Good show. Third party DRM in Steam games makes no sense.

I could follow my instinct to disbelieve Ubisoft, but I think if Valve were taking a moral stance against DRM by removing games from Steam, they’d do it in all territories.

I clicked this headline in my Google Reader expecting to be taken to an article at The Onion.

$5 per new map? Who else is glad they didn’t buy Modern Warfare 2? Phew.

Good one here; I’ve been enjoying the mini-series. I hope it’s in for as good a run as the Knights of The Old Republic comic was.

Perhaps Microsoft and EA weren’t the villains we thought? Ah, probably they were.

I’m more excited for Skate 3 than ever. Graded challenges, landing feedback, and hardcore mode are longstanding features of the Tony Hawk games. Jason Lee was in the last good one (Project 8), too. They should fit well.

True. I might have bought Assassin’s Creed II if it weren’t for Ubisoft’s DRM. Maybe not at $60, but eventually. Now I won’t, not until the DRM is gone.

This is too bad for people who bought the game, but this is good for those of us who abstained because of the DRM. Keep making noise.

How’d he make his beard so pointy?

I think InstantAction and OnLive are too different to make any fair comparisons. OnLive render the game remotely and stream the video, whereas InstantAction streams the game itself and processes locally. GameTap is probably a fairer comparison in that regard as many of their games can be played when only partially downloaded. That functionality coupled with the 20 minute demos make InstantAction sound more like a 21st century shareware service.

This product couldn’t appeal to me less.

Preach.

I take this as confirmation of what we PC evangelists have been saying for a long time: the market isn’t dying, it’s changing.

And I expect Steam on Mac will make PC gaming’s growth this year even stronger.

And I thought I was going to make it to May without buying another new game.

I’ve already written about Portal 2 and the build-up to this formal announcement, but there’s one thing I didn’t know then: Portal 2 has co-op. Besides that, I’m considering the creative marketing campaign as the PC version announcement; this press release and Game Informer cover are for Xbox 360 players.

Hopes fulfilled.

Bad Company producer Patrick Bach talks about what makes Battlefield Battlefield, and the differences between designing for console players and PC players.

Despite reports to the contrary, yes, Silent Hunter 5 is cracked.

Probably the worst thing Activision did this week.

They also did this. I’m less interested in what’s happening now, though, than I am in what’s happening in a year or two when West and Zampella have a new game.

This is several weeks old, but I’ve only just seen it this week. And it’s relevant again. It’s educational and entertaining, even though it’s from the Xbox 360 perspective.

My apathy may be due to my preoccupation with Valve this week. I usually think about Valve and Steam a lot anyway, and not always good thoughts. Sometimes I envision a future where Valve goes public and starts making Actiavellian decisions, such as developing Counter-Strike 2 as an Xbox 360 lead, charging $10 for the Engineer update, or releasing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 as three separate games. All of these belong to a future I don’t want to live in.

But this week Valve updated Portal with a cryptic achievement and change log that prompted a community investigation. After doing a bunch of things which I won’t pretend to understand, the forum sleuths uncovered a bunch of other things which I also don’t understand. Morse code, a BBS — ASCII art of turrets and Gabe Newell? I decided to just assume it was leading to a Portal 2 announcement.

And then Valve updated Portal to change the ending. I read the headlines and my heart skipped a beat. Back from the E.R. and to the article, I found yet more that I didn’t understand. But it seemed that an Episode 3 announcement was near.

We already knew Episode 3 and Portal 2 were on the way, though. Why are we so excited? Because it isn’t hollow; it’s not just a press release. Valve’s pre-announcement takes advantage of the one thing we gamers are sure to appreciate: interactivity. And although Valve makes games out of the same stuff everyone else does, only they could have put on such a performance, prodding that part of our psyche from which zealous devotion and unthinking admiration flows. The performance took not only creative marketing ideas and the will to take a risk, but autonomy — something Valve has spent the better part of a decade building for themselves in Steam. This week, they reaped the benefits. This week, everyone who makes games wishes they were Valve. Again.

Also Valve announced Steam for Mac OS X.

My words about it are over here.

Does game design work best when it’s analogous to film making, or to music composition? Neither, and I don’t think it’s important to make the distinction. Games shouldn’t imitate a specific art form, they should express the qualities of them all. Because they can. Video games are the culmination of art as technology, and technology as art. They’re amazing. We shouldn’t limit such a medium by trying to make sense of it in the context of less capable mediums.

Games as we know them today owe a lot to Carmack’s work. I can’t think of a person more deserving of this award.

This week also marks the first year anniversary of Quake Live, as well as the 14th year anniversary of QTest. In celebration, Quake Live received an update and event, and id employees past and present have reflected on QTest on the Bethesda blog.

Of course it is.

EA/DICE restricting dedicated server files to certain “partners” is leaving me conflicted about wanting Bad Company 2. They’re keeping dedicated servers on a leash, just out of reach of total freedom. But whether I like it or not, the market is changing, and we players seem incapable of shifting it in our favor. If EA’s restriction really is just to maintain statistic and rank integrity, and to sell maps (which seems benign in comparison to Activision’s or Ubisoft’s), I can be okay with it. Or I could, if it weren’t for EA’s history of shutting down online games.

But I’m probably overreacting. EA appears to deactivate games based on how many people still play. There’d be greater cause for concern if Battlefield 1942, despite its persisting popularity, had its master servers taken offline in light of a sequel being released. Besides, the Bad Company 2 beta was a heck of a lot of fun, and we haven’t had a successful non-Call of Duty, non-Valve shooter on PC in a long time. I’ll probably give in to temptation and buy it.

This is an hour-long “Quick Look” where every cut scene from Amped 3 is shown. I had no idea the game was so surreal.

My suggestion: Allow users to create and name groups in the My Games and Friends lists.

What they did: Half of this suggestion was implemented; we can now create and add games to “categories” in our games library. It works like a tag system on a blog in that games can belong to multiple categories.

Follow-up: Allow users to filter by “installed” and “uninstalled” regardless of which category they’re viewing. Also add an extra context menu item with a sub-menu where users can add games to existing categories.

What they did: This was added, though because of how Valve has changed the games library overall, it’s slightly different from how I imagined it. The games library now has a “details view” where, when a game is selected on the games list, a page is populated with game information, news, related links, and how many friends own the game in addition to their avatars and links to their profiles.

Follow-up: Nothing. This is just what I wanted.

My suggestion: Make the Community Blotter more sigificant.

What they did: The Store page now uses part of the Blotter by showing the last few games purchased by friends. Each game’s store page also now shows which of a user’s friends already own the game.

Follow-up: I’d still like to see the Blotter extended to Steam notifications.

My suggestion: Expand instant messaging features.

What they did: Nothing yet. We can’t access other services, and we don’t have tabbed chat containers. But we do have hope; Valve opened a section on the Steam forums for beta feedback, and therein is a thread where many people are asking for tabbed conversations.

Follow-up: Listen to the community.

My suggestion: Expand Steam Cloud

What they did: They did it. Favorite servers now synchronize across computers through Steam Cloud, and an icon now appears next to games which support it when in “list view.” This was the most practical and important part of my suggestion.

Follow-up: Nothing; the Steam Cloud feature is finally beginning to realize its potential.

My suggestion: Abandon Internet Explorer for WebKit.

What they did: They did this, too, and it’s probably the most significant change. Using WebKit instead of IE opens non-Windows platforms to Steam. We aren’t far from having Mac and Linux versions of Steam.

Follow-up: It’s done. The browser could be improved further by allowing custom home pages or bookmarks, but it may also be best to just keep it simple.

Valve has added or changed much more than what I imagined last month. The store page has been redesigned with purpose to make games easier to find; the games library was changed to provide more viewing options; and the overlay has been revamped both speed-wise and clockwise. What’s more, this beta may not be feature-complete yet. The Friends system and Community site are almost unchanged. If Valve’s out of ideas, the Steam community has many.

Jul. 15th 2009: “Remedy has a deep heritage in PC gaming and would love to see a PC version available to its PC followers, ultimately however this decision lies with our publisher.”

Feb. 12th 2010: “Some games are more suited for the intimacy of the PC, and others are best played from the couch in front of a larger TV screen. We ultimately realised that the most compelling way to experience “Alan Wake” was on the Xbox 360 platform, so we focused on making it an Xbox 360 exclusive.”

What a heap of bovine excrement. By what logic is it not preferable to have a more “intimate” experience with the game Remedy is billing as a “psychological action thriller”?

Hooray. Take a cue, Redlynx, and give us a PC version of Trials HD.

I’m not sure that the first Bioshock had color blind accommodation, but it definitely had gamepad support and (after a patch) proper widescreen scaling. How and why do you remove such functionality in a sequel built on the same technology?

This is a fascinating feature about the best character in Mass Effect 2. For some nice shots (and potential wallpapers) of Thane, check out my Mass Effect 2 screenshot collection.

Still bracing for disaster.

I’ve liked and used SteelSeries mice and mousepads for the last few years because of their quality and customer service; now their chief marketing officer is publicly decrying one of the most effective marketing terms in his industry? SteelSeries, be my Valentine.

Have $5 worth of fun for $0.