AMD video card driver updates through Steam, Blizzard talks about cheating in Starcraft 2, WoW Armory upate

For the record, Impulse did this with Nvidia over a year ago. Go Stardock

Via Bigdownloads:

Up until now Valve's Steam download service has been mostly for downloading games, demos, movies and strategy guides. Today it was announced that the service will be used by processor maker AMD for another purpose. If you have an ATI Radeon-based graphics card in your PC, Steam will automatically detect that and make available the latest driver updates for your graphics card.

This will certainly be a huge benefit for Steam owners which those graphics cards since many issues with PC games can be solved with a graphics driver update. The updates will begin later this month with the release of the 10.9 version of the Catalyst drivers. Ironically this announcement comes on the heals of the word that AMD intends to dump the ATI brand name for its graphics cards by the end of the year.

Update: Those 10.9 drivers are now available to download via Steam and from AMD's Game web site.

Cheating in Starcraft 2

If you listen carefully, you can here the soft whistle of the Blizzard Entertainment ban hammer falling as they release this statement:

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that's no different for StarCraft II. If a StarCraft II player is found to be cheating or using hacks or modifications in any form, then as outlined in our end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net to play StarCraft II with his or her account.

Playing StarCraft II legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net, and it goes against the spirit of fair play that all of our games are based on. We strongly recommend that you avoid using any hacks, cheats, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.

World of Warcraft Armory update.

So I was looking through the Wow character links that I have along the right side of this blog under recommended games, and I noticed they updated my pages (along with everyone else's) to include pictures. I thought that to be pretty cool. Behold Solice and Darkforge. Turalyon sever rules.

Solice



Darkforge

Looks like someone finally learned something

Obtained Via BigDownloads.com:

In perhaps their biggest game publisher deal yet, Valve has announced secured the rights to distribute a number of PC game titles from Electronic Arts via their Steam service. EA has previously handled downloadable PC game titles via their own EA Downloader service but now Spore, Spore Creepy and Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect, FIFA Manager 09, and Need For Speed Undercover are now all available to purchase and download via Steam (sorry, rest of the world, this is for North America only).

In addition to those games, EA will also offer Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, Dead Space and the upcoming PC port of Mirror's Edge via Steam in the near future. When contacted by Big Download, an EA spokesperson would not comment if any of EA's older PC games might find their way onto Steam as well. If you have been wanting to buy EA games but have been avoiding purchasing them because of EA's use of DRM in their recent titles, a message of Valve's Steam forums states that the EA games on Steam do not use third party DRM or SecuROM set-up, saying, " the only DRM it uses is Steam itself."

It looks like EA may have finally realized that there are alternatives to DRM. Personally, I don't care about most of the copy protection stuff out there, however limiting installs is BS, and the whole technology basically doesn't work. Now if EA wises up even more, they might consider making some exclusive content for the steam version, or offering a cheaper price than standard retail.