- Alien Swarm update released - 18 August 2020
Fixes and Updates Security fixes to client/server file transfers Fixed "Out of thread ids" error when launching Alien Swarm on a computer with 32 or more logical processors Updated localization files
- The 50 Best Free Games On PC - 16 October 2015
The best free games are on PC, and if you want to know what the best 50 are then you’ve come to the right place. …
- Have You Played Alien Swarm - 1 September 2015
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Valve have a game even more forgotten than Ricochet. Despite being only five years old, I bet if I’d asked you to write down all their games you’d have missed off Alien Swarm . …
- Mod of the Week: Turn Half-Life 2 into an RTS - 15 December 2014
MOD OF THE WEEK In Mod of the Week , Chris Livingston scours the world of user-created adventure for worthy downloads. This week, a mod that turns one of the best shooters ever into an RTS. Lambda Wars (originally HL2 Wars), a real-time strategy set in the Half-Life 2 universe, is a mod years in the making and has now had an official launch on Steam . This mod of Alien Swarm provides a bird's-eye view of the struggle between the Combine and rebels and includes both single-player and online play. The world of Half-Life 2 is perfect for a translation into classic RTS play, and the mod is both free and now completely standalone, so there's no reason not to give it a try. If you haven't played any of the mods earlier incarnations, there's a decent little tutorial to help you get started. You begin with a little base-building. Recruit an engineer from your headquarters, and you'll be able to…
- Lambda Wars reimagines Half-Life 2 as a real-time strategy game - 9 December 2014
Half-Life 3 it ain't, but if it's a new Half-Life game you crave then maybe Lambda Wars will do the trick. An RTS spin on the Half-Life universe, Lambda Wars has been kicking around the modding community for a while as HL2: Wars, but now it's absolutely standalone and most winningly, free. The beta has been available since the weekend. The game uses the Alien Swarm engine, but as a newly standalone offering you won't need a copy of that nor any Source Engine game to run this. As either the Combine or Resistance you can play online with up to eight human or AI players. Check out the trailer below:
- Steam Greenlight approves 37 more titles, including Ikaruga, TowerClimb, Steam Marines - 17 October 2013
Well that was quick. Ikaruga only shot its way onto Steam Greenlight the other day, and it's already emerged from the other end of the Valve's giant approvals machine, covered in a viscous, sticky substance it's probably best not to investigate too strenuously. It's joined by 36 other assorted things (most of them games), including sci-fi roguelike Steam Marines, platforming roguelike TowerClimb (not to be confused with Towerfall), and lots of other things that aren't roguelikes - if you can imagine such a thing. The full list is below. There's some great stuff in here, including action-horror Source mod Underhell, retro platformer Tiny Barbarian DX, the beautifully illustrated adventure horror Neverending Nightmares (pictured above), and a hell of a lot more. Aartform Curvy 3D 3.0 Alien Swarm FP Axis Game Factory – AGF PRO v01.0 Blood of the Werewolf CastleMiner Z Elder Sign: Omens The…
- Left 4 Xed? Check Out This Alien Swarm FPS Mod - 18 July 2013
3761 AD. Seattle. A line of tourists is snaking around a wrecked skyscraper. If we listen closely, we can hear their guide: “… this is the cupboard where they found the ‘test heads’, and this is where they arrested Robin “Mad Hatter” Walker, who admitted to 243402 counts of decapitation. That’s the rebuilt Dota 2 annex. The war where the Dota 2 team attempted to secede from the union in 2103 caused a brief civil war, but it turned out their tactics when applied to a real world conflict just got them all killed. We don’t know what this place was: a cupboard where we found the skeleton and a crowbar. Just a handyman, maybe? Moving on to one of the more remarkable finds: a PC that was found in the rubble, still running a copy of Alien Swarm . And beside it was this Steam Greenlight page for a mod that turned it into a first-person shooter. Wh…
- Valve’s artists display digital gallery as part of Steam Community update - 5 March 2013
Valve are currently beta testing a selection of additions and changes to Steam's Community pages. Not only have they separated out general community activity from your own contributions, and created a Community Home as an all-game version of the Game Hubs, but you can also upload artwork for any Valve game. It's not all charmingly crude MS Paint scribbles, though, as Valve's artists have created an installation for this digital gallery, featuring concept, prototypes and posters for everything from Portal to Dota 2. Artwork can only be uploaded for Valve games right now, with the rest of Steam's extensive library set to follow in the future. To use the new features, you'll need to opt-in to the latest Steam Beta Update from Steam's settings menu. You can also view them in-browser by joining the New Steam Community Beta group. Steam has also updated Workshop entries to provide more detail…
- The 15 best co-op games of all time - 16 December 2012
Games get a bad rap for being a solitary, violence-obsessed form of entertainment. But they can also be a collaborative, violence-obsessed form of entertainment. Just ask the close-knit PC Gamer team. Tom F: Co-op based games teach us the value of teamwork better than any kitten based motivational poster, by showing us how many more of our enemies we can crush if we can just learn to work together. Graham: They’re not just violent either. We can build giant penis statues together in Minecraft. No, wait, that’s bad. We can control egotistical millionaires in FIFA! Oh God, no. Rich? Rich: Well, Supreme Commander celebrates the pioneering spirit, by asking us to build a host of clanking deathbots... I got nothing. Chris? Chris: Uh. Diablo III shows that hell is easier with other people? Hm. Senior? Bail me out? Tom S: I can’t, I’m too busy shooting these damn zombies. Stop intro-ing and le…
- Alien Swarm Update - 12 July 2012
- Added latest localization files. - Fixed a crash when viewing the Achievements screen in a non-English language.
- Alien Swarm SDK Update - 6 July 2012
- Added shader source code. - Matchmaking system supports mods with more than 4 players. - Mods store their config.cfg separately from the base game.
- Into The Pixel 2011 collects incredible works of gaming art - 26 May 2011
Concept art is often beautiful, but even with a growing number of art books being bundled with collector's editions, it's just as often work that will never be seen by anyone outside of a game's development team. The Into The Pixel collection tries to change that. Organised by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the Entertainment Software Association, each year it selects some of the best pieces of gaming art, whatever the reason for its creation. The 17 new pieces to be displayed at this year's E3 have just been released, and I've posted the PC-relevant images below, including work from Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect, Dragon Age 2, Alien Swarm and the unreleased Drawn 3. So pretty. Click each image for bigger versions, and find more work from previous years at the Into the Pixel site. Alien Swarm Incident at the Workshop by Ivan Simoncini Mass Effect Normandy by Mikko Kinnun…
- 20 free PC games you must play - 3 May 2011
Every month, we present you with a roundup of the best free PC games that have been recently released. What we haven’t done before is sit down and think about all the best free PC games knocking around the internet at the moment, eventually formatting them into a big old list feature. We think it’s about time we sorted that out. Like PC Gamer’s annual Top 100, this isn’t supposed to be a definitive declaration of the best games ever. It’s a collection of titles that we think you should be playing right now. A snapshot in time, if you will. So at this moment, in May 2011, here’s our favourite free or free-to-play games. Onwards! 20. OpenTTD Grab it from the website. Why it makes the list: Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe proved cult favourites when they were released in the 1990s. That might be why some dedicated fans took it upon themselves to remake the latte…
- 20 free PC games you must play - 3 May 2011
Every month, we present you with a roundup of the best free PC games that have been recently released. What we haven’t done before is sit down and think about all the best free PC games knocking around the internet at the moment, eventually formatting them into a big old list feature. We think it’s about time we sorted that out. Like PC Gamer’s annual Top 100, this isn’t supposed to be a definitive declaration of the best games ever. It’s a collection of titles that we think you should be playing right now. A snapshot in time, if you will. So at this moment, in May 2011, here’s our favourite free or free-to-play games. Onwards! 20. OpenTTD Grab it from the website. Why it makes the list: Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe proved cult favourites when they were released in the 1990s. That might be why some dedicated fans took it upon themselves to remake the latte…
- Alien Swarm Update Released - 15 April 2011
Updates to Alien Swarm have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include: Alien Swarm * Allow XP gain on custom maps. * Fixed a camera prediction bug. * Added .smd and .qc files for the marine and drone to the SDK;
- Alien Swarm: The Model Kit: The Game Looked Great! - 15 April 2011
Last year, Valve released - for free - a game called Alien Swarm, which ended up with a visual style somewhere between the original Alien and a 1980s action figure. This early concept, though, shows something a little more unique. Drawn by Valve environmental artist Ivan Simoncini, it depicts an early test for a "diorama" style appearance for the game. Seeing as Alien Swarm shipped with a tile-based level creation suite, this "model kit" look seems a natural fit for the pre-fab nature of the title, and seeing how cool it is makes me wish Valve had actually gone down this path with the game. Ah well. We can always hope a future Warhammer game might look like this!
- Alien Swarm Update Released - 11 October 2010
Updates to Alien Swarm have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include: Alien Swarm * Added TTF font support; * Fixed an engine exploit;
- Alien Swarm Adds AI Director, New Difficulty - 23 August 2010
Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty. With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice. Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it. If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets w…
- Alien Swarm Adds AI Director, New Difficulty - 23 August 2010
Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty. With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice. Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it. If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets w…
- Alien Swarm Adds AI Director, New Difficulty - 23 August 2010
Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty. With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice. Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it. If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets w…
