Call of Duty®: Black Ops Coming To Steam With Full Steamworks Support

Most Anticipated Title of 2010 Prepares for PC Launch

Oct 22, 2010- Valve and Activision Publishing, Inc today announced the upcoming holiday blockbuster, Call of Duty®: Black Ops (PC), is now available for pre-purchase via Steam, a leading platform for PC and Mac games with over 30 million accounts around the world.

Those who pre-purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops on Steam will be able to start playing immediately upon release on November 9, 2010, when Activision expects the title will be available worldwide. Developed by Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops utilizes the Steamworks suite of tools. The title is rated “M” (Mature – Blood, Drug, Reference, Intense Violence and Language) by the ESRB.

In addition to leveraging Steamworks’ Auto-Updating, Achievements, and more, Call of Duty: Black Ops will support Steamworks Cloud technology. The PC version of the product will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and tangible versions of the game and, as with all Steamworks titles, offline play will also be supported.

“We are delighted to be delivering the year’s most anticipated title with Black Ops to PC gamers around the world,” said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. “We’ve collaborated with the development team to leverage the Steamworks suite of services to deliver the highest level of service to Call of Duty: Black Ops PC customers.”

“Steam has been a great partner throughout development of Black Ops,” said Mark Lamia, president of Treyarch. “We’re working closely together to take full advantage of Steamworks to ensure we deliver the most polished and secure PC experience that our community deserves.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops is slated for worldwide release the week of November 9 at retailers and via Steam. For additional Call of Duty updates, visit www.callofduty.com/blackops and also via Twitter @JD_2020.

Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools — ranging from product key authentication to social networking services — offered free of charge to publishers and developers. For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com.
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October 22nd Update

Lone Gunman, Did you Win, Do you rock?

Lone Gunman

You and your Magnum against the deadly horde and Boomers.

So you have your Magnum pistol and? well you do have your Magnum pistol. You better be counting bullets because four swipes by a common and you are dead. Getting boomed? Forget about it.

Did you win?

Last week we asked – Do you consider that you won the Campaign when you sacrifice yourself to restart the generator or did you just sacrifice yourself so your team won? Is it individual or team glory?

68% of you consider it a team victory and 32% of you believe you lost. For the 32% that either means you never go yourself or you really are a team player. This is one of those questions where we assumed the answer would have been closer to 95% of the people choosing you won. So if you have time, explain your votes in the forums or on our Facebook pages.

Do you rock?

With two Midnight Riders songs on Rock Band, have you ever played any of the Midnight Rider songs?

Next week: Bleed Out Versus

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Gaslight Anthem cover Rolling Stones for Record Store Day

The Gaslight Anthem The Gaslight Anthem will be participating in Record Store Day again this year. The band will be releasing an exclusive 7-inch on November 26, 2010. The A-side features a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” while the flip side features an original track “She Loves You,” recorded during the American Slang recording sessions. The cover art is silk screened on a jacket that folds like an old shipping parcel and the release comes in four colors (baby blue, black, white and brown) with the vinyl matching the jacket color.

The label is adamant about not limiting the pressing to ensure that anyone who wants a copy can get one for list price rather than overpaying on eBay. You can find the artwork on the release page.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization® V Update Released

Updates to Sid Meier’s Civilization® V have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

UI

* Fix for production prompt that sometimes appears with newly created puppet states that could stop the player from being able to end the turn.
* Aircraft banner corrections – now when you rebase an aircraft, the number will move with it.
* Resource icons now come up with Ctrl-R again, instead of sharing the same button with Build Roads.
* Selecting a great general will no longer cause yield icons to appear.
* Added option to disable auto-unit cycling.
* Fix for full-screen game when running dual monitors. Previously, the curser could scroll off the “open” side, and not be able to scroll the map in that direction.
* Misc additional fixes to mouse controls, and other interface issues.
* Rounded out financial information in the Economic Overview screen.
Details now provided on the amount of gold provided by each city, the cost of buildings in each city, etc.
* Auto-populate save menu with save file name
* Allow selection of other cities by hex from within the city screen
* Added detailed trade route info to Economic Overview screen
* Added new tab to the Economic Overview Screen: “Resources & Happiness.”
* Added option to activate the mp score list in single player (for “always up” score similar to Civ IV.)
* The Annex/Puppet/Raze popup now indicates how much extra Unhappiness will be assumed with each action.
* If there are less than 5 buildings still needed to construct a National Wonder, the production popup tool-tip now lists which cities lack them.
* Added Yield & Culture tool-tip info to the production popup.
* Tweak information on the Global Politics tab in the Diplomacy Overview screen.

MODDING

* Category list now displays correctly
* “Installed” panel now displays ALL versions of a mod but prevents the user from enabling multiple versions.

GAMEPLAY

* Workers – Added option to force workers to ignore manually made improvements (so they don’t change what you decide was best for a plot).
* Workers – Fixed bug where number of turns to complete were incorrect in build action button tool-tip.
* Economy – Fixed bug where players could disband a single unit, and not see the economic return until disbanding 1 more.
* Economy – Increased city wealth setting to 25%
* Economy – Multiple fixes to the way trade-routes are tabulated and recognized.
* Economy – Can now sell Buildings in a city (to help lower maintenance for obsolete buildings later in the game).
* Trade – Found and corrected a Trade problem that could cause your Resource inventory to multiply.
* City States – Fixed a bug where you could not gift aircraft to city states.
* Military – Medic promotion now only provides healing bonus for adjacent units.
* Military – Fix for Minuteman movement.
* Military – Correct promotions for “archer-like” units (horse archers, chariots).
* Military – Embarked units will no longer slow enemy land units
* Military – Improved unit cycling logic. Camera will jump around much less.
* Balance – Engineers +1 hammer
* Balance – Disbanding units now provides only 10% of their production cost in gold.
* Request – Enable “one more turn” button if you lose, but are still alive.

AI

* Military – Better handling of unit need (navy vs land, etc.).
* Military – AI will tend to build ships to deal with blockaded cities more often
* Military – Corrected an issue hampering movement of AI armies, especially when in close proximity to enemy forces
* Diplomacy – AI will be more reluctant to offer or accept open border agreements with more powerful opponents.
* Diplomacy – Fix for never ending deals (peace, research agreements, etc).
* City – City specialization and city focus improvements.
* City – Cities that are Avoiding Growth will not grow while that option is selected
* Workers – Priority of trading posts reduced, and rebalanced priorities on other improvements
* Workers – Improved the path-finding mechanic when building route-to roads improved, including a large performance increase when evaluating road-pathing.
* City – Make sure Puppets don’t construct buildings that require Resources.
* City – Add a Puppet city strategy that turns off training buildings and emphasizes gold.
* Military – Defensive tactical AI update. When you are at war and threatening an enemy city, the AI will better utilize the garrison, as well as the surrounding terrain in defense of the target city.

MULTIPLAYER

* Exploit – Fix for gifting unit exploit
* Chat – Color-coding, sound alerts, etc., added for in-game chat system, including a larger window.
* Deals – Additional deal validation put in place to verify deals before they are committed

MISC

* Research treaties that end because you declare war will no longer grant the free tech
* Save/Load – Fix for corrupted saves being experienced by some players in late-game.
* Map – Huge map crash-during-load fix that were reported on some specific systems.
* Map – Terrain caching fix that could cause problems for certain video cards (the “glowing red orbs” seen on the map are an indicator of this).
* Map – Fix for the low res terrain that appears the first time the game is run (terrain tiles would not load in anything but low-res the first time you play on some computer configurations)
* Strategic View – Crash fix for units rendering in background.
* Strategic View – Fix for selecting units either standing on a city plot, or garrisoned in the city plot.
* Eyefinity – Better handling of leader scenes when using Eyefinity displays.
* Tutorials – Many tutorial tweaks and adjustments.
* Multiple crash fixes.
* Taller than wide map crash fix.


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