Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Remember Duke Nukem Forever? I apologise for bringing it up, but it’s important you realise that it was an imposter. A duck in Duke’s clothes. There was a reason we were all excited about the possibility of a Duke Nukem game, and with the surprise release of Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition you can see why. Devolver Digital are bringing a shinier, but not too shiny, version of the classic shooter to Steam, and they magicked up a trailer.
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“It’s a console game on a console. End of story,” Phil Fish somewhat famously told NowGamer of Fez’s PC prospects. But that was many embittered eons ago, and now gaming’s most divisive documentary star is singing a different tune. Confirming yet another one of those increasingly prophetic Steam listings, the previously hardware-bound, headwear-powered dimension-shifter is finally scrambling onto PC. But when? And how? As with all the important things in life, you will have to cleverly rearrange key building blocks of time and space to find out.

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This is kind of cool. When Gabe Newell accepted his BAFTA fellowship last week, he crowd-sourced his speech in the Valve offices. All he received was sarcastic responses, which he then told to the audience. He was then interviewed backstage, and without the yoke of his cruel workmates he dropped a few amazing stats. The first one is that Valve’s business grew massively in the last year, by about 50%. I’ll bet it’s mostly Dota 2 related. And it’s an easy way to put paid to the notion that Valve’s recent lay-offs might be because of financial trouble. That was never going to be the case, but now it’s unfathomable. The other one is actually more impressive, and I’ll tell you that and include the video below. You’ll never guess.
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I think a lot of people were pretty surprised when Surgeon Simulator 2013 made the cut for Steam Greenlight. I mean, it’s an impressive, exceedingly hilarious little production, but it emerged from the bounty-filled chest cavity of Global Game Jam. It’s amazing that something with such high production values came out of such a short development period at all, but the fact is, Surgeon Sim’s roots show. It’s a silly sideshow, but it hardly seems primed for primetime. Fortunately, Bossa’s not hanging up its gore-caked coat just because it’s sharing a practice with the likes of TF2′s Medic and, er… yeah, mostly him. New additions are on the way, so as to make this the most realistic simulation of a deranged, depth-perception-less sloth creature performing surgery ever.  Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to operate the break, after which you’ll find a video conclusively proving that you also don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be, well, a brain surgeon.

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The strange and sordid saga of Xi3′s Steambox/apparently not a Steambox/grapefruit of the fuuuuuuuuture slogs on. You’ll remember that Valve publicly denounced the little-PC-that-could (cost $1000) yesterday, which came as a strange turn of events after it was first announced with an investment from the very same Steam-powered empire. Right hand, meet left? Or maybe this was all an evil plot hatched by none other than Nega-Newell, who’s spent the past couple years masquerading as the real deal and making a series of baffling decisions. It sounds just as plausible as anything else, I think, given that Xi3′s now revealed that the rabbit hole runs even deeper. Apparently, it was actually Valve who commissioned them to make the damn thing in the first place.

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If you don’t watch the trailer for 4X Action-Strategy game StarDrive and immediately go 1) “HOLY BALLS SPACEBEARS” 2) “JINKIES! That captain-type man smoking a pipe looks jolly good wot wot” or 3) “I really want to make my own little ship to laser people with” then you are probably not me. But don’t worry! I hear that if you do like the look of this space shenanigan you can preorder it on Steam now and get immediate access to the Beta along with a 15% discount on it at the same time. I can bearly contain myself. Have a look:

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Here’s a cautionary tale, and a stark reminder that digital goods are still the World Wide Wild West. While a majority of PC games these days seem to ultimately involve a Steam key (which is itself an understandably controversial state of affairs), ownership of one of those keys can be sold by any number of third parties. So we see online stores both reputable and troublesome striving to offer downloads for less than a direct Steam activation, less than each other and, most commonly, less than the frequently outrageously inflated official pricing in some territories. Such was (and presumably is) the case for Natural Selection 2. Revealed developer Unknown Worlds yesterday, “Recently, a batch of 1,341 NS2 Steam keys were purchased using stolen credit cards. These keys were then offered for sale by various resellers. The owners of said cards disputed the transactions, and thankfully received their money back.”

Thankfully for them, but less thankfully for a) Unknown Worlds and b) the people who had bought the keys.

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The Age of Empires series has seen better days. Days like the year 1999, for instance. That’s when Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings charged onto the itsy-bitsy adowwwwable killing fields, and oh what a grand thing it was. It even looked quite nice for the time, eschewing 3D razzle-dazzle in favor of goode ye-olde-fashioned sprites. Times, however, have changed, and monitors have grown wide and voracious in their appetites for tender, succulent resolutions. Thus, Microsoft’s deemed it high-time for a re-release, on that newfangled, installation-frisbee-free Steam contraption that’ll probably never catch on, no less. Graphics, however, aren’t the only thing getting a modern makeover here.

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Oh boy, gaming’s favorite brain-dissolving apocalyptic disaster is back! And in the game, naturally. After a sojourn away from Steam due to excessively shady dealings and unforgivably poor quality, The War Z’s been re-listed on Valve’s ubiquitous storefront. So then, the natural question: what’s changed? Well, this probably warrants further investigation (yuck) inside the game, but for now, the answer appears to be “not a whole lot.” You will, however, notice the omission of some flat-out untrue promises from War Z’s last wibbly wobbly go-’round.

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Gabe Newell hasn’t been particularly sweet on Steam Greenlight as of late, but the fully open Steam of tomorrow hasn’t supplanted its “dictatorial” ways just yet. Instead, the mighty user-driven machine trundles on, streamlining the process where it can and rhythmically opening its jaw each month to crunch down whatever creative morsels we offer up. So then, what’s on the menu this time around? Well, semi-big-names certainly top the list, but it’s not without a couple enticing curiosities.

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