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Tomorrow will see the highly acclaimed Half-life 2 Episode 1 mod, Minerva officially appear on Steam. Adam Foster, the creator of Minerva, was hired by Valve shortly after releasing the mod to critical acclaim back in 2007.

With the help (and nagging) of his colleagues at Valve, Adam is re-releasing Minerva as a Director's Cut edition with "tweaked visuals, bug fixes, better puzzles and all kinds of subtle improvements. Nothing majorly new, just old stuff tidied and polished for this re-release."

Expect the usual single-player shooting and puzzles, a healthy dose of mystery and plenty of on-screen dialogue from the unseen Minerva, who guides (and insults) you on your journey through a vast Combine underground facility.


If you haven't played it before it's certainly up to Valve-quality in terms of the Half-life experience. We've been fortunate enough to get early access to the re-release, which you can find our thoughts on in our full video review!

UPDATE: Minerva is now live and available for all to play for free on Steam!

Valve certainly stepped it up this week and gave our new writers plenty to talk about. In the news this week, Valve announced the International 3 Dota 2 tournament, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive received the first "Operation" community map pass and a variety of Steam updates introduced brand new features to the service. Stay tuned for the return of ValveTime TalkTime coming later this week! We promise this time.

The Dota 2 update for this week went live late last night and, while it was a relatively light update in regards to amount of content, it still managed to introduce a wide variety of gameplay fixes and cosmetic items. New cosmetic item sets for Huskar, Meepo, Slardar were added to the Dota 2 store alongside four new couriers including the Llama Llama, Kupu the Metamorpher and the return of Porcine Princess Penelope and Nimble Ben, both of which were added to the game files several weeks ago. As we mentioned earlier this week, a Houndeye courier also appears to have made its way into the game files, so we're currently looking forward to seeing whether or not this new item happens to be an upcoming pre-order bonus for a certain game.


Drow Ranger and Tusk were both added to the tournament version of Captain's mode while Bristleback, Slark and Skywrath Mage were all implemented into the most recent variant. Slark, Invoker, Skywrath Mage, Troll Warlord and Tusk all received major gameplay fixes in order to rectify a set of issues which have arisen in recent weeks. Unreleased heroes Elder Titan and Legion Commander both received major updates to their existing content including the addition of comedy ability icons, updated hero portraits and improved textures, all of which provide a deeper preview of how the heroes may look and function once released. If you're looking for information, you might want to check out the official changelog over on the Dota 2 blog or, alternatively, you could head on over to Cyborgmatt's website to read his update analysis. Incase you missed it, be sure to read all about the recently revealed International 3 tournament, as more information is set to be revealed in the next few days.

From now until July 31st, seven of the top-rated Steam Workshop maps will be available on official CS:GO Classic Casual servers through Operation Payback, available now through an in-game purchase for a limited-time discounted price of $2.99, or $5.99 after the offer expires.


The seven maps that will be made available are: Museum, Downtown, Thunder, Favela, Motel, Seaside, and Library. After purchasing the update, players will be able to invite their friends to play on the seven new maps with them - even if they don't have the pass.


It also comes with an upgradable challenge coin, which can be viewed alongside players' avatars. Players will begin at bronze and can battle their way to gold.

Operation Payback is the first in a series of limited-time updates aimed at giving a financial reward to some of CS:GO's most popular mapmakers. From the Counter-Strike blog:
Source: Counter-Strike Blog

Please note: the Store page for CS:GO reads that there should be eight maps, while the Counter-Strike blog, the in-game map list, and the Operation Payback page state that there are seven. It would seem that Operation Payback was to contain one more map, Pool Day, but for unknown reasons they chose to exclude it. Pool Day is currently available in the Steam Workshop.

In the latest update to the official Left 4 Dead Blog, Valve announced that the Beta Client for Left 4 Dead 2 will expand its availability to the entire community next week.

The Beta Client was introduced back in February with restricted access to mod makers wishing to help test the "Extended Mutation System" -- a scripting system that allows modders to create custom game modes with greater complexity than currently possible with the existing SDK. The public beta should allow all players to download and test these Mutations when it goes live.

In addition to the EMS, the Beta Client will also see testing of the upcoming Linux version of Left 4 Dead 2. Linux support for the game was first seen back in September 2012, when Eric Anholt demonstrated the game as an example of Source on Linux. The game will join Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike Source, and the GoldSRC era titles in Valve's Linux library.