Yesterday, Eidos Montreal announced their plans for the Deus Ex series.
For the uninitiated, the series explores heavy themes of conspiracy, transhumanism and the ethics of technological advancement, and consists of two cyberpunk RPGs that are routinely held up along with Half-Life as the greatest PC games of all time, plus two more that are…well, not.
Can gaming on Linux work? It could. If there wasn’t DirectX.
Over a year has passed since the community-founded Valve-centric podcast, Steamcast, closed down. However during August this year, a countdown clock appeared on a sub-directory of the website with the title ‘2013’.
Steamcast was originally founded back in 2009 with the aim of supporting the Valve community by offering frequent and direct participation with listeners, however in 2012 the podcast closed indefinitely.
This week Valve introduced us to a trio of living room orientated products that will be entering the Steam Universe in 2014.
The announcements took place as a series of countdowns which occurred on rather peculiar and cryptic webpage on the Steam Store. The page, titled as The Steam Universe Will be Expanding in 2014, presented three small circles which individually became available on Monday, Wednesday and Friday respectively.
Things haven’t been the same since. The doctors say my addiction to Team Fortress 2 (and by extension, my addiction to hats) may never be cured.
This started out as a part of my upcoming review of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but I have decided to release it on its own, as a sort of prelude or companion piece, to the aforementioned review. I would like to thank my awesome colleagues here at LambdaGen: Erebus; Flamov; and Mimaz, for their invaluable assistance and input, during the creation of this article.
In order to properly discuss Global Offensive, we must first delve deep into the dark (okay, maybe not dark – slightly poorly lit) history of Counter-Strike, as a whole!
Last month, it was announced that Overkill’s PAYDAY: The Heist and Valve’s Left 4 Dead would come together, through a sort of crossover. Not in the form of a full game, but rather, in the form of some sort of DLC release – much like how the Potato Fools’ Day cross-game events played out (but with none of the glyph hunting and potato farming).
Well, it turns out that Valve and Overkill are not kidding around, as a teaser trailer has just been released for PAYDAY: No Mercy.
This is an original editorial piece created by Mimaz. It is the first in a series of editorials that we like to call “The Half-Life Dissertation”, which will aim to extensively cover a wide range of Half-Life related topics and issues.
Valve are looking down the rabbit hole.
At their core, video games are essentially entertainment – designed to be fun. They accomplish these two objectives through all sorts of ways, within the various genres of the gaming world. Most of the games we play are, ostensibly, mere entertainment – created to be fun, enthralling and, perhaps, little else beyond that. But recently, many have contemplated and whether or not video games truly are art. But this debate goes beyond gaming itself: for instance, can we classify the Roundhay Garden Scene as art? While we’re at that, can we classify the Mona Lisa as entertainment? Is all entertainment actually art, or is all art somehow entertainment? It’s a multifaceted argument that might be going on for a very long while. I, personally, am of the conviction that, video games are art. Of course, there are some games that simultaneously represent both entertainment and art (Portal 1, Half-Life 2). There are also some games that lead more towards the art side, but they still maintain the basic framework of a video game. If they didn’t, we’d have a tough time calling them video games.
But in comes something that might shake up the way we look at video games. That something is Dear Esther. Originally designed as a free HL2 mod in 2008, Dear Esther was a terrific, if flawed experiment regarding interactive, non-linear storytelling conveyed through a video game. Almost 4 years later, the same team, plus one master level designer, have returned to remake and reimagine Dear Esther, almost from the ground up, as a independent Source game. That which was primitive is now beautiful, and a whole new audience could be exposed to this interesting creation. But is it more than just an experiment, or, perhaps, is it more than just a video game? Well, read on to find out!
Ever since the birth of the atom bomb, man has been obsessed with his demise at its hands. From “On The Beach” to “Dr. Strangelove”, and from “DEFCON” to “Fallout”, we seem to have a hard-on for the nuclear holocaust. But something that many people seem to be ignoring is the idea of the post-nuclear society. Post-nuclear nation-states, and post-nuclear warfare. It’s a concept that has been neglected by many.
However, these visions are no longer confined to our dreams, or rather, our nightmares. No, now we have Nuclear Dawn. While it first began development long ago, in 2005, as an independent Source mod, its turbulent and troubled development soon led to it being lost in the depths of development hell. Luckily, InterWave Studios bravely journeyed into that sinister dimension, and after a couple more years in development later, it is now a full-fledged commercial Source game. But is it a fearsome bunker-buster, or is it a mere dud? Read on!
