VVVVVV is now available on Steam. To commemorate its release, the game is available at a 10% discount now through September 14th, 2010 10AM Pacific Time.

VVVVVV is a retro-styled 2D platformer by Terry Cavanagh. You play as the fearless leader of a team of dimension exploring scientists who inadvertently crash, and are separated. The game involves exploring the strange world you've found yourself in, and reuniting your friends.

VVVVVV explores one simple game mechanic: you cannot jump - instead, you reverse your own gravity at the press of a button. The game focuses on playing with this mechanic in a variety of interesting ways.

The game is designed not to artificially gate your progress. In VVVVVV there are no locks, no power-ups, no switches, nothing to stop you progressing except the challenges themselves.

RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "Destructoid is reporting that the 3.42 firmware has been released for the PlayStation 3, and it has fixed the USB vulnerability that allows the PSJailbreak exploit to work." Sony's brief announcement of the update refers only to "additional security features," though the EU blog post acknowledges that a vulnerability was addressed. PS3-Hacks.com confirms that the patch is effective against the various jailbreak tools, and they point out a different tool for bypassing the update. Sony told the BBC, "... as we always have, we will continue to take necessary actions to both hardware and software to protect the intellectual content provided on the PlayStation 3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Save 33% on Puzzle Quest 2 during the Midweek Madness Sale. Hurry, as the offer ends Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 4PM Pacific Time.

Updates to Garry's Mod have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

• Added Toybox tab to spawnmenu
  
• Added protection from spoofed Admin SteamID's
  
• Toybox entities can now have materials/models/sounds downloads
  
• Dedicated Server spits Warning's instead of Msg's for Lua Errors
  
• Fixed stutter when downloading from Toybox
  
• Made Lua do extra checking to make sure arguments are of the right type
  
• Various improvements to Lua's errors
  

An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Further your Mafia II experience with the new Mafia II DLC: Jimmy's Vendetta. Available in NA at 12:00am PST on September 7th.

Jimmy's Vendetta will take players into an alternate perspective of the mob through the eyes of Jimmy, a mercenary. Jimmy is the guy the other guys call when they need to finish the job.

Secret of the Magic Crystals is available at half price now through September 13th, 2010.
Act now and save!

Purchase Space Siege before September 13th, 2010 and receive 66% off!

Save big on Football Manager 2010. Purchase before September 13th, 2010 and receive 50% off!

Hugh Pickens writes "JP Mangalindan writes that for years psychologists have studied what makes video games so engrossing — why do players spend hours accruing virtual points working towards intangible rewards and what characteristics make some games more addictive than others? Now, companies are realizing that 'gamification' — using the same mechanics that hook gamers — is an effective way to generate business. For example, when Nike released Nike + in 2008, it 'gamified' exercise. 'Place the pedometer in a pair of (Nike) sneaks and it monitors distance, pace and calories burned, transmitting that data to the user's iPod. The Nike software loaded on the iPod will then "reward" users if they reach a milestone,' writes Mangalindan. 'If a runner beats his 5-mile distance record, an audio clip from Tour de France cycling champ Lance Armstrong congratulates him.' In addition, users can upload their information, discuss achievements online with other users, and challenge them to distance or speed competitions. The result: to date, Nike has moved well over 1.3 million Nike + units."

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YokimaSun writes "Sony may have dealt a major blow to the PSjailbreak sellers, but the release last week of PSGroove, an open source version of the hack, has now opened the floodgates of ports to mobile phones such as the Nokia N900 and Palm Pre. The final kick in the teeth is that a port of the exploit has been released by Waninkoko of Wii custom firmware fame for the Dingoo Handheld, which is a homebrew console that is very popular amongst emulation fans. It makes you smile that you can use one homebrew console to hack another to get homebrew on that console. Awesome." pudge notes that you can apparently do the same with a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator (YouTube video).

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A Zoë Mode production for the video game charity initiative OneBigGame, Chime pits gamers against the melody in an all-new puzzle experience. Place blocks against the clock, complete solid quads and try to cover the whole playing surface, all the while remixing and embellishing pieces by musicians from across the planet. And you get to feel good about yourself, too: The console version of Chime was originally developed for OneBigGame with all the developer’s royalties going to Charity for sales up to June 2010, and Zoe Mode will continue to donate a proportion of its royalties (equivalent to 5% of purchase price) for sales of the Steam version. OneBigGame always aims to donate a minimum of 80% of all donations to its charity partners Save the Children and the Starlight Children's foundation.

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam

• Fix selection highlighting of hyperlink text in chat
  
• Compatibility fix for Steam Service and MS KB2264107 with 0xFFFFFFFF registry setting
  
• Fixed issue with Steam Cloud that occurs when a game is launched outside of Steam
  
• Compatibility fix for in-game overlay and MS KB2264107 with 0xFFFFFFFF registry setting
  
• Steamworks fix for matchmaking
  

Updates to Puzzle Quest 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

• Hero selection - the first hero that appears in the hero select screen is now the hero you were last using in quest mode
  
• Chasm spell text updated
  
• Extra hero info in inventory - when you mouse over the portrait in the inventory, a tooltip appears to show you the stats you can't normally see
  
• 1600x900 & 1024x600 resolution support added
  
• Steam button - selecting the Steam button on the main menu gives you the option to view achievements, stats, the official group, and the PQ2 steam forum (must have Steam Community In-Game enabled)
  
• Treasure Grab! minigame loot drops have increased. Gives extra loot for matching 4/5 chests, extra loot on higher difficulty
  
• Mod support added
  
• Fix for the "Royal Door" quest door - the pathfinding sent the player to the wrong door, this is now fixed
  
• Gem dragging ability - added the ability to drag gems to move them
  
• Updated directx web installer - fixes issues on windows 7, the game wouldn't install correctly with the old directx installer
  
• Fixed issues with hint arrow - the hint arrow would appear in some cases when it was turned off mid-battle
  
• Balanced the Assassin spell 'Weaken' - gave it a two turn cooldown and increased the cost from 5 Yellow to 5 Yellow and 4 Green
  
• 'Completionist' achievement counter fix - the achievement was working, but the counter displayed on the user's achievements page wasn't updating
  
• 'You're doing it wrong' achievement fixed - it was counting the molten metal and hammer of the righteous weapons when it shouldn't have
  
• 'Hold the Line' spell fixed - it wasn't correctly giving immunity to Fear
  
• Poisons of the same kind (but with varying rarity and/or race) were stacking - poisons stacking with two varieties of the same base type was never intended and was removed. eg. You can now stack Wyvern with Manticore, or Manticore with Arachna, but not Wyvern with Wyvern, or Manticore with Manticore.
  
• Updated FMOD version
  
• Item drop tables tweaked - players will see less Normal, Fine and Masterwork grade items as they get deeper into the game. They'll see more Legendary and Epic items instead
  

eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called Killzone 3 and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems, like where to put the crosshairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads-up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model — the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3D while playing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Updates to Left 4 Dead 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

• Dev Choice Mutation: Hard Eight
  
• Fixed a remote DLL loading exploit (MS KB2264107).
  
• Fixed a crash when disconnecting a rcon connection due to an invalid password when multiple sessions were already connected.
  

Updates to Left 4 Dead have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

• Fixed audio client concommands that could lag a server.
  
• Fixed a remote DLL loading exploit (MS KB2264107).
  
• Fixed a crash when disconnecting a rcon connection due to an invalid password when multiple sessions were already connected.
  

theodp writes "The winners of the childhood obesity infographic design contest sponsored by GOOD and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative are in, and the overall winner calls out Sony's PlayStation as a major milestone on its timeline of childhood obesity (together with Coke, Pepsi, mall food courts, fructose and high sugar tariffs, TV, McDonald's, and other fast food). Somewhat ironically, the First Lady's other anti-childhood obesity efforts include a $60,000 video game contest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak has shed some light on the dark practice of installing stealth-mode P2P clients during game downloads and using unsuspecting gamers' PCs as 'bandwidth slaves.' The clients operate in the background and largely go unnoticed until problems arise that are caused by overactive uploading/seeding. While the Akamai NetSession Interface and Pando Media Booster are specifically called out, there appear to be other offenders as indicated in the comments left by TorrentFreak readers. A publisher called Solid State Networks is putting out a call for an industry-wide 'best practices' effort to promote transparency, control and privacy on behalf of gamers who are otherwise being abused for their bandwidth without their consent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Updates to Numen: Content of Heroes have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Fixes:

• dragging of quest items into the inventory now works as it should
  
• letter about dog's whistle now correctly drops
  
• line wrapping in the Load game menu fixed
  
• a few typing errors corrected
  

New Features

• auto-save when leaving to the main menu or quitting the game
  
• new screen resolutions of 1600x900 and 2560x1600 added
  
• invert mouse Y-axis option added