I have a jar of ball bearings on my desk. For each kill in CS: GO, I drop a ball into a hole in desk. The bearing rolls into a rat’s cage. The rat squeaks in terror, and a noise-activated switch turns on a fan. The fan blows a toy boat across a bucket of water, and the boat’s mast tips a small bucket of sand into another bucket. That bucket is on a string that’s tied to a switch, and it gently tugs at it, releasing another ball bearing from a small cage on a shelf above me. That other ball bearing drops into another jar. If I want to know how many kills I have, I count the balls in the jar. How do you track your kills in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive? You just use one of the StatTrak modules from the now live Arms Deal update? Show off. (more…)

I have a recurring nightmare: I’m sat at my desk and everything is soft-focus and great. I feel happy, and turn to say as much to my girlfriend. But she’s not there. It’s Gabe Newell, who is definitely not my girlfriend, and he’s using one of those old school accounting machines. On the floor is a pile of paper that he gathers up and hands to me, saying: “In Half-Life 2, destroyed 1200 crates. This is your bill.” And I say I don’t have that kind of money, then I wake up crying. I don’t think Valve would retroactively charge me for opening crates, but then I didn’t imagine that their strangely popular unlock system that drives both Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 would end up in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. But that looks like it’s going to happen. (more…)

3761 AD. Seattle. A line of tourists is snaking around a wrecked skyscraper. If we listen closely, we can hear their guide: “… this is the cupboard where they found the ‘test heads’, and this is where they arrested Robin “Mad Hatter” Walker, who admitted to 243402 counts of decapitation. That’s the rebuilt Dota 2 annex. The war where the Dota 2 team attempted to secede from the union in 2103 caused a brief civil war, but it turned out their tactics when applied to a real world conflict just got them all killed. We don’t know what this place was: a cupboard where we found the skeleton and a crowbar. Just a handyman, maybe? Moving on to one of the more remarkable finds: a PC that was found in the rubble, still running a copy of Alien Swarm. And beside it was this Steam Greenlight page for a mod that turned it into a first-person shooter. What was Greenli…” (more…)

People of a certain age (oh, alright: old people) will remember Sven Coo-op. It was probably the first action co-op game I played, back when my monitor had a degauss button. I degaussed the hell out of that boxy beauty. It brought co-op to Half-Life and its various mods. It was party co-op, though. Piles of players, bizarre maps, everyone having a good time. Well [record scratch] that good time is now OVER. The mod is now no more, shutting down after 14 year of development. Version 4.8 adds Blue Shift compatibility, but it’ll be the last mod version. [pause for sad news to take effect] Come back here! It’s not going away: Sven Co-op will be reborn as a free, standalone game on Steam, allowing everyone to play Valve’s ancient single-player classic with friends, even if they don’t own it. (more…)

Steam’s summer sale is happening as we speak! Isn’t that exciting? This webpage tells me it’s exciting, and it’s probably the greatest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. And of course, with Steam sales come innumerable guides, because your IQ is just a picture of a confused sloth and you need to be told which things to buy. But goodness gracious, there are so many. What ever will you do? How will you cope? Why, by reading my definitive, all-encompassing hyperguide, naturally. It’s scientifically proven to be 127 percent guidier than all other guides. Do you have questions? Well then, I have answers. But only to really specific questions that I wrote.>

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My Team Fortress 2 addiction, which is now mostly in hand thanks for asking, used to be fueled by Valve’s updates. The magnificent teases that they were, they’d hold my attention with week-long pieces of performance art. The mighty clang when everything finally dropped and was unwrapped was the best thing ever. Now, with the community contributions happening in plain sight in the Workshop, that seems to be lost. We know what’s going to be in the game, and Valve have said things will be added more swiftly. So we’ve probably seen the end of things like the Spy uncloaking during the Sniper reveal. The latest, even with two new maps and over 60 new community addons, arrived instead with a quiet thump. And another. And another. Wait, that’s my heart… (more…)

Get ready to empty your bank accounts into the chasms of Valve’s gold stores, because their Big One has started, and is going to last 11 days. So much so that the website is a bit hit and miss at the time of writing. The in-Steam version seems to still be working right now, however, and is currently offering the usual collection of very slashed prices. This time with their new trading card gubbins throughout, whatever they are.

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We live in strange times. Food chains are trying to poison us, we can probably save lives by putting heads on dead people’s bodies, and games can corral a million-gajillion players without ever being “released”. Madness. Nothing makes sense anymore. Civilization has been replaced by a steaming crater of contradiction. And while those first two things have much further-reaching, highly disturbing implications, this is a videogame site so let’s talk about the last one. DOTA 2‘s beta ran for two years>. During that time, it dominated all lanes of Steam’s most-played list because people like MOBAs a little bit maybe. But now – finally, amazingly – Valve Time has aligned with Real Time for a brief, shining moment. DOTA 2 is out. Oh, but you might still have to wait if you want to actually play. Why? Because – as I said earlier - nothing makes sense anymore>.

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In my day, kids used to actually play videogames, you know. Now they just sit around watching other people play them. Disgraceful, it is. They’ll never develop life-long RSI and lower back problems that way. They’ll probably still get the limited attention span thing, of course.

It’s going to get even worse now that Twitch, market leader of such inactivity, has officially gotten into bed with Steam, market leader of selling the games that people gawp at on Twitch. Now those kids don’t even have to load up two seperate services. They can just sit there, staring at the same webpage forever. Down the mines with them all, I say. (more…)

As I browsed through the list of new releases on Steam this morning, a blaring midi tune began to belch its way into my brain. The screen flashed – a random encounter! Final Fantasy VII had unexpectedly appeared, a comically large sword thrusting from the screen and carrying with it promises of a seemingly endless slog through a bloated story with precisely one memorable scene. Yes, you know the one, when Aerith reveals that she’s actually a robot the gang of heroes clamber up what seems like a hundred identical stairwells, quipping in blocks of blue text that do not appreciate the value of comic timing.

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