We will revert the CD-Key forums back to their original intent. Meaning they exist only for SU Users to post their experiences with a store and their purchases.  A store owner is free to comment on a user inquiry should be his store in question. It NOT allowed for an other store owner to put his two cents in.  Should you be in violation we will disable your posting rights to avoid an other flame war at our forums.

All CD-Key stores on our site that post in our forums need to take a fucking chill pill and calm down. Stop posting shit on our forums, stop fighting with each other or we will be forced to remove any CD-Key related sub-forums, threads and links. You will be gone from Steam Alternatives page as well.

We don’t care about your little war or anything related to that at all, we just want to provide reliable and cheap game sources to our visitors and if you don’t like it stop posting on this site.

This has to stop.

Weekend Deals article coming later today!

It’s probably one of the best sites for maps, skins, mods, custom UIs and other gaming stuff but recently they’ve been infected with the "Black Internet" trojan.

Do not even visit the site because you will get infected while you visit it (you don’t have to download anything).

Just thought we would  let you all know about this since the only thread on this on the Steam forums.

Read the rest of this entry if you want to know how to check if you’re infected or wanna know how to remove the trojan.

Here are some quotes of what people posted:

It’s embedded in the site itself somehow, which means all you have to do is go there– you don’t have to download anything, and you’ll be infected. All the following programs did not detect the trojan AVG, Ad-Aware and Windows Defender.

If you’ve been to FPSBanana in the last day or less, check your task manager. Look for iexplore.exe running– or multiple instances of it if you are surfing with internet explorer, of course. You might also be hearing audio advertisements and/or multiple weird noises and mouseclicks.

Apparently this trojan infects the MBR, to fix the virus problem make all folders viewable in the control panel -> large icons -> folder options -> view -> show hidden files, folders and drives, then reboot in Safe Mode and go here:

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Appdata\Local\Temp

and deleting these two files:

Loader.exe
Smss.exe

And until further notice I strongly suggest that you avoid going to the website.

Under the law recently passed the content provider may not use mechanisms to block access to files, which you can dispose by so-called fair use.

The rules in Brazil are very different from the rules applicable in such countries like the USA. Americans in contrast to the Brazilians may be convicted for breaching security each time in some way to circumvent the DRM locks.

Even if the song, software or the book is its author.

Meanwhile in Brazil everyone can purchase their music or book or software, do whatever they want – of course if they does not break the Brazilian law. It is possible to break the DRM and other activities to which you are entitled under fair use.

Moreover, the publisher, who by the use of DRM restricts users to their right to dispose of the purchased asset, may incur a fine.

Now we can only hope that other countries are going to take an example from Brazil and modify their law in such a way.

Source: boingboing

August 5th 2010 will be the next date for another hearing between these two companies who produced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  There has been a total of 3 lawsuits filed against Activision from former employees.

Back on the 1st of March 2010 Activision fired West and Zampella, creators of the Call of Duty series, claiming they were insubordinate and broke their contract.  They fought back with a lawsuit seeking $36,000,000 in unpaid royalties.  And of course Activision counter-sued.

Since this mess West and Zampella have created Respawn Entertainment and signed on with EA. 

And Activision has signed a 10 year contract with Bungie.

The current Call of Duty: Black Ops is being developed by Treyarch.

Source: airbornegamer

This is basically a blog where you can read all about Blizzard employees who just happen to leave their names on the Blizzard’s website. As you can see you can read a lot of private stuff from just seeing someone’s real name, like for example this:

There’s a lot more on that site so if you feel like reading private stuff about Blizzard’s employees go ahead.

Drunken F00l claims that the whole “random drop” system for the Golden item is bullshit and it was designed in a specific way. You just had to know the time in which it will drop and probably know the special blueprints on item crafting.

Anyway you can read the whole conversation between Drunken and some other people here (we hosted this conversation in case it disappears):

http://www.steamunpowered.eu/drunkenlog.htm

You can read more about this whole situation on official Steam forums.

Now lets get to the point, this is a proof that Valve Anti-Cheat system is not (fully) automated at all. As far as we know the user didn’t use any hack in-game to get the Golden Wrench, he used some sort of script to craft an item at specific time to get the special item. Additionally VAC Banned users don’t get their items removed – and he no longer has the Golden Wrench.

You can view the user’s profile by going here http://steamcommunity.com/id/df – leave a comment if you want.

We will keep you informed about the situation.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Blizzard introduced the new feature to their forum community – Real ID.

This basically means that gamers from now on won’t be using their World of Warcraft or StarCraft 2 character names but their real names on official Blizzard forums.

A majority of gamers are pissed at Blizzard for this.

The Real ID feature will be available as soon as World of Warcraft Cataclysm add-on comes out (before StarCraft 2).

Is this the way of stopping the forum trolls? Giving out their real names? We will find out pretty soon.

PS It’s probably gonna end up like this:

ACTA is a global anti-counterfeiting (and anti-piracy) agreement that might change the internet as we know it.

It would give federal officials the right to inspect your files without any warrant. It would make unauthorized possession of copyrighted material a federal crime.

And there’s nowhere in the developed world you’d be able to go to escape it, because they’re all on board: United States, Canada, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. A reddit user posted this information into the gaming section because many, many people in it have reason to be personally concerned by the passage of this law.

The user might be overreacting a little when you read about facism and all but he’s got few good points.

Here are some useful links to information about ACTA.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining what ACTA is and what you can do about it.

Wikipedia describing ACTA in detail, including participatory countries, controversy, and some potential effects.

The leaked ACTA agreement itself, hosted on The Pirate Bay.

And finally someone provided a link to this very interesting review of ACTA from just a few weeks ago by the American University Washington College of Law. Experts on intellectual property from all over the world gathered in Washington DC to discuss ACTA, and this statement is their conclusion; it goes into detail about what’s wrong with ACTA and why. The review is about says that ACTA is being misrepresented by the powers that be. It violates WTO agreements and threatens public interests.

Read more about it at reddit.

News thanks to Kossak!

The event was suppose to hype Portal 2 related stuff, before being semi-cancelled on 2 June (it was postponed to 2011). This first announcement, however, suggested an E3 ‘surprise’ was being planned in its place, leading to amusing amounts of speculation over what this could be.

On 9 June, Valve grew tired of hearing Half-Life 3 rumors and let us know that the surprise would be Portal 2 information while also confirming that the title’s release schedule had slipped to 2011.

And now? Valve’s Doug Lombardi has circulated an email amongst the press stating "Just a quick note to clarify the Monday Press Event at the Regal Theater is completely cancelled. Please do not head over there expecting to see us."

The developer will still be present on the E3 show floor at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but whether Portal 2 will now be making an appearance in any form is unknown. Given the way this is going, we may just need to wait a couple more days for the whole thing to be back on again.

Source: incgamers.com

Hopefully 4chan users managed to grab a screenshot of it and here it is:

As you can see we got a lot of stuff going on here, first of all 61810 which can be June 18th 2010 (6.18.10). Secondly, look below there’s Source Engine logo but look closer, it says Source 2, then we have EA and T2 logos.

BUT there is more, someone manipulated with the image and here’s what showed up:

That’s right, it’s the Duke. But is it true? I guess we’ll find out on June 18th.

CURRENT THEORIES:

• It’s Duke Nukem Forever, now appropriated by Valve.
• Kleiner with an ammo belt (HL2: Episode 3).
• It’s a new source engine for a new Half-Life game (HL3).
• It’s fake.

What do you guys think?

Source: http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=950007

PS Read their thread for a lot of crazy stuff, like this secret website.

Several days ago, we reported that Portal is now available on Steam for free, in celebration of Valve’s successful port of the game to the Mac platform.  Since the game was released for free, it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times. Currently, Valve hasn’t released any data as to how many of these are Mac or PC users, but they did announce that about 11% of Steam purchases since Steam for Mac was released have been by Mac users.

This is huge news for Mac gamers. Especially considering the fact that Mac gamers pretty much didn’t exist until a week ago.

Supposedly, Portal runs just as fine on a Mac as it does on a PC. In fact, the PC version crashes about 500% more frequently than the Mac version. Remember, Portal is still free for both Mac and PC users until May 24th. Even if you don’t have a computer capable of playing Portal, at the very least add it to your Steam account so that it’ll be there when you get an upgrade!

Source: The Gaming Vault

I’ve recently found out (thanks to many user reports) that some CD-Key stores are requesting ID scans from their users after you purchase a game. They want users to send a passport, driver license or ID card scans or even pictures of buyers holding their ID card (with face visible)!

Do not send them anything, never do that! You have a right to protect your identity online and you should be keeping your IDs and documents for yourself or very trusted stores and institutions. Especially when you’re using PayPal. It’s basically against PayPal’s policy to request those things from buyers. The online seller has no right to ask for and ID not even mentioning the scans. Period. Always request a full, immidiete refund if any shops requires an ID, unless you’re ok with it.

These CD-Key shops request ID scans:

• G2Play
• GameKeyDistrict
• OnlineKeyStore

From now on the Steam Alternatives section will have a separate section for stores which require ID scans.

It’s unacceptable that these stores don’t even mention of ID scans before the purchase! So gamers out there, watch out!

You can discuss this problem here or by leaving a comment below.