Valve is using its Steam online distribution hub to provide PC gamers with access to ‘Alien Swarm’, a new squad-based tactical shooter. The whole thing is absolutely free and an official release over at SteamPowered.com explains:

“‘Alien Swarm’ is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community. Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. With your friends, form a squad of four distinct IAF Marine classes.”

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Having seen a slim version released just last year Sony’s PlayStation 3 might be the console that’s been touched on the least over the course of this year’s E3, but it seems that there are big changes in store for the device over the coming months, not least of which a fee-based version of Sony’s PlayStation Network service and more activity from Valve.

Strange to see Valve reverse direction on the PS3 so dramatically

Word of the move to a fee-based version of PSN will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who’s been keeping an eye on Sony over the last few months. Sony had been pushing surveys to ask its users just what they’d expect from the service if money were changing hands, and unsurprisingly the answer seems to have been “free games.” As a result, Sony is gearing up to launch a fee-based version of PSN that would see users charged a flat rate per year, which would entitle users to one PSN Game, two minis and one PSOne game per month.

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Valve has cancelled its much-anticipated pre-E3 event, which had been gearing up to be a very interesting first-look for the public at the upcoming sequel to Valve’s very successful Portal.

If nothing else, a new Source would be very interesting indeed...

Rather than go ahead with the whole thing, Valve has cancelled the Portal 2 event in favour of launching a “surprise” event, which it has assured us will not end with the surprise being that there was no event after all, nor that the Portal 2 event will go on anyway. Now though, rumours are beginning to circulate about just what it is that Valve is preparing to show off that could trump Portal 2. The first among those suggestions has already been shot down by Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, who said that long-time fans of the series shouldn’t get their hopes up for a third installation of Half-Life, the third episode of which has been a long time coming.

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Game development and digital publishing monolith Valve has announced that its Portal 2 event, which had been scheduled to be the company’s big showing at this year’s upcoming E3, won’t be going ahead.

We'll be curious to see what it is that Valve has to show off...

Valve had been set to show off the sequel to the runaway success first-person-puzzler that was Portal, but has now sent an email around to some journalists to detail the cancellation of the Portal 2 event in favour of a surprise announcement, which it’s expecting people will be happier to see than they would have been with Portal 2 anyway. It’s a very strange letter indeed, but one that the folks at TomsHardware have posted in full. The full mailing from Valve says,

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Valve has opened up a little recently on just what its plans for are the long-running Half-Life series and, if Gabe Newell is to be believed, the future is scary.

If nothing else, the logos have always been scary

For the moment, it’s not giving any indication of whether or not the rumour suggesting Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could eventually see release as Half-Life 3 (a rumour brought about by the vast time between the release of Episode 2 and the coming instalment). Still, that doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t been happy to talk about the upcoming game and give some hints as to just why it’s been delayed. Valve’s own Gabe Newell talked about the next release in the Half-Life series in a recent interview.

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It seems the EA and Dice have, between them, managed to drop the by now fairly infamous SecuROM DRM from copies of the companies’ Battlefield: Bad Company 2 sold via digital distribution service Steam.

If nothing else, it makes Bad Company 2 a more interesting prospect...

Stranger still is the fact that neither EA nor Dice went to great lengths to publicise the fact that SecuROM was being dropped, with word of the change coming from the update notes for Bad Company 2. Indeed, it doesn’t even go into too much detail there, with the change log simply pointing out that,

“Change: The STEAM version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 will no longer have SecuROM on the exe file. Instead it will use Valves [sic] own DRM instead.”

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It seems that one of the services that’s truly revolutionised the way people play games on PCs, Valve’s Steam, is soon to be brought to Apple’s Mac OS.

These teaser images have been sent to various videogame news sites

This move will likely be welcome news to any Mac-based gamers, who will by now have likely grown either very-used-to or entirely-sick-and-tired-of restarting their machines to boot into Windows so that they might play a game. Indeed, this is a move that had been hinted at in the past, though the last time people from inside Valve were asked about the lack of availability of the company’s games on Mac it said that the demand wasn’t there to make it a very sensible mood.

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One of the things we’re very much aware of in the Komplett offices is the dwindling amount of free time that people find themselves with these days. The fact is that an awful lot of people spend their hard earned cash on games and, very often, end up not finishing or even really playing them for any significant time at all.

Sure, you've got a monstrous rig, but when was the last time you finished a game?

Considering the amount that people spend on keeping their hardware up to date, to play the latest games at high resolutions or, in some cases, just to keep the old benchmarks impressive. Still, we were curious to see to what extent people felt they got value for money out of the games they opted to pick up, what the average gaming spend in Ireland might be and just what kind of games people got value for money from.

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Valve has a solid history of putting out quality games, even if it does take a monumental amount of time to get there, but it means that there’s been some curiosity about just what the developer would do with motion control.

Valve's own Left 4 Dead has done well enough on consoles that it could see motion control in future iterations

Indeed, so compelling was the question that when it had some time to talk to Valve’s own Chet Faliszek, CVG raised the question of motion control, not least because of the fact that Faliszek has expressed a certain attraction to Microsoft’s upcoming motion-sensitive addition to its Xbox 360, Project Natal, in the past. Faliszek had some fairly harsh criticisms for the state of motion sensitive gaming at the moment, and while he doesn’t single out Nintendo’s Wii, there are some fairly telling statements in there.

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It seems that Valve is being nice and up front about the odds of us seeing any new additions to its vastly successful Half-Life series over the course of this year, shooting down hopes that we’d see a new episode in 2010 nice and early.

I wonder how long the logo took...

Word from Valve comes courtesy of VG247, which highlights the fact that Valve’s Gabe Newell discussed Half-Life 2: Episode 3’s development in an interview last year, saying that the game was still under development. For now we have no indication of just why the next addition to the Half-Life 2 continuity is taking quite so long, but when the protracted delays seem to be a fairly damning indictment of Valve’s move to episodic content for the series.

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For all of those angry to have missed the days when Valve dropped Team Fortress 2 to €2.50, your chance to get in on the new sale on Steam is starting today, with Steam announcing some fairly impressive price cuts.

New sale has offers you just can't manage without digital distribution

Timed to coincide with Black Friday, more than once referred to as “the most dangerous shopping day of the year” in the US, the latest Steam sale sees many of the most popular games of the last year discounted fairly heavily. The vastly successful, and many will argue solid contender for game of the year, Batman: Arkham Asylum has been dropped by 50%, and there are plenty of other similar deals to be had.

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