Someone at the LAN wasn’t sure what steam was, and so I promised to throw something up explaining it. If you make it to the end you’ve done well!
If anyone else wants a bit of extra info on a COGS topic, email us. Other ideas in the pipeline include game specific guides (if anyone wants to explain the controls for dwarf fortress to me I’d love to put that up!), LAN help, building pc’s, etc. If we really like what people write we might also submit it to the Epigram!

What is it?

Steam is the biggest online digital distributor of games. What that means is you can browse their catalogue of games, buy and then have it instantly available for download straight to your pc. Simple disk free installation and you’re good to go.

Why do we like it?

The reasons we like using steam are pretty varied. One of them is the pretty lame “because everyone else we know does”, but there are a couple of reasons which are a lot more pressing:

• Reasonable DRM
• Community features
• Price point
• Exclusive games

DRM

A lot of modern games have got some pretty hefty DRM on them which is designed to stop pirating, but in reality often does nothing more than inconveniencing legitimate players. Assassains Creed 2 springs to mind…
Steam on the otherhand is very reasonable. Once you have a game in your account it stays there. It’s available to download as many times as you want to, to as many computers as you like for as long as you need to.
By default steam additionally keeps all of the games up to date with the latest patches, and if you’re worried about not always having an internet connection don’t be; steam can boot up in offline mode so you can play single player games whenever you like.

Community

Although there are a few useful community features, the ones which gets the most use all centre around the friends feature. As in most applications you maintain a list of people you enjoy playing with and can see a a glance what game they’re playing if its a steam one, and if you have it you can usually join the server they’re on with a simple click, and if you don’t have it you can view the page where you can buy the game if you so wish.

Price

The main reason we like steam has to be the price. The software itself is free, but more importantly steam has a habit of selling games for a tiny fraction of their true value, and the Christmas sale has filled many members with games they’ve still not gotten around to playing. I can assure people that this did not cost this much! In particular I feel I should point out that there is currently a sale on for thanksgiving which is offering both single games and multi packs – see the COGSBay section in the forum if you need some people to share with!

Games library

The variety of games available is staggering.

• Exclusives – Half Life, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal…
• Top selling series – Call of Duty, Dawn of War, Supreme Commander 2 (alas, not the original), Civilization, Fallout, Dragon Age, Street Fighter…
• Indie games – World of Goo, Plants vs Zombies, Penumbra Overture, Beat Hazard, Audiosurf …
• Golden Oldies – Deus Ex, Age of Wonders, Sonic the Hedgehog, X-Com, Ecco the Dophin, Jedi Knight, , Monkey Island, Quake, Doom, Heretic, Hexen…

Combine those with sales that usually knock between 70 and 90 per cent off the price and hopefully people can see why steam is so popular!

Steamworks

Finally a feature of steam which makes disorganised people like myself particularly fond of steam is the “steamworks” initiative. What it boils down to is that select games can be bought in a store as usual – disk, manual, case, etc – and then simply by entering the CD key into steam you can then have the game permanently linked into your steam account, which means a game can be installed simply from the CD key, no need for the disk at all!

It’s coming! We are now taking pre-orders for the best ever COGS Charity Nude Calendar and for a mere £5, you could have one.

Further details are in this forum thread, so take a look and let us know if you’d the most epic calendar in the world hanging on your wall next year

To whet your appetite, here’s a promo shot:

Firstly, and most importantly is the pizza ordering form for those people at the LAN – available here. Money taken from 1700 (see Wyrm), order placed at around 1730 once money is taken.

For those of you not at LAN the EGM results are as follows:

• 2kah is president, defeating Tayters.

• Ragzouken is Vice President, defeating Vert who only ran to in turn defeat Tayters. Which he did….
• Constitution changes also passed.

Congratulations to both successful candidates!

10:30 – Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II

12:00 – EGM

12:15 (‘After EGM’) – Return of the RTS slot and assorted games organised by shoutout

17:00 – Unreal Tournament 2004

21:00 – BZFlag (a free tank shooter with very simple controls)

There will also be the usual staples of a minecraft server, console gaming and mongle radio going on all day. If you’d like us to set up servers for any other games, just ask! And for anyone who’s interested, Ragzouken will be starting a game of Desert Bus at around 13:30.
The tournament for the day will be running from 14:00 through to 17:00, and a pizza signup system should be put up (here) early in the day, with a 17:30 order.

Unfortunately, Dave (Bernkastel) has decided to resign his position as COGS president as he feels he doesn’t have enough time. This means that we need an EGM to elect a new president.

The EGM will be held at COGS LAN 2 (next Saturday 20/11/10) at 12 noon and will hopefully last less than 15 minutes. If you’d like to nominate yourself as a candidate, please post your manifesto in the Serious Business section of the forum or email the committee.

More details can be found in this forum post.

Also, remember to sign up for CL2 by midday this Wednesday (17/11/10) if you need a lift.

In brief:

1. Signup for the next LAN ASAP
2. Get Trackmania here or on Steam (it’s free!)
3. 8pm start
4. Join the only Mongolian server – “COGS Gaming Night”

In long:
If you want a lift to the next LAN, sign up by early next week. We’ll be sorting the lifts out a bit earlier this time than previously, so the sooner you sign up the better!

As for the gaming night, the above list covers pretty much everything; the reason our server is Mongolian is that it’s the easiest way to find it in the server list as it should be the only Mongolian one. Thus: Start TrackMania, click Play Online, click All, find Mongolia in the “World” list in the middle, click on it, and then click “COGS Gaming Night” on the right. It saves a lot of hassle trying to use the friend system which isn’t tied to anything like the steam friends list, and has a max capacity of 16 friends….

For chatting to each other we’ll once again be borrowing the kind SWLans mumble server. Get mumble here if you don’t already have it. The IP is voip.swlans.co.uk, the port is the default one and the password is “swlans”. We’ll be in the Racing channel!

Any issues, instant feedback can be had by going to the IRC chat and saying the names of anyone who has a star by their name. Other people might also be of use….

PS, Day of Defeat:Source is currently only £1.50 on steam if there are any WW2 shooter fans out there.

Defence of the Ancients is an old mod for Warcraft III which is widely renowned as having one of nastiest learning curves around; around a hundred heroes, similar numbers of items and strategies. For that reason the recent article about Valve’s work towards DotA 2 has got me looking forward to more news. I’m optimistic that the proposed changes will actually make DotA 2 a very fun game.
If nothing else it should persuade a few people to take it up so I’ll have people to play with again!

~Wyrm