Like somewhat rusty clockwork, the not entirely predictable Steam Greenlight machine has whirred to life again – granting the wishes of hopeful developers who dared perform the dark rituals needed to invoke its promotional might. This time around, 13 games made the cut, and – as is becoming a happy trend – it’s a fairly diverse selection. Well-ish known standouts include Waking Mars, Primordia, and StarForge. Oh, also, there’s productivity software this time too, so thrill> to that. (How does one thrill to something? I’ve never understood that phrase.)

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Headup Games are trying an interesting tactic to get more Steam Greenlight up votes for their game, Bridge Constructor: they’re giving it away for free. Expressing their frustration at not getting into the Greenlight top 100, the company have suggested that people might like to vote them up in exchange for getting the game entirely for no pennies (and DRM free). It’s a bold and brave move, and you can see from it just how important getting on to Steam is for companies like Headup, that they’ll give their product away to Greenlight voters in order to get noticed. It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone else employs similar tactics to get those vital upvotes as competition hots up.

After all, Steam is continuing to grow as a market, and recent peaked with six million concurrent users over Thanksgiving weekend. PC Gaming/Dead, etc.

You’d think I would’ve figured this out by now. Every year, Steam hosts one of its wallet-eviscerating sales right around American Thanksgiving (or, as it’s known to many of you, Thursday), yet I consistently fail to budget the necessary amounts of money or time for its incredible bounties. One reason for this might be that it’s impossible>. Indeed, it would require setting aside all the money in the world and forever, respectively, and I don’t have either of those things. Alas. But good gravy, these are – as ever – some terrifyingly enticing deals. Can you say Darksiders II for 66 percent off? How about Walking Dead at 50 percent? Anybody want to give me a loan? And, er, immortality?

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I have to say, I appreciate games that let us know what they’re all about upfront. These days, the industry revels in adding subtitles to subtitles, but there’s something to be said for simplicity, grace, and handsome elegance. That in mind, DEATH RALLY. It’s a rally in which everyone dies. Constantly. Beautiful. It is, of course, a remake of Remedy’s top-down classic with a new paint job and a few tweaks under the hood, which probably explains why it’s not called, say, Race Carr’s Armenian Fastdrive. Also, it’s free this weekend. Huzzah!

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With the announcement of Steam’s expansion to the Linux platform, lots of aspects have been highlighted as possibly significant. It could be a strike against Microsoft and their desktop-unfriendly Windows 8. It could be a movement away from closed source systems. It could be a strike against DRM. Or it could be the infestation of GNU/Linux with DRM. But one thing you don’t see often mentioned is the matter of drivers. Because, well, they’re boring – right? But it seems Nvidia have made a big improvement to the ones they offer hungry penguins today.

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By way of careful study and hundreds of hours of naturalistic observation, I’ve ascertained that some PC gamers actually don’t> like Windows 8 all that much. Which – in retrospect – seems like a pretty tremendous waste of my time, because it was punch-me-in-the-eyeball obvious all along. But while everyone else becomes vocally enraged, outraged, and other directions of rage, Valve’s actually trying to do something about it. The king of swing (and also PC gaming) is pushing to build Linux into a viable gaming platform with Steam for Linux, and now, it’s taken the oh-so-crucial step of, you know, letting said masses use it.

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Given that you’ve paddled your browser over to this isle of the vast Internet ocean, I feel fairly safe in assuming that you’re a PC gamer. Therefore, you have – presumably, in some form or another – played Counter-Strike at some point in your life. But maybe that was back in ye olde futureyear of 2000, or perhaps you gave Source a go around the time Half-Life 2 came out. So along comes this newfangled “Global Offensive” thingamawhatsit, and naturally, you’re suspicious. I mean, what if they replaced all the guns with bottles of Mountain Dew? Or maybe Valve turned the series into a piece of postmodernist art, with us taking the role of a deeply contemplative bomb forced to witness the futile conflicts of man. These are very legitimate concerns, but this weekend, you can find out whether or not they hold any water. For free!

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That right there? That’s Sir Buttersworth. His hobbies include savoring life’s most delicate fineries and single-handedly justifying the existence of Serious Sam 3‘s Steam Workshop support. Oh, and loping ever onward – to almost completely certain death – in dim hope of truly understanding> that most top-hat-less of Others, Serious Sam. Can’t forget that. But he is not alone, neither in that indirectly suicidal pursuit nor his presence on Steam Workshop. Sam’s only just arrived on Valve’s mod-friendly service, but his page is already impressively populated.

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By my estimate, there are 327 billion videogame Halloween events, but they all tend to share a couple commonalities between them: 1) they do the bulk of their grim work before or on Halloween, and 2) many of them sorta aren’t very interesting. DOTA 2, though, has dumped out its pumpkin pale to reveal an entire new mode, complete with its own mysteeeeeerious> metagame. Meanwhile, it’s keeping the festivities going until… well, nobody’s really sure. That said, the new items expire on November 12th, so draw your own conclusions. For now, though, let us not worry about that. Instead, let’s turn our doting gazes on poor, malnourished ancient terror Roshan. He lurks beneath the break, million-year-old maw glistening with unquenchable candy lust. Awwww. I kind of want to give him a hug.

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They Bleed Pixels is in the Steam Halloween Sale, which we’ve already drawn your glowing Jack o’ Lantern eyes too, but since we didn’t have a great deal to say about the platformer at release, I thought I’d write a few words about its macabre delights here. Despite featuring fiendish platforming and blood-stained levels, it all plays out more like N fused with a beat ‘em up than Super Meat Boy. I’ve only played a few levels and haven’t seen the new Halloween content, but it’s discounted to £2.37 until November 1st and if you’re craving a devilishly difficult game in which spikes are actually your friends, do consider these dripping pixels. Trailer below.

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