Tech Olive

The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature that helps out gamers in this tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

With new independent developers popping up every day, each with their own games to show the world, it can be difficult to find the hidden gems in all the hustle. Luckily, the Independent Games Festival helps us with this very issue. This week’s budget title was among only a few finalists for IGF’s prestigious “Seamus McNally” award.

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Always working to further improve Steam’s user-friendliness and security, Valve has announced the latest feature to enter beta: Steam Guard. Steam Guard is a system designed to keep user accounts safe from hackers and other nefarious persons, even if your password gets out in public.

“Account phishing and hijacking are our top support issues,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “With Steam Guard, we’ve taken a big step towards giving customers the account security they need as they purchase more and more digital goods.”

What Steam Guard offers is hardware-based recognition and authentication, much like many online banking systems use. For a login to be accepted, you must manually define if a PC is allowed access via an activation email sent to your Steam account’s email address. Gabe Newell is so confident in the technology that he even publicly released his login details to prove the system’s reliability. In the future, Steam Guard will make use of technology built into second-generation Intel CPUs that generates a new password every 30 seconds.

[Press Release]

For the first week of March, Steam is offering a fantastic 50% off deal for anyone looking to purchase one of the scariest games ever created. For a mere $9.99, Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be yours. The sale is to celebrate the game’s Independent Games Festival (IGF) 2011 finalist nomination.

[Press Release]

Finally deemed worthy of receiving the PC port of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, PC gamers can now pre-order Brotherhood through Steam, to ensure you’ve got your hands on it as soon as it releases on March 17th. By pre-ordering, you will automatically be upgraded to the “Digital Deluxe Edition”. What does the Digital Deluxe Edition include? I’m glad you asked:

• 2 Exclusive Single-Player Maps: The Trajan Market & The Aqueduct
• 2 Multiplayer Characters:
  • The Officer – Death’s Finest Ally: Few have seen him. Even fewer have lived to tell about it. Fear is his friend, and Death is his ally.
  • The Harlequin – The Walking Nightmare: Behind the gaudy costume and twisted smile lies the soul of a merciless Assassin.
• 1 Ezio Skin – Helmschmied Drachen Armor: Fashioned by the Helmschmied Armory in 1489, only a few sets were completed due to the weight of the metal. Very few men proved strong enough to wear it.
• The Original Codex Written by Altaïr: Take a closer look at the history of the Assassins and art of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.
• Multiplayer Characters Collectible Trading Cards: A set of trading cards featuring all the characters of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Multiplayer, including their kill moves and biographies.
• Map of Rome
• Assassin’s Creed Lineage – The Complete Movie: Explore the events that revolve around Ezio’s father, Giovanni Auditore da Firenze, and gain insight on the Assassin’s Creed story and universe.
• Making-Of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – Behind the Brotherhood: Go behind the scenes with the development team to learn about how the game was made and Ezio’s continuing story.
• Game Soundtrack: 22 songs from the original game soundtrack by Jesper Kyd.
  Digital Premium Edition content is only available via download

The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature that helps out gamers in this tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

A real treat for long-time fans of the point-and-click adventure genre was Steam’s recent influx of older adventure classics in their online store. Even better was the pricing of these games.

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In a recent Forbes profile of Steam CEO Gabe Newell, he brought up the new PC gaming streaming service OnLive and said that while the technology is great, it’s ultimately inefficient and expensive. However, OnLive Exec Steve Perlman says that his service’s streaming costs are reasonable and are in line with what Netflix charges for their streaming. He continues by firing back at Valve, saying that Valve’s audience is “limited to people who have a high-performance computer.”

Say what you will about Steam, but there’s no stopping them at this point. According to Forbes, Steam controls around 50- to 70-percent of the digital PC gaming market and its profits continue to rise.

[Forbes]

This week on Steam’s Weekly Top Sellers list, the just released Test Drive Unlimited 2 sees the top spot while Magicka jumps up to number two. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still holding on in number 7 and Civilization V squeezes back into the last spot at number 10. See the complete top ten list after the break.

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The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature that helps out gamers in this tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

This week’s budget title is for all the MegaMan and side-scrolling space shooter titles. If that’s not enough, it also happens to be an indie title and makes full use of Steam Cloud and Steam’s achievement systems, and even offers full controller support.

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This week on Steam’s Weekly Top Sellers list, Dead Space 2 reclaims the top spot while last week’s top seller, Magicka, drops to number three. Call of Duty: Black Ops jumps back on the list after being absent last week, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still holding on in the 10th spot. See the complete top ten list after the break.

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Continually improving their service, Steam has added yet another invaluable feature for gamers: Screenshots. Sure, there are already several programs that any self-respecting gamer should already be running (FRAPS, Xfire, etc.) that offer screenshot functionality, but it’s always nice to get more of what you want in one program.

Any game that supports the Steam overlay will also support the screenshot integration (except games running DirectX 8 or older rendering). Just go into your Steam account’s settings and change your beta participation to enter the screenshot beta. After enabling screenshot support, just use the F12 key to take a shot, and you can upload the shots via Steam Cloud for management on your Steam Community page.

[Press Release]