New Steam Community Feature (Total Playtime)

Valve has just today added a new feature to the Steam community profile page, namely total playtime. This addition has been awaited, since a Valve employee mentioned it long ago (HERE), and, finally, it's here.

Normally, you only have the option to view playtime for the past two weeks, but since March this year Valve has been recording gameplay hours of your games through Steam. Now, when you look at someone's profile under gameplay stats, you'll see e.g. "9.7 hrs / 157.7 hrs" where the first number is from the past two weeks, and the latter is total playtime since March. You can also look at people's gamelists and see how much they've played their games.


Here I should note that total playtime also includes idle time.

Google, I praise thee...

For a long time Google has offered 1GB of storage for their Picasa service. 1GB is not very much (only around 300 full resolution pictures taken with a six megapixel camera), so users who wish to backup all their photos have to purchase extra storage (which also can be used on Gmail if 7+GB isn't enought). The prices upto now were 10GB for $20, 50GB for $75, and so on. So far I've used 7.18GB out of my 10GB plan, and already been annoyed by the fact that there were nothing between 10GB and 40GB...

Today this changed! Not only have they lowered the prices, but at the same time they've added more storage. So now the prices are 20GB for $5, 80GB for 20$, and so on upto 16TB (whoever needs that much?). With 80GB (70GB more than before!)  I can easily backup all my parents photos too without risking anything (80GB is almost a quarter million high res photos!). I wonder what else I can backup...

Some links from Google:

Twice the storage for a quarter of the price (Official Google Blog)

More extra storage for less (Official Gmail Blog)

Purchase extra storage

Happy 20th Anniversary to Wallace and Gromit

Title says it all. Wallace & Gromit have existed in 20 years. Man, I remember seeing their shows when I was younger. Not long ago I saw TellTaleGames had made an episodic game with the two loveable characters, namely, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures. I got the first episode for free when I bought the Tales of Monkey Island and I enjoyed it much seeing it kept the style from the old shows.
To celebrate the anniversary TellTale put the adventures on sale for only 15€, 34.99€ being the normal asking price.

100% on Left 4 Dead (again)

The Crash Course DLC added 10 new achievements for the two map long campaign. All of them were pretty simpel, some of them just required some luck. A few of them are also well overdue, like the 25 hunter jump, and the hit people with cars achievements. There are just a few problems with these two achievements.
1. The Crash Course campaign is not very hunter friendly - seriously, why did they lock the roofs?
2. I have yet to see a tank before the final. Luckely they did add a car and a container (which also counts) in the final.

The only achievement I had a problem with was the Smash Hit (Win a Versus campaign of Crash Course). That doesn't make much sense, right? No matter how many times I won that campaign I couldn't unlock it. In the end, while I was doing a few of the achievements with a friend (Bart Simpson), it popped up after I got all the others. He got his after I won over him (try to make sense of that).

Why you hate the Internet

50 most annoying things about the internet
This is just a funny article telling you what you hate about the Internet. To name some:

1) Godwin's Law: As a [online] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
4) CAPTCHAs
6) The next big thing(s)
7) Blogs =)
8) Pop-up adverts
11) YouTube speech bubbles
12) Rickrolling (I blame you, YouTube!)
14) Comment pedantry (Shut up already!)
22) Viruses, scams and spam
27) WrItInG In A MiXtUrE Of UpPEr CaSe AnD LoWeR CaSe (Or just spamming 1337 sp34k!)
28) Patently absurd abbreviations (OMFGWTFBBQ!!1)
30) Filth, everywhere (I don't know about this one; the more filth there is, the less filthy the filth becomes...)
31) Websites that don't support a browser's back and forward features
34) Compulsory fields on forms (I don't want to fill out all those damn forms!)
35) National restrictions (Yeah, what's that about? Also, release things at the same time!)
42) The gradual erosion of your moral boundaries (That's what I said in #30)
43) Buffering (Fix mah Internet already!)
45) Hostility to 'newbies' (Yes, you! Mr. Anonymous.)

Big games with achievements

More and more games with achievements get released. Most of these are various indie games, but it looks like that is changing. First of all, the publisher MumboJumbo has started putting in achievements (Zombie Bowl-o-Rama and Everyday Genius: SquareLogic). Then we have SEGA's Football Manager 2010, Konami's SAW, and one of the most expected games this year, Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Game #200 on Steam

I can't believe it's only three month since I bought my game number 150 on Steam (as I blogged HERE), but here we are. I wanted it to be something special so I could blog about it, but I couldn't really decide. At the time I reached #198 I knew what I wanted my #200 to be. I decided it would be Nation Red (for 8,99€) for a few reasons

1. It was announced that the game would get achievements (22 be be precise).
2. The support for this game is awesome, just look at the forums - they listen to every idea, and implement what people want (achievements, leaderboard, new playmodes, coop, etc).

I haven't really had time to play it yet, so I can't say much about it yet. Also, I will probably wait until the achievements are in place.
As I said, I decided when I were at #198. That meant I actually had to buy some other game first. After looking through the list of achievement games I decided on Spectraball, because I already had been looking at that game (it has achievements too!), and I just noticed that the game had been lowered to only 4,49€.