In some news that I have been sitting on for a few days I am pleased to inform everyone that World of Goo will be getting a release on Steam come Monday the 13th October for $20. Want to know what the best thing is? World of Goo will be using Steamworks which means we will be having a great eight achievements to work our way towards.

Mr. I Decide What Games We Get On Steam Justin Holtman said that World of Goo was one of the most asked for games to come onto Steam.

“More people have told us to get World of Goo on Steam than any other title coming this year. It has captured the imagination of the press and other members of the industry during its incredible pre-launch campaign, and we’re delighted to debut the PC version with Steamworks Achievements.”

He is damn right that World of Goo has captured the imagination of almost everyone. Check out the praise the game has received from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, The Poisoned Sponge and even from yours truly.

There is another bit of great news for those who pre-ordered World of Goo, you won’t be missing out on the Steamworks perks. You will be able to use your Magic Key from your pre-order email to activate the game on Steam. Brilliance!

If you don’t wish to get it from 2D Boy themselves you can get it from a variety of other places including amazon.com and Direct2Drive. Goo will also be purchasable from Indie friendly Greenhouse and from 2D Boy’s North American retail publisher Beanstalk Games.

Seriously there is now no reason why you shouldn’t be buying your daily allowance of Goo.

How is it that Goo can contain more charisma, charm, cuteness and lets not forget gooeyness than pretty much any other video game character ever? I will tell you why, it is because the two men who created World of Goo are masters of their craft. From all accounts Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler have spent their time sitting in a giant pool of goo becoming so intimately attached to it that they could create the perfect Goo ball.

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According to this Edge Online report pre-orders of Valve’s upcoming survival-horror-co-operative-shooter-extravaganza are 60% higher than those for the Orange Box.

Valve managing director Gabe Newell has this to say regarding the pre-orders:

“People had really strong reactions to Left 4 Dead when we started showing it. Our pre-orders are running 60 percent ahead of Orange Box. This in combination with the fact that it is a new IP made us think that an extensive marketing program made a lot of sense.”

Valve have launched a massive promotional campaign for the game costing $10 million and covering television, online, print and outdoor advertising. The promotional posters for the game (as seen below) feature the logo of the game, the disfigured hand that is now synonymous with the game.

These advertisements will run hand in hand with a massive television campaign with 30-second adverts appearing on a wide variety of US TV networks from November 9th to the 28th. The ads will be mixing humour and horror, and I assume with bear classic Valve stylings.

The Xbox 360 and PC demo of the game is slated to be released in early November and will feature 1-4 player gameplay from the game’s “No Mercy” campaign. Newell is also positive regarding the future success of the game.

“Well, Left 4 Dead has a long way to go to beat Half-Life and Counter-Strike, but our fans’ excitement when they play the game has certainly infected us. It will be a top five title for the year, but beyond that we’ll have to see how big it gets.”

Pre-orders up 60% on the Orange Box, a $10 million advertising campaign? I am sure that Left 4 Dead will be a hugely successful game.

The next iteration of the Football Manager series from SI Games is going to be released on Steam on 14th November for $49.99. For the first time ever Football Manager will be utilising Steamworks, the publisher and developer tools that allow games to plug into the Steam service. Steamworks will be present in both the retail and Steam versions of the game, and more importantly those with the retail version will be able to register their copy of the game on Steam to fully utilise the Steam experience.

Miles Jacobson, the studio director at Sports Interactive had this to say regarding the announcement:

“Many of us at Sports Interactive have been big fans of Steam since it’s inception, so to be working with them properly this year across releases of Football Manager on the PC is fantastic. It gives us the opportunity for all of our games players to get any patches or updates that we make available quickly and easily, as well as a place for us to host any other downloads, such as demos and promotional videos, with super fast broadband speeds for download, and no issues with bandwidth, which we are hit with each time we release a demo”.

The demo for Football Manager 2009 will be made available via Steam a few weeks before the release of the game. You can pre-order the game on Steam now which will allow you to pre-load the game 48 hours before the game is unlocked at 9.00 GMT on the 14th November. Further information regarding pre-orders can be found here.

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Those 2D Boys behind World of Goo have posted an update regarding their no DRM experiment with their game.

so far, the experiment is going well. we’ve sent the full unprotected game out to the few thousand people who pre-ordered it before this past monday and we haven’t yet found the game on any torrent sites.

They do request that you get in touch with them if see any illegal copies on the internet.

The crucial thing is though that currently the game has only gone out to people who pre-ordered the game. These are people who were willing to pay the money for the game, and as such are less likely to go out spreading the game illegally. It must also be noted that the game hasn’t been released properly yet and hasn’t been covered madly in every magazine out there. No, it has just been me and a few other sites that have been doing that.

The true test will be what happens when the popularity of Goo explodes into a big world-wide thing. If piracy remains a small issue then, well 2D Boy will have proved in some small way that by creating a great game with no-DRM that piracy can be fought.

Here is to 2D Boy for having created a master-piece of a game.

The shock is that there isn’t a PC version of the game on the torrent sites yet. Instead all the versions out there are pirated Xbox 360 versions of the game. Following a tip-off from the halflife2.net forums I did some internet scouring myself and failed to find a PC version of the game available to download.

Obviously it is not good to see the game being available to pirate in any way, shape or form. However I do think that this is proof that piracy is not just a PC problem, it effects every gaming platform. Now we just need people like Ubisoft to realise this.

This time though they are talking about EndWar. Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater told Videogaming 247 that they aren’t releasing the PC version of the game at the same time as the console version due to rampant PC piracy.

“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.”

“But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC.”

I don’t want to take the same line that I did when tackling Cliffy B’s piracy comments so I will simply link to what John Walker wrote over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

John takes the view that unless we get hard evidence regarding the impact of piracy on sales of PC games then these comments are just rumour-mongering and doing untold damage to the reputation of the PC. Damn right, tell us the truth devs and stop tarnishing the image of the PC.

League of Legends is an online multiplayer session-based game. Which means that you play the online in pitched battles against another group of people who have been lured into playing the game.

Well I say lured but that sounds wrong for you see I expect many people to be interested in LoL (oh dear) as it is coming from the people behind the immensely popular Warcraft 3 mod DotA-Allstars.

LoL will combine elements of high fantasy, real-time strategy and role-playing all rolled up into a mulitplayer ball. Players will be tasked with taking control of a Summoner who, suprisingly will summon a Champion onto the field of battle. Both the persisten Summoner avatar and the Champions at its disposal will gain skills and powers over time.

Riot Games promise LoL to be an extremely team-focused game custom built multiplayer support. You can expect to see matchmaking, stat tracking and ladders. There will also be a Bot-Ai with which you can do battle with to learn the ropes of the game.

Beta begins next year so check out the website for more details.

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The latest iteration of Pro Evolution Soccer is nearly upon us with an October 17th release for the UK version and a mid-November US release. If the demo is anything to go by, then this is going to be another top quality football game from Konami. Pro Evo is the fierce rival to the FIFA franchise which will see the 2009 version released later this month. These two football games have been rivals for many years now and while the Pro Evo series has long held the upper hand the FIFA games have been improving as of late. As such it is going to be interesting to see how they fair this year.

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The Mod Squad has arrived on Steam which sees five of the leading mods for Source games arrive onto Valve’s digital distribution platform.

The first five members of the Mod Squad are: Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic. These mods are available to download freely via Steam for any owners of a Source based game and will receive automatic updates as other Steam games do and they all make use of Steamworks.

Valve’s marketing guru Doug Lombardi hastily made the following statement after opening his Steam account and saw the mods ready to download:

“Valve has been supporting the MOD community since the company’s inception, offering updates to the SDK, holding MOD Expos and being the first to bring a MOD to retail with Counter-Strike in November 2000. The debut of these MODs on Steam marks the beginning of a new level of support for the MOD community by putting the leading MODs at the finger tips of over 15 million targeted gamers.”

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