I make this point in order to to ease myself into the second paragraph, where I link to Digital Distribution Review. It’s a relatively new site run by one ‘Kurina’, which since May has been posting the kind of erudite analysis I always strived toward for the same reasons I always identified with. I like it.

It’s only fitting, of course, that a Digital Distribution Review should take over from The Steam Review. Steam is a long way from the only service on offer today, and although I tried to encompass other services on this site doing so never quite made sense beneath a green, white and black header. Don’t unsubscribe just yet however (there are still over 450 of you), as TSR isn’t going anywhere; depending on whether Kurina covers Blizzard’s reveal of the new Battle.net there may even be a new article coming up…maybe.

But as anyone who’s been following my updates for long enough knows, these are lean times. Even the Steam Community has provided remarkably little to talk about: like Steam today in general, it’s there and it works, but nothing of particular interest is happening with it.

It’s clear to me that Steam’s development has plateaued, at least for now. I don’t intend to shut the site down (hopefully that will never happen), but with the articles I have notes for today either entirely speculative or concerning another distribution service there seems little point in continuing to try to produce them. Nor in working myself up over whispers and rumours that turn out to be nothing.

Consider The Steam Review, then, in official hibernation until something comes along so big that it convinces me to pick it up again. Which having made this post will probably be some time next week…

Murphy’s Law strikes again! Eve Online is an addition I’ve coveted for a very long time, and I’m trying to arrange an interview about its future relationship with Steam right now.

While we’re all waiting, there might be some early screens floating around somewhere…

There are lots of advanced usage options for anyone who needs something besides a feed, including iCal output. Pretty cool stuff.

There is now an official feed for new games.

If you want to receive the full text of each post in your feed and don’t mind the larger download, your new URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/steamreview-fulltext.

The laptop you can see features a Pentium III chip with an astounding 500MHz clock for ultra-speedy calculations. Two USB ports allow me to make use of the latest digital devices, and 256MB of RAM and an ATI RAGE Mobility video card combine make my multimedia experience second-to-none. A gorgeous 12″ LCD display at a native 1024×768 and with a refresh rate of up to 60Hz rounds off the package.

While I’m not going to be playing many games on this hardware (even Defcon’s menu can’t break 2FPS), despite or perhaps because of the abysmal nature of the halls’ internet connection Steam can connect without hitting any closed ports. I should be able to soldier on, save perhaps for any first-hand analysis of the something being integrated into Team Fortress 2.

The piece on publisher contracts I was talking about, er, three weeks ago (it’s Valve’s influence, I swear) has been dusted off now that I’m settled in. For the time being things aren’t too hectic, and hopefully there won’t be any more delays quite like this latest one, but as I hope you all understand it is extremely hard to make promises.