Like Captainface shouted in the shoutbox a couple of days ago, the biggest announcement in the past few days was Portal 2, hinted and slowly spoiled by valve in the last years and more frequently on the last weeks. No release dates have been announced so far but we’ll probably be playing it this holiday season. Lots of people are speculating if this could be sold with Half Life 2 :Episode 3 or will be Episode 3 itself but I think it’s a waste of time to day-dream on a plot where the last villain in the series was an AI addicted to cakes.

The second Valve-related news is the (likely) upcoming Steam support for Macs. The Orange box games have been made object of some Mac-inspired ads so it’s not difficult to guess what Valve is hinting.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has also been announced recently. It’ll be a downloadable game for XBLA and PSN. The game has already been nicknamed Diablo Raider or Lara of Persia. Allow me to say that I knew that Square-Enix would have screwed up. You’ll get a couple of related comics in the next weeks. You can bet on this.

Before giving you the last sad news of this post, I’d like you to know that Super Street Fighter IV will have some extra content for the players that own Street Fighter 4 for the same platform. Hokuto no Ken costume for Abel. I called this first.

Some people complained that we didn’t get a new video of Metroid Other M at the Nintendo Media Summit this year. Well, it got released a few days after that and it’s full of cinematic. I wouldn’t even consider this game in my must-buy list after seeing this if the game wasn’t directed by Yoshio Sakamoto himself. Still, next time models and animations should be done by Epic Games because I just can’t stand plain reflective surfaces with no detail after the awesome work that Retro Studios did with Metroid Prime.

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.

Time flies. It’s been almost a month after the last post already. I know I should have written this earlier but I had some exams to pass. I passed every one of them by the way and only three remain in October but I have the whole summer to work on those, between some Mario Galaxy and Metroid.

You may have read the latest news on game announcements at E3 but let’s recap, just to make sure what we’re going to buy and why.

Microsoft

Probably the most embarrassing conference I’ve seen, even worse than that Nintendo conference from 2009. Let’s face it, Kinect (Natal’s new name) is just an improved Eye toy and what they showed was a more multimedia box than a gaming console. Movies, Facebook integration and sport events aren’t that interactive when it comes to actually play. And about Skittles, I’m sure that the little girl enjoyed that part as much as we didn’t. You’ll see my comic on this later. There’s at least a really good news in the release of a new 360 model, with built-in wi-fi and larger HDD.

EA

Nice stuff, really. I’ve got a couple of friends overly excited about Battlefield Vietnam just for the lack of Carl Gustav and seeing Dead Space 2 in action with more quick time events was really a bang. I’ve been re-playing Dead Space lately after EA’s big sale on steam and I perfectly recall the adrenaline i felt the first time a drag tentacle grabbed me.

Crysis 2 is nearing completion and it has been optimized for slower machines while faster machines will star in Need for Speed: Hot pursuit featuring multiplayer police car chase.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft presented a handful of very interesting games, starting with Child of Eden, from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and ending with Rayman Origins, passing by Assassin’s creed brotherhood. They also showed a new non-video-game with plastic guns and laser sensors that allows you to battle in your living room or set up checkpoint runs. I don’t know if you have ever seen this but in the 90’s there was a game called “Laser combat” sold with 2 guns and 2 chest sensors. It’s pretty much the same, even in the look.

The most interesting product is probably the UBIart Framework: a new in-house development engine. I hope they release it as free someday, like the Unreal Engine or Quake Engine.

Nintendo

Everyone that wasn’t expecting anything big after the leaks in the months before E3 got terribly shocked. Nintendo threw on screen a huge number of games for both DS, Wii and the new 3DS, finally unveiled. Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kid Icarus Uprising, Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby Epic Yarn, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and many more. I really can’t figure out precisely how much I’m going to spend within the next year.

My bad, I couldn’t see the Nintendo 3DS in action as you don’t get the 3d effect from videos but from what I’ve read it works like a window on another world. The black border around the screen helps to isolate the 3d image from the rest and your brain reads it independently. It sounds awkward but it’s possible if your eyes aren’t too close or too far from the screen and not tilted. With the amount of games revealed and awaiting us within the end of Nintendo’s financial year (March 2011) there’s no doubt they owned the show this year.

Sony

Sony’s motion control, named Move, is finally priced at $49.99 and supported by good games and not only tech demos, like Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Media molecule’s Alex Evans unveiled a little more of Little Big Planet 2 and how it will be a platform for games and not just a platform game. I admire their intents but I feel that the LBP franchise would work way better on PC with external applications and a supportive community. Just look at how far Garry’s Mod made it.

The big bomb came with Gabe Newell, announcing that portal 2 will be released on PS3 too. I wonder what made him change his mind considering that coding forPS3 is actually time-consuming, despite his previous statements were jokes or not. Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 went on the screens again with Dead Space Extraction as bonus playable with the PlayStation Move. The conference ended with a disturbing clown in an ambulance promoting a new Twisted Metal game.

The worst part was Kevin Butler, charging up the crowd  and mocking the products of other companies like Sony invented everything in gaming since the creation of PlayStation. That’s not something you do in front of people who probably owns every console on the market.