Now if only Valve would release Homefront... But no, looks like this is the new Mafia 2. U_U

Don't feel too bad about that. I have it and it's really not that great. I'd say BC2 is a superior game in almost every way. Only reason i'm playing it still atm is because I paid for it and it's something 'new' to play for a while, and some of the toys are fun to play with.

Impulse :
Daily deal Mount and Blade Warband 80% off .

No disrespect or anything, but how good or bad you feel the game is, has nothing to do with whether I or anyone else feels annoyed at the treatment Valve are giving us. We did, after all, pay for the right to use a game that is now readily available here on consoles. The only reason we can't play the PC version properly, is because Valve won't unlock it.

The good news for me, at least, is that I bought the US retail version via GamersGate so at least I can take advantage of the screw up they made with that version. That being, that while it may show in Steam as unreleased (and thus can't be backed up or patched) it can at least be played via running the main executable from the games directory.

Even so, Valve should never have been given the power to dictate when a game can be played when it wasn't purchased directly from them.

Also, it's the people who bought it directly from Steam who get it even worse. While they had the pre-load and even had the game unlock yesterday. Valve locked it again, disabled the pre-load (and the exe trick doesn't work for that version -- so those who did manage to pre-load can't even use that workaround to play it). They then removed Homefront from the Japanese store entirely and haven't even issued refunds.

Oh and just to piss us off further, they still advertise the Prima guide for the game (even though it leads to a regional restriction error).

It's just downright unbelievable how they constantly get away with this shit.

</sorry about the off-topic rant>

I was just giving my opinion of the game, don't kill me please xD

Anyone know if Impulse's version of Warband is activatable on Steam? Edit: Apparently not. Too bad :/

Sorry for being offtopic, but is bully worth trying out?
I've heard mixed reviews.

yes bully is a good game but has terrible controls best to play with a xbox controller

If you ask me there seems to be some seriously underhand practices going on in Japan to keep the PC market down. I doubt it's a coincidence that the home of two of the three console manufacturers has such a repressed PC market. But this is pure speculation.

No doubt about it. As far as retail is concerned, even Square Enix have made comment on that. But to see Valve join in, that's just really fucking annoying.

What makes you so sure it's not at the publisher's insistence? Sure, they might be telling you it's all Valve's doing. But then I bet Valve are blaming the publisher too, right? The main problem with Steam has always been that they pretty much let publishers do what they want.

I'm sure most people here pre-ordered on Steam long ago, but just for general info amazon.com has Portal 2 right now for $34.99 with 99cent release day shipping.

So... save $9 and get the game on Tuesday around lunch, if you want.

I'm sorry but Valve is a worldwide DD. Valve's not going to make a stand against big publishers for a country you already admitted has a very low PC market. It doesn't make any sense for them to do so.

Ha! So they DID price match Best Buy's price!

People who buy it that way don't get the Companion Cube pin, though. :p

You can get the pin by playing each of the potato sack games at least once on steam, then opening you steam profile and just under the "potato" badge on the right, you can claim your pin there. Only difference is the name of the pin. ("Resurrection Associate Pin" instead of "Companion Cube Pin". So it even SOUNDS cooler) http://87.238.173.111/wiki/Team_Fortress_2

Worldwide or not, taking a stand or not, you can't honestly sit back and say that Valve doing the following is acceptable:

1 - Selling the game with release date A
2 - 1 hour before release date A, changing to release date B
3 - Several days after release date B, releasing game only to lock it and set it to unplayable again 1 hour later
4 - Removing game from store entire and still refusing to allow retail purchased games to unlock

I'm sorry, but especially from games not even purchased through them, they should have zero say in when it can or can't be played. And if this were the publisher, then other sites wouldn't be able to sell it in this region either, yet they do.

Besides, in the case of Mafia 2, and its retail versions, even 2K stated that it should have been playable. It was Valve who weren't letting it. The 8 month delay in getting a release on Steam of that game was down to 2K Japan, the continued selling of it without a firm release was down to Valve (as confirmed by 2K).

Considering the different publishers involved in an ever increasing number of similar cases, I find that the simplest explanation makes the most sense (i.e., the one constant factor in it all - Valve - are primarily responsible for the toying around of releases on Steam) and that is supported with the fact that other DD services have not shown the same behaviour with the same titles.

And again, it's been heavily hinted at by Square Enix to Japanese gaming sites (when they found it nigh impossible to get a distributor to push the PC version of MW2 to stores), etc., that it's the console manufacturers and the distributors who are holding PC game releases from the market.

And again with Square Enix, they specifically gave Valve (and publicly made it known) permission to sell their games on Steam in Japan and yet, each new release still meets with restrictions thanks to Valve (yet all other distributors sell them without issue following Square Enix's OK).

So it's quite simple, either you believe that many publishers are lying and blaming one company, or one company is consistently lying and blaming many publishers. Seriously, which makes more sense?