Here’s Gabe Newell’s Pioneer award acceptance speech. One of the best parts is when he touches on the subject of DRM. Considering the state of PC gaming this year, you have to wonder if he’s the only guy that actually knows how to properly sell a game to a client.
Yeah, there’s a secret message in there, gist of it is “SUSPEND UNTIL EEE”, meaning more interesting Valve stuff is gonna be at E3.
New TF2 blog post, this time answering a few questions about the Mac version of TF2. Gotta love their tone.
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.
In other news, CEVO season 5 starts next week, and registrations close on Sunday. More info on this here.
Portal 2 is officially confirmed. It’ll also have co-op. More coverage here. You can almost feel the excitement violently emanating from me.
New TF2 blog post discussing one engineer unlock Valve has been thinking of. Truly, the engie is very hard to balance or modify without breaking something else severely.
Portal got updated again, this time with “Added valuable asset retrieval” being the only change. Goes without saying the steam forums are already looking into this incessantly. Edit: One hour later, a new endgame sequence.
Valve is also not so subtly hinting at the steam platform coming to the Mac. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but some ads seem to poke fun at the Mac’s shortcomings.
Valve updated Portal a few moments ago with this cryptic line being the sole change.
Portal
- Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations
Don’t ask me what this means, but there’s a new achievement for the game, and Steamforums posters are already all over this. For now all we know is that there’s rumors of a radio in each chamber, and they play different messages, in morse code or whatever. As an European, I can’t check it out, as Valve updates always come at the darnedest times.
Tags: achievement, hype, portal, valve
So you wake up one day and you find out your Steam friends list has been deleted. Something must’ve happened in the Valve offices, probably someone falling onto a server. I’m not going to make any more fat jokes on this subject for fear of HL2:Ep3 being delayed even more, so let’s talk about that new TF2 update.
You know that spot in 2fort on the Blu battlements where there’s a tiny tiny slit you can see through under the corrugated iron? Yeah, it’s gone. Doublecross got clipbrushed even more now so you can scratch your head and wonder why the crap you can’t rocketjump to that perfectly accessible spot. And flares can be reflected by the pyro yet again. Oh, who am I kidding, the only interesting thing going on on Steam right now is everyone complaining about their friends list!
Not harboring any ill will towards anyone, but I kind of enjoyed all the drama created by the friends fuck-up. Meanwhile, I’ll be playing Bad Company 2. If you’re played Battlefield 2/2142, I strongly suggest checking it out. You won’t regret it if you’ve had fun with those two games.
Edit: Well, logged on this morning, everything’s back to normal on Steam. Also, a beta.
So whoever’s been waiting for that new expansion just so they could play with the original cast will be disappointed. The old cast is appearing in The Passing only as non-player characters. On the other hand, L4D1 will receive an expansion later on that ties in with the new L4D2 expansion. Derp.
Also, I’ll be updating the site from now on with other gaming news I find interesting. Source/Valve may be a fun subject but they don’t throw out good news that frequently, and since the editors I don’t pay stopped writing, I’m going to try to bring content here more often.
Edit: I’ll also be trying a few new things with the ads, if something does happen and you get bombarded with really annoying ads, please contact me.
A new version of Pirates, Vikings and Knights is out, and you’ve got no reason to just sit there and not play it. I mean, there’s Pirates, there’s Knights, there’s Vikings too, there’s a ton of fun game modes which are made even better thanks to the asymmetric teams, the melee system is actually done right (there’s no wussy autoaim stun bullshit ala AVP3), and the maps are great. I don’t know if it’s still in, but I remember having tons of TDM fun in an ancient mayan looking ruin filled with traps and dangers.
And to top it off, it’s also free. Get downloading ye scurvy dog.
Not much to comment here. The runner-up entries have been posted, and there’s a rumor going around that a couple of entries weren’t exactly created by the submitters.
EDIT: Yeah, not much of a rumor, as the comments say. TF2’s also been updated to work with the steamcloud, but other than that, the patch doesn’t offer any new gameplay changes.
A few things:
First, on the blog, Valve has created two exciting new posts. The first gives the numbers for the top 20 cheaters in the Soldier-Demo war. As they point out, one spectacular player managed to score a soldier kill every 2.7 seconds. No way he was cheating, right?
The second post contains all the propaganda contest runners-up. Wow, are there a LOT. Many of those would make great sprays. Make sure you have a bit of time to read them, because there are WAY more than I thought there were.
I also want to point everyone toward tf2lobby.com, a new site for forming pug (pick-up-game) groups. It’s set up primarily for 6v6 matches, though it also supports highlander (9v9 with one of each class). Players register, set up and join lobbies, and the site launches your game and automatically connects you to the server. Really awesome, and much easier to use than any previous form of pug set-up. If you have been thinking about competitive play but don’t know where to start, GO THERE. It’s great.
Tags: blog, competitive, tf2
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