Derek Smart hasn't committed suicide yet!

And for the low, low price of 200 dollars, you too can have access to what is essentially a tool to separate idiots from their money!

Gamers are Fat

How to make money in Game Design

1.  Take any videogame idea.
2.  Add zombies.
3.  ????
4.  Gamers will buy it because gamers are fucking dumb, simple imbeciles.  Profit.

Gabe opens his mouth and shit comes out.

Valve Boss Gabe Newell Says "Windows 8 is a Catastrophe"

You know what else is a catastrophe? Your fucking cholesterol.  How about lose some weight, you sweaty meat bag.

Residual Life

Another Black Mesa simulator, but this is actually fun.  Level design is true to the original Halflife and there was enough interesting things to see in the intro that made me keep playing through.  Fun mod, one new enemy type, no new weapons, and good, consistant level design.  There were a few memorable combat areas and clever puzzles. All in all, a good, solid Halflife mod.

A short review - Vengeance

I know I haven't updated in a while, but I've had this Halflife mod installed in my Steam folder for a while now, called Vengeance.  It's just another HL1 mod, set in Black Mesa, that is no different than any other mod of similar nature.

It starts out with text that fades in and out, along with camera cuts that fade in and out.  The text is in broken English, and the title states that this is 'Episode 2' or 'Part 2,' I don't remember.  My gameplay experience consisted of waking up in a dorm room or something, walking into a train car, then seeing a three minute cutscene of a train slowly making it's way across an underground lake, and finally I got out.  I walked my way into a series of rooms with bad design, came across a very narrow hallway with a scientist walking through it, and my adventure ended when said scientist plowed right through me, squashing me into chunks of meat.

So why am I bothering to showcase this?  I have no idea, but after months without playing a Halflife mod, I thought I might as well.  Maybe it gets good after that, but probably not.  I think what probably drew me in was the 62 mb filesize.  I expected maybe it would have some interesting music in it, or some new enemy models or weapons, but nope.  There's about 23 maps about 3 megabytes each.  I hate to judge a map based on a short playtime, but I think I just lost the will to play any mod that is set in Black Mesa or that doesn't contain new assets.

http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/vengeance-half-life/

Ruin Christmas for whiny gamers who don't matter

So it seems with the new Steam contest, you can complete objectives to earn prizes, coupons, or 'coals'.  Coals by themselves are worthless, but if you earn seven of them, you can craft them into a free game.  Additionally, the more coals you have in your inventory, the higher chance you have of winning the Steam ultimate prize: All the Steam games, plus hundreds of second prize winners.

Now here's where I take advantage of the situation.  I have about 10 dummy accounts.  I made them using different emails so they couldn't be traced to my primary email.  But the thing you need to remember is that you need to own a retail game in order for an account to be authentic (ie you can't add friends or trade certain goods if you're not authenticated.)  Additionally, in order to trade certain goods, your account has to be in good standing for 90 days (meaning it CAN'T have been banned).  It's a good thing I created these accounts a long time ago.

I would have recommended buying the Humble Indie Bundle 4 for a penny (and I still do), but they caught on to this scheme, so now you need a minimum of 1 dollar to get a Steam key.  Still, one dollar to authenticate is not that bad, that's ten dollars (well, for me it was ten cents American) to get 10 legitimate Steam accounts, which will pay off when you get coals to do with as you please.  In addition, the money goes to a good cause, AND you get some Steam games which can help you get even more coals, so everyone wins and no one loses.  So far I managed to complete about 7-8 objectives on each account, yielding six games, some coupons I probably won't use, and some coals to spare.

Really though, I don't know why people like to complain about this.  Do these gamers realize that there now exists, even if temporarily, a 'coal economy'?  With any economy there will always be farming of one sort or another.  Do complainers think VALVe doesn't know about this?  They wouldn't have made coals tradable if they knew it was a bad idea.  There is nothing in the Terms against creating dummy accounts, despite what the retards on the Steam forums say.

All in all, there are some hardcore farmers out there who have a hundred accounts, I mean just look at this shit, this PEDXS guy has over 200 dummy accounts.  Though they may have thousands of coals, they still could lose as the drawing is random.  The chances of you actually winning are slim to none, so if you have fifty coals, you may as well craft them into something useful before they disappear in January.