Official Steam sections are appearing in retail stores across the US, UK and Canada. We took a quick look.

After some time in hibernation our podcast, All Things Lambda has risen from the ashes with a new episode.

The Half-Life series can be quite glum at times, especially with no resolution in sight for the series. Good thing we have the modding community to deliver us some light-heartedness. Here are fourteen off-the-wall mods hand-picked to help relieve those Episode 2 cliffhanger blues.

The classic Counter-Strike map Train (de_train) is back, with some new features to boot.

Hovik “KQLY” Tovmassian, Simon “smn” Beck, and Gordon “Sf” Giry were all slapped with VAC bans a few days ago. What does that mean for the competitive gaming scene in CS:GO?

CS:GO releases operations every so often to highlight community made maps. This latest operation among many is titled Vanguard, which sets a new trend with missions.

The popular “XboxAhoy” YouTube channel, which is a member of the Machinima.com gaming network, just uploaded an excellent retrospective video analysis that explores Valve’s success with the original Half-Life.

Written by Stuart Brown, the video analysis highlights the early influences of Half-Life, such as Quake as well as the affect that Half-Life’s release had upon the FPS in genre, including the modding scene as well as Valve’s later developments with Team Fortress, Steam and the Source engine.

If you have a spare 20 minuets, it’s well worth a watch!

Valve today announced a $250,000 prize pool for the DreamHack CS:GO Championship at DreamHack Winter 2014.

DreamHack takes place in Jönköping, Sweden from November 27th-29th. Why this event is so special you ask? DreamHack is the largest digital festival in the world, and lays claim to holding the world’s largest LAN party in the Guinness Book of Records.

Amateur video game filmmaking website Style-Productions.net has launched a competition offering a €300 prize pool for the winning submission.

Many of us will have played through most of Valve’s titles and enjoyed them. When we’re wrapped up in the action or the story however, the rules of the game we’re playing are almost invisible to us.

As a level designer it often pays to take a step back and look at the purpose of the content of a level. Why things are placed where they are, what do they add to the gameplay and what can we learn from them.