Portal 2′s Perpetual Testing Initiative

Valve has announced their new free Portal 2 DLC, which is effectively a map creator kit, in the best way possible – a memo from Cave Johnson.

TO: All Aperture employees
FROM: Cave Johnson

COMPANY MEMORANDUM

Cave Johnson here. Your boss. It’s come to my attention that some of you are concerned after receiving my all-staff memo yesterday (“You: Design Test Chambers or You’re Fired”). So to put your minds at ease, let me clarify: You are not mentally ill and you did read the memo just fine. It was real. You should be designing test chambers, right now and at all times, or by God I will fire you.

To celebrate the release, Portal 2 is on sale for $6.79 from Steam which is a bargain for how much time you’ll spend solving, and now creating, the ingenious puzzles it contains.

Check out the trailer for the new Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC below.

Grab Super MNC Free On Steam

Monday Night Combat is back – now with 100% more Super in front of it, 100% more free to play and 50% more chickens!

Super Monday Night Combat continues the proud MNC tradition of team-based, cartoon FPS MOBA gameplay and is supposed to be in the beta phase of development. However due to some unfortunate mishaps, the game is now freely available from Steam.

Developer Uber Entertainment explained the sudden release, which was a surprise to them too, via their forums:

We did a bunch of invites over the weekend and there was some wonkiness on how the messaging went out with lots of confusion which resulted in more silliness. We decided to just open it up. There will be an announcement about it on Steam soon.

Don’t question it, just grab a copy from Steam and start playing! While you’re waiting for the download, you can check out the gameplay intro video below:

Orcs Must Die! 2 Announced With Co-Op

Over 3.4 billion orcs were heartlessly slaughtered in the first Orcs Must Die! game, but Robot Entertainment feel there’s still more work to be done in the field of orkish genocide.

Orcs Must Die! 2 introduces a new character, The Sorceress, along with the co-op mode that was sorely missing from the first game. There’ll also be a whole new campaign, new spells, enemies, traps and items to use in the ethnic cleansing of the ork population.

The game will be playable at the upcoming PAX East event, so we should see a lot of news and impressions popping up in the next week.

Check out the announcement trailer below.

Counter-Strike:GO Beta Key Winners

WINNERS HAVE BEEN PLANTED!

Our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta key contest was hotly contested by lots of people who thought “I love Counter-Strike, give me a key” qualified as a creative entry. They were wrong.

The following people had legitimately creative entries and will find a beta key arriving in their inbox shortly.

Patrick M.
Peraras I.
Ashley S.
Gidych I.
Kevin P.
Gavin M.
Kurtis F.
Christopher H.
Hugo J.
Ian V.

My favourite entry, while flaunting the allotted 25 word limit, still wins because it was creative enough to offset the whole cheating thing:

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for a good entry, I can tell you I can’t do that. But what I do have are a very particular set of skillz; skillz I have acquired over a very long career. Skillz that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you give me my CS:GO key now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you…in game.

Take note; I only endorse cheating if it’s creative cheating.

Vessel Out Now On Steam, 10% Off

The liquid physics platformer Vessel is available now on Steam! To celebrate the launch you can save 10% on the price and grab it for $13.49, so act quickly.

Vessel is all about inventor M. Arkwright and his liquid-based Fluro machines. What starts as simple puzzles solved by water machinations soon turns into complex puzzles with lava, slime and all sorts of other liquid physics.

Check out the launch trailer below.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Beta

It seems today is a day of beta contests, because now Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is considering your application. All you need to do is complete a survey on Steam and let them know about your extensive history with the Counter-strike series.

According to the official blog, they have already sent out over 9000 beta keys to existing CS 1.6 and CSS players, and now plan to select participants from the Steam survey over the coming months to be included in the closed beta.

These aren’t the boring, generic beta survey questions either. Do you play CS 1.6, or are you more of a CS: Source player? Is the AWP more cost-efficient than the AK-47 when it comes to kills-per-dollar? If you knife a sniper in the back after he makes a rude joke about your mother, will you teabag him in revenge? These are all important questions that will evaluate what you can bring to the CS:GO closed beta process.

Load up your Steam client and then complete the survey to be in the running to join the beta.

Gotham City Impostors Out On Steam

Shotguns, bear traps, bows and arrows, gliders, bolt-action rifles and roller skates. These are just a few of the weapons being used in Gotham City Impostors as unwanted vigilantes dressed as Batman and gangs of self-appointed junior Jokerz turn the streets of Gotham into a warzone.

The game looks like a cross between the crazy, arcadey shooter gameplay of TF2 with the unlock system from Call of Duty. Throw in some ridiculous items, cover the map in trampolines and add some classic team deathmatch and capture the flag multiplayer modes and you’ve got one awesome game. Let’s just hope the matchmaking doesn’t shove Aussies into a bunch of US games.

Check out the video below (and try to ignore the incredibly annoying voice-over) to see the glider in action. I can’t wait to start dive-bombing everyone.

Gotham City Impostors is available now on Steam for $14.99.

Skyrim Creation Kit On Feb 7

It’s time to get ready for a new era of Skyrim mods with the official Creation Kit from Bethesda set to hit Steam on Feb 7. They’ve even hinted at a special surprise to come with the kit. Fingers crossed for high-resolution textures.

While the kit itself is fairly similar to what you got with the Fallout mod kits, the best part of the Skyrim Creation Kit is how it ties in with Steamworks. Now when someone builds an amazing mod, instead of having to go through the effort of downloading and installing it yourself, you can simply grab it through Steam and start playing.

It’s a smart move from Bethesda to open the mod scene to a wider audience. Before, someone who isn’t familiar with how mods work might look at a readme.txt file and say “I have to do what to install it?” and give up, but now they’re just a few clicks away from hearing a dragon shout YEAH!

Check out Bethesda’s preview of the Creation Kit below:

Liquid Physics Puzzles in Vessel

I’m calling it now – the next cool little indie physics game with sweet music that’s going to make insane amounts of money is Vessel from developer Strange Loop Games.

Vessel is all about inventor M. Arkwright and his liquid-based Fluro machines. What starts as simple puzzles solved by water machinations soon turns into complex puzzles with lava, slime and all sorts of other liquid physics.

Check out the trailer below or read on for a more in-depth look at the game in the new videos promoting the game’s March 1 release on Steam.

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Dinner Date (Stood Up For A)

Is this one of those Japanese SIMs where you work all day to pick up chicks?
Is it like Burger Time, but with other types of food?

Not at all, but prepare for questions like these if you try this game. Even calling it a ‘game’ feels like a stretch. It’s more like an immersion simulator, or an ever so slightly interactive short film.

Dinner Date, by Stout Games, places you in the subconscious mind of young single Julian, waiting alone in his apartment for his date to arrive, alone with his thoughts as he realises she does not intend to show up. Putting it very bluntly, you’re up for half an hour of listening to some British guy complain about his life. And, oh – none of your actions affect the story.

I realise I’m not selling this very well, and with good reason – it’s not for everyone. It’s introspective and poetically mundane, easily falling in company with Trauma, Myst, Grow Cube and I wish I were the Moon, but with no unlocks or surprises. Despite this, I found something oddly engaging about sipping wine, eating bread and nervously checking the clock in time with the crests and troughs of our hero’s 30 minute monologue.

Though Dinner Date is a cheap anti-thrill by today’s standards, it makes me want to imagine the levels of immersion we can look forward to in tomorrow’s gaming world. If the sound was better, if the graphics were crisper, if my in-game motions were Kinect-ed to my body motions – if technology allowed me to see only the tiny, lonely apartment and hear only the ticking clock – I wouldn’t just play Julian, I could be him.

Hopefully still for just $4.99 on Steam.

(Ps. Stout Games recommends drinking-aged gamers enjoy a glass of merlot while playing.)