66% Off Half-Life Steam Games

Steam is discounting every Half-Life game in their collection. From now until Sunday you can download these games onto your computer for a third of what you’d usually have to pay to get them. You can get all of the following games for only $16.99, or purchase every game Valve has created for only $89.99. As a bonus, you will get the Orange Box classic first person shooter, Team Fortress, which is still one of the most played games on Valves servers. Here are the prices of the different Half-Life games that you can purchase at the 66% off price.

Half-Life: $3.39
Half-Life: Source: $3.39
Half-Life: Blue Shift: $1.69
Half-Life: Opposing Forces: $1.69
Half-Life 2: $6.79
Half-Life 2: Episode One: $3.39
Half-Life 2: Episode 2: $5.09
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch: $1.69
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast: $3.39

You have until Sunday to take advantage of these deals. The Half-Life games I’ve played were very solid and provided hours of fun. If you missed any of these versions of Half-Life, I’d suggest buying them while they are sale. They go back to their retail pricing on Monday.

China Bans Gold Farming

China’s latest set of laws are going to hurt their economy even greater in this economic depression. Their latest set of seemingly pointless laws include one to make online gold farming illegal. What this means is that you can’t sell virtual items obtained in games for anything other than the games virtual currency. This means you can’t buy or sell gold in games such as Runescape or World of Warcraft, and makes games like Entropia questionable where the entire point of the game is to make money.

It has been estimated that each year between $200 million and $1 billion a year is made through gold farming across the globe and that 85% of these gold farmers can be found in China. These laws may be meant to protect the rights of these gaming companies who clearly prohibit the selling of their virtual items. There was no mention as to whether account selling of these types of games was allowed. Loophole?

Anybody out there a gold farmer from China who is going to be affected by this? I’ve seen some pretty big gold farming sites in the past, and it’s clearly a very easy, profitable little business. If you’re not living in China, now would be your time to dive into the market. All these previous customers are going to be looking for a new place to buy their gold.

MapleStory Hits 92 Million Users

So you thought that the World of Warcraft numbers were impressive when they reached 11 million users worldwide, but when you look at the stats for MapleStory you will be amazed. 92 million users, of which, I am not one. Having never played the game, I can’t really say much about it. There are probably many many users with multiple accounts as they are free for any user to create, but whether this is included in the 92 million users or not I am unsure.

The game is six years old, having been available in the United States for four of those years. This game rivals MMO’s like pay per month World of Warcraft and free to play Runescape. These are probably the three major MMORPGs out there, any of them are a great choice with your only regret being actually start to play these addicting games in the first place.

Age of Conan Free Trial

The MMORPG game called Age of Conan has recently been upgraded to the point where they are thinking if they can get you to try the game out, you’ll pay to continue playing it. The game initially was a success, but has ever since its release they have struggled to keep gamers paying to play.

With the recent additions in place they are offering a free 7 day trial to anybody that wants it. After the 7 days I’m assuming you will need to either pay to continue playing or move on to another MMORPG. I’ve heard relatively little about the game and if pricing is the same as WoW, why would I play this game?

Team Fortress Servers Failing

Remember a few weeks ago when I told you about all the new improvements that were coming to the rather cartoon-ish FPS game for the PC? Well with the release of the new changes we have seen a great decline in the quality of their servers. Whether they moved their better servers and server space to a new game since the spike of it’s popularity and are currently being overloaded or they are simply having problems is unclear. What I do know is that it’s a bad time to play unless you have a really good connection.

The server scores have plummeted to the point where it’s looking like the stock market. The bad player connections have been for the most part steady throughout the entire time period of the graph (graph weeks/months not labeled). So while there are just as many poor quality games as there were when it was successful, the overall quality of the game has completely diminished.

Have you noticed any difference in the game lately? Things such as terrible lag or just really slow loading times. I was really considering buying this for my computer but then I never got around to it. I’m just happy I never did blow the money as I’d have ended up with a bad game and been out $15.

GameTap Drops Mac Support

GameTap is adding some improvements to their service and their website to make your experience much simpler. You will now be able to launch the games from your desktop, start menu, or at the GameTap.com website. This should make it a bit easier to actually get in the game.

The bad news that is with this change, they are dropping Mac support. While the majority of users, more specifically gamers, are using PCs, who is left for the Macs? I mean, sure there are a few inferior services, but this is definitely going to limit the options of Mac users. This leaves a big opening for a new company, and may hurt GameTap immensely in this bad economy.

Any of you guys Mac users out there that will be affected by this? By this I mean, do you use GameTap and is this going to be a big loss to you?

Valve to Update Team Fortress Scout Abilities

Valve is going to be upgrading the techniques of the different classes in Team Fortress. They are announcing the updates day by day, which is a bit slow for my taste. If they want to build anticipation for it why not release all the new techniques at once so that we can get excited. Anyways, the first of the new techniques was announced today.

Today, they announced that the scouts bat will have a new special ability. It will be able to hit baseballs at other players. If hit by a baseball the player will be temporarily stunned for you. Whether this means they will be stunned long enough for you to switch weapons or not is the main question. Apparently, the further away from you that they are when the ball finally hits them will determine how long your enemy is going to be stunned. This leads me to believe that if you snipe them from some distance away that you will probably have time to switch to your gun to shoot them. The only bad thing is that you won’t be able to double jump when you have this bat equiped.

Check out my blog for more updates to the game. All of the updates should be taking place on February 24th. Who knows what this could do to the pricing of the game. To be safe, I’d suggest downloading it now if you haven’t already. It’s a good game, and I’m considering putting it on my computer as the Xbox 360 version doesn’t appear as though it will have these updates anytime soon.

Amazon Selling Game Downloads

Amazons newest income will be coming from video game sales. They are selling downloads to hundreds of games. There are over 600 games to choose from and they cost $9.99 or less! While browsing the games, I didn’t really notice anything that strikes my interests. It seemed like a lot of younger child type games. They haven’t said much about the future of this. Hopefully they expand it into something like Steam with some more adult games.

They are offering some sample games too! You can download Jewel Quest II, Build a Lot, and The Scruffs. Be sure to check out some of these games, and possibly even consider purchasing another game in their list. I’ll check them out and let you know what I download.

Sims 3 Delayed

Electronic Arts has just announced that they are going to have to delay the release of the newest game in the Sims series. The good news is that it is not only going to come out on the Mac and PC, but also the iPhone, iTouch, and a few other mobile devices capable of running it.

It has been delayed until June 2nd. To me, provided it’s not one of the big three (CoD, Halo, and GoW) the decision to delay a game is generally okay with me. There are so many games that should have been delayed and don’t and they end up failing or needing mass updates right after launch.

The Sims games are a bit on the expensive side for my taste in games. It’s a classic, but I never really got into the series when I was younger nor do I really have interest in the genre of games.

Gears of War 2 Troubles Persist

Just when we thought that things couldn’t have gotten any worse with the sequel to the award winning Gears of War game, another big problem pops up. Gamers of the PC version of Gears of War 2 have recently been reporting that they are unable to play the game even if they have purchased a legit license to go with their games. These digital certificates have apparently expired and the only way for these gamers to get back in the game is by setting back their system clock to make their computer believe they are in their proper time span.

The irony of this situation is that the people who were supposed to be targeted, the pirates, are those using illegal copies of the game. These users; however, are still gaming hard. It appears that Gears of War has yet another problem that they need to fix urgently. I think they rushed into the release of this game. They probably could have used a few month delay like GTA IV was forced to do.

Has this problem been fixed yet? It started on January 28th, and gamers will continue to experience this as the days go on until a fix is found. What is the biggest problem with the new Gears of War game in your opinions?