Trigger Finger

Perhaps three or four years ago, Steam was a swear word in my world. It was some buggy piece of bloatware that I was forced to use for some of my favourite games.

But for the last 2 years or so, I can only applaude valve for what they have done. Steam to me, is now THE model of what the future of desktop gaming should be modelled on. A great and very stable client that is a one stop shop for digital distribution of games. For the last 18 months to 2 years (is that when Team Fortress 2 came out?), whenever I want to buy a game for the PC I always check to see if it is available on Steam first.

Sure they are not always the cheapest (though if you are patient they often have great sales), but I can buy the game online in a few clicks, it starts downloading straight away and usually at a very decent speed. Then with the game downloaded, updates are delivered automatically pretty much for the lifetime of the game. The community integration and friends list makes it the ‘Xbox Live for the PC world.’ The best part of all is that after a format of my computer, I can just install Steam and instantly redownload the latest version of all my games without worrying about activation or other DRM nightmares.

Now, the Valve gods have truly pulled a masterstroke in announcing a Mac client to be released in April along with Mac versions of all their big titles such as Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Left for Dead series. Not only will they be native versions of games (no emulation yay!) they are fully cross compatibile with the PC versions meaning I can play in the same servers as my PC using buddies.

This is a great day for Mac gaming, and giant step for the future development of Mac as a gaming platform. I suspect they are the only big company out there with the balls to try and become the defacto ‘appstore for games’ before Apple does it. Having this kind of distribution and tools already developed for simultaneously developing mac and PC versions of games (OpenGL and DirectX versions are built simultaneously when devs checkin code) should not only mean a bright future for fans of Valve’s games, but their engine can then be used by other developers to bring cross platform goodness to all us Mac users.

And if you are still not convinced by Valve’s good intentions then read this:

“They are also adding a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge”

I would have happily rebought some of my favourite games for a mac version, but I don’t need to! As I own the games on the PC, I automatically own them on the Mac (this only applies to Valve’s games as far as I can tell).

My Mac Pro is licking its lips with anticipation for April already! Bravo Valve… Bravo!

In summary, an MMOFPS, on Xbox360 and Playstation 3, based in the Eve Online universe, and linked to the Eve Online MMORPG universe on the PC. Those playing Dust 514 fight for control of the planets within Eve, whilst those playing Eve Online continue battling over space.

The best bit…. the two games are linked to each other so Eve Online players can hire Dust 514 players to take planets for them to profit from within the Eve Online world.

Sheer frickin genius!

Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.

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The Mac Pro is ‘Out for Delivery’ according to the TNT tracking page so that means, with luck, it should be in my sweaty anticipatory palms by this evening. In between refreshing the tracking status every five minutes I will start off this article which will cover many things. continue reading »

Total War with extra musket!

Time to try something new, I thought. Maybe it will suck, maybe not, who knows, who cares?

A live blog review of Empire Total War starting with my pre-release expectations through to some point in the future where I get bored of the thing – genius right? We will see, but here it comes

2nd March 2009 13:00 – Expectations
I am a big fan of the Total War series, not to the point of building my own mods and doing the virtual equivalent of painting my own soldiers, but I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every one of the series.

Starting all that time ago with Shogun Total War where my breath was taken away by SO MANY stick figure soldiers on the battlefield and being introduced to that seemingly vast campaign map. continue reading »

If there is one thing that has gotten this site more hits than any other topic, it is the billing problem described here when moving from one country to another with an XBox Live subscription. After two years of inaction from Microsoft, it’s time to take it the top! continue reading »

So I was coerced by some work mates into trying Warhammer Online this week. It was, in all honesty, a game I was planning on skipping because I have never been the warhammer type. I imagined myself not really being able to stomach thousands of brats with their painted figuirine history berating me for not knowing about waaagghh. I have also never really been a big pvp’er (Eve Online excepted) because normally PvP means gank versus victim in my experience.

So a couple of days ago I was persuaded and hopped on the WAR-wagon, creating my first character on a core server. continue reading »

Is that there is no reason for the DRM to even exist in the first place.

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Two things stand out to me about the pirate themed mmorpg so many have been waiting for.
1. How much potential it had
2. How bland the final gameplay is.

This is very standard fare by anyone’s standards. There are so many things that could have been done well, nay properly! I am going to keep the rant brief and thus assume that people have a general knowledge about the game and mmorpgs in general.

Here are 5 reasons the game simply sucks at this moment in time:

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Well that was unexpected!

A year where the console dominated my playing time rather than the PC! I never thought I would see the day and to be honest, I didn’t even realised I had seen the day until I thought about offering up my thoughts for Game of the Year!

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