

As it stands, the development team for Tag: The Power of Paint are currently employed at Valve. No other details were allowed to be given out at this time. While this may seem like a "well, duh" moment to some, there were many within the community who were a bit up in arms over the matter. Hopefully this clears up some confusion.

Earlier today, while I blissfully slumbered, Valve officially announced that Steam and a number of Source titles are headed to the Mac platform! The big update for Mac users will commence this April.

Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."

Portal 2 will be the first Valve title to see a simultaneous release on both the Mac and the PC. Project lead, Josh Weier, stated that the "checking in code" produces a Mac build at the same time a PC build is created so the two platforms are always identical in terms of features and fixes.

The Portal 2 issue of Game Informer starting to arrive in the hands of subscribers, and with it comes the various scans of the article in question. While we can't include the scans of the article itself, we can give you a quick list of the details as they are known for Portal 2. Enjoy!

Let it be known that there is a high probability of spoilers being mentioned below. If you want to be safe and know absolutely nothing about Portal 2, it's best that you don't read this. However, good luck hiding from the information until the game is released near the end of the year.

Single Player Details
- Stand alone, full-priced retail release
- GLaDOS and Chell return
- Portal 2 takes place well after the events in Half-Life 2
- Portal 2 takes place hundreds of years after the events in Portal
- The labs are in various stages of decay with plant life taking over many areas of the facility
- The AI cores (seen previously at the end of game cutscene in Portal) have been tasked with rebuilding the facility
- One such core, Wheatley, serves as a preliminary guide at the start of the game
- Wheatley, fed up with his rather limited lifestyle promises to aid Chell in her escape if she helps "him"
- Wheatley will be carried through some of the earliest areas of the game and can be used to open various areas of the lab to bypass obstacles
- Chell encounters GLaDOS rather early on in the game: "Oh, it's you. It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead. You know, after you murdered me? (...) Okay look, we both said a lot of things that you are going to regret. But I think we should put our differences behind us. For science. You monster.

The latest issue of Game Informer (you know, the one hitting subscribers' hands now with a massive Portal 2 blowout?) may have included a huge reason for PlayStation 3 owners to once again voice their disdain for Valve. Listed in the release platforms for Portal 2 are the Xbox 360, PC, and Mac. The obvious omission being the PlayStation 3 from the release list.

Needless to say, the fans are not pleased. PS3 owners on both the Game Informer forums and QJ.net are livid about this news. Here are a few choice comments.

**** Valve. Valve is a video games developer - their one purpose is to develop video games and they can't be bother to figure out how to develop for one of the major consoles.

Not that I'd buy the game on a console anyway (it's more of a PC game), but still, it's laziness. How come EVERY other major third-party dev has been able to figure the PS3 out?

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Even as a PS3 owner myself, I don't see the point in trying.

Valve is still full of Microsoft fanboys no matter what we think.

Even if they did make a PS3 version, they would make sure it was a piece of crap on our end. They would then wait 3 years later and then have their founder Gabe Newell come out and say, "Well I'm sorry you PS3 owners had to play this piece of crap. Does it make you want to buy an Xbox now?"

Although I like Portal, I despise Valve right now.

And yet, for Valve being "Microsoft fanboys" they curiously seem to forget that they're now working on Mac releases, but I digress. What is your take on the fact that another Valve title isn't making its way to the PlayStation 3?

The GameStop listing for Portal 2 makes mention of a little piece of interesting information. There will be a co-op portion included with the main single-player experience.

Coming this holiday. Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007's Game of the Year and draws from the award-winning formula of innovative game play, story, and music that earned the original over 70 industry accolades. Features single and multiplayer co-op modes. The single-player portion of Portal 2 introduces a cast of dynamic new characters, a host of fresh puzzle elements, and a much larger set of devious test chambers. Players will explore never-before-seen areas of the Aperture Science Labs and be reunited with GLaDOS, the occasionally murderous computer companion who guided them through the original game. The game’s two-player cooperative mode features its own entirely separate campaign with a unique story, test chambers, and two new player characters. This new mode forces players to reconsider everything they thought they knew about portals. Success will require them to not just act cooperatively, but to think cooperatively.

Well this just got a whole lot more interesting!