Steam app coming to iOS and Android

Valve have just announced that a Steam app is incoming for iOS and Android. It’ll support chat, groups and screenshots. You’ll even be able to purchase games when on the move.

Lord of Valve, Gabe Newell seems keen: “Seeing which of your friends are online and playing a game, sending quick messages, looking at screenshots for an upcoming game, or catching a sale – these are all features customers have requested. Mobile is changing way people interact, play games and consume media, and the Steam app is part of our commitment to meet customer demands and expand the service functionality of Steam to make it richer and more accessible for everyone.”

The app is currently in closed beta. To express interest, download the app for iOS or Android, then log into your account from within. Valve will send out more invites as the “service ramps up.”

I can imagine the drunken 3G purchases/messages already. Apologies in advance friends list.

Flatout 3: Chaos and Destruction available on Steam now for just £8.49, Usual price £24.99 … Offer ends January 20th.

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction brings a new dimension to high speed destruction racing.

Feel the adrenaline pulse through your veins as you barrel through insane race tracks against monster trucks, race cars, off road vehicles and much more.

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction is demolition racing at its extreme. Real world physics with 9 different game modes, and over 47 different vehicles available. Players may choose to race, smash and destroy their opponents in a wide variety of online and offline options.

Lay waste to farm houses, fences, and then wreak havoc in a Detroit suburb, race up the walls in giant waste disposal sewers. Let the chaos begin as you race through over 60 different tracks, narrowly avoiding wrecking balls, Double Decker buses and much more.

Create as much destruction in the all new monster tuck mode.

Choose from 20 different playable characters, select your weapon from the 47 available vehicles! Create as much Chaos & Destruction! In stuntman mode anarchy rules create havoc with some rag doll fun.

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction offers more vehicles, game modes and different ways to demolish your opponents before crossing the finish line.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to get 20 chunks of DLC in nine months

Here’s a trailer showing off the first couple of maps scheduled to land later this month for Call of Duty Elite subscribers on Xbox. All of the extra maps should be making their way to PC after a delay, though they won’t be through the Elite service, which isn’t available on PC.

This “season” of DLC releases is set to deliver 20 downloads over the next nine months. Each release will consist of extra maps, game modes and even story missions. Black Ops DLC arrived a month after each Xbox launch. It looks as though we can expect similar days for Modern Warfare 3′s extra maps, but there’s plenty on the horizon for Modern Warfare 3 fans. We’d love to see more Spec Ops missions, how about you?

Q.U.B.E

Set in a mysterious and abstract sterile environment, Q.U.B.E. (Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion) is a first-person puzzle game that challenges players to navigate each level by manipulating coloured cubes that surround them. There’s little to go on as the game begins -- the player is dropped into an all-white room with few instructions, and simply has to figure their way out. The tone of game changes as the player finds small and big alterations to their environment, supported by an original score, inviting each player to let their imagination take over as to where they might be. Through experimentation and discovery, players will progress through an ever-evolving series of cube puzzles that will challenge them with logic, physics, platforming.

I noticed this game a couple of days ago on Steam, It kind of caught my attention so i just downloaded & installed the demo via Steam, I must say im quite impressed.

Its a first person puzzle game where you have to manipulate blocks in each area to advance to the next area. If you like portal i dare say you will  enjoy this too, The next time i have a spare £10 i think im gonna pick this up.

The above is a video i recorded of me playing the demo, It seemed a little easy but the demo is actually the very first couple of areas of the game. I reckon this game will be quite a challenge in later levels.

Be sure to watch in 1080p

AMD launches HD7970.

Quoted from PC Gamer.

AMD’s dropped an almost unexpected Christmas present into our laps this morning: the launch of the company’s latest flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD7970. As well as stealing the ‘fastest single chip graphics card’ title back from NVIDIA for the time being, the HD7970 is the first card manufactured on its microscopic 28nm process and is the first to use the all-new ‘Graphics Core Next’ (GCN) architecture.

But what does that mean, and is it any good for gaming?

For the time being, at least, the issue is a little moot. AMD’s festive gift turns out to be more like getting vouchers than an actual present. The Radeon HD7970 isn’t expected to be available for sale until after January 9th, and priced at around £450 it’s not exactly a new year bargain either.

Still, it is one of the more interesting tech developments of the last few months. The HD7970 is the first card that’s compatible with the next version of DirectX, 11.1, which will be added into Windows next year. And GCN is quite a big departure for the company.

So far, all of AMD’s post DirectX 10, unified shader cards have used a technique based around combining computations into ‘Very Long Instruction Words’ and clusters of four or five processor cores to run them. With GCN, however, the company has completely broken from this design and adopted one which is more similar to that used by rival NVIDIA. Each processing core is a more or less autonomous unit capable of running a single instruction at a time. This scalar architecture isn’t necessarily better for gaming graphics operations, but it is arguably more efficient for the other stuff today’s graphics cards are supposed to do, like physics and GPGPU supercomputing.

There are still a lot of shader cores though. The Radeon HD7970 boast 2048 versus the older HD6970′s 1536, and runs them at a massive 925MHz. Coupled with 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.5GHz (equivalent) with a 384-bit interface, this new card has a truly phenomenal amount of processing power packed into its 4.31billion transistors.

So what is GCN capable of? In terms of new features, the biggest difference is support for something AMD is calling ‘Partially Resident Textures’ (PRT), which is a hardware implementation of the megatexturing technique pioneered by id Software. This reduces the amount of memory bandwidth used up by transferring textures around system, as it allows games designers to create very large, high resolution images which the GPU then divides up into smaller tiles to work with as and when required.

Performance-wise, the last minute rush to get this announcement out before Christmas means we’ve not had a card in the office yet, so can’t say definitively whether or not AMD’s new architecture works. But news from around the web suggests that the HD7970 is between 15 and 30% quicker than previous cards.

Here’s what the tech sites are saying.

Our colleagues at TechRadar seem vaguely unimpressed with the HD7970, but largely because recent price cuts have made NVIDIA’s GTX580 almost 100 cheaper.

Anandtech meanwhile, is impressed by performance of the HD7970, especially by its lead at the highest resolutions. But again the worry is about price – specifically the relatively good value of a double chip HD6990.

Tom’s Hardware hedges its bets and calls its benchmark fest a preview, but says it prefers the HD7970 to a dual chip card for the price. The hope here is that non-reference designs are a bit quieter than the stock samples.

HardOCP really likes the HD7970, very enthusiastically so and with exclamation marks. There’s two apparent reasons. Firstly it draws no more power than the older Radeon series, and secondly it’s a single chip card capable of powering a three screen set up (says the reviewer).

What everyone’s agreed on is that this is a big shift in strategy for AMD, which in recent years has built cards which compete more on value than out and out performance, with really good Crossfire scaling. Radeon HD7970 is a throwback to the old days of monstrous cards, monstrous performance – but at a monstrous price. If you’re prepared to pay it, it looks like a winner.

We’ll be able to confirm or deny that when we get hardware in the new year.