Hints and rumors from the Portal 2 ARG have been circulating for days, but Valve just came right out and said it: Portal 2 may release early, but only if you contribute. ARGs (alternate reality games) generally play a marketing role in the games industry. Developers code hidden messages about their games (release dates, features, [...]

You’ve probably already heard of Valve’s free top-down shooter, Alien Swarm. What you may not know is that it’s also a FPS. PCGamer broke the news from the steam forums. It just takes a few console commands to make a whole new game from the downloadable title: Go to Options > Keyboard > Enable developer [...]

Exceeding your Portal RDA: Portal 2 confirmed, with 2 player co-op and bonus Steam for Macs.

If you’ve missed out on the seminal Half Life FPS series (or you just happen to be a dirty pirate), Valve has discounted the whole lot to fire sale prices. This weekend, you’ll be able to download Half-Life, Half-life 2, both episodes, and Half-Life: Deathmatch from Steam for 66% off regular price. For Steam neophytes, that means about $1-6 for each of the games. If you’d like to just up and download the lot of them, it comes out to about $17 (which is probably cheaper than Episode 3 will be whenever it arrives).

The Half-Life series is famous for popularizing scripted events as a way to integrate narrative into gameplay without using cut scenes. Subsequent games made great strides in physics-driven gameplay and facial animations that made characters warmer and more believable. So even if you aren’t a huge FPS fan, you can still have a piece of gaming history for less than the price of a budget game.

Valve’s entire collection is also 10% off, which adds Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead (among other notables) to the deal for a grand total of $90. Whether you’re in for a penny or pound, there’s a lot of gaming for just a little money over at Steam this weekend.

Hoary old gamers (read: anyone around since The Orange Box) may recall that it shipped with Peggle Extreme, a standalone Half-Life-themed bundle of levels for casual megahit Peggle. If you’ve ever been curious but haven’t wanted to shell out the cash, Valve is now offering it for free via Steam. For those unfamiliar, Peggle is a gravity-driven puzzle game where the objective is to destroy every peg on a game board by bouncing a ball among them. It’s sort of like pinball without flippers, and has a habit of depriving otherwise productive members of society of their duly-earned sleep. Go have a crack at it.