This article was written using products provided by Alienware and the The Alienware Steam Machine First Look program. It’s been over a month since Kill Screen’s first piece introducing the Alienware Steam Machine and our blossoming relationship, and you’re probably wondering how we’ve been getting a
The dark fantasy esport Dota 2 is undeniably Steam’s killer app, according to the number-crunching-smiths at Ars Technica, who found that over 25 million copies have been downloaded and played on Valve’s popular digital download service. We shouldn’t be shocked that such a hardcore, complex game—eve
Okay, so you’ve beaten Half-Life like 15 years ago and felt pretty good about yourself. But these guys just beat it in 20 minutes 41 seconds. Well, the word “just” is a bit of an exaggeration. The speedrun, posted on YouTube recently, was the result of four years of “painstaking theorycrafting, exec
These crisp and meticulously-rendered screenshots of the train station from Half-Life 2 titillate and tease. Just how gorgeous would Half-Life 3 look on modern hardware? Not like that’s going to happen, but from time to time its good to rub fresh salt in old wounds. The shots come to us courtesy of
Time to start thinking about some custom firmware to guard the content of that brain of yours, presuming you are not a futurist who already thinks about that daily. Researchers at Yale have found a way to read people’s minds with an MRI machine. Before, they could read nonspecific things, like wheth
When Turtle Rock announced that their next game was Evolve, a co-op first-person shooter with ugly aliens in it, it was generally assumed that they were doing a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, the co-op first-person shooter with ugly zombies, which they developed with Valve. But you know what th
Carlos Montero, the project lead on Black Mesa, the HD Half-Life remake, was one of the few who were invited to go face-on with Valve’s virtual reality helm, which is apparently the next best thing to lucid dreaming. So what do the lucky ones who tumble down the rabbit hole in Gabe Newell’s personal
We recently learned that Oculus Rift—the guys who make the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset—are bulking up to develop their own games. They’ve already have brought on FPS-forefather John Carmack, although it was suspected he’d just be working on the technical aspects of thing. Not so! Now, they’r
Not all Steam Machines are created equal. As we learned at Valve’s press conference yesterday, they come in all shapes and sizes. But one thing that is universal across the board is that they aren’t pretty, as we see demonstrated by the monstrosity pictured above, the Spark by Maingear. As for the
Valve’s Gabe Newell, looking and sounding a bit like Jerry Garcia, recently fielded questions from students who are learning to code. While the Google Hangout session was fairly standard fare for those familiar with the company’s m.o.—the internet upturning traditional economic models, the unorthodo
Those ingenuous engineers at Valve have invented a mouthpiece that could make games more accessible to disabled players. The creatively named “Tongue Mouse” is a mouse that lets you control a reticule with the tip of your tongue, as its inventor Ben Krasnow explains in the video below. However, Kras
Soon you will have even less motivation to venture outside the cosy confines of Steam’s grey and black home-screen, as the digital game platform is adding user-reviews to their software suite. (Metacritic scores are already integrated.) “Steam Reviews,” as you might expect, let Steam users review th
Gabe Newell, the C.E.O. of Valve, plays by his own rules. You can see this with Steam, the on-line service that finally got right digital distribution for games. You can see it with the Steam Boxes, the set-top machines that bring Steam into the console arena. And you can see it with the Steam Box g
Valve certainly aren’t gun-shy about ousting their best-known talent. Though critics and fans admiration of Portal approached adulation, designer Kim Swift soon parted ways with the company. And you might have heard that after only a year Jeri Ellsworth — the quirky electric engineer who began her c
In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow created a system to figure out an age old question: what do people want? He called it his “Hierarchy of Needs” and it ranged from the basic physiological desires such as food and water at the bottom to the heady realm of self-actualization at the top. You’ve prob
