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Valve’s bright idea - The Steam Community Portal

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Gather round, Valve has a new idea! The guys have adapted Steam to now include a ‘myspace’ like community portal whereby you can do all the socialising with other players in one place. It promises many exciting features.

Valve’s latest big announcement, The Steam Community, will encourage you to play with friends, and make new ones.

The headline feature is one-click matchmaking, both for new games and existing ones such as Counter-Strike. You’ll be able to jump straight into a game with players of your skill level, with no history of griefing, by pressing a single button. It also lets you form a party with your friends, and automatically find a game that you can all jump into and play together.

There is also the promise of creating groups where members can see other members playing games, join their game or schedule dates/time for later games. The group also gets access to a private chat channel to talk in despite playing different games.

Steam Community gives you a personal gamer page that’s accessible via the web, with embarrassingly detailed stats about what you play, how much you play it, and what kind of player you are.

Team killers beware! Steam Community shows the further progression of Steam bringing together everything online gaming needs.

Now this is just some funny ass shit. According to this article a man who was repeatedly ganking a female character in world of warcraft had his house broken into, got beat with clubs and had his computer and entertainment center smashed by the husband of the woman he was harassing.

Bronco Carson, a World of Warcraft player from Mexico, reported to police on Saturday that three men broke into his home and beat his arms with clubs and totalled his computer. The reason? Carson had been repeatedly ganking the WoW character of the wife of one of his assailants.

Carson reportedly told police that he had been “making it hard for her to get far in the game.” The woman had already threatened Carson online, and Carson said that he had already been constantly harassed in-game two weeks prior to the attack.

And then Carson made the mistake of giving the woman his address, telling the woman that “if her husband was man enough to just come meet me to settle this.”

read the rest.. now that is some funny shit.

It really annoys me to see a good movie or game that has been promises to have a sequel…that never shows up.

Boondock Saints was supposed to have a sequel; they even went so far as to give screenshots. What happens to the brothers? Do they keep killing, or do they just spend the rest of their life in a bar getting drunk off their asses?

Starcraft, the mother of all real time strategies, has left us hanging on a climax of events. We have been hanging for 10 fucking years. Blizzard even goes so far as to start Starcraft: Ghost, but never finishes. The first person shooter game that many Starcraft fan boys would have bought (me being one of them) never came out.
Well, I guess you cannot be surprised, after Blizzard made Warcraft 3 and just screwed up from there, somehow they are making millions. What would possess them to make a second Starcraft when it might not even live up to the reputation?

Well, perhaps the companies know what is best for money more than I do, but who are they making the games for?

In a shocking and unexpected turn of events, the self-proclaimed “school shooting expert”, gay rights activist, and all around unbiased gaming pal, Jack Thompson, blames video games for the Virginia Tech shooting. What game specifically? Counter-Strike, which is a “mass murder simulator” according to Jack Thompson. But then again, according to Jack Thompson, video games are the cause of global warming, 9/11, WWII, and the travesties of the innernets known as “4chan” and “myspace”. But the real kicker is that Jack Thompson is blaming the wrong company for Counter-Strike. Jack should be blaming Valve, as they are the creators of Counter-Strike, as opposed to Microsoft, which is the company he is currently blaming, which is just more evidence that Jack Thompson doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about therefore should shut the hell up. Jack Thompson even sent a letter to Bill Gates himself, in which he asks Bill Gates to “pull the plug on Counter-Strike.”

The copy of the letter is in this article, which is definitely worth reading as it’s a source to no end of laughs.

In very similar news, Jack Thompson’s fiance, Dr. Phil, also happens to blame video games for the Virginia Tech shooting. This is what probably happened, I’ll make it as detailed as possible to give you the inside scoop:

Jack Thompson: Phil, publicly announce that you, too, blame video games for the Virginia Tech shooting or I’m calling off our wedding.

Dr. Phil: Yes master.

Update: Police searched through Cho’s dorm room and there were zero (0) video games found. I was going to say something really funny/witty, but it just wouldn’t compete with what “Sam G.” already posted in the comments of that article so I won’t bother: Can we officially refer to him as “Jack Thompson, attorney at lawl”?

Watch this New Yorker attempts to beat a hacked SMB game.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6204903272262158881

That’s right folks, apparently Valve, the creators of the award-winning game series “Half-Life”, has been hacked yet again.

” MaddoxX, of the anti-Valve website No-Steam.org, has an ax to grind. He says he’s hacked the Steam servers in the past, swiping information. Up to now, it’s just been to prove a point — and score a few free games. In fact, MaddoxX says that he’s been tooling around on the Steam server’s back door since January. “I did try [to] contact them several months ago. At the time, I didn’t do anything harmful — just got [a few free copies of games] but never heard anything from them,” he says. “Later,” the steamed hacker adds, “I tried to warn them to fix bugs…but as usual, they don’t listen.”

The hacker apparently hacked the Cyber-Cafe servers, and stole tons of customer information and credit card numbers.
Valve REALLY needs to upgrade their firewalls and anti-hack devices. Either that, or like always they’ll use it as an excuse to delay Episode 2.

The Xbox 360 has been updated to play some more original xbox games. Here is the full list:

* Tenku (Japan only)
* Avatar: The Last Airbender (US)
* Avatar: The Legend of Aang (EMEA/ANZ)
* Breakdown
* Call of Duty 2: Big Red One
* Call of Duty 3
* Cars
* Crash Bandicoot 5: Wrath of Cortex
* Daisenryaku VII
* FIFA Soccer 2007
* Full Spectrum Warrior
* Guilty Gear Isuka
* Innocent Tears (Japan only)
* Jet Set Radio Future
* King of Fighters 2002
* King of Fighters: Neowave
* Mad Dash Racing (Japan only)
* Mech Assault 2
* Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
* Nascar 2006: Total Team Control
* NFL Fever 2004
* Oddworld Munch’s Oddysee
* Panzer Dragoon Orta
* Petit Copter (Japan only)
* Phantom Dust
* Reservoir Dogs
* Return To Castle Wolfenstein
* Rugby League 2
* Sengoku Warriors (Japan only)
* Sonic Riders
* Soul Calibur 2 UPDATED
* Spider-Man 2
* Star Wars: Republic Commando
* Street Fighter Anniversary Collection
* Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
* Tony Hawk’s Underground
* Ultra Bust a Move /ULTRA Pazzle Bobble
* Unreal Championship 2

Pretty impressive update that covers some choice titles.

Duke Nukem Forever has basically turned into a huge e-joke as the symbol and champion of vaporware. After over 10 years some thrilling news has surfaced!

According to Voood Extreme Duke Nukem Forever is going to be featured in the July issues of PC gamer.

Remember those slick decoder rings you played with as a kid? How you sent indecipherable notes to your best friend about how gross that girl sitting next to you was? Well, at PC Gamer, we love secrets, and since we always have our well-trained, doctor-like hands on the pulse of the gaming industry, we’ll have some tasty inside info for you next month. Is Duke Nukem Forever finally being released? Hey, it could happen.

This is pretty big news as 3D realms said they would not be publicizing the game until it was 6 months-year away from release. As hard as it is for me to say, we might be playing Duke Nukem Forever Christmas 2007!

Update: A post on Shacknews from George has some rather disappointing information!

I have no idea what tasty info they could be talking about. Someone at PCG feel free to contact me - I’m curious

The more and more we talk about it, the more I’m pretty sure we’ll lead off with releasing our own videos of the game, then do press after that. We’ll see, but thats certainly the prevailing attitude internally.

Bleh.