Not exactly huge news, but Portal: First Slice - the demo that had previously been available for free to owners of certain (read: nearly all) graphics cards - has now been made available to all other users for free via Steam.
If you havent heard of Portal, I’m not sure where you’ve been for the past year, but it was originally released as part of the Orange Box, and is now available separately. With a metascore of 90, Portal is a critically aclaimed, loved by players cult hit and well worth sitting down for the satisfyingly short 4 hour play time.
Personally, I’d advise you not to bother with First Slice, just buy the whole game; for $19.99 there really is no excuse! And now that you have an extra three and a half hours to add to the original game for free, it’s an even better deal.
However, if you must demo Portal before buying it; now you can.
Steam are offering Team Fortress 2 free for this weekend only. This is your ideal chance to try what is undoubtably a fantastic game that has recently been released separate from it’s Orange Box ’shackles’. You’ll get to trial the game in full, including the brand new Goldrush update.
Valve say:
A worldwide Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend is now under way! Join now, and play the full game for free, including the new content just released in the TF2: Gold Rush Update.
The Free Weekend is open to players around the world, and there is no obligation to purchase to participate; all that is needed is a Steam account to join.
To join in the fun and learn more about Team Fortress 2, please visit www.steamgames.com/goldrush
The Free Weekend ends Sunday, May 4th at 1pm PDT.
So, get Steam (if you havent already), download TF2, and lets see you online!
Great news for gamers and Linux users today as Valve appears to be actively recruiting developers to work on a port of The Orange Box for Linux. Word came when a Valve employee posted a message in the #ubuntu-offtopic IRC channel advertising the position. Looking on the Valve jobs board also reveals a job that matches the same description.
This of course leads to the potential of the Steam platform being ported to Linux. Right now Linux gamers are forced to emulate Steam and its games with a huge performance cost. Making it native will be a huge boon to that community and could even lead to further ports of Steam to other platforms down the road (ahem…MacOS). More news when we have it.
