Go buy it right now if you missed one of the best games of last year.
This offer only seems to be valid in the US. Anyone else had any luck?
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
Fairly substantial updates for these games are available now, the changes are as follows.
Audiosurf
- Players can now easily experiment with custom game modes by
combining special tags in song names. More info is available on the
forums- [as-4lane] Play with 4 lanes
- [as-monoonly] Mono characters required
- [as-everybodymono] All characters have only 2 block colors
- [as-lessgrey] Mono characters have less grey blocks
- [as-allgrey] Mono characters have all grey blocks
- [as-nogrey] Mono characters have no grey blocks
- [as-monoptX] Base points for Mono characters (default 3)
- [as-nostlth] Remove Stealth and cumulative hit bonuses
- [as-swind] Sidewinder camera mode
- [as-bankcam] Banking camera mode
- [as-first] First-person camera mode
- [as-caterp] Block caterpillars
- [as-mszX] Minimimum match size (number for X)
- [as-wbX] Percentage of white/black blocks
- [as-mtX] Match collection ticks (default 10-25)
- [as-prowsX] Puzzle row count (0-8)
- [as-hidepuz] Play with an invisible puzzle grid
- Fixed bug finding CD tracks in drives beyond the first
Children of the Nile
- Lots of fixes for French, German, Italian, and Spanish where strings would be missing or have extra nonsense at the end of them. Cheats work again in French, German, and Italian. Some messages appearing with a “” marker in them have been taught to speak proper German
- When running the game on Vista, you can now open scenario info screens without crashing, regardless of your user privileges. This will let you start a campaign or load a scenario without any of the fiddly rigamarole with properties and options you had to go through before
- Fonts are now installed in-game if needed, fixing a problem where you’d lose most text and could crash if the game was updated without your machine being restarted
- Steam achievements now work properly. IMPORTANT: On some machines, this will prevent you from running the game directly from the “steamapps/common/children of the nile” folder. You’ll need to start the game from the Steam client, or use the client to create a shortcut (right-click on the game in “My Games”, select “Create desktop shortcut”, and move that shortcut wherever you like)
- The latest version of DirectX is automatically installed if you need it when you first run the game
The Settlers: Rise Of An Empire, The Settlers: Heritage of Kings and The Settlers Pack all hit Steam today. I wish I could tell you more than that but sadly Ubisoft hate me and anyone out side North America.
Enjoy this clip instead.
Over at Steam Review they spotted an update for the Steam Player statistics. This update, which took the stats down for a brief outage last week, now allows you to see the current players, and the peak number of players for all of the games that are available of Steam.
Currently, out in the lead is a (slightly) surprising Counter-strike: Source (with over 77,000 players at it’s peak today), followed closely by the original Counter-strike (with 64,000). I was personally expecting Team Fortress 2 to be out in the lead, however that comes in 3rd place at a measly (by comparison to the other two) 15,000 players at it’s peak.
The stats are quite interesting, and definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in what’s going on behind the scenes. One thing that they certainly prove is that with a peak today of over 1.1million players, there is definitely a massive audience of people that consistently use Steam, and that support the digital download model. Looks like we’re in the right place!
Last week we posted some news regarding Valve’s ’showing’ at E3, and since then some more information has been released regarding both of the games mentioned, and who would we be if we didn’t update you!?
Left 4 Dead’s disturbing boxart has been released (left) which I think makes clear that the game will feature plenty of gore (if any of us were in any doubt!), and zombies.
In addition, if you were still unsure if you were going to buy the game, Kotaku have an interview with Doug Lombardi (Valve’s Director of Marketing), where he gets 15 seconds to sell Left 4 Dead to you… whether it will work for you, who knows, but it’s worth a watch as Doug is always interesting.
Moving on to Portal, it has been revealed that the newly announced Portal: Still Alive release for Xbox Live Arcade will in fact be a combination of Portal and Portal The Flash Version Mappack. The excellent (see our review) map pack is an interesting addition to the game and it is great that Valve are clearly still helping out independent developers by buying into their work. I’m sure that Valve will add their own seal of quality to the pack, and perhaps remove story elements so that it doesn’t clash with the original story arc, but until the actual release, who knows… Either way, if you have the PC version of Portal, there really isn’t a great deal of incentive to buy this, since you can already get the additional content… for free, but it’s good that Valve are spreading the Portal love 
We’ve been a bit lax on the old release news this last week, mostly because we were too busy scouring every piece of E3 news trying to find the few tidbits of information relating to Steam.
Anyway, better late than never, here’s a rundown of the releases on Steam over the last week!
First up, the previously mentioned Planet Busters has released a demo. If you were unsure if you wanted to purchase this before, you now have a chance to test it out and see what you think.
Next, we have The Wonderful End of the World. Another casual and independent game, there is both a demo and a trailer for you to check out. From the trailer this certainly looks like an interesting game, and looks like it’s taken influences from Katamari and Da Blob. Pick it up now for $9.99.
Finally, we got Silverfall: Earth Awakening. Another RPG to add to the growing pile on Steam (no bad thing!), this is a standalone expansion to the original Silverfall. You can buy it on your own, or can get the complete package of both games for a very reasonable $35.99.
So, after slagging of Ubisoft before, and then partially retracting it, Ubisoft have provided me with some more ammunition to slag them off further.
It seems that Ubisoft have been found to have pirated a patch created by RELOADED in order to fix a problem with one of their own games. Oh the irony. It seems that after an recent update for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, and disc check was implemented, but unfortunately they forgot to think about those who got hold of the game via digital download (no, not via Steam, it was through Direct2Drive - this sort of thing would never be allowed to happen via steam…). So, after a number of people complained, Ubisoft released a patch on their official forums, which turned out to be the said crack created by RELOADED.
This would all be very funny, but it just brings to light a few issues - firstly, Ubisoft should be using Steam. If they had, these issues would have been noticed before release and they wouldn’t have been made to look like idiots.
Secondly, it shows just how good these scene groups are, and how widespread their work has effect. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is down to your own point of view, but it certainly cannot be ignored.
Finally, it re-awakens my (and many others) feelings towards Ubisoft. I like a lot of the products they push out, however I can’t get them through Steam because I don’t live in the right place. It’s ridiculous, and this kind of mistake just goes to show how many problems they must have internally that they need to start sorting out.
Anyway, something tells me that Ubisoft (and any other game publishers that may be reading) won’t be making this kind of mistake again, but in this industry… who knows! Watch this space
This years E3 is well underway, and the amount of news to come out of the Valve camp has been relatively low. There have however been a few announcements that are worth mentioning.
The first bit of news comes from the Microsoft Keynote, with the announcement of Portal: Still Alive coming to the Xbox Live Arcade. The game will feature updated levels to add to the original story arc, however according to interviews with Doug Lombardi it is basically a stand alone, downloadable version of the original game with extras tacked on. What has this to do with Steam? Unfortunately, absolutely nothing as of yet… The new levels for the game which was originally released on Steam and the PC have not been announced for these platforms, so at first glance they do not appear to be getting a release. I for one however think that Valve will not leave us hanging - not only do I have my gut feeling to go on, but it seems that Valve employees posting on the official forums also seem convinced that we will not be left out. In the meantime, if you can’t wait for an eventual PC release, why not check out Portal The Flash Version Mappack, which will certainly give you a few extra hours of playtime, or go through the Portal Maps Archive.
The other game to get a significant showing is Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead is now in a fully playable state and Joystiq have an interesting read detailing their time with the game. Not only this, but Kotaku have a great set of interviews with Doug Lombardi where they discuss both Left 4 Dead and Steam itself. Key points from the interview are how Left 4 Dead may well allow users to easily create their own Machinima with a patch post launch, why Microsoft decided not to use steam and to create Games for Windows, how Steam is creating a history of video gaming and reviving old titles, and Valve’s opinions on PC exclusivity.
From the interviews, it certainly seems like Valve have plans to keep the updates to the Steam Client going and that there are going to be plenty of things for us to keep writing about, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief!
Now all that’s left to do is wait for Left 4 Dead to come out in a few months time, so in order to kill that time, I guess we’ll have to watch the new gameplay videos.
The Official Team Fortress 2 blog has recently posted a link to a wealth of community creations from fans of the game. While the blog now has an RSS feed, I thought it was still worth a mention since there really are some good creations there!
A personal fave of mine is the always amusing Team Roomba’s: Meet the Pyro.
You will notice when you next boot up your Steam Client that there is a brand new update for the Client itself.
This update adds a number of neat fixes, but the one that I’m most pleased about is “Fixed apps getting stuck at Updating 0% when downloading”
This has been bugging me for a while now, so hopefully I wont have to see that dreaded 0% again!
Full list of updates after the break…
