Over the past year it's been hard to avoid noticing that the world's been sinking itself into a very deep recession. Every notable industry of mention is facing difficulties, layoffs and outright closures as money and funding start to dry up. Needless to say, things have been looking fairly grim.

Given all that, it was surprising to hear recently that the videogame industry is in fact recession proof.

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Dslyecxi has written his second magnificent guide to this game. I suggest everyone take some time to read it.

If you'd like some first hand experience with ArmA 2 Steam has a demo, so go get it now!

Holy shit Ghostbusters!  I remember seeing the leaked footage for a Ghostbusters prototype a year or so back and feeling exciting, but since I'm pretty cynical these days, also cautious. How could a movie franchise game be any good when pretty much all movie tie-ins so far have been terrible. 

Boy was my cynicism misplaced with the Ghostbusters.  

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I was listening to The Video Game Show the other day and they mentioned the dreaded summer gaming drought. I thought to myself, "What? What the fuck?"

What the fuck indeed.

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I'm not sure what happened there, but Steam-Gamer.com is back once again.

Valve once said:

Left 4 Dead, set for release on PC and Xbox 360 on November 21 in Europe, is primarily a four-player cooperative game that sees a group of Survivors battle through four 'Movies' and against 28 Days Later-style zombies called The Infected.

Newell said that Valve's support of the game post-launch will be essential for growing the community.

He said: "One of the things that we're doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that's really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community.

"So each time we've released one of those for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."

Yeah, so that never happened did it?

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Looks pretty badass.

Video after the break.

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Happy Memorial Day Everyone!

I'm übergeek, a friend of Slim's from Penny Arcade. He asked me to be one of the first contributors months back, and it seems I'm the last one out of the gate. I've known him for about 6 years, through games like CS:S, Battlefield 2, Left 4 Dead and a little TF2. I've known Stormy for about just as long, and Sub for a couple years as well.

Slim and I tend to sit around and talk about current events through Steamchat every few days, and now and then he uses me as a guinea pig for new site features and throws new designs at me (by the way, I like the new banner Marc). I look forward to sharing my thoughts on how Valve is changing the industry, PC gaming, some observations on console gaming, and MMO's.

Enjoy your holiday.

Wow! I took part in an amazing ArmA mission during the ShackTac session this Saturday.

Video after the break.

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AlabasterSlim: Hi Sub

Subedii: heya

Subedii: what's up?

AlabasterSlim: I want to have a conversation about the PC as a gaming platform

Subedii: OK.

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