Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A few weeks ago, Valve started beta testing its Steam Trading feature and people have swapped over a million items since then. Were the majority of them hats? I don’t have those figures, but the entrails in this animal say “yes”. The trading feature is now officially live and you can trade all sorts of gubbins with one another. Clarification: “all sorts of gubbins” means Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Spiral Knights items so not a great deal has actually changed. Perhaps more interesting than item swapping is the ability to trade unredeemed games, although do note the qualifier ‘unredeemed’. Steam is not letting you swap grubby used goods. There’s a FAQ here. The fact that every public profile now comes with an inventory means that Steam is officially an RPG in which buying cheap games is the grind. The plan is to bring more developers on board in the coming months, so one day you may be able to trade the Incas for a pair of cowboy boots. Truly, we live in exciting times.

Charming free-to-play MMO Spiral Knights has added a new PvP mode, and it’s all a bit Bomberman, as you can see from the footage below. Three Rings explain: “Blast Network is now available, with more events on the way soon. Blast Network is a highly explosive event that pits Knights against each other and equips them with instant-charging bombs. The object of the game is to blow the competition to smithereens! Blast Network has no equipment requisites at all – simply join and get blasting whenever you like.”

And we all love Bomberman (yes, even you), so this sounds like profit to me.
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Sega have just sent us word that they’ve now had over 1,000,000 players registered on their free-to-play Action RPG, Spiral Knights. I thought that was a bit rude, just emailing us to brag, but they also sent news of a new batch of free content. You like free content, right?

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Valve have just announced, as a few were speculating, that they will now be supporting free-to-play (F2P) games via Steam. The first five that have now arrived on the service are Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. There’s to be “exclusive content” if you try each of them out on one of the following days until this Saturday, depending which is the “F2P game of the day”. The micro-transactions will be handled by the same tech that’s currently selling hats in TF2. So that’s Hi Rez, Atari, Sega, Perfect World and NHN USA Inc. on board already, with surely very many more to follow. F2P is out there, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You’re even – whisper – bound to start playing one soon.

SEGA’s free browser RPG Spiral Knights drew gentle approval from the Quintin-creature last month, but at that point it was stranded in the twilight limbo-world of beta status. That has changed. Its shackles are gone. Anyone may now play it, and play it now. Hooray for playing things. I’ve just had a quick fiddle with it, and endorse the sentiment that it’s a pretty slick and charming affair, although the super-derformed hyper-cute style isn’t especially to my tastes in this context. Still – swords and guns.

The game works best when played as a co-op baby-MMO – thus I’d advise anyone interested in embarking upon this heads to our forum and sets up a buddy-search. I’ll stick the post to the front if there’s sufficient interest. So go, be sufficiently interested.

Ooh, Spiral Knights is pretty good. It’s the upcoming free-to-play hack’n'slash MMOG from Three Rings, developers of the now-ancient Puzzle Pirates (and also currently working on the Doctor Who online game). No release date on Spiral Knights yet Spiral Knights will be out on April 4th, and the preview build just devoured a not-insignificant chunk of my afternoon without a care in the world. “How rude!” I cried, as I gunned another fox to death with a cool series of clicks. Trailer and thoughts after the jump.
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