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Steam's item trading system is convoluted to protect you
Steam's community market may have started as a system for buying and selling silly hats in Team Fortress 2, but it's evolved over the years. These days, its an active economy and item trading system with heavy account security and complicated transaction restrictions. It has to be, Valve says. When it comes to hacking, "all Steam accounts are now targets."
Maingear's Spark is a tiny Steam Machine with laptop internals
Traditionally, gaming PCs aren't built with size in mind, but Valve's Steam Machine initiative has changed the game -- now these rigs are taking up residence in the living room. In fact, that's exactly what Maingear's Spark was built for. This diminutive PC is built from notebook components: a 3.1GHz AMD A8-5575M processor with Radeon R9 M275X graphics, up to 16GB of DDR3L RAM and support for a 256GB SSD with a spare 2.5-inch HDD tray. All together, the Spark measures in at just over two inches tall and 4.5 inches wide in either direction. Tiny? You bet. Weighing less than a pound, Maingear says it's the smallest gaming PC they've ever offered. Despite its size, the company still had room to squeeze in four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet and audio jacks and both HDMI and Mini DisplayPort output. Unfortunately, the Spark's final price point is up in the air, but the company promises it will be "an affordable PC solution." Spark is set to launch in the first quarter in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Steam OS configurations.
Valve's Counter-Strike tweaks to level pistol prices [update 1]
Counter Strike: Source's dynamic pricing system has raised the Desert Eagle's cost to a point that Valve has admitted to be "somewhat out of control." As the only viable pistol option, the "Deagle" has become one of CS:S's most expensive items, since the pricing system raises and lowers costs according to popularity. Valve hopes that by tweaking the effectiveness of the Five Seven, P228, and Dual Elites pistols, players will cash in for these decidedly cheaper options, in turn driving the Deagle's price back down.Update: the new modifications have already been introduced.
Japan gets HL2 Survivor, we get videos of it
And here we thought Japanese gamers could care less about FPSs. Just because Halo releases don't result in new sales records over there, doesn't mean the FPS has no place in their hearts. Take, for example, this arcadization (?) of gaming's most celebrated first person shooter: Half-Life 2. Taito and Valve teamed up, buddy copy style, to adapt the PC classic to Taito's Type X arcade board (not much of a challenge, since it's a PC already, Windows and everything).What did take some extra work was adapting Half-Life's intimate, story driven affair from the long-form to the arcade form; that's even shorter than the episodic releases! They've created three game types: story mode (single player), mission mode (co-op), and battle mode (multiplayer).Don't expect to stumble upon one in America's limping arcade market though; they're still rocking broken House of the Dead machines from five years ago. Lucky for us, 1UP grabbed some videos of the game from the recent JAMMA show in Tokyo, which we've embedded after the break.
