What’s the best way to ruin any online game? Exploits. Unfortunately Left 4 Dead (check back in a few days for our full review) is not safe from hackers, at least not on the Xbox 360. The above video is almost comical in nature, due to the crazy stuff that one can pull off. I’d just hate to be the guy on the receiving end of these cheats.

Thankfully Valve has already issued a server-side fix to all Xbox Live dedicated servers, which will prevent any and all of these exploits from being used. They expect a title update to be completed shortly for those on player-hosted servers in the near future.

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I’ve been impressed by Steam for a long time, and am always more than happy to purchase a new title via the service. I think Valve really found that balance between giving the customers the freedom to actually play their purchased games when and where they want, and still combating piracy. Honestly, in order for a service like this to work, it not only has to be something people don’t mind using, but something they actually enjoy using. Of course, having excellent package deals on your games doesn’t hurt things either. Every now and then you’ll find a huge bundle of games for a good price, and right now is one of those times.

The Valve Complete Pack was recently made available, which combines 22 different Valve titles. The $99.99 price tag does seem a bit steep, until you look at everything you’re getting. Sure, you’ll see all of the titles from The Orange Box, but even its value pales in comparison to what you’re getting here. Hit the jump for a complete listing of games.
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I’ve said for a long time that Steam is the best thing to happen to PC gaming since the concept of shareware was created. The ability to download your game directly from Valve’s servers onto any computer, at any time is just awesome. Now they’re starting to save your key bindings, and soon your saved games. It really just doesn’t get much better than this. That is until Microsoft comes in and tries to do it better.

Yes, Microsoft is planning to compete with the digital distribution service by making full PC titles available through their Marketplace application. In two to three weeks, we’ll see the beginnings of the service, though it will only include videos, demos and DLC.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone stepped up to challenge Valve, and Microsoft definitely has the resources to do it. Unfortunately their Games For Windows Live initiative was all but a complete failure, which doesn’t give me much hope that they can really make a better Steam.

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It seems like years ago that Valve announced their new Cloud syncing service for Steam. If you missed the announcement back in May, the new service will actually save all of your settings such as key-bindings and such on their server, rather than just your PC. This will make things much easier when you go to play one of your games on a different PC, or just upgrade to a new one. Another great feature is that you will be able to sync up save files, though unfortunately that one won’t be seen just yet.

So why the refresher course? Well Valve is finally ready to launch the Cloud service with Left 4 Dead when it launches this month. It will be the only title with support for a little while, though Valve has promised to add it to older titles (as well as new ones when they are released) sometime in the future.

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One of the constraints that some developers have to work with when creating titles for XBLA is a size limit. They have to squeeze their entire game into a measly 350MB in order to be considered. Well, unless their name is Valve that is.

Portal: Still Alive was recently released on XBLA, and we were shocked to see that it will consume a whopping 629MB. Granted, these days a few hundred MB’s isn’t exactly large, but when you consider that they’ve gone over Microsoft’s size limit by nearly double, it’s a big deal. There’s currently no word from Microsoft on whether or not this was a one time thing, or if they are raising the cap for everyone.

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Half Life 2 (along with the subsequent episodes) definitely ranks pretty high on my list of all-time favorite games. Naturally, ever since completing Episode 2, I’ve been itching to once again fill the shoes of Gordan Freeman. Valve hasn’t been quick to give us a good time frame of when to expect the final episode to be released, but according to Doug Lombardi (of Valve), they may be showing us footage by the end of the year. Doug also dropped a cryptic hint on when to expect the game to be released. Or rather, when not to expect the game.

“The next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between HL2 to Ep1, and Ep1 to Ep2.”

A quick check shows that there were 19 months between the release of Half Life 2 and Episode 1, while there were only 16 months between the two episodes. Since Episode 2 came out in October of last year, don’t look for the game until sometime after May 2009.

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