The well-meaning earnestness and awesome gaminess of the Humble Indie Bundle IV are being exploited by evil internet users who would probably sell their own grans to be in with a chance of winning the latest Steam competition.

According to the Humble Indie Bundle blog, distinctly un-humble buyers are using the Steam codes from the Humble Indie Bundle to legitimise throwaway Steam accounts created specifically to enter Valve’s current raffle. “It’s a lose-lose situation for the indie developers, charities, Valve, and Humble Bundle,” says the blog.

To combat this, the minimum you’ll have to spend in order to get Steam keys in your Bundle is $1, instead of 1 cent. If the Scrooges among you can’t afford the $1 minimum you can contact the Humble Indie guys and they’ll send you the Steam keys - if you promise not to resell them or otherwise abuse them.

The incessant, nauseating loop of Band Aid on the radio and tear-jerking ads for homeless dogs on the telly are there to remind us that Christmas isn’t just about being drunk for a whole day, but that it’s also about donating to charities and hard-up indie game developers. Let's just hope the Humble Indie guys don't lose faith in the goodness of humanity.

It's Christmas on Sunday! That means we can expect lots of Christmas events to start appearing in our favourite games. Terraria proves that you don't need the third dimension to get into the Xmas spirit. From now until December 25 newly generated worlds will contain new snow biomes. You'll be able to make houses out of candy, add festive Christmas lights and engage in the traditional Yuletide pastime of smashing a snow globe to summon an army of evil snowmen wielding Tommy guns. What, what?

The snowman army works a bit like the goblin army. They will attack from the East or the West once you've smashed the snow globe. Snow Balla types will throw snowballs, Snowman Gangstas will bring Tommy guns and Mister Stabby jump towards you with a shiv. If you defeat the snowman army, there's a chance that Santa Claus will move into your house. Christmas is weird in Terraria.

The update also makes some bug fixes and performance improvements, and fixes overly sadistic clowns. Check out the patch notes below for an overview, originally posted by Re-Logic on the Terraria Forums.

Bug Fixes / Performance

Reduced the amount of RAM needed to run Terraria.
Added an option to turn backgrounds off.
Improved the automatic game quality adjuster.
Lighting update won’t skip as much on lower quality levels.
Items dropped on death for hardcore and mediumcore characters will retain their conditions.
Space Gun now has a value.
Water Bolt can now have conditions.
Diving Helmet now works correctly.
Walls now correctly show behind Glass Blocks.
You can now untie bound NPC’s with Autopause enabled.
Mediumcore and hardcore players will drop their cursor item on death.
Coins held on the cursor will correctly be dropped on death.
Dryad’s Corruption and Hallow status numbers are correct.
Wyverns are less common and will be less likely to spawn near the ground.
Mana Flower's price has been increased.
Fixed the shadow glitch of trippy lighting.
Music Boxes no longer dupe when placed on platforms.
Fixed an issue that caused stacked coins to go missing from chests during multiplayer.
Cursed Torch item now emits light in water.
Harpoon can now be reforged.
Lighting will now be set to Retro instead of crashing if Terraria is unable to switch to the new lighting mode.
Keybindings will no longer sometimes be set to "None" automatically.
Bombs thrown by clowns will now show that the wall has been destroyed in multiplayer.
Crystal Shards now give off light in retro and white color mode.
Hallowed Armor only has graphical effects with the helmet.
Players now have hair under their hats.
Statues no longer turn into Armor Statues when they are smashed from the top.
Clowns only throw bombs when their target is alive.

 
Items

Added Candy Cane Blocks & Walls.
Added Green Candy Cane Blocks & Walls.
Added Snow Blocks.
Added Snow Bricks & Walls.
Added Red, Green, and Blue Lights.
Added Presents that are dropped by monsters during the holiday season.
Added Snow Globe.
Added Santa’s Outfit.

 
NPC’s

Added Snowman Gangsta.
Added Mister Stabby.
Added Snow Balla.
Added Santa Claus.

 
World

Snow biomes will always be created during world gen during the holiday season. There is a 1 in 3 chance for snow biomes to be created during world gen during the rest of the year.

 

Humble Bundle 4 has made as much money in a day as Humble Bundle 3 did in a week. The total payments sum is shown live on the Humble Indie Bundle 4 front page (currently $1,261,341 and counting). The folks behind the bundle tell us that it took the last sale seven days to reach similar figures, adding that Humble Bundle customers have donated more than $3 million to charity in total so far.

The Humble Indie Bundle 4 is the most tempting bundle yet. You can pay anything for Super Meat Boy, Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, Shank and NightSky. If you pay more than the average donation (currently $5.36), you get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+. If the bundle keeps selling at this rate, it could hit the $14 million mark when it ends in 12 days time. Humble Bundle organiser Richard Esguerra is understandably quite pleased. "We're thrilled to see the gaming community respond so enthusiastically to this bundle, which has been about half a year in the making," he says.

After peeking out from behind Steam's registry files earlier today, Humble Indie Bundle 4 has made its official debut. And yes, it's everything you hoped for. I mean, if this is what happens when the Bundle Wars heat up, I'm all for it.

To start off, there's Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, Super Meat Boy, Shank, and NightSky. I know, I know. Your piggy bank just let out a frightened squeal and then exploded. But there's more. If you beat the average price, the masters of the not-so-ancient art of indie bundling will throw in Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles. As of now, said average is just a spec over $5.00. So yes, take your piggy bank's charred ashes and make with the spending.

Some inquisitive fellows on NeoGaf have been raiding the Steam content registry for clues, and seem to have come across some entries suggesting that that Alan Wake may be heading to PC.

In further support of the Alan Wake PC release rumours, Just Push Start spotted an interview on Finnish site YLEX in which Aki Järvilehto from Remedy said "we have received feedback from a lot of PC gamers, and I have to admit that yes, we somehow ignored that. Let’s see if in the near future we could have some positive news to tell you about dating!" We love positive news about dating!

Way back in 2006, Alan Wake was the poster boy for Intel's Core 2 Duo CPU, and was regularly demoed on PC to show off its multi-threading tech. Then, all of a sudden, it became an Xbox 360 exclusive, and the PC version vanished. As a PC version was worked on heavily in the run up to its release, it theoretically shouldn't be too hard to resurrect it for a Steam release. It'd coincide nicely with the downloadable Alan Wake follow up story, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which is heading to the Xbox 360 early next year.

It's not just Alan Wake haunting the Steam registry files. DIY Gamer have spotted evidence of a very tasty new Humble Bundle. The registry entry suggests that a new bundle may include Super Meat Boy, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Jamestown, Nightsky and Shank as a starting lineup, with Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+ to be added after the bundle has kicked off. If accurate, that's a fantastic collection. How much would you pay for that bundle, and would you like to see Alan Wake come to Steam?

http://youtu.be/XxPg1YeXE2E

Ridiculously pretty co-op platformer, Trine 2 will be hitting Steam tomorrow. The standard edition will cost £11.99 / $14.99 , and there's also a digital special edition. It comes with a digital art book and the soundtrack and will set you back £17.99 / $24.99 USD. If you pre-order them now, you'll get two bonus Team Fortress 2 items, a wizard hat and a spiky "War Head" helmet to "protect your thought-horde from dragons, sorcery, and other make-believe dangers."

Trine 2 can be played solo, but if it's anything like the original, it'll be much, much more fun in co-op. The three playable archetypes, wizard, warrior and thief have different specialities, and must muddle through the fights and physics puzzles with hastily improvised solutions, many of which would involve the warrior throwing the wizard around while the thief casually grapples past all danger. A new online co-op more will make it easier to play with friends as well. It looks stunning, too. Just check out these Trine 2 screenshots. You'll find a picture of the bonus TF2 items just below.

The picture above is an image from Steamgraph showing the player stats for Modern Warfare 3 and Terraria. Terraria is shown in yellow, Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer is in blue and Modern Warfare 3 singleplayer is in red. As you can see, it's been neck and neck since December 1. That's when the huge Terraria 1.1 update landed, adding new items, monsters, bosses and biomes.

The stats were helped along by a Terraria sale last week, but it's heartening to see a fantastic indie game matching the multimillion dollar shooter. Terraria and Call have Duty have been trading places in the top five most played Steam games over the last week. Skyrim remains firmly at the top, with 148,921 players at peak times today.

If you're interested in picking up Terraria , check out our Terraria review, and the many improvements made since then in the 1.1 update. If you've just bought it, check out our Terraria beginner's guide for some early pointers, like how to survive the night without getting killed by a flying evil eyeball.

Terraria is really, really cheap on Steam for another few hours, which is good news because Terraria's great. Check out our Terraria review to find out why. It just received a huge 1.1 update adding new monsters, weapons, accessories and a hard mode. It's available on Steam for just £1.50 / $2.50, a quarter of its normal price. Before you get started, check out our Terraria Beginner's Guide. It'll give you a few useful pointers to help you survive your first few hours, including instructions on how to build your first home.

Terraria's also part of Steam's new Daily Wishlist Giveaway. If you have a set of ten games in your wishlist you'll be entered into a draw to win them just by clicking on the Steam Terraria page, so make sure you're logged into Steam while checking out the deal.

http://youtu.be/Azq5IOrFtEI

Terraria 1.1 will be released on December 1, according to a post from the developers on the Terraria forums. The huge update will add 39 new monsters, four new bosses (including a hideous Wall of Flesh), three NPCs, 222 items, four armour sets and 21 accessories.

Re-logic haven't revealed too much information, preferring to let players discover the new items and bosses for themselves when the update hits. They do say that there's a new hard mode activated by "taking revenge" on The Guide NPC in hell. You'll then have to "destroy a giant creature made out of left over body parts that pukes up worms and shoot lasers out of it's eyes" to unlock the new challenges and harder enemies. "You will probably die. A lot" warns Redigit on the Terraria forums.

The patch will also improve the world generation tech, improve the lighting system and, judging from the trailer, add great big rainbows to the backgrounds. A useful NPC interface will let you see what items you need to keep your village's inhabitants happy, and there will even be pumps that will let you move liquid about. We're already planning lava moats for the PC Gamer castle.

Randomised bonus effects will be added to weapons and accessories (these can be changed by getting a new NPC to reforge the item) and you'll be able to customise your homestead with banners and windows. There will be some new unique items as well, including something called the "Unreal Megashark," which looks like a machine gun hidden inside the body of a shark. Terraria may have gone a bit mad.

Once 1.1 has landed, Terraria players will then be able to look forward to a Christmas update on December 15. Terraria's come a long way since it was released back in May. We'll definitely be jumping back in when the update hits.

The Steam sale is doing a good job of expanding our game collections, but what about our ears? They need entertainment too. The Indie Game Music Bundle is here to help. You can pay what you want above a dollar for the collection, which includes sountracks from ten games, including Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV and Cobalt, from artists like C418, Souleye, danny B, Jake "virt" Kaufman. Find the full list below, with links to each album page, where you can listen to samples of many of the tracks on offfer.

The Indie Game Music Bundle includes:

Minecraft
Cobalt
Super Meat Boy
Impostor Nostalgia
Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion
A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda
Return all Robots!
Mighty Milky Way / Mighty Flip Champs
VVVVVV
Tree of Knowledge

 
The deal is available "for one day only," so grab it soon if you're interested.