Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It doesn’t take a lot for me to get obsessed. I’d managed to pull away from Team Fortress 2, but then Valve introduced the Strange category of weapons, stat-tracking guns and melee weapons that report how many kills each has, and I got into it all over again. I’m almost embarrassed by how easy it was to hook me back into the mainframe. Worryingly Valve have just added a new category of unlocks to augment the Strange weapons counting abilities: Strange Parts.

Only found in crates, Strange Parts will help you study specific aspects of your performance in battle by letting you customize your favorite Strange weapon. Now you’re free to track the number of enemies you gib, projectiles you reflect, heads you’ve shot, and more.

They’ve also dropped three new hats into the game, and that number is a more descriptive than you realise: there are only three in the entire game, and to get one you’ll most likely need to spend a significant amount of money.
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Clever wavelength-tweaking game Waveform – in which you must fit a wave to suit the incoming stream of, uh, things – failed to reach its relatively modest Kickstarter goal, but has nevertheless arrived in the mechanical innards of Steam. There’s a demo on there too, so you can get a taste of what the thing is like before you choose to plunge headfirst into its attractive, wave-based challenges.

Following rumours circulated by The Verge, Valve has told Kotaku that they are experimenting with biometrics and connecting PCs to TVs. However: “All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.” Marketing VP Doug Lombardi said: “We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on.” Lombardi denied that the boxes were prototype of a home console, and instead suggested it was simply a part of the current Steam development process, allowing them to make it easier for us to play PC games on our TV. It’s not a denial that Valve would ever head in that direction, and they’ve reiterated that they might ship hardware eventually, but the purported “Steam Box” (okay, Steam Engine, if you like) looks like hot air for now.

I am sure there’ll be more comment on this in the week (especially if it is announced at GDC), but while I was compiling the Sunday Papers I realised that the The Verge reporting that Valve could be making a “Steam Box” gaming console probably warrants its own thread: “Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We’re told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA’s Origin) to be loaded up.”

Obviously this is largely speculation and hearsay, so to be taken with a hefty pinch of internet-salt, but it’s a fascinating possible next move in the console wars, with everything basically becoming a PC. The idea that it will allow for other services to be run on it is the particularly interesting point, to my mind, because it allows internal competition in the way that consoles usually do not.

Ooh, I’m in PSA mode: bank-robbing FPS PayDay:The Heist is free on Steam this weekend, and 50% off if you choose to buy it. Dan Gril loved it, and I concur that it’s an excellent mash-up of gaming and film influences: everything from the opening sequence of The Dark Knight to Heat is mined and tossed into a Left 4 Deadish co-op run and gun. It’s kind of the perfect weekend game, if your idea of the perfect weekend is shooting policemen and being able to get to sleep at night afterwards. And if you’re not planning to play this, why not tell us what you are up to that’s so important that you can afford to ignore a free game? It better be damn good.
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Waveform is an interesting experiment in minimal game design: you stretch and compress a wave passing through space, manipulating it to fit the patterns it encounters. It’s on the relaxing end of the spectrum, with only one control and chill-out music. Despite a troubled inception, failing to reach a modest Kickstarter goal of $8000 funding, it’s managed to wiggle into Steam’s servers, oscillating to fit the wavelength of Gabe Newell’s heart. Fancy seeing what it’ll look like? Video here.

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Somewhere along the line, cooperative MMO bullet hell shooter Realm of the Mad God became a real thing. I was looking the other way when it happened, perhaps getting a haircut that required my head to be pointing in exactly the opposite direction, otherwise I’d have noticed and not had to rewrite this opening paragraph where I’d previously claimed it was being released now. So, yeah: Wild Shadow‘s magnificently silly bullet-hell based MMO is now out on Steam, rather than just being released for the first time. Alec has written so many words on the game that I’ll refer anyone looking for actual details to those. Or if you prefer video, I have that below via another cynical Brit. It’s good, it’s free, it’s frighteningly compulsive and the Steam version ties into the web-version, so you can continue progress from one to the other.
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Did you know that 90% of all gaming videos on Yourfaceinatube are Modern Warfare related? And that 99.99% one of them has music that’s been recorded in a scrapyard crushing machine? I believe there’s an option labelled “scrrrrrawwwwwwewrarrr” during upload that adds it. In addition, every video must have at least two labels, pointing to various other videos that benefit you, the viewer, and for no other reason. There’s an exciting world of video-making that I’m just not a part of. If you’d like to get some of that action, but don’t own the game, Modern Warfare 3′s multiplayer is to free play now and all weekend on Steam. If you start downloading now, you can spend the evening Warfareing Modernly 3ish, like the chaps in the video below.
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Dear Esther, the minimalist first-person explorer, made its costs back in the first five and a half hours on sale. A quite remarkable achievement for an indie game, and a rather impressive vindication of The Indie Fund, the gathering of successful indies who are funding new projects. It has sold 16,000 copies in its first 24 hours, and made back all $55k they’d invested in the game before it was even six hours old. And by the rules of The Indie Fund, that means the developers thechineseroom are now making profit. You can read all about how it went down here. Alec adored Dear Esther, as he writes about here. I didn’t think it was nearly so good, as I explain here.

Remedy’s sleepy writer sim Alan Wake is out on Steam in a day and a bit, after the lengthiest beta test we’ve ever experienced. As far as I can tell, it’s a perfectly accurate recreation of the life of a writer: just this morning, my breakfast was interrupted when I realised I had been sitting on my foot and that foot was now asleep possessed by a demon intent on enslaving the world to do its bidding. What does it want? It wants YOU to watch the launch trailer they’ve just released, or it’ll smite you with corns. I’ve embedded it below, to save your soles.
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