G3

A quick little background for those who didn’t know… Valve did this thing for the people that went out and bought a new (yeah, new a year ago) ATI video card for the purposes of getting a free copy of Half-Life 2 upon release.

Through their Steam client they made a bunch of their games available for free download to the aforementioned suckers customers. One of which is the Counter-Strike Source Beta, which is basically the Counter-Strike mod applied to the new Half-Life 2 engine. It’s actually pretty fun. But they only give you one map to play with.

It’s a fun map, but after a few times through on each side you wanna try something new. I found some other cool maps to try out. I put them here. Give them a whirl.

So yeah, when this image is gettin ya down, fire up some CS:Source.

This probably falls into the “press release 5 years too soon” category, but it seems some scientists are working on a way to make a robot that eats — and thus self-powers — house flies:

Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink

Interesting idea. What will be more interesting is to see how the Marketing Department manages to sell housewives on the idea of a domestic robot that’s carrying around a bucket of sewage.

- W

Looks like the Half-Life pre-load on Steam that I spoke of has another round available.

The first round was about 500MB, and I just started round two, which reset my “percent complete” to 50%. Advanced calculus and prediction models make me guess this current one is another 500MB. Happy downloading!

PS: The latest rumor for the release is November.

Once again, I must declare that programmers are cool. No really! I’m not just saying that because I am one. But, everyday I see cool new things done with software.

Anyhoo, remember that Xfire program that I posted about a while back? Well, it updates itself regularly, which is pretty cool … adding new functionality and game support. But the latest upgrade just made me think about how computing just keeps getting cooler and better every day.

Xfire is cool, but some games don’t let you ALT+TAB out. Or sometimes the sound is so immersive that you can’t always hear the faint sound of a friend messaging you through Xfire. Not a problem. Check this out from an email I got from them.

True Cross-Game Messaging Arrives from Xfire

With the release of version 0.22 today, Xfire is proud to debut the first portion of its forthcoming cross-game instant messaging technology that will allow gamers to IM each other in real time while playing in different games. In this first test version, you will be able to receive IMs while playing America’s Army via a small Xfire chat window popping up in the corner of the screen. In a future version, you will be able to send and receive IMs in real time in any game, from any game, to any game. Stay tuned!