Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.

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As you may have heard, yesterday Valve (mostly) met one of their rare scheduled dates and released the OS X version of their popular digital distribution client, Steam. While the move to OS X is certainly a welcome one, as it gives access to a subset of computer users often left out when it comes to games, Steam's arrival hasn't been completely graceful.

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We Fly Spitfires has an entry up regarding Global Agenda and its decision to go the digital distribution-only method. I mentioned in my review earlier that it's only available through Steam, but there's also a limited edition version available through purchase on Amazon's US store. Either way it's expected by Global Agenda's developers that if you want to buy it, you're likely going to buy it through Steam.

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I wanted to take a moment to post an update on the issue I wrote about earlier regarding Valve's swear-word filter on their forums. A short time after I posted the original article, the filter itself was edited and "gay" was removed; unfortunately this appears to be a Pyrrhic victory.

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"With Rockstar Games releasing The Ballad of Gay Tony, will Valve ever include a gay character in any of their games?" That was the gist of a thread created on the official Steam forums several weeks ago. Innocuous question or not, however, the thread itself was quickly locked and hidden from public view by one of Valve's volunteer moderators, a fate that almost every other discussion of LGBT topics on the official Steam forums ends with, as well.

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