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If you happened to miss this weekend's Brickcon 2008 in Seattle, as we unfortunately did, you missed the appearance of the "Zombie Apocafest" project. It was one part Left 4 Dead, one part The Big Lebowski and two parts LEGO. It was also 6.8 parts awesome, with a massive zombie-filled scene of Left 4 Dead-style destruction, featuring copious amounts of LEGO gore.
Valve hates the PS3. Well, Gabe Newell hates the PS3, and since nobody else had ever said otherwise, we just figured it was company policy. Times, though, times change! Valve's Doug Lombardi has told CVG that, since the PS3 started shifting a few more units, they've stopped hating on it, and started to "take it seriously". Funny how that happens.
Hey, 2009's almost upon us, and TF2Newbs has put out a 12-month zipfile of spies doing the crab walk in Team Fortress 2. My favourite is August, which captures this conversation between Nfreak (the calendar's creator) and his cohorts:
{OSS} |CiC| Andy <3 amvalvo: Nfreak, turn around
Bob Dole's Woodlen Critters >:3: We're trying to do a spycrab calendar
Bob Dole's Woodlen Critters >:3: SS
{OSS} |CiC| Andy <3 amvalvo: Bob, keep walking back and forth
TF2Newbs promises to donate $1 to the National Spy Crab Fund for every download.
(/rushes to establish National Spy Crab Fund).
Rare Endangered Spy Crab 2009 Calendar [TF2Newbs]
To celebrate the launch of MODs on Steam, Valve is giving away five "leading Source MODs" to anyone who owns a Source-based game. The publisher is also offering Half-Life 2: Episode One on steam for $5.
The free MOD pack comes with Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic.
"Valve has been supporting the MOD community since the company's inception, offering updates to the SDK, holding MOD Expos and being the first to bring a MOD to retail with Counter-Strike in November 2000," said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve. "The debut of these MODs on Steam marks the beginning of a new level of support for the MOD community by putting the leading MODs at the finger tips of over 15 million targeted gamers."
Once the MOD pack, available now, is installed it will appear in the Steam "My Games" list and the MODs will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, the MODs support Steamworks, providing stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community.
Box art disaster averted! The official Left 4 Dead web site features updated box art for Valve's upcoming zombie shooter, ensuring that not a single pun opportunity has been squandered, with a trifecta of wordplay fully realised. We're so glad we were properly prepared for this shocking news. Thanks to Fuga for the eagle-eyed tip.
Alternate history alert: seems LittleBigPlanet devs Media Molecule were, at one stage before starting on LBP, working on a game very similar to Portal. Indeed, it was so similar to Portal it was "more Portally than Portal". While pitching the game, they met with the guys who published Media Molecule founder Mark Healey's Rag Doll Kung Fu on the PC: Valve. Valve brought up the idea of MM and the PC gaming overlords doing something together with the project, but nothing ever came of it. Imagine, though, if it had. We'd have Portal, but no LittleBigPlanet. Or...we'd have both, but with Sackboys tearing open the fabric of time and space, while PS3 owners built platform games made of...cake. The mind boggles.
Need something to play this weekend? Need it on the cheap? If you're on board with this whole digital distribution through Steam thing, some classic and not-so-classic Rockstar Games titles are being sold at bargain basement prices. Ten bucks for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Five for Manhunt? You could do a hell of a lot worse. The entire Rockstar Games Collection is just $29.99 in U.S. dollars, making corruption by video game violence a steal.
The whole thing is time limited and may very well not be offered in the country of your choosing. For the lucky bargain hunters, have at it.
Rockstar Games [Steam]
Valve's Doug Lombardi dropped word with the folks at Halflife2.net on the official, 100% legit, absolutely bunkum-free hardware requirements needed for Left 4 Dead. What's it gonna take to run the game? A CPU better the ones in the Kotaku Towers West supercomputers, sadly. It's OK, you kids have fun with all that zombie killing, we'll just do some Peggle. While not steep — though that 7.5 GB install is impressive — we just don't have the video card or central processing power to run the thing.
Last week Penny Arcade's own Tycho contacted me to see if I would be interested in writing a short piece for their site about Digital Rights Management. What with the escalating brouhaha with Electronic Arts and likelihood that this won't be the last time gamers run face first into some form of DRM they don't like, I jumped at the opportunity.
In the short essay I talk about the origins of the word piracy (Daniel Defoe don't you know), and the absurdity of applying todays shrinking ownership rights to a situation closer to that origin. I also call for a sort of Gamers' Bill of Digital Rights. Not that anyone will listen.
If that sort of stuff floats your boat hop on over on the link to check it out. If it doesn't interest you, hop over there to read Tycho's take on my "wavy locks and hard-arse goatee."
The Origin Of The CD-Keys, Part One [Penny Arcade]
Valve make PC games. They port em over to consoles, sure, but at heart, they're a PC developer. But what if they were more than that? What if they decided to start making Wii games, or MMO games? Team Fortress Summer Party? World Of Black Mesa? It'd be hilarious. And it's something Valve would love to do. Except, uh, they won't. Not unless you or anyone you know knows magic.
GN: The thing is I'm a big fan of the Wii in terms of a lot of the interesting things that it does, and we have absolutely zero Wii games in development. There's always so much more that we'd like to do that we could do. We have a bunch of MMO fans inside of the company that would kill to be working on an MMO....
1UP: ...including you?
GN: Myself included. [Laughs] A Wii MMO! Woo-hoo! We have nobody working on such a beast. Magically, if we could increase ourselves in size, then we can do a lot more of this stuff.
Don't know about magic, Gabe, but we hear cash money works just as well with that sorta stuff.
