If you go on Twitter, where every second image is of a dog being cuddled, rated, or dressed up as a Star Wars character, it’s a reasonable assumption that every> year is the year of the dog – however Valve, not to mention the ancient Chinese zodiac, are here to tell you that’s not the case. As of today, it legitimately is> the year of the dog, which is why Valve’s latest sale is adorned with images of famous game pups including Okami’s Amaterasu, Half-Life 2’s DOG, and I, er, don’t recognise any of the other doggos.

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It has been a trying week, pleasure seekers (Okay, we’re not using that one again – Ed>). A lovely weekend in Wales did not prepare me for a week of kafkaesque negotiating with my PC and router and whatever transdimensional demons were squatting in between them. And of course, this week everyone agreed to stop releasing tiny platformers made in Paint in favour of 5Gb monstrosities. Confound those indie rascals.

Fortunately, they also released a fine crop of clever and intuitive games, easily grasped but with that tantalising complexity that makes Unknown Pleasures such a joy.

Restoring my patience this week: roaming dwarves, irradiated artifact hunters, and extremely aggressive feng shui. (more…)

Overwhelming though Steam’s catalogue may be, it can be a hell of a tool for testing your assumptions. I pitch this to nobody in particular: a free week of everything on Steam. Not just one or two games, but the whole lot, free to everyone. Play something you’d normally hate, I say. See also: food, music, relationships.

Anyway. In the meantime, there’s always Unknown Pleasures.

Anchoring an unlikely flight of fantasy this week: globular gladiators, treacherous tycoons, and regicidal revenants.

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Oh here we go. Now it’s Christmas. Some judge the season by when their advent calendar starts (December 1st), by when their kids wake them up screaming at stockings (5am), or by when the shops start selling chocolate coins (August or summat), and some don’t consider it Christmas until someone on the night bus belts out “FIVE! GOLD! RINGS!” (every day, if we’re lucky). Some even go by the Steam winter sale. That has just started, so jingle those bells and scoff some roasties. The sale is huge but we have picked out a few games ourselves if you want recommendations. (more…)

Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly round-up of hidden gems released with little-to-no fanfare on Steam over the past seven days.

This week: cowboy vs space-whale, voxel swordplay, deft Gameboy throwback and 6 degrees of freedom space-racing. (more…)

The latest Steam client update introduces a feature aiming to stop the longer load times and framerate stuttering that can happen the first few times you load a game after installing it. It’ll do this by trying to download and pre-cache the game’s shaders, part of their technoguts which your own computer can need to compile when you first launch it. That compilation is what can cause the hold-up. This doesn’t affect every game and isn’t a huge problem but hey, anything that makes getting into a game smoother is welcome. You shouldn’t need to do anything to benefit from this.

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Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly* search for five splendid but under-reported new games released on Steam over the past seven days.

This week: firelight survival, bootleg Podracing, Mario vs Super Crate Box, monkey-free Monkey Ball and lava lamp simulation. (more…)

Black Friday-Smiday, this weekend’s all about the Steam Autumn sale, don’t you know? Yep, it’s that time of year again when we all spend way too much on games we’ll probably never play, but hey, at least we got a good saving in the process.

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Valve are making more changes to Steam reviews in response to a different kind of review manipulation. This time the changes are to how Steam decides which user reviews are most helpful, and to make the user reviews that are displayed on Steam’s homepage representative of its overall review score. This is on top of changes made back in September designed to reduce the impact of organised “review bombing” campaigns.

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