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Since the Day 2 podcast was delayed, the E3 team thought you folks might enjoy getting a chance to check out Day 2 and Day 3 nearly simultaneously.

On Wednesday (Day 3 if you count Monday), the guys got a chance to check out Rock Band 2 (a game that I definitely want to hear more about). Now, I don’t know how they managed to get by without my amazing guitar skills, but they apparently did. They also dealt with something that was referred to as the ‘Konami Apocalypse,’ as well as getting some hands on time with Valve’s upcoming zombie-fest, Left 4 Dead. (Yes, that last bit makes me green with envy.)

You also get a chance to see what 3 days of sleep deprivation does to these guys, as they sound like they might be fraying ’round the edges just a bit.

This episode is available for direct download right over here.

As always, you can send comments, snide remarks, or suggestions to podcast@filefront.com. You can check out the entire File-N-Forget back catalog of episodes at http://podcast.filefront.com.

You can also check out the File-N-Forget Podcast on the iTunes Music Store.

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Gamers can now find Sacred Gold on Valve’s Steam service. As the preparations for the coming of Sacred 2 accelerate, some gamers may want to take a shot at the first game to get to know the setting or revisit an old favorite. The Sacred Gold digital download contains the original award winning game as well as Sacred Plus and Sacred Underworld.

It seems that gamers are waiting breathlessly on several games based on old favorites these days. Between Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Fallout 3 and Sacred 2, players seem happy to over look the absence of new titles out there. I know that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it; but that will only please the masses for so long.

via Steam

The first piece of concept art for the Half-Life 2: Episode 3 has surfaced thanks to the 2008 IntoThePixel E3 art gallery. Half-Life 2: Episode 3 will be the final chapter in the HL2 series, and it has been rumored that the game would be heading to the PS3 despite the hem-hawing and side-stepping Valve has been doing to avoid the question.

While trying to maintain that they are not “PS3 developers”, IntoThePixel shows information for the game beside the concept art, and the PS3 along with the presumed PC and Xbox 360 is listed. While Valve will only be present at E3 2008 to discuss Left 4 Dead, I am sure they will still get bombard with HL2:Ep3 questions the whole time, especially now that this bit of info has come to light.

The concept art was created by Valve artists Ted Backman, Jeremy Bennett, and Tristan Redford and shows  Gordon Freeman within a large Citadel-like environment with a Combine Advisor looming overhead.

Thanks: Shacknews

NCsoft’s Brian Hudson, a developer on Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, has contributed a developer diary on Velon Hollow. This upcoming instance will introduce two new features for Tabula Rasa; item sets and zombies.

Imagine that an evil alien race has developed a serum capable of suppressing your personality and trapping you in your own mind. The chemicals make you stronger and more aggressive, and the sight of human flesh makes you hungry. As the last of your sanity slips away, you are only slightly aware that your friends and family have become your latest meal!

It’s a great concept but it doesn’t really fit in a science fiction game. It’s definitely in the survival horror genre. It would be a great mod for Half-Life… oh wait that’s Left for Dead. Maybe they should concentrate on developing more of the sci-fi aspects.

Who wants to play I was a teenage zombie… Well I do, but not enough to commit to Tabula Rasa over one instance.

You can download the Tabula Rasa - Velon Hollow Developer Diary“>Tabula Rasa Velon Hollow dev diary courtesy of FileFront.

via FileFront

With the beta out of the way, Day of Defeat: Source has officially introduced its set of new Steamworks features this week. The Palermo update adds 51 achievements, player avatars, Steam Community integration, updated graphical effects, and a new freeze cam. There’s also a new map, Palermo, which is a remixed version of a user-created map (dod_salerno).

The integration with Steam Community allows you to easily spot friends you’re playing with (via an icon next to their name on the scoreboard) and player statistics much like those in Team Fortress 2’s. This is nothing earth-shattering, but I’m sure it must be nice for the longtime DoD fans to see all of these new free features be released.

Counter-Strike seems like a natural fit for a Steamworks update, so I wonder if we’ll be seeing that next. In the meantime, you can be playing DoD: Source free this weekend. All you need to do is download Steam, and you’ll have free access to the game (and its new features) through July 6.

Valve has announced that the Heavy class is next in line for Team Fortress 2 class updates and not only is this good news for gamers/fans, but Valve is actually opening up the floor to suggestions. The designers will be talking about how the update is designed, how to “make the Heavy more viable when he has no Medic to pair with”, and other interesting tidbits - here is an excerpt:

Here’s a list for how to help define the problems we want to solve with the Heavy pack. It’s pretty much exactly what we would start a design meeting with. Try coming up with a new unlockable for the Heavy that addresses the goal, while staying within the constraints as much as possible…. Finally, keep in mind the skillset required to be a good Heavy. He doesn’t really rely on fine aim, since his minigun has such a wide spread, instead relying on more tactical skills.

If you want to get all the inside information on the process, and maybe make a few suggestions, head on over to the site and check out what is happening so far.

Via: Evil Avatar

Rumors that Half-Life 2 Episode 3 will be feature at E3 2008 have proven to be just that. Valve’s marketing boss Doug Lombardi has officially announced that the next episode in the Half-Life 2 franchise will not be at E3 this year. He did promise fans a playable version of Left 4 Dead would be on display at a Valve hosted suite.

The zombie FPS Left 4 Dead has been generating quite a bit of hype of its own. Valve is confident the multiplayer co-op game will be groundbreaking.

Valve managing director Gabe Newell has said, “What Counter-Strike did for multiplayer action games, Left 4 Dead will do for co-op games.”

Left 4 Dead is currently under development by Turtle Rock. Gamers can expect Valve to publish the title this fall.

As if you didn’t have enough reassurance after all of those claims that PC gaming was dead, Valve’s Gabe Newell has chimed in once again and explained why his company is such a strong supporter of the platform, and why things like Steam and Audiosurf are proof that PC gaming is very much alive. And, naturally, World of Warcraft will come up in any argument for PC gaming.

“Until recently, the fact that World of Warcraft was generating 120 million dollars in gross revenue on a monthly basis was completely off the books,” Newell said. “Essentially, [Blizzard is] creating a new Iron Man every month, in terms of the gross revenue they’re generating as a studio. Any movie studio would be shouting about that from the rooftops. But it was essentially invisible.”

He even went so far as to proclaim that the MMO is “arguably the most valuable entertainment franchise in any media right now,” which is certainly a bold claim.

A colleague of Newell’s, Valve business developer Jason Holtman, had an interesting point when he spoke of the potential that lies in untapped markets.

“PC’s are everywhere in the world,” Holtman said. “PC’s are the same all over the world. All of sudden, if you can open up emerging markets and go somewhere like Russia or South East Asia, you’ve gone way further than you can go with a closed console. There are 17 million PC gaming customers in Russia alone.”

You can read more about Valve’s pimping of the PC over at Eurogamer.

If you’ve paid close attention to the rate that Medics heal in Team Fortress 2, you may have noticed that they sometimes (seemingly arbitrarily) will heal significantly faster than, say, when you’re in the midst of battle. The new official Team Fortress 2 blog has already proven itself useful, revealing why this is and how exactly it works.

The absolute basics: the healing rate increases as the amount of time the heal target has not been damaged increases. In other words, the longer you’ve avoided taking shots, the faster a Medic will be able to heal you. More specifically, “If it’s been greater than 10 seconds since the target was hurt, the heal rate is increased. The amount of increase ramps linearly up to 3 times the base heal rate at 15 seconds since the target was hurt. So if you’re healing a target who’s been hurt less than 10 seconds ago, you’ll only be getting the base heal rate of 24 health a second. If the target was hurt 12.5 seconds ago, you’ll be healing at 48 health a second. If the target hasn’t been hurt for over 15 seconds, you’ll be getting the maximum heal rate of 72 health a second.”

Valve’s reasoning for this is because they wanted to encourage players to retreat. But given the rate at which Medics healed, having to retreat and find a Medic to heal you didn’t save you much time over just continuing to attack, die, and then respawn. So this was the solution to encouraging players to retreat without affecting the capabilities of a Medic in the middle of a firefight.

This gets me to wondering what other layers of hidden complexity this game (and for that matter, any other game) contains.

This week Adam Sessler returns with his thoughts/review of Valve’s highly anticipated zombie title Left 4 Dead. While he is in rare form this week, meaning that he is not ranting about anything, its is still the same bitingly witty Sessler we have all grown to know and love.

He talks a bit about the cool cinematics and atmosphere of the game, co-op play and a nice little feature that is lacking in a lot of games. Say you need to leave the game for a minute to run to the bathroom but do not want to leave your online friends without backup. You can hit a button which basically turns your character into a bot thus giving your team the fire power it needs while you are doing the Tiijuana quickstep.

While I am excited about Left 4 Dead myself and found his little review nothing more than another reason to get the game, I found that Adam and I have something in common. We both are firm believers in the impending zombie apocalypse, and like Adam suggests, Left4 Dead will be great way for us to hone our skills so that when the undead do rise forth from the grave to feast upon the gooey gray matter lodged in our craniums, we will be well prepared.

Thanks: G4 TV

Valve recently launched an official blog for their popular online shooter, Team Fortress 2. According the lead developer, Robin Walker, the new site is a way for the developers to talk directly to the game community and inform them of upcoming content releases. To kick things off, one of the sites initial posts gives a glimpse at some of the initial concept designs for the Pyro’s new flare gun. Something tells me this is going to turn into an endless source of TF2 information in the coming months.

Via Official Team Fortress 2 Blog

Thanks to the wonderful link provided by iKiddo yesterday, we now know exactly what you have to do to get all the Pyro achievements listed for Team Fortress 2. Therefore, without further ado, here they are:

1. Arsonist: Destroy 50 Engineer buildings.
2. Attention Getter: Ignite 100 enemies with the flare gun.
3. Baptism by Fire: Force 10 burning enemies to jump into water.
4. BarbeQueQ: Cause a dominated player to leave the server.
5. Burn Ward: Ignite 3 medics that are ready to deploy an Uber-charge.
6. Camp Fire: Kill 3 enemies in a row, all within the same area.
7. Clearcutter: Kill 6 people with your axe in one life.
8. Combined Fire: Use your shotgun to finish off 20 players you’ve ignited.
9. Controlled Burn: Ignite 50 enemies capturing one of your control points.
10. Cooking the Books: Ignite 5 enemies carrying your intelligence.
11. Dance Dance Immolation: Kill 3 enemies while they’re taunting.
12. Dead Heat: Kill an enemy in the same second that he kills you.
13. Fire and Forget: Kill 15 players while you’re dead.
14. Fire Chief: Kill 1000 enemies
15. Firefighter: Kill 500 enemies.
16. Firewall: Ignite 5 Spies who have a sapper on a friendly building.
17. Firewatch: Ignite 10 snipers while they are zoomed in.
18. Freezer Burn: Provide enemies with freezecam shots of each of your taunts.
19. Got A Light?: Ignite an enemy Spy while he’s flicking a cigarette.
20. Hot on Your Heels: Kill 50 enemies with your flamethrower, from behind.
21. Hot Potato: Reflect 100 projectiles with your compressed air blast.
22. Hotshot: Kill a Soldier with a reflected critical rocket.
23. I Fry: Ignite 10 disguised Spies
24. Lumberjack: Kill 3 people with your axe in one life.
25. Makin’ Bacon: Kill 50 Heavies with your flamethrower.
26. Next of Kindling: Ignite an enemy, and the Medic healing him.
27. OMGWTFBBQ: Kill an enemy with a taunt
28. Pilot Light: Ignite a rocket-jumping Soldier while he’s in midair.
29. Plan B: Kill 10 enemies while you’re both underwater.
30. Pyromancer: Do 1 million points of total fire damage.
31. Pyrotechnics: Kill 3 enemies in a single uber-charge.
32. Second Degree Burn: Kill a burning enemy who was ignited by another Pyro.
33. Spontaneous Combustion: Ignite 10 cloaked Spies.
34. Trailblazer: Ignite 10 enemies that have recently used a teleporter.
35. Weenie Roast: Have 2 enemy Scouts on fire at the same time.

I also went ahead and posted a pic of The Sniper since it was so cool.

Via: Steam

Championship Gaming Series has signed an exclusive contract with DIRECTV and will be featured on G4. CGS is in its second season and has shown on cable in many parts of the world, but this will be its first cable engagement in North America.

“G4’s young male viewers are passionate about video games,” said Neal Tiles, President, G4. “By bringing Championship Gaming Series to the network, we are giving our audience the rare opportunity to watch some of the world’s best gamers in action. The competition is certain to appeal to our viewers.”

Gamers will be able to follow the series as the CGS teams from around the world compete for $1,000,000 in prize money. These digital gladiators come from North America, UK, Europe, Asia and Australia, Middle East and Latin America. Each ten player team will test its mettle on the four official CGS games: Dead or Alive 4, Forza Motorsport 2, CounterStrike: Source and Fifa ‘08.
For more information on the CGS contract with G4 or the 2008 Championship Gaming Series, visit Business Wire.

As promised, Valve has a rolled out a new humorous trailer highlighting one of the characters in Team Fortress 2. This time, we get a look at the Sniper, who is basically an Aussie badass. In this video, he discusses the pros and cons of being a hired gun, plus his general code of standards. That and we get to see how one bullet can lead to hilarious tragedy. Enjoy.

Get ready to go flame-crazy in Team Fortress 2 this Thursday when Valve releases the second major character update for the masked, flamethrower-wielding class. Three new weapons and a total of 35 new achievements for the class will be included in the update, which will also include two user-created maps.

A website dedicate to the update will be going live Tuesday afternoon at 11AM PDT (2PM on the east coast), so we should hopefully have more information on the specifics then. For some reason I get the impression that the new weapons won’t be unlockable — at least not in the same way the Medic’s were. I really hope that’s the case, but the Medic update really ruined the game for a period of time there. Valve clearly underestimated people’s desire to farm achievements.

If that’s not really your thing, a new “Meet the Team” video will be going live — Meet the Sniper, to be more specific. Be sure to check back tomorrow and we’ll have the video for you to enjoy.

As we reported last week, Valve will be introducing “some significant changes” to the class, regardless of your having the new weapons. No word yet on what those might be, but once again, the new Pyro Update website will hopefully clue us in and get us prepared for the new wave of Pyros we’ll see later this week.

This upcoming weekend will also be a Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend, starting at 11AM PDT on Friday. That’ll give you a chance to try out the community maps and Pyro changes.

The new unlockable weapons and achievements for the Medic in Team Fortress 2 — as great an idea as they were — ended up being a pretty big mess. Suddenly, mountains of servers were locked and running a specially-designed map to make farming the achievements as easy as possible. The games that were open were littered with people who either hadn’t a clue as to how the class should be played or had a single goal (a specific achievement) on their minds.

I’m clearly not the only one who’d like to see Valve handle the next big release differently. That’s at least hinted at in last week’s Steam update news, which confirmed the news that the Pyro would be the next to get the unlockable weapon treatment.

We’ve almost completely wrapped up the next big release for Team Fortress 2, which will focus on the Pyro class, along with the Meet the Sniper movie. 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.

One of the new unlockable weapons, the Axtinguisher, is an axe that does half-damage to enemies if they’re not on fire, but if they have caught fire, you’re guaranteed a critical hit. I don’t know how practical that is, because if you’re so close to the enemy, why not just keep spamming your flamethrower?

Unlike the Medic update, Valve intends to make “some significant changes” to Pyros, whether or not you unlock the new weapons. We’ve got that to look forward to, as well as the next “Meet the…” video, which will star the Sniper.

PC gaming is dead!

We’ve all heard it over and over recently from many pessimistic sources in the games industry. They cite software piracy as a major culprit, claiming an incredible percentage of games are stolen. We’ve heard how PCs are so much more expensive to upgrade than consoles and with the seemingly infinite combinations of hardware, software and drivers is it any wonder consoles look so promising to developers? With each successive generation of systems, consoles have become more sophisticated and now rival the performance capabilities of midline PCs.

PCs are hard to write games for. Again and again, developers complain about the time and money involved in creating games for systems that have no standard specifications and have a wide range of performance capabilities. Consoles represent a base configuration, sure they may or may not hare a hard drive and even when they do the size might vary but its nothing like PCs and its use of different hardware, OS and drivers. There’s no guarantee that a game will work for every build out there even if the machine meets the minimum system specifications.

All these are legitimate complaints, but I think there is one very important reason why the cries of PC game death are false. PC games have an appeal that is uncommon among the proprietary game consoles by offering a training ground for future developers. Gamers modify PC games adding increased value for other players while granting the titles a longer life span if the mod scene takes off after release. Developers even plan for and encourage game owners to create new content and change existing code. What console offers this sort of tool? Some games come with tool sets packaged with the game, while others are free to download. Its become common for development teams to challenge amateur game makers to enhance or create new game content through contests, some - like the Make something Unreal contest, offer substantial prizes to the winners.

Read the full article

Online gamers went wild for the achievements and unlockable weapons for the Medic in Team Fortress 2 when they were first release. So it only makes sense that Valve would be working on giving similar treatment to other characters in the near future. Well, it looks like the next one to get some new weapons and achievements will be the Pyro. No word yet on just what types of weapons or achievements we’ll be getting yet, but you can expect to see about five Pyros per team online when they finally are released.

Via CVG

We know that Valve is raking in the cash from games sold through Steam, but Valve prez Gabe Newell has revealed that within the next several months, they’ll be making more from digital distribution than they do at stores, according to GI.biz.

“We see sub ten per cent growth rates in our core, packaged retail business,” Newell said. “Right now we’re seeing close to 200 per cent growth in the alternative ways of connecting with customers.

“It will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels,” he said.

Many gamers would still prefer to have a physical copy of the game that they can hold. And who could blame them? A reporter pointed this out, to which Newell said, “At this point, people have had Steam long enough that their experience is that Steam is more reliable than physical media.”

Add in support for Steam Cloud and the ability to access your games and saves from any computer, and it’s hard to really argue with him. Lose or scratch a game disc, or misplace the CD-key, and you’re suddenly out of luck.

Newell also addressed the concept of Steam distributing non-game related media, and how Valve is looking at that in the long-term. “It’s something that we’re looking at,” he said. “Right now we’re focused on games… but I think as we get more mature, there’s no reason that we wouldn’t.”

One thing that got me very excited about that possibility: Newell talked about the potential to distribute Firefox, where Steam Cloud could be used to allow you to access your bookmarks and settings.

Valve has announced that it will be introducing a new feature which will allow remote storage of all game data for games purchased through Steam, its digital distribution platform.

While Steam already allows you to play games purchases through the service on any PC, the inclusion of Steamcloud will extend that service to game data. This means that all progress saves, keyboard bindings and option settings from certain games will be able to accessed as well because all data will be automatically saved to back-end servers and kept forever at no cost to the player.

There are no storage restrictions or quotas and even video replays and screenshots taken from your games will be saved on the servers. For example, say you deleted your games off your computer along with all the save files, screen captures, videos etc, and sold your system. Two years later you buy a new system, log into Steamcloud and voila! All of your game data, purchases and the like are still there waiting on you to pick up where you left off.

The CounterStrike, Half-Life (the full series), Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Left 4 Dead will be the first games in t he Steam catalog to offer the Steamcloud service.

Steamcloud is part of the Steamworks set of developer tools and Steam’s developer John Cook stated that many more updates are planned for the future such as:

• Auto-updating of your computer’s device drivers
• Social features including events and calendar systems
• Official community pages for games
• Pricing localized to your country’s currency
• Amazon-style recommendations and shopping cart systems
• More payment options.

For more information on this upcoming service check back with us often.

Via: GamesIndustry.biz