I had all the characteristics of a blogger frayed jeans, opinions, laptop, tea but my depersonalisation was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to compile charts had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating top ten articles, a rough resemblance of a best-sellers list, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

And yet. … [visit site to read more]

Marc Laidlaw posted a fascinating blog entry from a younger version of Laidlaw about the development of Half-Life from the narrative perspective. By “a younger version” I mean that it comes from his own hand but via a file timestamped the day after Half-Life was shipped and is thus far closer to the game’s… ground zero? than the Laidlaw of now.

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A non-major but still interesting Dota 2 [official site] patch has dropped. 6.88e is all about tweaks, as you’d expect from a patch with a letter on the end of it, rather than one which heralds a whole jump forward in numbering. The reason it’s interesting is more that it gives me a chance to talk about a thought related to patches and living games like Dota 2.

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I’m trying to think who it could be. I don’t really have enemies any more, or not knowingly so. Some forgotten bully from school who never left our hometown and is still obsessed with tormenting me? A fellow journalist whose article I might have drunkenly tweeted something rude about in 2009? Someone I unfollowed or unfriended because they were tiresome or awful? You Know, Those Guys? Or: all of them, working together. Pooling their life savings to buy as many copies of a certain game as they can. Make no mistake: someone’s out to get me. It’s the only possible explanation.

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This is some kind of sick joke, isn’t it?

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Meer stared at himself in the mirror. Was he really a man anymore? Or was he just a machine made of meat that endlessly pasted the same handful of game-names into a CMS post, week after week until he died?

Or was he dead already? Was this hell? Yes, that must be it. What else could writing “a href=”https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/Grand-Theft-Auto-V” for an eternity possibly be?

Yet still, there was faint hope in those dim, anguished eyes. Hope that one day there might be new games, new hyperlinks, new opinions> to be expressed. One day. But not today. … [visit site to read more]

Cos this stuff comes up in comments most every time I run one of these: these charts depict the top ten best-selling games on Steam as accumulated over the week leading up to Sunday just gone. They are not what are the top ten best-selling games at this moment in time, as seen on the front-page of Steam and which are invariably a little different. They come from this here Valve RSS feed. If there is any massaging of figures or weighing of e.g. revenue earned vs copies sold then I do not know of it, but neither can I say for certain that there is not. This is, however, pretty much all that Steam ever lets slip about what’s going on, though you can look to the guesstimates on Steam Spy if you want to try and drill down further into actual figures.

So: Steam’s ten biggest games last week. Well, nine and a half. Deus Ex has been dethroned already.

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I am ill today. It’s my guts, you see. My Goddamned guts>. Despite my imminent death by a thousand craps, I am duty-bound to bring you the regular round-up of what sold best on Steam last week. Think of me, won’t you, as you wonder how many humans who don’t yet own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive there can possibly be in the world, and lament the total absence this week of anything we might traditionally deem to be ‘indie.’ … [visit site to read more]

A rash of hacks in the past two months has left the usernames, emails and passwords from at least twelve gaming forums compromised, including those of Unreal creator Epic Games and Secret World developer Funcom. Other breaches include a GTA fansite and, as previously reported, the official forums of Dota 2. All the attacks involved an exploit in the forum’s software, which the hackers used to hoover up details of members. And while the passwords are encrypted, they can often be easily cracked. In total, over 9 million user accounts have had their details stolen.

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Happy 20th birthday, Valve! Yesterday. Happy 20th yesterday. Sorry, I only just saw the Facebook notification. On August 24th, 1996, ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington made a beautiful baby who was mighty eye-opening.

In the dreamy game of “What if…?” one curious hypothetical is: what if Valve never existed? There can’t be many companies who’ve had nearly as much impact. Steam (eventually) revolutionised digital distribution, changing the entire landscape of PC gaming. Half-Life was seminal; its mod scene was legendary. That’d be plenty, but Valve have made a load of other really good video games too.

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