Author Archive
Team 17 combines with Valve Software for TF2 items!
Team17 and Valve Software bring you bonus Team Fortress 2 items if you buy Worms Reloaded prior to Thursday Sept 2nd!
Tripwire’s Dwarfs coming to Steam
Roswell, GA, August 13, 2010: Tripwire Interactive is delighted to announce that it will be publishing “Dwarfs”, a hugely addictive casual game from Power of Two for PC and Xbox. Dwarfs has already won the Game of the Year title at the Swedish Game Awards 2010, as well as the Pwnage Award at its native Gotland Game Awards. The game, like all great casual games, is really simple to pick up – but provides an almost infinite range of challenges, from a 15 minute arcade game to the challenge of managing your ever-growing horde of Dwarfs as they explore and mine an underground world of almost unlimited size.
“When we were looking at the possibility of a publisher, we wouldn’t settle for anything but the very best” according to Robin Flodin, co-founder of Power of Two. “During the discussions with Tripwire Interactive, it was evident we had found what we were looking for. With their extensive experience in games and publishing – both in retail and online – as well as their fresh take on marketing and sales, having Tripwire as our publisher quickly became a no-brainer.”
"We met the team in Gotland in 2009 and loved what they were doing" said Alan Wilson, Vice President of Tripwire Interactive. "Since then, Dwarfs has started stacking up awards and has now become a full-featured game, which is great fun and maddeningly addictive – which has been proven by how hard it is to get people here in the office to stop playing it and get back to work! "
Wanna try it? Download the open beta now!
About the game:
Dwarfs is a single-player casual game for PC and Xbox, providing endless hours of addictive entertainment. The aim is simple enough – guide your Dwarfs to mine the caves around your home base, find the gold, minerals and treasure – and try and keep them out of trouble! Dwarfs just tend to keep digging, following only their lust for more gold. So they will dig into water and lava, threatening your home. If that wasn’t enough, they keep finding all sorts of nasty little monsters that have to be dealt with too. The player can build walls, dynamite holes in the floor, or turn earth to stone in an effort to prevent disaster. But in the end, success or failure will depend on the player’s skill at directing his ever-growing army of dwarfs! And if the basic modes aren’t enough, there is a complete sandbox, where you can create your own challenges – and a “Defend the Town Hall” mode where clearing out waves of enemies becomes the biggest challenge.
Key features:
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Tutorial mode to give players a step-by-step guide
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Campaign mode with awards and prizes to earn
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Arcade mode for a wide range of challenges from a 15-minute timed game, to a game that will only end when you want it to, with an almost infinite size
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Defend the Town Hall mode – instead of exploring and mining, you will need to defend the Town Hall from ever-increasing waves of enemies, using all the tricks you have learnt
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Randomly-generated maps, to ensure replay value stays high
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Full sandbox mode to create your own caves and challenges
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Low system requirements
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Steamworks features including achievements and leaderboards
The game will be available on Steam and in stores from Fall 2010. For further information on the game visit the team’s website: po2games.com or, if you are going to GamesCom/GDC Europe, you can see a Beta version of the game in Hall 6.1 booth 52a/b. You will also be able to play it on the Tripwire booth at PAX in Seattle.
Age of Empires Online – sign up now!
Our earlier post about new project Spartan turned out to be Age of Empires Online! A free RTS by Microsoft, it’s focused on multiplayer gameplay, cooperative gameplay and some single player content. You can sign up for beta access right now by clicking logo below:
MAFIA 2 already on BitTorrent – shame on you Steam!
And at this point… why shouldn’t people like me cancel their pre-orders? I can assure you I’m not going to cancel my pre-order just because I respect these developers and loved the original game but seriously things like this shouldn’t happen when it comes to digital sale. We want the game now, we paid for it and can’t play it or even pre-load it.
And publishers are amazed that people pirate the games? Think again idiots.
CDKeyPrices.com
We’re proud to introduce CDKeyPrices a site which has been running for around 5 months now. It is a price comparison website which lists several of the cd-key sites (like G2Play, OnlineKeyStore and others).
We believe a lot of you will find it extremely useful!
The website is here and you can discuss this website on our forum (or even suggest changes to the creator – Mark).
Join the forum discussion on this post
Steam is forcing Apple to fix graphics issues on Mac

Apple has got the message and has provided a graphics update for OS X Snow Leopard which will go some way towards closing the gap between the two platforms.
“When we launched Steam on Mac OS X back in May, there was a lot of buzz about performance, particularly relative to Windows running on the same machine,” says a statement from Steam bosses.
“While we met our goal of making sure all of our customers had an acceptable gaming experience at launch, we have spent a large chunk of effort in the intervening months working with Apple and their GPU vendors to close the performance gap with Windows.”
Steam reckons a combination of changes to its own code and the latest graphics update available from Apple today removes a variety of software bottlenecks, resulting in significant graphics performance enhancements for Mac gamers.
In addition to low-level implementation changes which have improved performance across the board, Apple has also removed some implementation inefficiencies which allow Steam games to improve visual quality, most notably in the area of GPU occlusion queries.
Since the latest update to 10.6.4, Steam has been able to properly implement ‘occlusion query’ which is a GPU-based mechanism which allows OpenGL to draw convincing lighting effects, particularly when a light source is obscured by in-game objects.
“A given light source may be partly or wholly occluded by other geometry in the scene and we use the occlusion query to determine how occluded it is. The percentage of a given light source’s screen area which is actually visible is used to scale the intensity of an additive glow sprite which is drawn over the frame without any z-buffering,” – Steam developer said.
“We have been able to measure performance improvements with the latest software update, but we are anticipating even more speedups if Apple implements the uniform_buffer_object extension and GLSL 1.3 in a future update. With these additional features, we will be able to sidestep this particular CPU bottleneck, allowing us to win back a bunch of CPU time and, ultimately, performance.”
The gaming community is reporting dramatic performance improvements on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models. Older systems are generally already operating at the limits of the hardware, and Valve Software says it’s unlikely that any significant performance improvements can be achieved in the future.
In conclusion, Steam employees said, “We’re very excited about the performance improvements that Apple and the GPU vendors have been able to deliver this summer and we are working with them to further improve performance.”
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