Alien Swarm

[Nick]

Valve just released (for free) a rather good game called 'Alien Swarm.' Despite its few shortcomings, most of which are related to non-gameplay parts of the application, I highly recommend giving it a try. Its a top down shooter where you and a team try to achieve objective while being attacked by swarms of angry alien bug-rodents. Full all around.

Go get it! Its free! Come to my place if you need bandwidth! Or I can put it on a DVD! Ok!

[zourtney]

Wouldn't that imply that I'd have to install Steam? And isn't Steam the single most hated piece of software by gamers? But yeah, cool. I probably won't get around to it, but someone else on here might

[Nick]

Steam is better then people give it credit for. How else could you install your games on any computer that has access to the internet. It has its bugs, but its better then having to lug DVDs around to every computer you might want to play a game on. And you can 'loan' out your account to people now and then. And the install medium never gets all scratched up. Plus they are hard on cheaters. And the company that owns steam gave me free cool stuff, and portal, and halflife.... so perhaps its the most hated software by whiny gamers

[zourtney]

I've never so much as hovered a mouse over its interface, myself. Perhaps it's other one of those irrationally despised pieces of software, such as "Vista friggin' SUCKS!....Windows 7 is AWESOME!!!!1"

I'm sure there's an inner gamer in me somewhere. It just gets distracted by other activities. Though I did  (breifly) play my racing game last night...and won a 92 Supra Turbo! Which I like, for some reason; turbo lag and all.

[Nick]

Get one! A '92 cant be that much anymore.

[zourtney]

True. I've actually been considering getting a different car lately. Though it'd probably be somehong economical for driving to work. Just to stay off-topic

[Brad]

Actually the Steam sentiment has completely turned around. It is now nearly universally loved by gamers. It probably has something to do with the frequent and extremely awesome Steam sales. As well as the fact that it makes playing games on multiple computers really easy, and for some of the games it'll even synchronize your saved games. Valve giving away free games which are actually pretty good doesn't hurt either.

[zourtney]

I don't know, it actually makes pretty good sense. That sounds nice and convenient, anyway. I think the (very legitimate!) complaints I heard were for titles which would only let you install from the physical medium a finite number of times (like 3 or 4?) Cloud computing may (or may not) be the wave of the future, but people will always want a hard copy.

But yeah, that's kind of off topic, too (...not that any of the 3 people to see this would care.)