Posts Tagged ‘steam’
Left 4 Dead Demo Confirmed on PC and Xbox 360
Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve (the greatest gaming company ever), confirmed at Videogamer.com that the demo of Left 4 Dead will be for PC and Xbox 360. Gabe, while unsure of the final content that will be in the demo, assures gamers that both singleplayer and co-op will be in the demo as a taste of what the game will be like. The game itself is due out on November 18th in the US, and November 21, 2008 in Europe.
The Pxl Lab is also planning on reviewing both the PC and Xbox versions of the game, so be sure to check our reviews of the game when it’s released!
Team Fortress 2, The Greatest Multiplayer Game of the Year, Now Free
To celebrate their latest patch to the amazing game Team Fortress 2, Valve is allowing anybody with a Steam account to download the game for free and use it for the weekend. After the weekend (June 20-22, 2008) you can no longer play the game for free unfortunately. The new patch adds 3 new unlockable weapons for the Pyro class. There’s a shotgun replacement called the Flare Gun, which is basically just what it sounds like. It shoots off a flare to allow you to ignite your enemies at long range, but takes a very careful aim to get it right. It also adds a new flamethrower into the mix, called The Backburner. It removes the Compression Blast ability, but the Backburner always has critical hits when burning an enemy from behind, as well as adding 50 points of health to the Pyro wielding it. The final unlockable is a new axe, called the Axtinguisher. This weapon critical hits any enemy who is on fire, but does considerably less damage to those who remain in a state of not on fire.
The patch also adds 35 achievements for aspiring Pyros to unlock. One of my personal favorites, is called BarbeQueQ. You obtain it by causing a dominated player to leave the server. Other fun achievements such as Freezer Burn (provide enemies with freezecam shots of each of your taunts), make it worth your while to try for the achievements. There are also two new maps added, A capture point map called “Fastlane”, and a Capture the flag map called “Turbine”. All of these factors make it an excellent weekend to play TF2, and if you aren’t already a player, to join the phenomenon.
Team Fortress 2 Pyro Update Announced
Valve announced in their weekly update news that the Pyro would be receiving the next major update with 3 new weapons to unlock along with a lot of achievements. For people worried about how this will effect the game as much as the Medic update did, here’s a quote that should put your mind at ease:
We’ve spent time looking at how the recent Medic release went, and have rolled feedback from that release into the new item designs for the Pyro and into the design of the achievements required to unlock those items.
The Axtinguisher, as pictured to the left, is one of the three new unlockable weapons for the Pyro. This axe will only do half the damage of the standard axe in a normal situation, but if your enemy is on fire, then the Axtinguisher will always hit a critical. For those of you who aren’t into the whole unlocks thing, then Valve has some news for you too:
Along with all of the new content, we’re also going to be making some significant changes to the Pyro class for everyone, regardless of whether they have unlocked any new items.
Valve did not announce an official release day for the update, but expect it to come this month.
Steam Will Soon Hold Save Games Online
Steam, the service that Valve uses to distribute games online, is known for its excellent copy protection, easy game downloading, and large base of players. Valve announced that they will be adding two more features to help gamers in the near future, namely keeping save games and key bindings on the user’s account, so that players that play their games on multiple computers can keep their data with them. I, who use two computers to play Steam games, find this news a godsend from Valve. This news is also great for people on a single computer, because if a freak accident like a hard drive wipe or fire wipes out the data on your computer, then you still have it when you get a new one! The games that will first see the effects of this update are Half Life, Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Source, and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. I can only hope that they add it to Team Fortress 2 soon after. For those of you that don’t have Steam, you can take advantage of the download button below to get it.
