Pity the poor Pyro from Team Fortress 2. He (or she—or it) simply wants his rivals to join him in the splendor of “Pyroland,” but his delirious kindness actually leads him to burn up everyone and everything he encounters. But now you can take home one piece of Pyroland without winding up in a burn ward afterwards: The bouncy, fluffy Balloonicorn.

When Fez first launched on Xbox LIVE Arcade in April 2012, hope for a PC release was low.  Creator Phil Fish dubbed it a “console game” specifically, with an experience crafted by the way players ingest it.  While this caused some PC gamers to close the window on Fish and Fez permanently, those who have patiently awaited a change of mind have finally been rewarded with a Steam release.  Time may not heal the PC-spited’s wounds, but giving into the joyful charm of Fez just might.

Valve has announced the sixth batch of Greenlight games to make the transition to Steam. With 18 games in total – as well as two pieces of software – it’s one of the biggest groups yet.

In 1993, Peter Molyneux's Bullfrog Productions unleashed Syndicate, an isometric, hyper-violent proto-RTS set in a dystopian future controlled by globe-spanning corporations to whom the idea of "competition" meant everything from industrial espionage to all-out warfare. It was fantastic stuff and today remains a nostalgic favorite among gamers of a certain age, and that subset of gamers in particular would be well advised to take a look at Black Annex, an upcoming action-strategy game in which they'll get elbow-deep in the dirty business of business.

Have you ever wanted to be a video game tester? I mean, playing all those new games before anyone else just seems like the best job in the world (except for writing about games, that is!). Well if you’re a Steam user, then today is your lucky day. 

When Fez creator Phil Fish announced that the game would be coming to platforms outside of Xbox 360, he didn’t specify which ones. Most people seemed to assume it would be PC, and as it turns out, most people assumed correctly! Fez is hitting Steam on May 1, and you can preorder it here.

The OUYA’s Kickstarter campaign hit its lofty $950,000 goal in only eight hours. The Gamestick, a competitor to the OUYA, had no trouble reaching its goal, either. Not long after, both Valve and Nvidia announced they would be releasing devices that simplified the process of playing PC games on a TV. Change is coming soon to the console market, and based on everything mentioned above, it’s clear microconsoles will be leading the charge. To learn more about what we as consumers can expect in the months and years ahead, we reached out to Tadhg Kelly, author of the What Games Are blog and creative director at Jawfish Games.

In their ongoing quest to dominate the world of PC-based game distribution, powerhouse Half-Life creator and hardware developer Valve has announced that the company’s popular Steam client is now available on Linux. Steam can be downloaded for free through the Ubuntu Software Center, which has proven to be the most popular distribution method for Linux users in the past.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has a grand idea of where the Steam platform should go. He finds the store as it is to be “really boring,” and would like to see users play a bigger role in both the creation and curation of content. He’s also dissatisfied with how Greenlight operates, and hopes to do away with it completely. But this only touches on the surface of what Newell would like to see changed, and he recently outlined his hopes for the platform in a talk at the University of Texas.

Whether you’re only into games with stunning HD graphics, or strictly prefer the retro look of your dust-covered Super Nintendo cartridges, I think everyone can at least agree that video games have come a long way since the days of The Legend of Zelda on the NES. In fact, the NES Legend of Zelda was the first console game capable of saving the player's progress, and imagine where we’d be today without that!