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In its ongoing support of Left 4 Dead 2 on the PC, Valve has issued another patch for the game, fixing a number of problems including physics crashes and hit boxes on the Charger, Jockey and Spitter. Some of the exploits PC gamers have stumbled upon have also been eradicated, including incapped survivors improving their weapon accuracy by holding the crouch button -- though we wouldn't call that an exploit so much as a natural evolution in the face of the zombie threat. Good, old-fashioned human ingenuity is what will win us this war, people!

You can head past the break for the full patch notes. An update for the Xbox 360 will be available "later this month."

Hey PC gamers, it's the holiday season, are you sure you want to read this post? Who wants to spend the yule upset that not only are they getting Borderlands DLC "The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned" two weeks after their console brethren but they actually have to pay for it, like a peasant? Wouldn't you rather just sip some eggnog and chill out, rather than focusing on the grave, $9.99 injustice launched into the world today on Steam and Gearbox's store?

No? Okay. But don't tell Baby JC that we didn't do anything to keep your Christmas spirit alive.

Tragnarion Studios has announced that it will soon bring its third-person shooter, entitled The Scourge Project -- first announced in 2007 -- to Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and Steam. The game, powered by the Unreal Engine, promises "a unique focus on co-operative narrative and gameplay," in which each of the four playable characters will have a unique perspective on the story. From a more meat-and-potatoes standpoint, the game features five hours of gameplay over four levels (each with different special abilities), nine different weapons and co-op for up to four players. The Scourge Project also offers versus multiplayer for up to sixteen players and includes deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and "Frontier."

The game certainly seems to be packing some graphical chops, especially compared to Tragnarion's previous project for the DS, a puzzler called Doodle Hex. The game is expected to debut on Steam this month, while the XBLA version is scheduled to arrive in March 2010. The press release does mention a PSN version of the game, though it doesn't appear in the body of the text. We've contacted Tragnarion to see if the PSN listing was legitimate or made in error.

Check out some screens in the gallery below and find more info on the official Scourge Project site.

[Via Big Download]

Not that we've ever run across an invincible, burning Witch, but we'd say it's probably a great thing that Valve decided to fix that particular bug in Left 4 Dead 2. You see, apparently there's a glitch that allows Witches to become invincible if set on fire, the upshot of this being that the Witch is both invincible and on fire. Sound scary? You bet your ass it is. The patch also fixes a bug that prevented the launch of the game on certain machines. Yet another tweak fixes a bug where "bots would not shoot at Jockeys and Chargers while approaching to save a teammate." Yeah, that one seems kind of important too.

In the market for Nathan Drake's latest adventure but not trying to spend a hidden fortune on it? Amazon.com's Cyber Monday deals are here to help, offering Uncharted 2 for only $40, among other great deals. How about Left 4 Dead 2 for $40? Or maybe you'd prefer a 60-hour-long fantasy RPG for the same price? Amazon has you covered.

Look, we'd keep listing deals here, but there's kind of a lot. So pick your console of choice (Nintendo Wii / DS, PlayStation 3, or Xbox 360) and check out all the savings for yourself. While it's not quite Steam levels of insane price drops, we're quite partial to games for a third or more off normal retail price. Aren't you?

The next-to-last day of Steam's "Early Holiday Sale" brings with it an eclectic collection of discounted PC titles, including last year's Prince of Persia ($14.99), Battlefield 2 ($14.99), Lucidity ($2.49) and Guild Wars Trilogy ($24.99). Also, here's a link to a Black Friday sale for a 1TB internal HDD. If you've been following this Steam sale for the past few days, you're probably hurting for hard drive space right about now.

Make sure you free up some room before tomorrow -- at 8 a.m. PST, the last batch of 24-hour sales will be announced. Stay tuned!

To quote the immortal words of the musical revolutionaries known as Widelife, "all things just keep getting better!" For the purpose of this post, "all things" include Steam's post-Thanksgiving deals, which seem to have hit critical value mass today. Resident Evil 5 for $24.99? Borderlands for $33.49? Ghostbusters for $9.99? Left 4 Dead: Game of the Year Edition for $7.49? Daddy like.

Once again, if you don't like the games which have had their prices temporarily torn in twain, tune in tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. PST for the next batch of deals.

The second day of Steam's five-day-long "Early Holiday Sale" has arrived, bringing with it another batch of wallet-friendly prices on a few excellent titles. The highlight from today's offers is, of course, Left 4 Dead 2, which you can now purchase for just $37.49.

A few older titles have also undergone a bit of cost reduction surgery, including Dead Space, which is $14.99 for today only, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which is just $2.49. None of these float your boat? Swing back by tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. PST for the next round of cheapenings.

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Regardless of what some developers may say about Valve's digital distribution service, Steam, the Left 4 Dead 2 developer remains steadfast in its belief that listening to customers and developers is the best way to stay on top of the game. Ars Technica spoke with Valve director of business development Jason Holtman before his keynote at the Montreal International Games Summit, and Holtman explained his company's one-two-punch plan of listening to Steam customers and developers for advice on running the operation. "They're actually usually far better predictors of success than we ever could be," he said.

He was also quick to point out that, despite the cyclical claims that PC gaming is "dying," Steam has been enjoying strong digital sales for years. During his presentation in Montreal, he noted that Valve's games have doubling sales numbers (or more) when they're put on sale, with Team Fortress 2 sales having jumped by as much as 520 percent when the Sniper vs Spy update was released. With numbers like that to back up his claim, it's starting to make a lot more sense to us why developers were so happy to defend Steam last month.

After reviewing Steam's Black Friday offerings, we can't help but find the post-Thanksgiving sales offered by other retailers kind of adorable. Aww, you're knocking $10 off the price of Red Faction: Guerrilla? That's cute. Steam is selling that game, and almost every other game by THQ in an enormous, $49.99 bundle. You've got a buy-one-get-one-free deal on LucasArts adventure games? How quaint. Steam is selling like, every LucasArts PC game ever in yet another $49.99 bundle.

On top of those two preposterous offers, Steam will be slashing prices on a handful of games every day for the next five days. Today's sales include Batman: Arkham Asylum for $24.99, Far Cry 2 Fortune's Edition for $9.99 and Dragon Age: Origins for $37.49. In short, you should spend as much time downloading things from Steam as you possibly can this weekend -- with prices like these, we're guessing they'll be filing for bankruptcy some time before Christmas.

In Serious Sam, you use an increasingly powerful and ridiculous set of weaponry to blast an increasingly horrifying array of demons back to the dimension they came from. To put it another way, Serious Sam is what your grandmother imagines every video game to be.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter has just been brought into the modern era by Majesco and Devolver Digital with Serious Sam HD, on Steam today with a $20 price tag. I stepped into the beefy hero's signature T-shirt for a couple of hours to see how well the experience had held up over the years.

If you've got an impressive amount of money buried in your backyard and would love to own a super slick gaming machine, Alienware might be an option you're currently considering. The company has announced that its "All Powerful" systems will ship with Valve's Steam platform pre-loaded onto the system, allowing potential gamers to sign up for Modern Warfare 2 boycotts mere moments after booting the rig up.

The Steam client will also include a free copy of Portal, in case you missed most of 2007.

A few minor glitches which Left 4 Dead 2 players on Steam were experiencing have been squashed by a recent patch. The update includes fixes for an error which impeded matchmaking for players looking for higher difficulty games, for a bug which allowed special infected to team up on players who are being pummeled by a Charger, and for performance problems which cropped up when the game rendered too many decals, "notably when fighting Tanks with shotguns."

Well, thank goodness for that. If there's a better way to kill a Tank than with a few well-placed shotgun blasts, we've yet to find it. Check out the full list of changes after the jump!

Stardock isn't a publicly traded company, though it strives to be as open as possible about its business. This is where the annual Stardock Customer Report (PDF link) comes in, an annual assessment of the company's financial situation. Stardock, a publisher of games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, is also behind digital distribution service Impulse, which boss Brad Wardell says is the second only to Valve's Steam platform in terms of revenue generation.

"Our estimation is that Steam - as the current market leader - enjoys approximately 70 percent of the overall digital distribution market with Impulse at 10 percent and all others combined at 20 percent in terms of actual dollars generated per month," Wardell explains. As Wardell estimates, 25 percent of PC platform sales will come from digital distribution channels during 2009's calendar year, so we're talking billions of dollars here.

"Steam and Impulse both have the advantage of exclusive content (Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, etc.)," he adds, but explains that Valve's strides in getting major publishers to sign on for Steamworks as a DRM solution (Dawn of War II, Modern Warfare 2) effectively nullifies those games' chances of appearing on Impulse. This is a big area where Impulse is missing out and even though it offers its own alternative -- Impulse Reactor -- the company already missed the boat on its share of the big, fat money-filled pie.

[Via Gamasutra]

Source - Stardock Customer Report 2009 (PDF)

Speaking to GI.biz, Valve's head of Steam, Jason Holtman, had some interesting things to say about the company's frequent deals and their effect on long-term game sales. According to Holtman, Steam's quick game sales -- offering Team Fortress 2 for $2.49 for only a few hours last month, for example -- don't have a negative impact on a game's long-term performance. Holtman notes that once a brick-and-mortar retailer reduces a game's price, people are reticent to ever pay a higher price again, but downloadable games are different. "You can have sales that are dramatically low and bring the price back up and people don't care," said Holtman, "They don't care at all."

Regarding the $2.49 Team Fortress 2 sale last month, Holtman said that sales actually increased the following weekend -- after it went back to full price. He also mentioned Steam's previous half-off sale of Left 4 Dead, noting that it didn't hurt retail sales at all (readers will recall that Valve claimed that it actually boosted retail sales). Holtman stated that it's possible to run several promotions without "sacrificing" either downloadable or retail sales, and added, "You don't have to hurt somebody to win."