When Portal 2 was first announced, it was expected to be released sometime this holiday season, but in traditional Valve fashion, the developer has announced that the game has been delayed and is now expected to launch at some point next year. The new comes via a press release titled “VALVE ANNOUNCES MAKING GAMES IS HARD,” in which the company explained that “even though Portal 2 will arrive slightly later than planned, all life on earth won’t instantaneously stop as every molecule in your body explodes at the speed of light.”

This news comes after the announcement that Valve had cancelled its previously planned Portal 2 event at E3 and replaced it with a “surprise.” It looks like the surprise will be something that is Portal-related.  Valve described it as the “E3 ***PORTAL-2-THEMED-FOR-GOD’S SAKE*** surprise.”

Stay tuned for further details and more E3 coverage by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our RSS feeds.

Steam for Mac is now officially available, along with a sizeable number of games – including Portal, which is now free for everybody!

Valve’s plan is to release a new set of games for Mac every Wednesday for the next few weeks. This week notably, every game has SteamPlay, which means you buy it once, and it’ll run on all Steam-supportd platforms. This does imply that not every Steam game will be available on Mac and PC. Although games have existed on the Mac for a long time, the promise of true multiplatform computer gaming on the largest scale in a long time is a pretty thrilling idea.

As of right now, there are 63 games/gamepacks listed as beign available for Mac – Torchlight, Civilization, the LucasArts action pack, among others – though Team Fortress 2 is still not in sight. As noted, Portal’s only free until May 24, so get in there! Here is the full list on Steam’s site as of right now:

TriJinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery
World of Goo
Zuma Deluxe
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV
And Yet It Moves
Braid
Escape Rosecliff Island
Civilization IV: Warlords
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Colonization
Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Complete Edition
BRAINPIPE: A Plunge to Unhumanity
Diaper Dash®
Machinarium
Football Manager 2010
Bob Came in Pieces
KrissX
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse
Galcon Fusion
Quantz
Torchlight
Toki Tori
Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal
Parking Dash
The Nightshift Code
Nightshift Legacy: The Jaguar’s Eye
Mahjong Roadshow
Hotel Dash Suite Success
DinerTown Detective Agency
Fitness Dash
Gemini Lost
Atlantis Sky Patrol
Fairway Solitaire
Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery
Unwell Mel
My Tribe
Tales of Monkey Island Complete Pack
Osmos
Wandering Willows
Wedding Dash 2: Rings Around the World
Zenerchi
Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child
Diner Dash: Hometown Hero
Cooking Dash
Chocolatier: Decadence by Design
LUXOR: Mah Jong
The Dig
LOOM
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
City of Heroes: Architect Edition
Peggle Nights
Luxor
Luxor 3
Portal
Peggle Deluxe
Bejeweled 2 Deluxe
Bookworm Deluxe
Chuzzle Deluxe

The word is out and it is official, no more teasing, Valve’s digital distribution service, Steam is coming to the Mac OS X and bringing Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, portal, and the Half-Life series (along with Source) with it this April. As a bonus to making Steam Mac compatible, the company also plans to make the Mac a “tier-1″ platform, promising simultaneous releases of games for the Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360. Portal 2 will be the first game that will be released (planned to be released later this year) that will release on Mac and Windows simultaneously. Another feature Valve has mentioned that any games supported by Steam can be played and saved on one, then continued on the other, which is something completely unexpected. Both the PC and the Mac version of any games will come bundled as one price as well so if you’re one of those geeks who has both you won’t have to drop any extra money. Valve’s official announcement can be seen below:

VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.

These announcements are probably words Mac gamers have only dreamt about until now. This also allows other developers to easily create Mac-compatble versions of games without much additional effort, which should open up many doors for future gaming under Steam.

For those of you who don’t know what League of Legends is, consider it a free to play and free to download version of DoTA (WarCraft III’s popular custom game, Defense of The Ancients.) Developed by a California based company from scratch (Riot Games), League of Legends was released on October 27, 2009 and since then has won a number of awards for its fabulous gameplay as well as its progression into developing a competitive game for e-sports and the tournament scene. With continuous work, Riot has managed to bring the game a long way from when it first started out and further more seems to be bringing more updates in the near future.

This week, marks the release of an upcoming ranged champion known as Ezreal: The Prodigal Explorer. Ezreal seems to be the hype and also has developed into a much more refined character with testing done on League of Legends’ Test Realm. The champion first started out on the test realm with the following look (blonde Harry Potter anyone?) and abilities:

With feedback from the test realm community and some tweaks and changes, Riot will be releasing Ezreal this upcoming patch (probably Wednesday or Thursday) and most likely continuing with the trend of making him available to buy in the store this week and part of their free champion rotation next week. The finalized lore released by Riot for the champion can be found below as well as some pictures and fan art of the new champion.

Lore:

Ezreal was born with the gift of magic flowing through his veins. However, Ezreal was also born with a much stronger sense of wanderlust. Though enrolled in Piltover’s most acclaimed school for skilled young techmaturgists, Ezreal quickly became bored with magical studies. By the time the boy genius was eight years old, he had fully mapped out the underground tunnels of Piltover. The quality of his work was so remarkable that the government of Piltover purchased his maps and commissioned his services as the city-state’s Master Pathfinder. This sealed the deal for Ezreal’s true calling – he would eschew the arcane arts in favor of archaeology. Since then, countless adventures of his have been romanticized and published.

One of Ezreal’s more recent adventures brought him face-to-face with his other legacy – his latent magical power. While exploring the pyramids of the Shurima Desert, Ezreal uncovered an amulet of inestimable power. He barely managed to extract it from its sandy abode due to its sheer magnitude (it was made for a being easily twice Ezreal’s size). After fervent investigation, he found that it allowed the wielder to control and shape magical energy – provided there was a source of magic nearby. This permitted Ezreal to tap into his latent magical abilities without having to put any serious effort into it – a “big win”, as the young prodigy notes. The lingering drawback is that, for some unknown reason, the amulet is highly attuned to summoning magic. This means that without warning, Ezreal may find himself acting as a champion for, as he puts it, “a summoner hell-bent on resolving some irrelevant world-shattering League conflict.” Still, Ezreal feels that being summoned to a Field of Justice on occasion is a small price to pay for his prized artifact.

“There’s little time to study ancient, musty tomes when you’re busy trying to find them.”
-Ezreal

Abilities:

Mystic Shot: Ezreal fires a bolt of energy. If it strikes an enemy unit, it reduces all of Ezreal’s cooldowns.

Essence Flux: Ezreal fires a fluctuating wave of energy, damaging enemies and reducing their attack speed. This also heals allies and increases their attack speed.

Arcane Shift: Ezreal teleports to a nearby target location and fires a homing arrow which strikes the nearest enemy unit.

Trueshot Barrage: Ezreal channels to fire a powerful barrage of energy missiles, which do massive damage to each unit they pass through (barrage deals less damage to each successive unit it passes through).

Rising Spell Force (passive): Hitting a target with any of Ezreal’s abilities increases his attack speed for several seconds.

-Community Manager, ByronicHero

There has also been some gameplay footage of Ezreal released which can be seen below:

Not only, is the new champion being released, this past Friday, Riot had a test realm event where they opened up Twisted Treeline for their matchmaking. After almost 5 months from release, finally players get to play a new match (for normal games, which actually count on records) and possibly can que up for solo and with an arranged team. This has been one of the many things the community has been asking for and the testing for it has started. Although there is no set release date for TT matchmaking on live servers, it is surely being worked on. The news should leave all fans and players excited.

What are your thoughts of Riot and League of Legends? Does the new champion seem cool to you? Are you excited for the new map being available for the Normal Game mode? Leave your thoughts and comments below!

Valve’s update earlier this week for Portal has sparked several hints to what the company is working on such as Steam coming to the Mac OS X. The Portal gaming fans out there have uncovered more information as well, hints of Portal 2 and it’s story line. All of which ended up confirmed thanks to GameStop putting out a Portal 2 pre-order with information attached. GameStop ended up revealing information about a new feature that Portal 2 will have, which is two-player co-op mode . Gamestop has the following information on their site which indicates the new game mode:

“Coming this holiday. Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007′s Game of the Year and draws from the award-winning formula of innovative game play, story, and music that earned the original over 70 industry accolades. Features single and multiplayer co-op modes. The single-player portion of Portal 2 introduces a cast of dynamic new characters, a host of fresh puzzle elements, and a much larger set of devious test chambers. Players will explore never-before-seen areas of the Aperture Science Labs and be reunited with GLaDOS, the occasionally murderous computer companion who guided them through the original game. The game’s two-player cooperative mode features its own entirely separate campaign with a unique story, test chambers, and two new player characters. This new mode forces players to reconsider everything they thought they knew about portals. Success will require them to not just act cooperatively, but to think cooperatively.”

Furthermore, popular gaming magazine, GameInformer, released their new cover for the month of April, indicating that they will have a full-featured Portal 2 article with information on “gameplay mechanics, storyline, and some surprising new twists.” The magazine cover release picture can be found below:

According to MacRumors, Portal 2 will also be available for Mac as discovered with a part of a leaked image from the GameInformer magazine, which can be found below:

Stay tuned for any news regarding Portal 2. What are your thoughts and comments on the whole announcement? Share your thoughts and comments below.

With Portal being updated with a new ending this past week, several gaming fans noticed Max OS X components and other items in the update indicating that Valve is planning on making a move into the Mac platform. Several images were released to various companies such as Macrumors, MacNN, Shacknews, Eurogamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Macworld indicating the same. The pictures are Valve Software’s game characters with something Mac releated. The teasers generated alot of controversy and conversation amongst the gaming community as well as to those who infamously debate about the ongoing Mac vs. PC argument.

The teasers can be seen below:

Personally, the Steam coming to Mac is a good thing. It should provide Valve with more profit as well as Mac users one less thing to complain about. Games will also be more populated because believe it or not, I am pretty sure not everyone installs Windows on their Mac just to play games such as Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life. Overall, a good move from Valve from my pointo f view.What do you think of Steam coming to the Mac? Share your thoughts and comments below.

If you don’t already know about it many people have started to prepare for the StarCraft 2 tournament scene. Some people have quit their jobs, others have been practicing heavily on the StarCraft 2 beta as if it was their job, and others have been looking for a way to prepare but are stuck without a key. For those of you in the latter situation, there is a solution for you which might help you get very good practice until the StarCraft 2 beta turns to open beta or until you get that lucky email telling you that you are accepted into the closed beta. Play amongst the pro’s in the original StarCraft! It can also prove to be useful for those who are interested in StarCraft 2 but haven’t played the original at all. Instead of going out and buying it while the sequel is on the verge of release, download it and practice for free amongst the very best!

An organization known as the International Cyber Cup is trying to enhance the competitive scene for competitive blizzard games (outside of World of Warcraft) by hosting their own private servers to compete on, complete with an anti-hack tool and a ladder system that allows you to be ranked amongst the pros. Many from all over the world have started to compete and the organization has run 11 successful seasons, growing with popularity for each season. Many of those who are stuck in the situation of no beta access have turned to the iCCup to practice and for many reasons.

The best part of the iCCup private servers for the competitive scene is that you can play StarCraft: Brood Wars for free. The organization allows you to download the client (the original StarCraft and it’s expansion – StarCraft: Brood Wars) from their site and provides step by step instructions on how to properly set up access to their private servers. If you are interested in trying it, just follow the steps below:

1.1. Getting the latest version
To play on our server you will need a StarCraft: BroodWar 1.16.1 client. If you don’t have one, you can download it from our FTP. Note: You won’t be able join official servers. We strictly recommend you to buy a licese copy.

1.2. Adding our server to server list
You will need to add our server to your server list to start playing. You can do it in two ways:
1) download an auto-reg file. Note: this will overwrite your current server list.
2) download Anti-Hack Launcher and run it, it will be added automaitcly in you registry.

1.3. Game account registration
You will need to fill this form to register your nickname. It is allowed to use only roman letters and numbers in any form field. Nickname length shouldn’t be lager 14 symbols. Please, specify your real e-mail address. You won’t be able to retrieve a password with non-existing e-mail address. You should also accept a basic rules of our server. And Ladder rules.

1.4. Playing on our server
Our server have a ladder-based system. To play ladder games you should set game type to «one on one» for 1×1 games or «top vs bottom» for 2×2 games. It is not allowed to play ladder games on non-official iCCup maps. You need download the latest mappack.

If reading and following instructions step by step isn’t your thing, then you can hit up the following YouTube video explaining the same steps while showing you what to do step by step simultaneously:

If you are interested, right now is the best time to install the client and get ready because iCCup’s 12th Season is about to start (In the next 1-2 days as mentioned on their site) for StarCraft. Just a heads up to anyone who might be having trouble connecting as of right now; in between seasons they take their private server down (so don’t panic thinking it isn’t working) and when the new seasons starts you will be able to practice away!

As for those of you who don’t find interest in playing the original StarCraft competitively again and rather wait for the upgraded, StarCraft 2. There is a crack out there that lets you play the StarCraft 2 beta vs AI (you won’t be able to play with friends but you can play vs bots.) MGN will cover how to do that soon, so stay tuned. Don’t forget to leave thoughts and comments to discuss iCCup’s ladder or any StarCraft related news below!

As many of you may already know Blizzard Entertainment last week announced that it has begun closed beta testing for its new real0time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. StarCraft II has been a long time coming. It is the sequel of the 1998 hit, StarCraft. The new game will feature an entirely new 3D graphics engine and just like its predecessor, it will focus on the battle between the Protoss, Terrans, and Zerg. Blizzard said that StarCraft II should launch sometime in the first half of 2010.

In a release, the company mentioned there are thousands of people in the beta test. one of the main thrusts of the testing at this stage is for the company to gain as much feedback as possible on the multiplayer balance of the game. In addition to being able to play the game, the testers will be the first to experience Blizzard’s reworked Battle.net platform, which the company has plans to use for not only StarCraft II  but also World of Warcraft and all future Blizzard games. The new Battle.net system is said to be launched with StarCraft II. As of right now the delays in getting Battle.net ready have already caused some delays in the launch of StarCraft II but Blizzard thinks it will be well worth the wait. Players can set up a Battle.net account now and submit system specifications for a chance to be admitted to the beta.

On the other light of the scene are it’s diehard fans and many communities have already risen in support of the upcoming game. Many tournament players from the original game, Starcraft, have been sharing some of their experiences about the beta with the public (which is allowed) and are filling in those who have not yet had a chance to play. Amongst the tournament players are the Koreans who are infamously known to be the “best” at StarCraft. YGosu (a Korean fansite) for the upcoming game interviewed ZenioWerra, a top level amateur Zerg player who gave up his aspirations of becoming a WarCraft III progamer in order to prepare for StarCraft II and Lee “Check[Pooh]” Hyung Ju, a well-known WarCraft III progamer in Korea who made his claim to fame in the early days of the WarCraft III professional scene.

Some highlights of YGosu’s interview with “Zenio” can be read below:

YGosu: What do you think the strengths of Starcraft II are?
Zenio: First off, it`s still in the beta phase, yet Battle.net works really well so even new players can start playing with ease. The ladder system is great, too. From an observer`s standpoint, the tempo of the game is quick so it`s fun to watch.

YGosu: Were you thinking about E-sports with that last bit?
Zenio: Yes. There`s a real joy to watching the game.

YGosu: On the other hand, what do you think the weaknesses are? In terms of balance, or gameplay.
Zenio: The sound effects could be better. I think Zerg has the biggest problem there, there`s just no energy behind the unit sounds. It barely sounds like they`re responding when you click on them, and you can`t tell what unit is making what sound. There aren`t units that sound desperate or growl at you aggressively, and the “You require more minerals” sound is kind of off-putting (the Korean dub of the Zerg lady is said to be pretty bad). So it`s kind of annoying.

Some highlights of YGosu’s interview of “Check” can be read below:

YGosu: That`s a similar position as the Starcraft: BW gamers. If you`re part of a team, I suppose it`s the rule that you follow team policy. Then tell us what you think of Starcraft II.
Check: It`s still beta, but it seems very complete. The balance is alright, and I rate it highly from an E-sports perspective as well. It`s being streamed a lot lately, and it`s getting a good response from the viewers. It`s personally pretty fun to watch other guys play as well.

YGosu: Outside E-sports aspects, do you think Starcraft II is a fun game that the average person could enjoy?
Check: I think that maybe Brood War fans might not be able to get used to the fact that Starcraft II is in 3D. But it`s really similar to the original, and if they gave it a try I think they`d like it. The interface is more convenient, too.

Translation was a courtesy of Waxangel from Team Liquid for translating the articles from YGosu.

So what do you guys think of StarCraft II ? Are you excited as many of the people in the PC Gaming world? Share your thoughts and comments with us!