Have you been sitting on the edge of the rain-slick precipice of darkness? Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode One is half-off on Steam this weekend. That's right, an Alexander Hamilton (US $10) for verbose RPG romping. Deal ends today, so act fast!

[Thanks, Matt J]

Valve's Steam service is generating the power for Tilted Mill's digital distribution of its enhanced 2004 title, Children of the Nile. The game places players in the role of a Pharaoh tasked with building an ancient Egyptian society SimCity-style and is available for $20.

Although Tilted Mill did say previous owners of CotN would be able to get this updated version for free, that upgrade is not available just yet. We spoke with the company's president, Chris Beatrice, who tells us the download should be available on their site and several others "in the next couple of days, hopefully today." He also tells us Tilted Mill is currently working on several other projects and at least one of them will be announced this Friday. Beatrice believes that game should be available this fall and we'll be sure to post what it is as soon as we get word from the company.

[Via BigDownload]

Back in April, a website used by Valve to manage its Steam-related Cyber Cafe business was hacked. As we reported then, the hacker, known as "MaddoxX," claimed to have gained access to a variety of sensitive data, including credit card numbers. Well, the jig is finally up.

A special Dutch police unit, "Team High Tech Crime" (certainly somehow related to G.I. Joe), nabbed the culprit in the town of Maastricht on June 24. Dutch authorities report that he hacked an Activision server prior to the Valve job, obtaining a pre-release version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. He is also charged with stealing nearly 50,000 credit card numbers from a UK-based ticket sales service, using some of them to buy electronics and play online poker.

In lieu of a prison sentence, we suggest that "MaddoxX" be assigned to a work release program at Aperture Science.

[Via ITExaminer]

A new update Team Fortress 2 is now available via Steam and includes major updates to the Pyro class. The basic flamethrower has alternate fire compression blast, the hadouken taunt now kills people and, most importantly, three new weapons have been added, to be unlocked by conquering the 35 new Pyro achievements.

The update also adds two community maps (cp_fastlane and ctf_turbine). Don't forget, Team Fortress 2 is free to play all weekend starting tomorrow. You can pre-load the game now.

The big overhaul of Team Fortress 2's Pyro class won't arrive until tomorrow, but Valve is pulling the veil off of the changes today, including three new weapons and 35 new achievements for the firestarter.

At the top there, you see the Flare Gun, which replaces the Pyro's shotgun and lets you light up enemies at long range. In the middle? It's the Axtinguisher, the melee weapon that always makes a critical hit on flaming enemies. Finally, there's the Back Burner, which is guaranteed to crit if it hits a foe from behind.

If we still haven't cured your pyromania (we've been waiting all post to say that) check out all the details right here.

We've made no secret of our love for rhythm action game Audiosurf. But if there's one thing we've made more blatantly obvious it's our distaste for exercise. So you can understand if we have mixed feelings about Bodysurf, a hack developed by Evan Jones that allows you to play the game using the Wii Balance Board.

If you're curious how you deploy your power ups, Jones has you covered, allowing you to shake the Wiimote to use them. We're sure you're also asking if a game can still be fun if it asks something more than fingertip energy from you, but for that we, sadly, have no answer.

We didn't think it possible to get more satisfaction out of setting people and property ablaze, but the eternal optimists at Valve are attempting to improve on the experience with an update to Team Fortress 2's Pyro class, which the company has announced will arrive on Thursday. Expect the Axtinguisher (which sounds like something Strong Bad came up with) as well as two other weapons and 35 new achievements for the Fortress firebug.

What's more, all Steam users will be able to try out the new enhancements with a free Team Fortress 2 weekend beginning this Friday. (Note to new players: TF2 is not always a hellish world of flame, populated only by masked men spraying fire in every direction. That will pass, we promise.)

Valve announced its new Steamcloud service last night which will store Steam player data online, allowing gamers to access their save games, keyboard configurations, and any games they've purchased through Steam from anywhere in the universe. RPS attended the mini-press conference at Valve where Gabe Newell and company introduced Steamcloud and wanted to talk a little about all the negative press the PC games market has been getting.

Valve strongly believes that PC at retail is not doomed and explains that when the company holds free weekends for games on Steam, it results in stronger sales at retail; Newell jokes that retail must have some kind of magic. The company says that future innovations for Steam (beyond Steamcloud) include driver auto-updating and the continued expansion of the game catalog.

[Via Big Download]

For the PS3-deficient amongst you, you've got a second chance to play ... nay, experience Jonathan Mak's procedurally generated musical shooter, Everyday Shooter. If you've got a Windows PC, Valve's Steam client, and an unused $10 bill, you could show up to this rock party a measly seven months late. Let's see if it can prove to be as popular as Steam's other indie audio title, Audiosurf.

If you haven't taken a procedurally-generated spin on your copy of runaway indie hit Audiosurf for a while, you may want to fire it up: The game has gotten a batch of new features, referred to collectively as the "FM Update." You'll now be able to run the game as a music visualizer, make scoreboard comments and create your own mods. All the features (which we've listed after the jump) will automatically download the next time you load the game on Steam.

Perhaps most notably, last.fm audioscrobbling has been enabled in the new patch. We here at Joystiq would like to remind everyone that though audioscrobbling seems fun and a good way to really get to know people, it should only be performed by adults and only with protection.

Audioscrobblin' -- It's Worth The Wait.®

Now that Steam is running 300 games and 15 million subscribers strong, Valve's grand experiment in digital distribution seems like a no-brainer. Some of the titans of the computer industry apparently didn't see it that way, though, when given a chance to get in on the ground floor years ago.

"We went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam," Valve marketing veep Doug Lombardi told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview. "We went around to everybody and asked 'Are you guys doing anything like this?' And everyone was like 'That's a million miles in the future ... We can't help you." Valve, of course, proceeded to single-handedly bring the future to the present (which is now nearly five years in the past) and the rest is history.

Readers without a vested interest in Microsoft and/or Yahoo should check out the full interview, where Lombardi talks about piracy, independence, and the future of PC gaming. Anyone involved with those two companies would probably be better off visiting this handy site first.

Considering Valve released Portal as a separate title on its Steam digital distribution service, gamers might have been confused as to why the developer didn't pursue a similar avenue with the game on Xbox 360, via the Xbox Live Arcade service. As it turns out, it did, but the title was rejected due to size limitations and other unnamed reasons.

GamesIndustry.biz reports that during Portal's development, Valve did approach Microsoft to make the title available through XBLA, but several factors made the title an undesirable candidate for the service. Still, marketing director Doug Lombardi does state that the company is always happy to renegotiate. Maybe we'll see Portal on XBLA one day, after all.

Team Fortress 2 took center stage at a Valve-sponsored pizza party in San Francisco last night. Well, to be precise, the team-based shooter's new Goldrush map and unlockable Medic weapons took center stage, and the pizza provided just the right ambiance. ShackNews got their pizza-stained hands on the new offerings, and also had a chance to talk with Valve's Robin Walker about plans for unlockable weapons for the other classes (they should be coming "faster"), difficulty in balancing new weapons (there's a "trade-off"), and plans for other news maps with the Payload gameplay like Goldrush ("you have a moving fortress").

The medic is the first class to get the new weapons – unlock a series of class-based achievements to earn each of the three new toys, including the Blutsaugher ("a new syringe gun" that draws health from enemies), the Critzcrieg (a "new medigun" that switches up the ubercharge), and the Ubersaw (melee attacks charge your medigun). The update should hit sometime in April; still no word on whether any TF2 downloadable content will make it to the consoles.


Read – Valve Reveals Final Team Fortress 2 Medic Weapons
Read – Robin Walker on New TF2 Content, Future Maps, and Awesomeball
Read – Team Fortress 2 Goldrush and Unlockable Weapon Hands-on Impressions

Valve announced today that Ubisoft will be using the company's Steam digital distribution service and plans to add over 40 other titles from its repertoire soon. Games currently available are jungle shooter Far Cry ($9) and sneaky-sneak stealth game Splinter Cell ($18); meanwhile, Assassin's Creed can be pre-purchased for $50 before its April 9 launch, which will include four bonus missions unique to the PC release.

In the coming weeks Ubisoft will add many more games from the Tom Clancy and Heroes of Might & Magic series. Valve says that the Ubisoft line-up on Steam will be the largest of any publisher using the service.

PC gamers will be frolicking through the radioactive wastelands of Chernobyl once more with the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky, now set for August 29th. The post-apocalyptic prequel promises "an alternative look" into the events of 2007's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, pitting players against radioactive decay and mutated creatures with one too many of something. Probably teeth. Also, it's apparently "set in 2011 and brings forth the events to have preceded the third campaign of Strelok to the Zone center." Exciting!

Developer GSC Game World aims to ship the shooter simultaneously worldwide "according to the agreed plan." If said plan falls through, there's always the consolation of the game's day and date release on Steam.