Steam is expanding

It would seem Steam are making a push for the living room, which I'm taking as hints at the 'Steambox', Valves take on a console. Anyways on the Steam website we are told that "The Steam Universe is Expanding in 2014" and it goes on to mention about their 'Big Picture' feature in Steam optimizing controller and TV use.

Along with this we have a count down timer, which is sat at around 70 hours at the moment. It also has 2 more imaged next to the first timer with nothing around them currently. So I am going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that the guys at Valve have 3 big announcements over the next coming months/year. The first of which we will find out about in just under 3 days.

As I mentioned before this is bound to be news about Valves console and their push for the living room. Hopefully if I am right about this, they will be the ones to push what Microsoft should have done with the Xbox and GFWL and encourage cross platform gaming. I prefer playing on my PC a lot of my friends prefer to play on console. This has generally stopped us playing together as I don't have consoles and they don't have PCs. The different platform should be irrelevant, I would quite happily wait a few extra months for developers to integrate this feature in to their games, if anything this could quite easily extend the life span of games due to there being more players rather than having the fan base of a game split up over at least 3 different platforms. It is the way forward. I get that different platforms have their exclusives as incentive to buy said console. But more and more games are becoming available on multiple platforms, in these cases cross platform gaming would be idle.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see what Valve and Steam do, considering we haven't heard too much from them as of late.

Steam is a big boy now.

It would seem that Steam has hit it's 10th birthday today. Which apparently means I missed out on the first 3 years of it's life missing all those big moments like it's first steps, it's first word and the fact that it was a little bit shit when it first came out and everyone hated it.

Back then was a simpler time for gaming, you bought a game put a serial key in during installation and boom you can play your game. But Valve obviously saw the potential of the future of online gaming and took a left turn while everyone else was going right. This is also why I am so lenient with the likes of Origin and the fact everyone rips on it. It's still early days for EA and their digital download system, yes it's not the greatest, but since it started it has improved and will continue to improve of the years, just as Steam did. Other wise it will end up as another GFWL, I don't see that happening though, as EA do seem to actually be working on it.

Hopefully we will see the guys at Valve continue to improve Steam for the next 10 years and we will see some bugs fixed, new features and other improvements I can't think of. I was going to put a corny line in to finish this about the cake and lies but I decided against it. Instead have a picture of portal cake.

Blizzard and Valve Make Up

A while back there was some legal issues between Valve and Blizzard about Valve making Dota 2, Dota originally being a Warcraft mod. But this has been sorted out according to the guys at PC Gamer where I found out about this. (The italic paragraph below is quoted from the PC Gamer article about this linked above)

Valve will retain the commercial trademark to DOTA, and will not be required to change the name of their upcoming title DOTA 2, a stand-alone sequel to the Warcraft III map. Blizzard, however, will retain the right to use the DOTA name non-commercially. This includes promoting DOTA-style maps made for Blizzard games by the community. Their in-house DOTA successor, formerly known as Blizzard DOTA, will be renamed to Blizzard All-Stars while keeping the core gameplay mostly unchanged. 

The great Gaben in the sky has commented about this ordeal stating “We’re pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one,” “We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities.”

I don't like it when mum and dad fight and am glad they've kissed and made up.

Valve are making a console?

A couple articles have popped up this morning mentioning that a new console may well be in the works from Valve would you believe. I really wasn't expecting this from the guys at Valve. I knew they must have been working on something as tweaking DOTA and CSGO won't kill all their time. While this is still only a rumour, I edge on the side of believing this as there was an interview with Penny Arcade I believe it was, where Gabe mentioned if they had to sell hardware they would. Now with the "Steam Box" rumoured, you start putting 2 and 2 together. If this is true and they are making some sort of console platform, I am going to put bets on now that it will have cross platform capabilities just as Portal 2 did between PC and Playstation. This is something that I would love to see, and not just from the "Steam Box" but all consoles. Microsoft could have been doing this for years with XBL and GFWL all they had to do would to counter the unfair skill gap between keyboard & mouse and controller, which is apparently why they never did it, would be to make the Xbox compatible with keyboard and mouse. It's not rocket science. Anyway I'm not going to get in to that rant because I've done it far too many times before and it will take to long for my likings. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this matter and I really hope they can pull it off because I could see this being the start of something awesome for gamers across the field. If they allow cross platform gaming I could easily see Sony and Microsoft doing the same at some point down the line to keep up.

Blizzard Vs Valve over DotA trademark

Vs

It would seem that Blizzard are appealing against Valve and there attempt to tradement DotA 2. I can see why as the original DotA game was a mod for Warcraft 3 and has had the Blizzard name behind it over all these years. However it is just that a mod, a fan made game and we all know Valve are famous for taking mods and making them full fledged games with the likes of your Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat. However I'm sick of frivolous lawsuits popping up every which way.

I still think every quarrel in the gaming industry should be solved by playing games. Notch mentioned about playing Quake to determine the outcome of the whole "Scrolls" thing with Bethesda a few months back. Shit like that should be the way forward. Best of Valve vs the best of Blizzard in a winner takes all DotA tournament. If Blizzard win Valve changes the name. If Valve wins they get to keep it.

You could take this principle in to other mediums as well. Take the music industry for instance, the amount of people that bitch and whine about how "this band stole my riff" or "that band is using the same chord progression as my song" bull shit (I'm looking at you Joe Satriani, yup as much as I dislike coldplay, them using as tune similar to one of your riffs is hardly worth a law suit, there are more examples but I can't think right now). Anyway crap like that could be easily sorted that out with a guitar battle.

Anyway I'm getting slightly off topic but if you want to have a read through of the appeal you can here. From the law side of things I would probably be on Blizzards side as the name has always been associated with them and they have accepted the mod as one of there own. I can't see it going anywhere as it was a fan built project and not actually owned by Blizzard.

From a gamers perspective however, I couldn't honestly give a shit what the game is called so long as it's a decent game. So my message to all those throwing lawsuits about in the gaming industry is fuck off and get back to developing video games. At the end of the day Valve could just easily change the name and this could all be over saving people a lot of time and money. The game would still be exactly the same except they'd have to think of a new name and logo. But as I said before I honestly couldn't give a crap about the name, it doesn't matter.

Let's Play Half-Life 2

A while back a bunch of Valve fans started a Steam Group named A Call for Communication, this is basically them just wanting better communication between Valve and the fans in question. This is all Half-Life 3/Episode 3 related as fans are becoming seemingly impatient with their wait for the return of a certain Mr Freeman. Along with fans making this page along with a Facebook page, twitter and a Steam forum thread. We have also seen Operation Crowbar put in to place as well where fans bought and sent crowbars to Valve HQ as yet another not so subtle hint.

Now it would seem they are going to try and get Half-Life 2 to the top of the most played list on Steam as an attempt to grab the attention of Valve. This mass play through of the Valve game is set to start at 7pm gmt (11am pst) this Saturday. I am actually playing through Half-Life with intentions of moving on to Half-Life 2 once I have finished. I believe I could finish off the first game by Saturday and join in with this. If anything, it's an excuse to play through the game again.

Idea for next Half-Life game.

I came up with a idea while I was half asleep this morning about something that Valve should do with the next installment of Half-Life. Basically you have three campaigns. One you play through as Gordon, one as Alyx and one as Barney. During these campaigns you will come across the other two and tag along with them for awhile, just as you did in Half-Life 2, so it would be single player with a hint of coop thrown in.

An example of what I mean is near the beginning you (Gordon) are at Dr Kleiners labs along with Alyx and Barney. Alyx gets teleported fine while Gordon's teleport experience is not the greatest and it takes him else where. This leaves Barney at Kleiners lab. This would lead to each character going along on their own story line and meeting up later on in the game. There is a part in HL2 later on I believe it's when your going to rescue Alyxs dad. I could well be wrong, but I know which part I'm on about. You are in a control room with some supplies and a couple sentry turrets. You have to hold out against a bunch of combine until Alyx gets there so she can do her computer thing. So depending on how well the person playing Alyx is doing (assuming you are co-oping with buddies instead of playing with the AI) you may have to hold out longer if they are having trouble getting to you.

I would seriously love it if something like this was in the next Half Life game. I came up with the idea as I was thinking about Blue Shift 2 and Opposing Force 2, which I am still waiting on coming out (I can only hope). As BS and OP are both in the same time line as the first actual Half-Life game I thought you know what would be good, is if they took the principle of Half-Life side projects (ie same time line different characters) and added it in to the game making one massive game instead of having a number of smaller games. 

Operation Crowbar

It appears a group of Valve fans have started what they have named 'Operation Crowbar' which involves buying a crowbar and sending it to Valve HQ. A lot of people have resorted to posting pictures of crowbars on the Valves facebook page as well. This is trolling at it's finest. It's just plain funny the random crap people of the internet do these days. At least the guys at Valve will have plenty of crowbars after this.

Steam Daily Wishlist Giveaway

So the guys at Valve are at it again. They are giving you the chance to win the top 10 games in your Steam Wishlist. I could do with 10 new games I hear you all cry apparently though that might be the voices. All you have to do to be entered is simply log in to Steam be it through the desktop client or the website, making sure you have 10 or more games in your Steam Wishlist, then visit the featured daily deal page. Today is Terraria, possibly to coincide with the new patch coming out. I plan on entering every day in hope to be one of ten daily winners.

Half-Life: Origins

I came across this pretty cool fan made video of the start of the first Half-Life game over at Gamerant. It's pretty cool and this trailer has left me wanting to see more, anyway I guess this is as much of a certain Mr Freeman we will be seeing any time soon as we all know Valve like to take their time. Anyway here is the video, check it out.

My top 10 games of all time.

This list is in no particular order, it is just 10 of my favourite games some are newer than others.

Guild Wars

I shall start the list with a MMO under the name of Guild Wars, I believe this game has been the under dog in the MMO market especially compared to the likes of WoW. Yes it does have quite the core fan base. But any casual gamer if they have heard of it and a lot of them will tell you no. The game is getting on a bit now as it was released mid 2000's, 05 if memory serves me correctly as of probably beginning of this year I finally escaped it's grasp on me, yeah I do have a few titles left to grind away at before I can say I have absolutely nothing left to do in game, to be honest I can live with my legacy left behind in the Guild Wars world and until Guild Wars 2 comes out I probably won't be getting back in to it. I have dabbled in a number of other MMO's but Guild Wars was the only one that took hundreds of hours of my life from me. I still to this day don't know why I was so addicted to this game but it does hold a special place in my heart.

Half-Life
The game that started Valves journey in to the hearts of many, many gamers. This game was probably the first game I played that had quite an in depth story behind it. Everything I had played before this game shooter wise, the story was 'There's the bad guy go kill him. Why? Because he's the bad guy.' While I still love those kind of games that essentially just give you a gun and tell you to go nuts, this game changed that. There was a lot of thought effort and time put in to the story, not saying it was the first one to do that of course it was my first story telling shooter game. I am much more of a fan of this game than the sequel. Half-Life 2 I still love that game to bits but there is far to many holes in the gap between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Valve totally could of done other games to fill in the missing pieces. Even if they had done a sequel to Blue Shift and Opposing Force that would have been more than enough game to explain a little more. I still think they should do a Blue Shift 2 with Barney and the events running up to Half-Life 2. You start off and he is undercover with the combine. You could have easily made a game with Barney and his time under cover with the combine, watch him make choices he later regrets so he doesn't blow his cover. I could sit down and come up with many situations you could make a story for a new Blue Shift or Opposing Force game. It has so many missing links you could fill in and you know from Valves huge fan base that people would be all over the games should they be released. I'm gonna stop my little rant there anyway and go play through Half Life up to Episode 2 as soon as I'm done writing this.

Road Rash 2
Now I am going back even further in time to one of the games from my childhood which I used to play the crap out of. Road Rash 2 for my Sega Mega Drive. I loved this game, it's racing motor bikes while trying to beat your opponent with bats and chains what is not to like. My only gripe at this game is the lack of save ability, but that's more at the console than the game it's self. Saying that though if I was able to save my game and beat it, the replay value probably wouldn't be as high as it was. Saving on this game involved leaving the console on with the game paused. All that time spent playing this game just so I could get the best bike available, I believe I got it about 4 times but because it took me so long to save up for it, I never got that used to the bike and crashed a lot due me not being used to the handling and speed of the bike usually ending up in me getting game over.

Final Fantasy IX
That's right Final Fantasy 9 not 7. Not to say 7 isn't a good game but it's not my favourite. I was a little late to jump on the Final Fantasy bandwagon getting into it with the release of the 9th in the series. But it is my favourite of all the Final Fantasy games. I have played it through so many times I could probably sit down and tell you the entire story start to finish.

Burnout Series

Burnout is probably my all time favourite racing game. Probably Burnout 3 being favourite of the lot. It's the most fun you can have crashing cars without being hospital bound.

Deathspank

It is a small(ish) game from developers Hothead Games. I am including all three games as this entry as well. I fricking love Deathspank and his random humour, abuse of orphans and just the generally weird ass hack and slash adventure. If you haven't heard or played any of the Deathspank games, be it the original, Thongs of Virtue or the latest adventure with our random hero, The Baconing. I suggest go invest in one of them, I believe they cost round about a tenner for each game. It's definitely worth the money.

Team Fortress 2

I have been a fan of Team Fortress since the days of TFC, never did play the quake mod though. I have only one gripe again TF2 and believe it or not it's not about hats. It's about how escort maps such as Hunted were never brought along with all the other game modes. For those of you unaware of this map type. Basically one person was a VIP which one team had to protect while getting them to a certain area to win the game while the other team had to assassinate them. I spent more time playing escort maps than any other type. I should really go look see if modders have made custom maps with escort objectives. I realise we have payload which is technically an escort type game but it's not the same. Anyway rant aside, this game is well it's fun as hell whether you enjoy using the variety of weapons available or just using the stock loadouts through one of the many vanilla servers which don't allow anything but stock weapons.

Left 4 Dead

Third entry in my list from Valve. This doesn't really much explanation why it was put in my list. It's killing zombies with your buddies. How can you not like it.

Unreal Tournament

This game was probably the first multiplayer competitive shooter I played. Epic totally need to revive this game and when they do they need to make it just a tournament, no storys like UT3, just pure good old fashion killing the other guy purely for the fact that you want to be better than them. They have Unreal if they want to put a story behind the game, Unreal Tournament should be kept as a Tournment nothing more nothing less. Anyway before I get in to a full blown rant I have to admit this game is fantastic, and whether you pick up the original or any other version of the game it doesn't matter.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge

While this is technically an expansion pack, one which I dub greatest expansion in existence, you can argue with me all you want you will never change my mind on the matter, I believe this game could have easily stood by itself without a problem. This game along with with Unreal Tournament was one of the games that got me into lan gaming, primarily with my brothers, while I haven't been to a lan for ages as it's a lot easier just to play online, I used to love sitting in playing over lans trying to out do one another. Though I hated playing my younger brother as he was always Yuri and made sure he was near enough to both Allied and Soviet bases so he could just send in Yuri to get their construction yard and get the best of each faction. I always swayed away from Yuri and went either Allied or Soviet, had a solid plan for each team though. If I was Allied it was simple as getting a shed load of rocketeers and prism tanks. If I was Soviet I just defended my base until I had a ridiculous amount of Mammoth Tanks, I would go for a minimum of 50, this would be followed by the complete and utter destruction of anything that got in my way, while this massacrer was in progress I would be preparing a second wave of Mammoth Tanks to join them.

Steams Halloween Sale Starts Now

Valve are at it once again and throwing even more discounts at you. I completely forgot Halloween was coming up to be honest, but now through scrolling through all the holiday deals they have which you can find here. I am now nearly £20 worse off than I was this morning. I got Bioshock, Resident Evil 5, The Ghostbusters Game, and  every Painkiller game for I believe it was £17 all of which have been on my list of games to get for awhile now. No doubt Valve will rob me of the contents of my wallet a little more before these holiday deals end on the 1st of November. I just noticed there is a Dead Space bundle for £15 I may have to get that as well while it's going cheap.

Gabe Newell on video game economics.

The mighty Gaben has sat down recently and spoke about 'how Valve experiments with the economics of video games'. There is a full article about it on geekwire here it is quite an interesting read. He talks about about piracy stating;

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market."

At the end of the day piracy isn't going anywhere and excessive DRM doesn't really stop it, if pirates want to crack a game they will getting round the likes of Ubisofts always online DRM for example, leaving pirates with a nice offline version of whatever game they happened to cracked, while genuine punters that may happen to have an unreliable internet connection can't play the game they paid for, which is generally why people dislike Ubisofts DRM. Anyway I don't want to get in to a full blown rant about that so I'll stop before I do. I must admit because of Valve and Steam I have bought a hell of a lot more games than I normally would have purely due to constant deals on games, games that I may or may not would have pirated if it wasn't for that, I mean I don't pirate games that's illegal. Shhh... Nothing to see here, move along people.

Anyway go read the article linked above.

CS:GO at Intel Extreme Masters

Here we have some competitive CS:GO gameplay on an updated version of Dust2 along with some incite in to the game from Chet Faliszek. The map itself hasn't changed all that much, there has been some boxes moved slightly and some scaffolding put up to climb on which I don't remember being there in previous versions of Counter Strike though don't quote me on that. The guns used in this footage seem to vary from the standard mp5, ak, carbine and awp which most people tend to use in CS:S.

Portal 2 summer DLC is not in summer.

Portal 2 was meant to have some DLC coming out over the summer, but anyone that knows Valve at all will realise they always take forever to do stuff, despite that I'm not going to mention a certain Freeman at all in relation to this matter. Anyway we know have an actual date for Portal 2s DLC update, which will be free for everyone. No matter which platform you have you will be able to get this no matter how skint you may or may not be. It's good to see Valve are sticking to their roots and still updating their games free of charge, which is why we all love you, instead of going along with what is seemingly becoming the norm in over priced map packs in the form of downloadable content. But I won't get into a rant about dlc because frankly it will take to long and I really can't be arsed with it to be honest.

Anyway getting to the point of this post, Portals 2 update will be available from the 4th of October and will be named Peer Review. It will have both single and multi player challenge modes. Valve have stated "You and a friend will continue the story of loyal bots P-Body and Atlas as you puzzle your way through a mysterious new co-op test track and once again match wits with GLaDOS.", Which means more co-op campaign missions. This shall be getting marked on the calender and I will be playing the new content as soon as possible.

Gun game is official game mode in new CS:GO

The popular mod for Counter Strike is become an official part of the newest rendition of the game. Valve have named two "new game modes"; Arsenal: Arms Race and Arsenal: Demolition. What these two new modes will entail is yet to be seen, I am guessing 'Arms Race' will be your standard gun game, as for Demolition I am not sure. Anyway these two modes will be accompanied by eight new maps, some screen shots said maps can be found here. Valve have also got the creators of this fun little mod on board to help them along with development as well. A mod of a mod getting backed by a big named company like Valve is quite an achievement those guys, saying that gun game has been immensely popular since it's first incarnation back in the days of the original CS and has been used in other games such as Black Ops, so it does make sense for Valve to do this. I hope they do the same with team death match and possibly surf as well. Whether they do or not these will no doubt be making a reappearance when the game is released.

Free Portal

So the guys at Valve have announced they are giving away free copies of Portal until the 20th of September. So if you don't have it now I suggest you go download it now. This is to do with their 'Learn With Portals' initiative. Along with this offer of yet another free game, they recently had a bunch of 7th graders on a school field trip at Valve HQ, letting them play about with 'Hammer', Valve's level design program. I am very jealous of these kids, not one field trip I went to at school was anything remotely as cool as this. Watching the video makes me want to break out the old Hammer tool and get back into using it again.

Blizzard and Valve Want Console Unity

The two biggest PC game developers Valve and Blizzard want consoles to shed the barrier of who you can play with due to which console you may have, which you can read about here. I think this is a brilliant idea, and why PC developers had to come up with me is just plain ridiculous. I guess Valve are having there say due to their upcoming Counter Strike title that allows cross platform play between pc and playstation users. At the end of the day it would create a bigger and better gaming community and you would be able to play games with friends no matter if you have different consoles or not. Of course there are going to be console exclusives, such as Uncharted and Gears of War. But they idea would be great for games that are released on multi-platforms such as call of duty, battlefield and I'm going to say Counter Strike as this is what started Valves involvement into this issue. I look forward to hearing more about this in the future as it is frankly a spectacular idea, and for companies like Valve and Blizzard to be behind it with their PR status along with the fact they seem to listen to what there customers want, this can only be a good thing.

Cross platform gaming with Steam for CS:GO

As we all know Valve are bringing out a new version of Counter Strike under the name Global Offensive. There is now use of cross platform being implimented between Playstation and PC, with Xbox hopefully joining suit in the near future. The PS version of CS:GO will have keyboard and mouse support, along with Playstation move (although I'm not sure how good/accurate this feature will be but fair play to Valve for using peripheral devices available to them) and of course Dual Shock Controllers, so you can play on PS however you choose.

For years there have been debates over which is better consoles or pcs. Now with Valve implimenting this we will be able to find out. While keyboard and mouse are obviously more accurate than controllers, I do think there will be some guys on PS that will give PC gamers a run for there money. Hopefully Valve can work things out with Microsoft and have Steam over on Xbox as well and we will have fully cross platform compatibility. So you can play against your buddies no matter what platform you happen to play and prefer. I do hope this is a sign of things to come and that we see more cross platform games in the future. Microsoft could (and should of IMO) have started cross platform play with GFWL and XBL. All they had to do really was put in keyboard and mouse support for Xbox, so they at least have the choice of having the same as PC guys, and just chuck a few ports of Xbox games over to Windows. While they did start porting over with the likes of Gears of War, and the first two Halos, which were all (apart from the original Halo I reckon anyway) were quite poor ports of the original Xbox games.  Hopefully Valve and MS will work something out as this would be great to see more games playable with people across all three platforms. We shall see soon enough.

I can see a lot of die hard PC gamers complaining about Valve branching out. I applaude them for forming this bridge between gamers. This imo is the first step to creating a bigger, better and greater gaming community for everyone. A chance for Xbox gamers to play with friends that only have a Playstation or PC and vice versa. And for Valve to be doing this is amazing as they do have great PR and actually listen to what customers want (except hiding away a certain Freeman but that's a completely different story. But everyone knows Valve uses Valve Time and gets things done when they get it done). I can see this making us a little more competitive and can prove once and for all who is better, Consolers or PC gamers.

Happy Birthday Team Fortress.

So Team Fortress turns 15 today. For the next 24 hours, if you play TF2 you will get a free party hat (more hats yay...), A free noisemaker (which will probably be annoying as hell) that have unlimited uses on TF's birthday and can only be used each year on that day! Free cake and gifts (in the form of remodeled health kits and ammo packs)!

You will also see some birthday items of previous years including: a TF birthday beach ball and the Celebration Gib, which causes gibbed players to explode in a shower of balloons and confetti (which sounds pretty cool)

I never have been about for any of Team Fortress's birthdays so I think I may go for a couple games of 2fort and get my free hat. Also I haven't played any TF for a week or 3 so it's a good enough excuse.