Friday, October 13 2006

This was a big week for new games on Steam. Four major titles from Activision - Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty, Call of Duty: United Offensive, and Gun - are available now. Also released this week were Psychonauts and City Life. Psychonauts is the critically acclaimed and wildly imaginative psychic adventure created by Double Fine studios. City Life is a visually stunning city building and simulation game that's sure to keep you glued to your monitor for a very long time.

The Counter-Strike: Source dynamic weapon pricing beta is underway now, so if you want to get a look at what weapon prices will be when we update the rest of the community, fire up the beta right from your Steam games list. (Look for "Counter-Strike: Source Beta.") Starting next week, prices in the beta will be adjusted daily in order to test that part of the system, but once the system is released publicly it will stick to weekly changes.

Something that caught our eye recently is a project by some students at Northwestern University using the Source engine to automatically create a three minute news broadcast, called News at Seven. Without any human intervention, their system automatically gathers all of the relevant data for the broadcast and creates a short newscast anchored by Half-Life 2 characters. Check out the ABC news story about the system, or watch Alyx and Eli deliver a newscast.