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]

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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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]

Portal 2 has been announced as Valve‘s first game to use Steamworks on the PS3 (which was announced at last year’s E3). What does this mean for PC and Mac gamers? Cross-platform co-op play.

Also, even more surprisingly, gamers that purchase a copy of Portal 2 on the PS3 will be able to download a free copy of Portal 2 through Steam on their PC or Mac by linking their Steam and PSN accounts.

via [Big Download]

Back in September of last year, GameStop updated their Portal 2 store page with pre-order bonuses: $5 off and “Custom Bots” for the game’s co-op gameplay, but what exactly that meant was unclear.

GameStop has finally updated the game’s page in their online store to offer an image of what these custom bots will be (see above, or click here for larger). Hopefully this little nugget of content will keep our Portal 2 cravings at bay until the game’s April 19th release date.

While it doesn’t come at quite a huge surprise, Electronic Arts has announced that they will be in charge of the retail distribution of Valve‘s Portal 2. Also, the puzzle shooter’s release date will see a slight change from what we last heard. The game will now release on April 21st, 2011.

[Press Release]

The top ten best-selling games on Steam from the past week:

1. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam
2. Civilization V
3. Just Cause 2
4. Metro 2033
5. Killing Floor
6. Battlefield: Bad Company 2
7. Killing Floor Bundle
8. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
9. Worms Reloaded
10. Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Sad news for all the Portal fans out there. Valve has announced that the sequel puzzle shooter won’t be hitting the market until April 20th of next year (April 22nd for Europeans). The game originally was slated for release later this year and then was delayed for February 2011. Now it looks like we’re going to be waiting a couple more months. No reason was given as to why the game was delayed again.

via [Shacknews]