Smiley's Life

UPDATE: The giveaway is closed, don’t submit any further entries.

This blog post was also posted on my Destructoid Community Blog

Time for a giveaway, folks. I walked out of Eurogamer Expo 2011 with several CS:GO beta codes, and this coming week I’ll give away one of the codes. This giveaway is only open to PC Steam gamers, as the codes I got were only for the PC beta — sorry!

To join the giveaway, join Destructoid’s unofficial Steam Community group Steamtoid, open the giveaway announcement and answer this question: (via comment) “What is the acronym CS:GO for?”. The challenge is to think of your own interpretation of the acronym, so don’t answer with “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive”. The most creative response wins the code. :D

Seeing as the beta has yet to begin, the giveaway will run until this Wednesday, the 26th of October 2011 at 20:00 UTC/GMT (13:00 PST) (26/10/11), so you’ll have plenty of time to think of a clever response. Good luck!

Valve have just announced a new free game called “Alien Swarm”, which was developed by a group of talented designers who were hired from the modding scene. According to Steam, “…the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics.” The game looks pretty interesting, but the part that caught my eye was the rather quiet announcement of several new features for Source, including Depth-of-Field, improved dynamic shadows and a (real) third-person camera.

These new features will be part of a new version of the Source SDK. In addition, the game will include the full code base for the game and the code for the updated features for Source. Neat, huh?

[Source: Valve’s official Twitter account and Alien Swarm’s Steam store page]

While looking around for a Last.fm alternative ever since it became a paid service (I only found out a month ago), I came across Grooveshark. Grooveshark lets you listen to any song at any time for free. Except for an ad in the right side of the page (and audio ads between songs, that I’ve yet to encounter), the service is completely free and doesn’t require you to listen to some radio “station” to listen to songs. You can either build your own playlist or choose a radio option that will pick songs based on your previous songs. You can also listen to a “tag radio”, a station that plays songs from a specific genre.

You can even upload songs, and not just ones you own the copyright to! Yes, I’m not bluffing! The whole service is based on sharing, and thus every song you listen to on it was uploaded by another individual. Got a song the website doesn’t have? Upload it so other people can enjoy it too. To test this theory, I looked up the soundtrack from Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s E3 trailer and I found it in seconds, even though it was released less than a week ago. I even tried to look up an Israeli song and found it. You can add songs to your library if you make an account, mark songs as favourites, create playlists, and more.

The best part about it? This is available worldwide. No regional restrictions, no licensing crap, nothing. And if you get a VIP subscription for $3 a month or $30 a year, you get mobile streaming, no ads, a desktop app, Last.fm scrobbling, a bigger library (50,000 songs!) and more space for favourites (5,000!), early access to new features, and a bunch of other stuff. If Grooveshark manage to release their iPhone app on the App Store by the time I get my iPhone, I’ll give VIP a shot. The iPhone plan I’m after has 10GB of bandwidth, more than enough for music streaming. If Grooveshark streams songs at a bit-rate of 160kb/s (wild guess), my calculations say 10GB should be enough for nearly 139 hours of streaming, if I do nothing else. To emphasize, if Grooveshark actually streams at 256kb/s, it would still come to 86.5 hours. Plenty of songs.

And being a sucker for detailed web 2.0 design, this service already won me over.

Valve introduced a sub-service of their content delivery system Steam last November called Steam Cloud, which is basically a system to store your saved games on Steam servers as well, so that you could pick up where you left off on any other PCs you might have, without needing to do anything. The service sounds well, but sadly, only supports a limited number of games, most of them from 2008 and later. Games like Half-Life 2 and Portal were excluded with a notice from Valve that they will be supported in the future. In addition, Steam Cloud only supports games purchased and/or activated through Steam.

But with a little willpower and about 5 minutes, one could make his own Steam Cloud without repurchasing games or even paying a single dime. This can be done with Dropbox, a service currently in alpha beta which can sync a single folder across all of your Windows PCs, Linux computers and Macs. You don’t have to be a computer expert, too; you just need to have an advanced knowledge of computers and not have the irrational fear of black-background-white-text console windows many people have.

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UPDATE @ 8PM Central Time (2AM GMT): …and that’s it! The giveaway’s closed. Apparently, only Lisa entered so she’s getting the free copy. Congrats, Lisa! :-)

UPDATE @ 6PM Central Time (12AM GMT): Bah, I forgot to close the giveaway. Well, you’ve got one last chance thanks to that. I’ll close the giveaway in TWO HOURS. That’s 8PM Central Time, 6PM Pacific Time or 2AM Greenwich Mean Time.

Today, I’m starting a new section of my blog where I review applications for Windows and iPhone OS. This odd combination of systems was chosen because I use an iPod touch and Windows PC. And to hit it off with a bang, I’m also having a little giveaway! Its details will be available after the review. (For the subscribers out there it will be placed after the link to the full article.)

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