The recent news of the retail black box cancellation has raised the question if buyers of the HD 2900 XT, who also received a coupon for a free "Black Box" will receive an upgrade to the orange variant. Valve has now confirmed that only the retail offering has been axed and anyone with a coupon will still receive the same games as found in the Valve Black Box. Sorry guys - no free Episode One and Half-Life 2 for y'all.

The Black Box has been cancelled...We're going to have one package, The Orange Box

said Doug Lombardi, Valve's director of marketing. The package, which was to offer only Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, has been officially cancelled by Valve. The Orange Box will be the only collection offered when Episode 2 releases this fall. In addition to the three new products - Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life: Episode Two - The Orange Box will also contain the full version of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One and cost additional $10. The Orange Box, will be available on the PC (US$49.99) as well as the 360 and PS3 (US$ 59.99) game consoles.

MaddoxX, a member of the No-Steam forums, has managed quite a feat; he has hacked into Valve's computers. He has managed to get access to Cyber Cafe data, as well as several hundreds of credit card numbers, and Valve's balance sheet.

At the moment, he is awaiting some response from Valve, which does not seem to be too concerned.


Source: DailyTech

All over the interweb, there are intermittent forum posts with a strange topic: how similar S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks to Half Life 2 and Doom 3. These claims certainly do not go unfounded. Someone, with way too much free time, went through and manually compared the texture directories of Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll see the results in the first two pictures below. A particular texture, lights_impflash.dds, has the exact same name of the Doom 3 version, excluding the extension. Half Life 2 has also been allegedly stolen from. Not only are the file names nearly identical (except for the extension), the images are extremely similar as well. Whether or not anything comes out of this depends on what ID Software and Valve decide to do. Do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R textures are stolen?

Eidos Interactive and Valve announced an agreement to deliver dozens of new and best-selling PC titles via Steam. This first agreement includes complete franchise sets of classics such as Tomb Raider, the entire Commandos series, Battlestations: Midway, Just Cause and many of the Hitman titles. In addition, Eidos is bringing some of this year's most highly anticipated releases to Steam, including Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Championship Manager 2007, and more. Pricing information is available at www.Steamgames.com, and news of additional Eidos games heading to Steam will be announced in the coming weeks.

Electronic Arts and Valve, today announced final information about Half-Life: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2, two of the most anticipated action games this year. Representing multiple platforms, the Black Box will ship for the PC and include Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box will ship for the PC, PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system, and Xbox 360 videogame. It will include all the content of The Black Box, plus the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. The Black Box and The Orange Box are targeted for release in Fall 2007. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.

The people who designed Half Life must have figured that they should not call the version of Half Life going onto consoles just "Half Life: Episode Two", especially when it ccomes with so much more than that. And so, Valve will release a bundle of Half-Life 2, Episodes One and Two, Team Fortress, and Portal as one big "Half Life: Orange". It should come to at least the Xbox360 and PC, but may also come to the PS3.

It was a busy and windy week here at Valve. As most of the community knows by now, last week a major windstorm hit the greater Seattle area. Power outages are fairly common in the area, but the magnitude of this storm knocked out our data center, resulting in about 20 hours Steam interruption. This was very frustrating for everyone here and we know it was frustrating for you as well. We learned a lot and are taking steps to make sure that when the next storm like this hits our area 15-20 years from now *fingers crossed*, people will still be playing games on Steam while we are buying flashlight batteries.

There is currently a major power outage in the Seattle/Bellevue area, exactly where Valve's Steam is hosted. Unfortunately, there is no guess as to when the power will come back on. Steam will work hard to restore the power as soon as the storm that is currently battering the area dies down a bit. Basically, if you can't connect to Steam, it is not your fault.