Valve's Dark Carnival

Ever wondered where to get your inspiration for the apocalypse? There are plenty of abandoned places out there to choose from, but none perhaps so mordantly fitting as Six Flags, New Orleans. Check out the gorgeously shot video with its excellent background theme by Godspeed You! Black Emperor below.

Opened in 2000 under the name Jazzland, the park was taken over by Six Flags in 2002, only to be closed before the oncoming storm Katrina in 2005. The park was flooded, with damage to the majority of the buildings, much of it beyond repair. The only ride to truly escape the rising waters was the Batman rollercoaster, later removed to another site by its owners. Various plans and offers have come through to redevelop the site, but as things stand the park remains a closed reminder.

This is truly the real Dark Carnival!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: I should probably point out that The Hidden during this scene was being played by someone who actually knew what they were doing, i.e. not one of us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Files available for download here.

I'm a surprise...

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Steam has come a long way since its initial release, but there’s still swathes of potential to be unlocked if only the development team would make some steps in the right direction. So I’ll get ready to eat a couple of my words when I say that there are some very welcome changes being worked on under the hood.

If anyone’s been brave enough to try it, there’s a new beta UI* that was released a wee while ago, which promises various enhancements to the current look, as well as swapping out the IE-powered browser for a Webkit model (same engine powering Safari and Chrome). Aside from being faster, more standards compliant and generally more up-to-date, the browser engine is safely cross-platform. Along with some files hidden away in the new UI, and some leaked adverts and whatnot, the latest information is that Valve plan to port Steam to Mac OS X to be released some time this year, and that the upcoming Portal 2 will indeed be playable on Mac.

Some pretty decent news all round, in my opinion. There are already a number of titles on Steam that could potentially be played natively on Mac, if the service had supported it on release, and this news can only have a positive impact on the number of games sold and released for the system. And presumably if Portal 2 is released successfully, Valve may make it their policy to release games for both systems in future, just as id once did for ‘coding practise.’ Now the question remains, just how long will we have to wait before Linux compatible binaries are released?

*Quick word of warning, when I tried the new UI my fonts disappeared and I had to re-download some games that somehow went missing.

Buffed

The TF2 team have recently posted on their blog that whilst all’s going swimmingly, a number of people have been temporarily pulled off the team ahead of November’s release of Left 4 Dead 2. Although the latter looks to be an interesting release, it has caused some upset being released so soon after the original, and with relatively little downloadable content having been pushed out in the meantime for the original L4D. An L4D2 Boycott group, demanding various efforts on the part of Valve to prevent a split in the community (and promising not to buy the game should their demands be ignored), gained quite a large following. Sufficient indeed that a couple of the group’s key figures were invited down to Valve HQ for a tour, and a proper outing of their views. Of course, once key figures in any dispute meet up for tea and biscuits, there’s bound to be disagreement in the ranks, and charges of the pair being bought out by Valve will no doubt drive a wedge into the group. You can read their (rather reasonably) worded manifesto here.

Of course, that might all be a moot point for the Australians, if the censors have their way. The latest draft of L4D2 submitted to the classification panel resulted in an ‘RC’—Refused Classification. Presumably a little tweaking on Valve’s part and things will all be hunky dory again. But the news does suggest plenty of blood and gore for those of us playing the game in the free freer world.

Meanwhile, for any further updates on TF2 we’ll just have to bide our time. But before shifting emphasis over to L4D2, Valve did at least give us a decent sized patch full of bug fixes and feature improvements to mull over. Sadly, no functionality for swapping backpack items yet, but in the meantime you can show off your own trawl with this handy little site. Or just use it to eye up future swaps—like the wonderful Mallet of Banishment sported by Gabe Newell.