No comments on if - similar to the GTA:SA PC release - we'll see some of the more annoying aspects of the game fixed up, but hey, at least we know you won't have to worry about your Rock Band controller freezing the game on boot. At the very least, if the game is anywhere near as moddable as its previous-generation predecessors, someone should be able to release a "make the cars all stop handling like ass" patch and a "make your cahzin stop bugging you every 15 minutes" patch.

Not quite the October some people were predicting, but well, here they are, right about on schedule with a PC release about 6-7 months after consoles.

However, if you're one of those few people who isn't playing GTA4, you can enjoy your shiny new medic achievements / weapons and new map for Team Fortress 2. It's out now. Just restart Steam.

Also, if you're one of the like two people who haven't picked up TF2 yet, TF2 is free this weekend starting this Friday at noon PDT. So hop on Steam now and get it preloaded so you'll be ready to go on Friday.

. . but we'll probably still be playing GTA4.

Yes, so you can go play it right now. (Windows and Linux dedicated servers are also available.)

Now you can enjoy your bunnyhopping, conc-jumping, grenade-jumping, rocket-jumping, and whatever other kind of jump-based lunacy they crammed into it for three whole days before switching over to the TF2 beta.

The Orange Box is up on Steam right now.

Good News: If you pre-order it now, you save $5 and get to play the Team Fortress 2 beta starting (you guessed it) next Monday.

Bad News: Despite the fact that it would be incredibly easy for the lovely guys at Valve to make HL2:E2, TF2 and Portals separate items available for individual purchase, or even if they just put them up as a pack that had just those three games, they didn't. So just like some of us feared, we get to all re-buy Half-Life 2 and Episode 1.

Oh, but look at this, at the bottom of the page they give us our consolation prize:

"Already own Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2: Episode One?
Give your extra game as a gift to a friend when you purchase The Orange Box."

Thanks, Valve, but I don't actually know of anyone who hasn't bought HL2 and Episode 1 yet.

So, who wants a free copy of Half-Life 2? First person to claim it on the forums gets it later tonight.

Fortress Forever is a third-party mod for Half-Life 2 that started years ago because some developers got sick of waiting for Valve to revive Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress 2 as-we-now-know-it was still unannounced, and Valve was being incredibly tight-lipped about it, so Fortress Forever looked like our best shot for ever seeing old-school TFC gameplay come back to the limelight.

When Valve let the world know that they'd been working on TF2, the Fortress Forever guys stuck to their guns, and actually managed to rally much of what remains of the TFC community. And all for one simple reason: Fortress Forever would be as close to TFC as humanly possible. All the stuff Valve changed between TFC and TF2 (which really is a lot) will still be there in Fortress Forever. 80 types of grenades, redundant weaponry, bunny-hopping, conc-jumping, endless demo-man spam, direct ports of classic maps like Dustbowl and Well, and so on.

Whether this will work is yet to be seen. Mods have a pretty hard time gaining traction these days, and Fortress Forever doesn't exactly look newbie-friendly, as it's strongly geared towards hardcore fans of TFC. And seeing as Team Fortress 2 is slated for release just a month after Fortress Forever, who knows what will happen to the player-base of Fortress Forever at that point. Plus there's the whole fact that some of us don't think TFC was impeccable, and something that should have been directly ported. It needed some of the changes Valve put into TF2, specifically all the streamlining. Though, at least with Fortress Forever, it looks like gamers will have two options. If you want a hyper-authentic recreation of TFC, you can go play Fortress Forever. If you want something reworked in an attempt to be more fun, you've got TF2. In any account, this will be a showdown that will be interesting to watch.

In addition to this announcement, the Fortress Forever guys have released a selection of videos on their website, and Planet Half-Life has an exclusive first-look at the mod. In a week we'll see if it was really worth the wait.

Here's how you get in:

From Steam, click File -> Settings -> "Settings" under "Beta Participation" and then choose "The Steam Community" from the dropdown.

Restart Steam and you're there. Just click on the new "Community" tab and start messing with it. You can create a profile, create a group, join a group, add friends, and so on.

Pretty neat so far, but it'll be neater when you can actually search for groups.

First up: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars got a release date. 2 OCT 2007, on PC, PS3, 360. There's also a new build playable right now at QuakeCon, which will hopefully trickle down to us beta people some time in the next week or so. I really like ET:QW so far, but it definitely needs a lot of improvement before release. From what we've heard from devs over at Splash Damage, the new build should be a major step closer towards that goal, but I'll wait until we start hearing stuff first-hand from people playing it this weekend before I start believing it.

After that we've got a bunch of little announcements that came out of nowhere. For instance, Quake Zero. Apparently it's some sort of free web-based incarnation of Quake III's multiplayer. I have no idea how the hell this is going to work, but id says they've got a team of devs working on it. So . . we'll see?

Then there's Quake Arena coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Due to the success of Doom on XBLA, porting some version of Quake seemed like a logical next step.

And of course, another big one: Nearly every game id has ever released is now available on Steam. Right now. The only game I can think of that's missing is Quake IV, but that was really a Raven game . . but then again, so was Hexen, Heretic & friends. The individual games range from $4.95 for Wolfenstein 3D or every Commander Keen game (!!!!!), to $19.95 for newer releases like Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. But the real draw right now should be the absolutely ridiculous multi-packs they've got running right now. Quake 3 + Q3 Team Arena are presently cheaper than either game alone, all the Hexen and Heretic games are currently only $9.95, and seriously do I have to mention Commander Keen 1 through 5 for $4.95? And if you feel like being a big spender, you can get all 22 games in one mega-pack for $62.95, a total savings of over $150. id and Valve obviously know far too well what happens when you put incredibly high quality games down in impulse-buy price range.

And finally, I already linked to it in the comments, as promised, but here's the Rage debut trailer I mentioned last night. It doesn't show a whole lot more than the WWDC video did, but it's much more clear, and really does look impressive.

In case you haven't been keeping track, "The Orange Box" is the first multi-platform release from Valve, and contains everything related to Half-Life 2 that you might care about:

• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Team Fortress 2
• Portal

This will be a physical boxed release, published and distributed by EA. $49.99 for PC, $59.99 for 360/PS3.

If you're already down with Steam, already have Half-Life 2, HL2:E1, and a variety of other goodies, Valve hasn't forgotten about you. They're expected to put out a Steam-only set of HL2:E2, TF2 and Portal, or possibly even sell them individually, we just don't have the price points for the Steam packages yet. Now that the release date is out there, it's safe to assume an announcement about Steam releases will be coming very soon.

Last night, due to some unbelievable weather, large portions of Seattle lost power. Due to the severity of this weather and the fact that it just plain wouldn't stop, repair crews had to wait until today to even start thinking about fixing it. The primary authentication servers for Steam are, unfortunately, located in one of the affected areas, and have been down for nearly 24 hrs.

What does this mean? Well, since you can't authenticate your account, you can't play games. Furthermore, since you can't authenticate your account, you can't change your account settings to be in offline mode, which would at least let you play single-player games. To further confuse things, since the authentication servers are totally offline, if you go through the "recover password" feature Steam will casually tell you that whoops, your account doesn't exist.

So what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to survive without your daily CS fix? I suggest taking a nap, because there's nothing you can do. Just don't jump to suicide, thinking your precious Steam account with hundreds of dollars worth of games attached to it is gone forever. It'll be back as soon as Seattle gets its grid back in order. Furthermore, this event will probably result in Valve creating authentication server backups in several facilities nationwide, so there will be failsafes in place if this happens again.

Oh, and when should we expect to see it back? Who knows. It'll be up as soon as possible, since crews are working more or less around the clock right now to get Seattle powered again. Once it's back up, it'll be announced over on their news page.

Source: Steampowered Forums (if you can connect to them)

Yes, as expected, the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade - has been pushed to 2007. (Officially January, for the moment. But don't be surprised if this turns into February or March.) To anyone in the beta round that just started, such as our own resident WoW addict Ping, it was pretty apparent that there'd be no way they'd hit their previous target of November/December, but hey, now we've got confirmation.

So all of you level 60's have at least another three months of thankless endgame raiding to "enjoy", and all of you under 60 have another three months to catch up . . and start some thankless endgame raiding. Won't that be fun?!!1?!1!

Source: 1up