You head along to your local torrent or newsgroup site and see some new application, a game that has just come out or a copy of the Operating System DVD and you grab it thinking if it is infected with a virus, your current AntiVirus is bound to flag it up. Of course this act is illegal but this is not the purpose of this article. I wanted to go through a handful of things that you need to think hard about and why, if the software or game is not too expensive, you should buy it.

There is more than just virus out there

Most people only ever think of a virus, that is a program that serves to disrupt your data in one way or another but what about a program that is stealing all your passwords and sensitive data? What is the easiest way to get someone to not only download a piece of software but override the antivirus to execute the thing? The simple answer is to first provide something that people want and secondly is to tell them that it is not a virus but this is how the crack works and to ignore any warnings they may get.

A Case in point

To give a graphical example of my own stupidity, Left for Dead 2 came out and I grabbed a copy, I ran this on my main machine and my current Steam account was in fact logged in. The game actually did not run beyond a few minutes and I just thought it was a bad copy. I since went and bought the game but of course not long after that my Steam account got comprised and you can bet it was the person who was sharing that game before. The amount of time and work it took to get my Steam Account back, protect it and make sure it never happens again took a long while, all because I did not want to spend £30 on a game, how sad is that.

If you use it – buy it

Here is my title motto, if you use some software and you find it invaluable, then why not spend that bit of money and buy the thing. Most software allows a trial mode so you can get a feel for the program / game and the cost is normally what you would pay for a game anyhow. What about expensive software like Photoshop or MS Office? I have found many free or cheap alternatives to these as well. Remember that if you buy some software, you can get the updates time and time again, no more waiting till someone has cracked the latest version and how do you know that someone has not placed some hidden code inside this so called cracked version of your application?

Online games portal Steam has bolstered its selection of free games by adding one of its own-brand titles to the pot: the hectic, caricatured first-person shooter Team Fortress 2. It used to be part of the Orange Pack for example and it features cartoon like graphics plus team play. The way they will make money is to have micro payments in the game itself and you can buy extra guns, costumes and so forth. Head over to Steam to grab this or you can get a complete list of Free steam games HERE.

Steam is the service created by Vale who in turn make games such as Half-Life and TeamFortress (plus many others of course). Recently over at Tom’s Hardware I read a story about Game Stores View Valve’s Steam as the Devil - The basics of the story is that a Major UK Game Retailer in the UK are upset enough by Steam to threaten that they will not carry any product that carry any Steam integration – I am having a guess here that the store in question is Game maybe? I might be wrong, but how about we look at buying a game via a store verus buying the same title over the Steam Service.

How Steam Works

After I bought the Orange Box at funny enough Game for a super low price of £9.99 which is by a large MUCH cheaper then sold on Steam (£16.99), I created a Steam account and installed the game. The service works by the fact whatever machine I installed steam on and log into that account, I can get the games – no need for the DVD any more in fact. Later I bought ‘Left For Dead 2′ and again this was cheaper in the store then via steam – a LOT Cheaper in fact. This was added to my account and now all the games can be played on any number of machines (one at a time of course).

Where does Steam fall over?

If you checked out my previous posts about steam, you will see that if you loose access to your account, you can wave goodbye to your games until you get it sorted out and this can take well over a week to get sorted in fact. This does not happen with normal games, you get a CD key and away you go and you can re-install and play to your hearts content.

Is there a good reason for steam?

Much like the XBOX Live Service, your account and name stick with you, this means you will be called Mauldor (as I am) in HL2 Death Match as well as Team Fortress. You can invite your friends to join you in a game and you can chat in-game. The other thought here is that if you want Black ops, no need to wait till the store opens tomorrow, add it to your list, pay for it and it will soon download.

Should the Store’s be worried?

It depends of the Store’s are worried about Selling PC Based games to be honest – I have no idea if Steam works across the likes of XBOX or Playstation. The floor space given to PC titles in my local Game store is shrinking each week and soon they will be out in the cupboard in the back at this rate. It makes sense for the Store – they are not selling many PC games, they blame pirates and they can shift the much more expensive Console games as well as re-sell them on and so forth. What these stores forget (as most stores have since learned) is that with the power of the Internet I can find the cheapest price on Black Ops for example, have it ordered and delivered the next day. They cannot hold every single PC titles, do I waste my time looking for a game that they do not have?

Sometimes it works

If I am in Town, I *might* pop into the shop to have a look, 90% of the time I walk back out without any games and I honestly feel bad that I am ‘just looking’ when they ask me if they can help. Sometimes I see a Game I want and the price is right, I am only to happy to buy the game – its something I can walk away with and store on my shelf. I still feel distrusted of Steam – a so called secure system manay to loose not only my password but no emails of this happening and it was not like the person went to jail even though I provided his IP and Picture. For me – I shall continue buying at the store I think.

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.

Grab it Here or search for it on Steam.

About the Game

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. Plan your attack using an unlockable arsenal of weapons with countless loadout configurations against a wide variety of aliens. Blaze your way through an overrun, off-world colony, eradicating the alien infestation in environments ranging from the icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility.

Along with the game get the complete code base for Alien Swarm that features updates to the Source engine as well as the SDK. Alien Swarm adds 3rd person camera, depth of field, improved dynamic shadows and a wide variety of gameplay additions to the Source engine.

• Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
• Complete game code and mod tools
• Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
• Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
• 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
• Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
• 64 achievements
• Tile-based map generation tool
• Powered by Source and Steam

System Requirements

Minimum + Recommended

• • OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
  • Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
  • Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
  • Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible video card with 128 MB, Shader model 2.0. ATI X800, NVidia 6600 or better
  • Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
  • Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
  • OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
  • Processor: Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz
  • Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
  • Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible video card with Shader model 3.0. NVidia 7600, ATI X1600 or better
  • Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
  • Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple’s traditionally game-deprived computers.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, director of Steam development, in Monday’s press release.

“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. “Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bringing Valve’s gaming engine Source, and the company’s Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,” said Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, in the press release. “We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Easy updates

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.

For those that are no in the know – Steam is the company that runs the servers and account details of games such as Half Life 2 and such – the FULL game list I have linked. When you buy a game that is Steam enabled, when you go to install you need a steam account and that game (plus serial) is now linked to that account. If anything happens to this account – the game on the shelf is of no use, you cannot play without that account or re-register another account and install. This works most of the time but what happens when it all goes wrong? Read on for my complete story so far..

In the beginning

I bought the Orange pack in a local store, it asked me to create a Steam account, which I did and we were soon on the way to playing games such as Halflife2, HL2DM and so on. I had set it up so that it auto logged on when you started the computer / steam and all was well.

How steam works

If you want to change anything on steam, this includes passwords or email – you have to confirm this via email – so in theory nobody should be able to change your account without your permission. I am always on top of making sure I do not have key loggers installed and my passwords are all different across all services and they are a mixture of Captials, lowercase and numbers.

Failed to log in

I got gifted a game and it was only then I started the client and noticed it was not logging in. I tried the various passwords I knew it could be but none worked. I then proceeded to try and reset the password but the emails that are supposed to arrive never did.

Logging a call

I created a support account and logged a ticket and waited FIVE working days to get a reply, they reset the password and the account email and once again I had full control over this account. I was worried though that the person who had hacked my account could just go back in at a later date and do the same again, so I created another ticket.

The mystery person

I noticed the person had changed my picture (some dark skinned person)and had added a load of his friends plus added me to various groups. I had no account of all my friends I used to have listed. I should have taken some screen shots but I forgot and changed all the details to mine, removed all the friends and groups.  I then got flooded with requests of forgotten password – it was obvious that this person was trying to log into my account and get the password reset but this time they were failing. I noticed his IP 99.244.239.224 as this came up on the various emails and I added this to my ticket for steam to investigate – after all this was stealing.

Down again

I guess when steam finally got around to looking at my question, they took the action of disabling my account – I was back to square one of not been able to play the games I had actually bought. They explained that both people were claiming that they owned the account and needed proof. I filled in another support ticket and took a picture of the serial from the box itself and added this to the ticket.

Back online

Today I got the email back saying they had sorted my account, reset the password and email and hopefully everything was good. I am still to this day worried that if I buy more games that need steam, what is to stop people from hacking it again? I keep seeing people in the forum saying people maybe had weak passwords or they shared there account but I can assure you on this occasion nobody would have any idea what my passwords would be – yet here we see some guy in Canada taking over my account.