Just a reminder to everyone that Half-Life 2: Episode 1 should be available to play on Steam right now. I use a qualifier there because Source's pre-loading screen is still at 61 percent on my PC after an entire night of downloading, It downloads a few bytes in staccato bursts, then sits there pondering, as if it's waiting for some inspiration to get cracking. It certainly is comforting to know that the same excellent distributed downloading we saw at the release of Half-Life 2 has made its way to Episode 1 without any of the sharp rises of quality we've come to expect.

In other news, Steam itself has been updated: the Friends feature now supposedly works. Congratulations, Valve, for finally fixing a superficial feature that has been broken in Steam for the last three years! FLORIAN ECKHARDT

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