Room #200 is finally published! Honestly I never thought i’d have been able to keep the comic going this far without slow downs. Unfortunately I’ll have to slow down in October to have more time to study so expect to have one comic a week and not two.

About the latest story (that I used to also change the physiognomies of the characters without a clean cut) I want to show you the little piece I’m so proud of and I should be hired at Crytek or Epic for: the galactic federation sniper suit.

As you can see I changed some small details in the final realisation, like the knuckle pads and a wider visor. Basically I took some ordinary GF trooper concept arts from Metroid Prime 2 and 3 and worked out my own suit, designed to be more flexible and comfy than armoured. The idea was that a space sniper must be able to change his position quickly even in high-gravity environments.

Environments like the ones in Mechwarrior 5. A trailer popped out of nowhere tells me that I’ll be firing EMPs again in the near future. And that’s a good thing, because a 7-year-long “near future” has just passed.

So, what do you think? Do we have any chance to see mad cats in hi-res textures?

Meanwhile, you might want to check out some L4D custom campaigns. Valve made it easy with the double click, install and play function so you don’t have to worry to put the right things in place. Take a look at the awesome Death Aboard and Dam It. Death Aboard will force you to escape from a prison through the docks and an amazing wrecked ship while Dam It is set (guess where?) in a dam but the fun part is that there are no safe rooms. If your team die the game is over, like a real zombie chase would be. It only has some small tank issues but the whole map is really well done.

Last news: I’ll be away from July 25 to August 1 for a little vacation that I plan to spend in the arcades as soon as I learn how to hack the Neo-Geo cabinets. You know, 99 players, 9 credits with a coin, that sort of stuff that leaves your wallet much heavier. Don’t worry, I’m drawing three comics in advance so you won’t notice my absence and when I’ll be back I’ll show you some doodles I’ll make down by the sea, hopefully.

EDIT: Mechwarrior confirmed. Now I’m cleaning the drool off my keyboard.

Literally, in italian it means spare time. It’s a funny expression and I don’t mind if you want to use it in english too. I’m writing this because I’m sorry. I’ve been a little absent in the last month due to the fact that I’m working on multiple projects for my exams and I didn’t have time to write a couple of news.

Probably the most important news from the last week is that Steam finally came to Mac. Oblviously the game library isn’t the same of the pc. Mac games are mainly indie games with only Portal and Civilisation IV from large companies. I’m really wondering if there’s marked for such a thing, considering that in the environment I work in 99% of the people use a Mac but none of them use it for gaming, except facebook and flash games in general.

Anyway, to celebrate and promote this step into steam integration with a new userbase Valve is giving away Portal for free until May 24th for both PC and Mac users. Team Fortress 2 will come later, probably after the Engineer update, to avoid fixing something on a platform and breaking something else on the other. Don’t look at me like that. We know how it goes everytime.

Almost siltently, TF2 got a lot of tweaks and updates recently. Adding four medals staing how far back in time your first frag (or death) goes, new community weapons and some important changes to the pyro. The flamethrower is now less effective in burning and more irritaing in airblasting enemies in the air and the Sledgehammer (it’s the Homewrecker’s filename and I like it better) guarantees the pyro a babysitter job for sentries. I’ll stick with the backburner like I always did, thanks. Now the Heavy is also faster when spinning the minigun and moving, the Sniper can nock the arrows while in the air and the bonk doesn’t slow down the Scout.Other unlockables are the Crit-a-Cola drink for scouts and the

Another free DLC comes from Futuremark Games as Shattered Horizon got the Firepower Pack, adding 4 new primary weapons, 2 secondary weapons, 3 grenades and a mining pick. The game now is way more various and unpredictable as some weapons also change the speed and aim of the players. The new grenades, again, can’t damage enemies but they can blind them, or fool with their radars. The only downside is that it greatly affected the performance on low-specs PCs but it has been mostly fixed.

The last freebie I’m giving you today is Mechwarrior 4, which got a completely free release two weeks ago from the Mektek servers along with the mektek 3.1 pack with extra mechs and weapons. Since Mechwarrior (MW5, it’s a reboot) is on hold this is the best we can have at the moment and trust me, this is really the best.

Super Street Fighter IV has been released a couple of weeks ago but I won’t be able to try it unless it comes to PC. Blame Capcom with me. I have a comic in my mind though.