Apologies if you read that headline and spat piping hot tea all over your computer screen, but it looks like Final Fantasy VII – the series’ finest hour – is heading back to the PC by way of Valve’s online vestibule Steam. Time to break out the Materia? Seems that way… Read more
We recently brought you news that Valve, the company behind the Half-Life series and online games store Steam, will soon be releasing a ‘Steam box’ gaming PC to sit under your TV. But now Commodore, who’s been sitting on the ‘Amiga’ brand for some time, might have just beat Valve to it. Read more
PC gaming titan Valve is said to be working on its own console. The ‘Steam Box’ will plug directly into your TV to bring a selection of the PC’s finest titles into your living room without the need to build your own gaming rig. Good idea, or has OnLive already got this covered? Will the Steam Box’s Achilles’ heel be price?
Just a day after we revealed EA’s awesome Battlefield 3 deal, Activision and Steam have teamed up to bring you a full weekend (and then some) of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for absolutely nothing. Read more
Gaming mods are like fan-fiction: painstakingly crafted alternate stories, features and transformations born out of sheer love for the source material. In some cases they breed entirely new games in themselves, such is their sheer amazingness. Here are the best ones we’ve seen… Read more
Ah, the days of playing Counter-Strike for hours on end may soon return. According to Kotaku, Valve is working on a new version of the classic title, due out in 2012. The game will be called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and thanks to supporting evidence on Steam forums, Twitter and gaming blogs, the news is shaping up to be more than just water cooler fodder.
Over on the Steam forums a thread has been started for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive which says “more info in the morning”. The details revealed thus far suggest the game with be released in the first quarter of 2012 and it will focus on 5v5 competition. A press release is expected within 24 hours from Valve and the game plays on an updated source engine.
Steam, Valve’s digital game distribution service, can currently grind to a halt when the company announces a big sale or major title like Portal 2 but that should soon come to an end. The company has announced that it’s designed a brand new content system for Steam that will supercharge downloads and put an end to having to download hefty updates for minor changes.
Valve says the new system decreases the amount of data you’ll need to download and will allow you to grab updates to games while playing them. It’s also promised that the new set up will bring long-awaited features including download scheduling, bandwidth throttling and the ability to pick which games you want to download first. Valve is rolling out the new Steam back end now and you can test its speedier approach by grabbing free HD trailers from the store.
Out now | From £free | Steam blog
