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Along with hacks, we’ve also got some general discussion sections, hacking tutorials and tools, porn, free giveaways and much more. This site has been conditioned to meet all your needs in terms of resources so be sure to take a look and tell us what you think.

Thanks again,
the fkn0wned team.

Steam Community Offline Message

Definitely do not visit that site mentioned (url removed)

As of 11/11/11 Gabe Newell has expressed his regret with the hack whilst providing further information that another separate database has indeed been compromised.  This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information:

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users,
Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.
We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Gabe.

• Update 7/11/11 2:26: forums.steampowered.com is completely down.
• Update 7/11/11 2:45: store.steampowered.com and client fine. Likely a vbulletin exploit.
• Update 11/11/11 9:46: Message from Gabe.

There are issues however and if you are an Australian Steam user you know full well the price discrepancy that can be seen with some game releases. Also, some Steam features may or may not be to every ones liking. Games you do not buy from steam, cannot take advantage of any of Steams features making it a tough ask for a lot of people to put all their faith into one platform.

This begs the question, are there any alternatives to Steam? Of course there are and here are some of the best!

Greenman Gaming

Green Man Gaming is a digital retailer of PC games based in London which sell games to over 89 countries. The most unique aspect to GMG is the ability for customers to trade-in their digitally downloaded games for extra credit in their account and this credit can then be used for new purchases.

Greenman Gaming also sell Steamworks based games which are not tradeable via their service but can be added to Steam. For certain regions, buying a Steamworks game from GMG is often cheaper than Steam itself which makes buying from Greenman Gaming all the more pleasant.

EA Origin

Origin is a revamped EA Store that allows you to purchase and play your favourite EA games. Features include an in-game overlay that allows you to chat with friends and browse the web while playing select games.

Origin’s new social features allow you to create a profile, connect and chat with your friends, share your game library, and effortlessly join your friends’ games.

The most interesting feature of Origin is the ability to register non Origin bought games and integrate them into the service – though this does not look to have been implemented at the time of this article.

GOG

A testament to the statement classics never go out of style, Good Old Games specialise in PC games from yesteryear and have a massive community of gamers eager to explore and return to a period when games were a little more complex.

GOG releases are completely DRM free and to ensure compatibility on newer hardware, are often bundled with emulation software like ScummVM and DOSBox depending on the game.

GOG is owned by Polish developers, CD Projeckt, famous for the excellent The Witcher series of games for the PC and their flamboyant public humour.

Impulse

Impulse is a digital distribution platform from retailers GameStop that allows users to quickly and easily find their favourite game or software and download it automatically to their PC. In 1998 Impulse Inc. was one of the first companies to distribute its software via a free digital distribution program known as Component Manager and has grown to become the Impulse we know today.

Unlike Steam, pricing has been localised for the Australian audience using current exchange rates.

Besides games, Impulse also features applications, utilities, themes, available to purchase or download free and offers community centric features like in game chat, friend finding and online game searching.

Direct2Drive

Direct2Drive doesn’t have a client like Steam and operates more as a traditional online shopfront. This fact alone is quite possibly a bonus for many users with no need for other features and prefer to keep digital downloads simple. Regardless of this fact, it is currently Steams biggest competitor.

Like GMG, various Steamworks games are also available making it another money saving option. There is also a price match guarantee where D2D will match any lower price offered by Steam and a few other digital content delivery networks.

D2D is owned by the online gaming rental service Gamefly who acquired the service from IGN earlier this year.

Up and Coming Features

• Brink Servers Scratch that, no one appears to be playing in Australia.
• Black Mesa Deathmatch Servers (when Available)
• The Steam Gamer (Empty) Server.  Stay tuned for this! (proving difficult to implement though workable)
• Reviews, yes we need to do something different.

On a different note, I recently took over Valve Community from Planet Phillip in the hope of continuing the website and maintaining it in such a way that it would be beneficial to the community at large.  After 3 redesigns and much procrastination, the website is almost completed.  Page views have tripled in the last few months so now is a great time to add your Valve, Steam or Source Engine based website, fansite or modsite .

Check out Valve Community here.

Valve earlier today disclosed its plans for a new “big picture” mode of Steam which will offer controller support and navigation designed for television interaction.

Details regarding big picture mode are among the highlights Valve plans to share with developers and publishers in its partner meetings during GDC this week in San Francisco.

If you want a pseudo big Screen Steam experience now why not try it the way I currently do.  My lounge room  HTPC runs XBMC which is set to launch Steam when a HDTV PC gaming fix is needed.

It is as simple as adding the XBMC shortcut to Steam and adding Steam to the XBMC launcher plugin.  You can then add Steam shortcuts directly to XBMC and activate each game at the click of a button.

Games with controller capability make for the best big screen experience though on more than one occasion I have sat on the couch with keyboard and wireless mouse in hand!

We present the second Gabe Newell interview thanks to community member backstepper. Newell answers a range of questions submitted by the community.

Listen, read and download here.

Monday Night Combat is a class-based, third-person shooter and if you purchase before February 1st, 10am PST – you will receive Team Fortress 2 Items for Monday Night Combat & Monday Night Combat Items for Team Fortress 2!

Cross gaming promotions on steroids, some pics of the items:

Oh Yeah, almost forgot about the update:

Shared Source Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed the dedicated server not running on machines using Win2k.

Team Fortress 2

• Added the Monday Night Combat gear.
• Added Crit-a-Cola to the weapon drop list.
• Added missing chalkboard/serverbrowser materials for 5Gorge.
• Fixed some missing particles systems in the low violence version.
• Fixed a bug with the round ending when a control point is captured during Overtime in CP_Egypt.
• Fixed the game not running on machines using Fat32.
• Updated the localization files.

Steam User Darth Tealc has managed to decode the in game audio samples from the newly added Portal radio that is scattered in each level, which when taken to the appropriate spot, an audio sample will play.

Radio achievement added and ringing the radios in-game to different spots in each map give soundclips SPOILERS:

I am decoding the images from the radio sounds – here they are – (EDIT: All have now been uploaded)
Note – dinosaurs 1, 5, 12, and 17 are morse code, not images. See this topic for the morse code translations.

dinosaur2 – http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2862/dino2.png
dinosaur3 – http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/5395/dino3.png
dinosaur4 – http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/8126/dino4.png
dinosaur6 – http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/474/dino6t.png
dinosaur7 – http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/804/dino7.png
dinosaur8 – http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/4015/dino8.png
dinosaur9 – http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/1900/dino9z.png
dinosaur10 – http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/6002/dino10.png
dinosaur11 – http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/5893/dino11.png
dinosaur13 – http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/2015/dino13.png
dinosaur14 – http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/6633/dino14.png
dinosaur15 – http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/2716/dino15.png
dinosaur16 – http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3671/dino16.png
dinosaur18 – http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5874/dino18.png
dinosaur19 – http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/8443/dino19.png
dinosaur20 – http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/8295/dino20.png
dinosaur21 – http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/6334/dino21.png
dinosaur22 – http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/6657/dino22.png
dinosaur23 – http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/4641/dino23.png
dinosaur24 – http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/1385/dino24.png
dinosaur25 – http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/4139/dino25.png
dinosaur26 – http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/3913/dino26.png

The Steam Store outlines all the changes and enhancements to the Steam client which you can digest here with my favorite being the new WebKit based rendering engine for the client and in-game overlay web browsing components which replaces the Internet Explorer dependency.  Fans rejoice!

As of today, a new version of Steam is available through a public opt-in beta, open to all Steam users. This Steam update provides several major upgrades to the platform’s core functionality. We’ve overhauled the Steam user interface to enhance the way you already buy and play games, adding more info about the things that matter — getting games, playing them with friends, and staying current in the gaming world.

AG2 v1.0 Released

Today is a great day as AG2 is officially available. You can download the full installer and/or zip file in the download.
AG2 includes some very advanced features. It matches not only the players who wish to play a fast paced game but also all the players who do enjoy the Regular version from VALVe.

This mod does include both regular and a fast paced mode for the sake of everyone’s pleasure.  AG2 is bug free which also means that the bugs that are in the original regular HL2DM from VALVe have all been fixed.  As you all know, AG2 also brings a lot of advanced features for managing matches as well as servers and also includes many game mods.
Well, we count on you

The anticipation for this mod is approaching boiling point.  Here is a selection of the new media to wet our appetites.