I was recently enlightened to a page as a result of a Google search for the ‘Greatest Game Music Ever’. The ‘Billboard’ website, listed 25 of the ‘Best Video Game Songs Ever’. In one of the biggest insults to real game music, the list comprised of real world songs, by real world artists, that had been used in games like GTA and Guitar Hero. C’mon Guitar Hero!? Best video game songs!? /sigh

While it may be dependant on the game in question, I’m not having a ‘go’ at the game itself, but the people and consequent websites who believe the GTA and Guitar Hero music is proper video game music.

On a final note, this page may be quite memory consuming with all the embedded files — but hey, it’s worth it

view remainder of this post…

I was browsing the Internet and some local pictures and found some interesting Team Fortress 2 comics and included them below. I can’t remember the sources, nor authors for all of them. Let me know if you’re the creator

Click the image to make it bigger, if it’s still not big enough, Right click then “Open in new tab/window” or similar.

Steam has opened Bioshock 2 for pre-order, to be released in just under three weeks.

BioShock 2 Pre-Purchase Now

JANUARY 19, 2010, 1:59 PM – VALVE – GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT

BioShock 2 is now available for pre-purchase on Steam! Save 10% and earn an extra copy of BioShock free! If you already own BioShock then gift it to any of your friends!
Want to play with a few of your friends? The BioShock 2 Four Pack gives you four copies of BioShock 2 and four free copies of BioShock to give out to your friends!

However, the price for Australia in Steam appears to be substantially higher, $27 USD higher… Using the two links below show two different prices, and unfortunately unless you have a US billing address, you wont be able to use the US store page.

AUD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=au
USD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=us

Suggestions for getting the lower price range from illegal to legal, however probably the easiest legal method is to just get it gifted from someone in America then pay them back via PayPal.

The other day I was listening to some music from BioShock (one of my all time favourite games), “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.

Below is video from YouTube of the song played piano

You can also view the scene from BioShock involving “Young Fitzpatrick” and Cohen’s masterpiece in the following video

I thought it would be interesting to source the sheet music and take a look at it. My favourite parts are from bars 4 through 7 (0:12 – ~0:25 in the topmost video), and the similar variations of that segment throughout the rest of the piece.

The pictures below are the three pages that make up the manuscript.

You can download the manuscript as a PDF: BioShock: “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.

Launch Time

One of the latest most anticipated releases on Steam seems to have missed its launch date. Déjà vu anyone?

The Steam Forums and Steam community are responding sluggishly to requests, most likely bursting at the seams from the influx of gamers that want to get their hands dirty and start playing…

Most users attempting to access the Steam Community site are being presented with a ‘Down for Maintenance’ message, pictured below.

Personally, I am not to fussed if the deadlines aren’t met down to the second — managing the release of a game across millions of computers worldwide isn’t an easy feat. So Valve, take your time, just ignore the barrage of insults and gamer rage…
In the mean time gamers, visit the stats page to view the new in-game achievements and various records statistics.

UPDATE (+ 15 Minutes)

Having blocked comments on the event page (most likely to reduce server load), gamers can now no longer leave their insulting comments.. which is probably a good thing… This has allowed people to once again, gain access to Steam community.

UPDATE (+ 1 Hour)

An hour passed the launch time and L4D2 is finally showing signs of being released. The Steam store page has been revamped and a new post has made it onto the L4D blog site. Maybe daylight savings had something do with it

UPDATE (+1 Hour 15 Minutes)

Users are now able to decrypt game files Happy Gaming!

While the art direction in Borderlands is fairly interesting, so is the music.

Here are two tracks from Borderlands that should be on the OST (Official Sound Track) at any rate.

“Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage The Elephant

• Show Lyrics

“No Heaven” by DJ Champion

• Show Lyrics

While Google Picasa Web Albums has had facial recognition in-built for a while now, I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before the Picasa desktop software was also updated with that feature.

Google finally released the long awaited, facial recognition update for Picasa (Google’s version of photo editing software), to version 3.5.

Along with this update comes the aforementioned facial recognition capabilities; the ability to have faces automatically recognized and identified in the photos you take. This lets you sort photos by who is in them as opposed to tags or file names. Don’t be alarmed; the results arn’t sent to some central facial recognition database! It’s kept purely on your computer for your benefit of photo classification.

Now to how TF2 comes into the picture (pun intended ). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online Game Photo Album, I tend to take a lot of in-game screenshots, which I organize through Picasa. So, Picasa begins scanning for ‘faces’ … and low and behold, the characters in the games are being identified! I found this quite amusing

And so, while the scanning is only at 10%, I have played Medic class at least 46 times… The engineer with the two different poses (on the right) wasn’t picked up as the engineer; but I soon added both the photos under his name.

Interestingly, the 46 Medic photos were all of the same face pose. This was because they were from all the final scoreboard screenshots; an option in TF2 to always take a screenshot of the final match scores.

And the time it has taken me so far to write this post has allowed Picasa to reach 16% of the way through scanning my photo collection. The engineer category now provides substantially more entertaining results

You can download Picasa 3.5 here.

Steam had some connection and networking issues today after about 750,000 users were disconnected and over 1 million users lost access to the friends services provided by Steam Community.

The connection went down at 2:15 am (GMT -8) with no reports or updates until after the issue had been resolved, about 2 hours later. The following is taken from the Steam forum thread describing the downtime issue:

Sorry for the inconvenience, we had a networking issue that was affecting about 1/8th of our users. The problem should be resolved now.

The problem wasn’t detected and fixed as quickly as it should have been due to some monitoring systems failing, we’ll be taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen in the future.

- jmccaskey: Steam Issues: Connection to Steam cannot be Made

The interesting this is that ‘jmccaskey’ says the issue only affected 1/8th users however the stats graph on Valve’s/Steam’s website says otherwise. The screenshot above clearly shows that no users whatsoever were online during the downtime.

Either way, its back online now and connection has been restored. Game time!

Every wanted to be playing… ‘Nothing’? Now you can with this small hack. Just follow the steps below to be on your way to in-game name falsification!

1. Firstly, open Steam. Press Add non-steam game…
2. Browse your computer for a simple exe which you can stand running in the background. For example, notepad or maybe even an application that runs in the tray.Important: This application will need to be run while you want the name displayed.
   
3. The program you selected will now be in your steam game list. Now to start the falsification!
   Right click the program and press Properties
4. Change the first text box to anything you like. (Make sure the target and start in are left the same)
   E.g. “Your Mum” or “Nothing” (without the quotes). Press OK.
5. Now run the program. Your steam name will be classified as ‘In non steam game’ but underneath will be the text you chose in step 4.

 
If you are viewing this post as a MOTD then welcome, I am glad you found the server — enjoy yourself Anyway. This server can get lag-a-licious and from what the Steam server list says: its the only one in Australia so if your not from Australia it may be an idea to contemplate your ping

If yout not viewing this as a MOTD then I can link you to the guide that will allow you to play Goldeneye Source, all you need is a source based game on Steam to play such as Half Life 2 Deathmatch. http://www.goldeneyesource.com will be able to provide you with what you need to get started

More specifically, take a look at this page for a tutorial to get you started. You should also note that the server is currently running Beta 1.1 of the Goldeneye Source.

– Shadow XVII