During Valve’s CES 2014 event this evening, the company released a brochure featuring images, prices, and specificiations for 13 third-party Steam Machines. Let’s take a look-see!

Aside from Alienware, the party pooper, each of the 13 machines at the very least comes with some basic specs, giving us an idea of what to expect from these Valve-approved gaming PCs. Some we’ve seen earlier today. Others we’ll be getting to know more about later this evening. According to Valve’s Gabe Newell, Maingear’s system was too late to make the brochure, but I’m sure there will be more about that down the line.

So, what do you guys think? That certainly a bunch of PC gaming machines, right?

Give that there are so many options, could it be that this will confuse consumers? After all, when you purchase a console you know that you are evenly matched with anyone else who buys it and developers know the specs everyone has under their TV.

With Steam Machine there seems to be so many options and some are so expensive that it seems it’d be more sensible to go out, buy a PC and hook that up to your TV. Can anyone actually see this venture being a success?

Check out the brochure here.

CES 2014 kicks off this week and you can expect to see a plethora of Steam Box related news.

Up until now we have received a good amount of information pertaining to Box’s specs but very little has been known as to whom would be selling the machines.

iBuyPower will be showing off their machine fitted with a multi-core AMD Cpu, 500GB hard drive (we are not sure if this is SSD), WiFi, Bluetooth, and an AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card.

The size if the unit is said to be around the same size as a PS4 and a tad smaller then an Xbox One.

A lot of Steam users today will have been met with a frustrating sight if they tried to access the Store or Community through their Steam launcher – that of a grey screen with only an error code upon it.

This is the second time in recent days that Steam has been hit with problems, apparently caused by a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the system by two people, both of who have taken to their Twitter accounts (@chFtheCat and @LARCENY_) to boast of their ‘feat’. The reasons behind the attacks, the first one which took place over the 1^st and 2^nd of the month (depending on whereabouts in the world you live), are still unclear at this point but for lack of a better reason e-fame seems to the goal of the pair.

As of writing both Store and Community can still be accessed through the Steam website 90% of the time, so this attack has been nothing more than a minor irritation and won’t really make much difference to Valve, except possibly a negligible hit in the sales of the days these attacks have happened. Twitter has also acted by suspending the account of @LARCENY_ although his friend is still active, tweeting in a manner you’d expect from someone who does this sort of thing for kicks.

Valve still hasn’t commented upon the attacks, but the Launcher being taken down twice in so few days is somewhat concerning even if the site still works. It’s currently unclear how long everything will be down this time.

Some news stories make you smile or laugh, others make you cry or rage. Then there are the elite few that make you go “WTF?” Put this firmly in the latter category.

When Democracy 3 – the latest title in Positech Games’ series of PC-based Political Strategy games – was preparing for its US launch, not one person broke a sweat. The game, self-dubbed “the ultimate political strategy game,” was launched on Steam on October 14, 2013 – as well as a retail game for PC, Mac and Linux – with nobody raising an eyelid to its game-play simulating the career as president or prime minister of a democratic government, the very theme of the series’ eight-year history. So why, in all seriousness, is a “major U.S. advertising agency” refusing to run banner ads promoting the game due to its “political content”?

Cliff Harris, the founder of Positech Games, reported on his blog yesterday that an ad for the recently-released Democracy 3 was deemed by a “BIG game-advertising agency” to be inappropriate to run on a particular website. When Harris asked why, he was told, “We can not promote any politics as this is a sensitive topic.”

Harris was noticeably unimpressed with the response, believing politics is a MUCH less sensitive subject than some of the OTHER things commonly featured in today’s games that go without criticism – as evidenced by the next statement on his blog:

“I bet ads for games like Hitman, or GTA, or games where you get slow-mo closeups of people’s skulls being blasted apart by high-caliber bullets are just fine. But discuss income tax? OH NOES THE WORLD WILL END! It’s stuff like this that sometimes makes me ashamed to be in this industry. Half of the industry wants to be grown up and accepted as art, the other half have the mentality of seven year olds. I’m pretty cynical, but I never expected my ads for a game about government-simulation to be too controversial to be shown (for money no less…).”

True enough. What’s more, the whole controversy smacks to me as discriminating against Democracy 3 rather than a genuine concern. After all, politics in video games is not exactly unheard of – there have been games as far back as the NES era where you played as a president of the United States or leader of some fictionalised land. For example, how about Civilization? A real-time strategy series inviting players to “Build an empire to stand the test of time”, Civilization has a much longer history than Democracy, beginning in 1991 in the DOS computer era and still going 20 years later. The games involve you making decisions on places to build; wars to fight; and even setting diplomatic rules – which makes them also political in nature even if it’s not as obviously signposted. If political content is really as big a problem as this unidentified agency is implying, why has Civilization had a free pass for so long? Here’s hoping common sense prevails – though sadly, it seems to do so less often these days…

Velocity Ultra by developer Futurlabs is a well-celebrated game already, having been quite popular on its original release on the Playstation Vita thanks to its interesting gameplay mechanics, fast pace and cool if not complicated graphics. The game is now being released on Steam by Curve Studios and I managed to get hold of a Steam code to see if this game had survived well on the trip between platforms.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the game, Velocity Ultra is a top-down space game that has you boosting, flying and teleporting your way around levels rescuing survivors while destroying hostile ships and security turrets with laser gun and bombs. The teleporting feature is used to move between areas that would usually be blocked off and although you can’t get hurt from banging into walls (which is unique in itself), the screen does move along with you and doesn’t stop if you do so try not to get crushed by the moving screen!

Now I’ve never had a Vita, so I’ve never played the original game but Ultra doesn’t seem to have suffered for the move. The graphics are crisp, the movement fluid and fast, the music great and the levels nicely challenging. The game starts with a launcher window that lets you choose windowed or fullscreen modes as well as having a tab to show the key bindings for each action, which I assume you can change. There’s also a diagram to show the button bindings for a controller which I think must be the better way to play the game. I didn’t do too badly with my keyboard and trackpad though and found myself unable to resist playing just one more level. Once you get into a rhythm the levels go amazingly smoothly and it’s this that keeps the game interesting. Just as it did the original from what I’ve heard.

Velocity Ultra will be available on Steam from December 12^th.