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Posts Tagged Valve

Portal 2 : More cake!

Mar 8

If you haven’t heard of Portal till now, I wouldn’t exactly blame you. It’s not a game you would necessarily notice, unless you were looking, or someone dropped you a line. Developed by Valve, on the Source engine, Portal is a physics-based puzzle game. But then, I wouldn’t exactly blame you if you loved the game. Although a relatively short game, Portal offered extremely entertaining (occasionally irritating) gameplay. The game revolved around solving puzzles using ‘portals’ which you could shoot from your portal gun.

Anyway, Valve has now announced the release of Portal 2, after realising exactly how popular the original was. It should be coming out sometime in December this year. Portal 2 will be set many many years after the events of Portal unfolded. Yes, GlaDOS will be back, as the sweet, yet homicidal antagonistic robot. And yes, Chell will be back.

What I’m really interested in, is the fact that Portal 2 will most likely be featuring a new version of the Source engine, which should give us an accurate idea of how Half-Life 2 : Episode 3 will look. Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet, considering the fact that the 2 games obviously underwent concurrent development at some point in their product development cycles, it’ll be great to investigate what new whistles and bangs the boffins at Valve have incorporated into the already-rather-amazing Source engine.

P.S. To those of you who’re die-hard fans of the game, I hope you’ve heard Still Alive by GlaDOS. Amazing song, makes me laugh each time I hear it…

P.P.S. Am really looking forward to meeting the Aperture Science Companion Cube again.

P.P.P.S. The cake is a lie…

Tags: Games, Portal, Valve

Valve controls Steam

Aug 21

Posted by The Nut in Tech | No Comments

To an engineer, this makes sense.

To a gamer, this makes sense.

But engineer ≠ gamer.

Allow me to elaborate. Valve makes games like the famed Half-Life, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat etc. Now, the point is that Steam is the network, through which these you can play multiplayer. Quite common, you’ll say. But the power of the network lies, not in its ability to allow mutiplayer, but in its tight-knit game activation system.

Let’s say I bought a copy of Counter Strike. To install it on my PC, I must first install the Steam Client, which comes bundled with all Valve games. Fair enough, I install it, and then I ‘install’ CS. The use of the quotes is because, I’m just dumping the installation files on my PC, not installing it. To play the game, I must first open Steam, create an account, and activate CS using the Activation Key I got with my PC.

To play a Steam game, you need to start Steam. Although, you can disable you Internet and play singleplayer offline, to play online, you must be connected to the Steam Network through your Steam Account. Other games with not-so-tough-and-very-crackable setups allow you to distribute your game around, and have a multiplayer party with your friends. Unfortunately, in the case of Steam, each one of them needs to buy an original copy to get an activation key, as each key can be used only once.

So that means that if I lease out CS to two of my friends, they can play using my account, but we’ll never be able to face each other in a match.

Tags: Games, Valve