Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’ve just had a note from Gabe Newell saying: “Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.”

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

It might be a good idea to change your Steam password, clearly. Full text below.
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Right then, what’s left? Everquest 1, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Lineage… What else yet stands firm against the free to play tide? The latest to switch is SOE’s 2004-launched Everquest II, which will offer itself to the microtransaction gods next month.

It’s dabbled before with a F2P parallel client, with but as of the Age of Discovery expansion free-to-play will be active on every one of its servers. It’ll retain subscriptions and expansion packs for those who want to stick to the old ways, however. Full details on exactly how it all works are in this Massively post; apologies for not summarising here, but I’m still a zombie after power-playing Skyrim. Also, I want to go and play some more Skyrim.

It was years before I stopped writing “jetpack” on my Christmas present list, when my parents sat me down and told me that they didn’t exist. Also that I was adopted. That second bit wasn’t true, but I really wanted jetpack and they were trying to soften the blow. I’ve never forgiven them for taking my jetpack dreams away. But a new Firefall trailer is adequate recompense. It has jetpacks in an open-world that’s built to take advantage of the vertical movement. It’s pretty as a picture to boot.
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Gotham City Impostors, the other Batman game, has a release date. It’s the 10th January 2012, which sounds like it’s a hundred years in the future, but is in fact in exactly two months.

This is the sort-of-like-TF2-a-bit online shooter from Monolithic, who suddenly remembered they’re at their best when having fun, rather than being all gloomy and serious. Will we be having fun with this? We’ve no idea yet, because we haven’t played it. But there will be opportunities to do so, probably from December when the beta is “expected” to go live. To celebrate there’s a new sreenshot, which is, er, poorly taken. You can see the full size version by clicking on the pic above, and leave your screenshot-taking guides for not leaving the centre of the image mostly empty below.

The second Indie Royale bundle has this second gone live. You’ll remember the first one from Adam telling you all about it. It’s the excitingly confusing system where the price goes up over time, but people paying more than that price cause it to go down. I think. Whatever it is, it works, and tens of thousands of people bought the first one, getting a splendid bargain. So what’s in the second collection?

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We know you’ve spend all day hitting F5 just for this, and finally the moment has arrived: Minecon’s official trailer is here. It shows the journey of Minecraft’s default avatar, Steve, from his lovely forest-based house all the way to Minecon. The con has been created in Minecraft. It’s so meta that I want to check that I’m writing this in the real world, and not some sort of facsimilie. Pinch me. No, not there. Lower…
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We’ve once again been dragged into our bitter feud with the game package the Humble Indie Bundle. We’ve already posted about the addition of The Binding Of Isaac and Blocks That Matter to the Voxatron package, and they’ve responded by adding Gish and Lexaloffle minigames to it in a futile attempt to make us look out-of-date. This is like the Cold War all over again. Consider this post RPS’s Cuban Missile Crisis. Your move, Bundle.
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My fingers are shaking I type this. I’m not sure exactly what I’m posting, other than it’s a surreal advert for Saint’s Row: The Third. I have a vague fear that it might be attempting to subliminally control me, but I feel fine so far. Anyway, I showed it to John and he demanded we share it with you. And that everyone buys 12 copies of Saint’s Row: The Third and gives all their possessions away to the New World Order.
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