If there’s one downside of having an SSD as your main hard drive, it’s that you find yourself aggressively removing any and all games you’re not convinced you’ll play any time soon. And so it is that I have no Source-powered games on my PC right now, and need to sit through a 5GB SDK download just to play this 200MB mod. While I wait, I’ll show you what it is I’m waiting for – Water is a mini HL2 mod about a singing Mermaid with magic powers who isn’t wearing a shirt. No Jamaican lobsters and crying here though: this puzzle-blessed action-adventure makes fish-people all grimdark, by the look of things. (more…)

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 3 of 7.>

Of everyone I spoke to, Magnar Jenssen is the only one still actively working in the game industry as a level designer at Avalanche Studios. Before, he also worked on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) and Bionic Commando at GRIN, up until the studio’s demise. When he isn’t raking in all that sweet map-stamp money from arena_offblast for Team Fortress 2, he tinkers with some less profitable but absurdly polished single player Half-Life 2 mods.

(more…)

The open-ish beta for Valve’s action-RTS remake Dota 2 is apparently impending, with a clutch of far’n'wide folk last night mailed a link to a survey intended to assess your level of experience with the multiplayer-only title. I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t complete it myself, such is my inexperience with these things – I put a fair bit of time into Demigod, but only really in singleplayer, and my one experience with a Dota game was a shower of incompetence. Keep meaning to check out League of Legends and see what the fuss is about, though.

If, unlike me, you are not entirely ignorant in such matters and thus can easily answer questions such as “Please estimate your average total gold earned in a DOTA match”, then set Steam running then click on this link. If that doesn’t work, hit Run from your Windows Start menu, paste the link in, hit enter and you should be presented with the questionnaire.

See that screen there? The screencap of one of Valve’s cute little cartoon instructional videos for Portal 2? Yeah, that’s not a frame from one of those adverts, that’s actually what the new Portal 2 level designer will look like. At least, according to the latest blog post on the Portal 2 website, which also [...]

Team Fortress 2′s sinewy neck of content has been slashed open once more, pumping forth a bloody torrent of hats and features. It’s the third annual Halloween update, and it brings full-body costumes for every class (including a fantastic “teleporter gone wrong” Brundlefly for the Engineer), an update for classic King of the Hill map [...]

While Valve prepare to release their Team Fortress 2 Halloween update, the mod community have been highlighting some of the most bone-chilling, spine-tingling items submitted to the Steam Workshop in a week-long event rather splendidly titled, Night of the Living Update. So, do you want the temperature of your skeletal apparatus to decrease? Do you desire spinal sensations of a peculiar nature? Traipse to the website and explore the blood-soaked offerings on display, some of which may make their way into the official update. This is particularly horrible. With two more nights of updates to go, I’m hoping for a Cthulhu mask. What’s the neatest thing you’ve found in the Workshop?

Last time we brought you news of Counter-Strike: GO (go go!), we were able to show you nine new images from the game. Nine! That’s a lot of global offense. This time, prepare for an offensive overload because there is over an hour of footage waiting for you below, in the form of a competitive match between the United States and Europe. I wouldn’t spoil the ending even if I had managed to watch the whole thing, but I have found myself riveted to it for a while – partly to stroke my chin and pretend I’m picking up on every difference, no matter how minute, but also because I’m keen for the Old World to represent itself well in the ancient and storied sport of man-shooting. Scarves, rattles and chants at the ready…

(more…)

As science has proven, everything is better with portals. And that, it seems, includes Mega Man. Which we can totally justify posting a Dorkly video of below, because it’s got portals in it, and they’re from PC. OKAY?

(more…)

Needless to say, they’re celebrating with a big old hat-infrastructure update to Team Fortress 2. The ability for people create and submit and submit items has apparently now earned the community creators $2m, and Valve obviously want that trend to continue, as the update is a big ‘un in that direction. They explain: “The Manniversary Update includes several new features, including Steam Workshop, an improved item submission system that allows community item-creators to test, share and track the status of their creations. The entire TF2 community will also be allowed to participate by browsing, rating and offering feedback on all submitted items. The Steam Workshop will be fully integrated with the Steam community. In addition to the Workshop, the Manniversary Update will also ship 30 new hats and cosmetic items, an item decal system, weeklong “try before you buy” item tryouts, loadout presets, multiple miscellaneous items slots, improved game performance, and a new taunt.”

Everything will be on sale until Monday, too. The details, they are here.

Again! Again! It’s our theoretically regular comparison of Steam’s top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman’s national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we’re going, there be tables. (more…)