…the Ring of Light, (rol) or at least that’s what Microsoft so lovingly calls it. Most gamers know this light as the Red Ring of Death. My Xbox was purchased in May of 2007. It as very short lived.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing games on Steam. At least I can earn generic achievements there till I get my replacement Xbox.

Valve has recently announced that its Steam service will soon utilize it’s new Steam Cloud Online Network. What does this mean? First of all, many people don’t even know what Steam is. Steam is a free downloadable game hub that offers features seen on Microsoft’s Xbox Live. You can purchase games online for download for anywhere from $3.99 – $49.99. Steam includes all sorts of genres as you would expect from PC games. There are tons of games for casual gamers who just want to play cards as well as tons of shooters for the more elite players.

Steam includes an instant messaging service as well as a voice chat service that runs over any game played through Steam. This service notifies you when your friends are online and what game they are currently playing. You can also point Steam to games you have previously purchased to include these features. Multi-player games can be hosted through Steam and made available to other Steam subscribers. Additionally, all your games purchased through Steam receive automatic updates. A really nice feature is once you purchase a game on one PC, you can access this game on a friends or one in a cyber cafe. As with Xbox live, game achievements can be gained through certain games. Also there is a free demo for practically every game available on steam. (more…)

AudioSurf has been available on Valve’s Steam service for some time now. There has been a recent rumor that it will be appearing on Xbox Live soon. Unfortunately, these rumors don’t look to promising. I have been playing AudioSurf for the PC and using the Xbox 360 Controller. I can see this being a good match also considering the PC version awards achievements similar to those on Xbox Live. Personally, I’d like to see AudioSurf on the Zune or IPod in the future. Keep reading and you’ll figure out why an mp3 player would be a perfect match for this kind of game. (more…)