Last night Steam informed me that they have a new UI coming up and if I want to try it out as part of their beta program. The list of changes seemed pretty enticing, like better games management and a new browser rendering engine (WebKit instead of IE).

A few minutes later I was gazing upon the new interface. Which looks like crap. I was never a fan of oversized text-only tab headers, but hey, to each his own. The game list window has a couple of improvements, mainly you can view details about the games or see them as huge, easy-to-click buttons. The downloads section is much better now, with bandwidth graph and everything.

And there’s where I started noticing the problems. For some unknown reason, Steam decided that some of my games (Modern Warfare 2 and Company of Heroes) need to be redownloaded… At first I thought it was a patch (Steam downloads and installs patches automatically) but then I noticed the size of the downloads: 6 and 8GB! A quick search on the forums for the beta UI found a lot of people that were complaining about the same thing: games being erased from the hard drive and redownloaded. What the hell, Steam?

Oh, and one more thing: I have a Steam account, which I use to purchase and play games. Then I have a Steam Community account, where I can manage my friends, see achievements, etc. And yesterday I realized, in order to post on the forums (Steam forums that is, not some third party) I need another account??? Are you serious? Haven’t you people heard of single sign-on? Or shared user database? Argh…

I’ve been losing my nights this week to Torchlight, a hack-n-slash RPG from a bunch of ex-Blizzard employees that worked on Diablo. And you can tell the resemblance at any step: the games are pretty much the same. Torchlight is basically a combination of Diablo 1 (three classes, vertical structure, just one town) and Diablo 2 (socketed items, sets, skill trees) with World of Warcraft-like cartoony graphics. That being said, it has all the addictiveness of Diablo, which accounts for many nights spent looting chests hoping for better drops. You know what I’m talking about.

On the literary front, I’m currently reading Makers, Cory Doctorow’s latest book. It’s about… real-life hackers – in the most literal sense, as people changing the world around them by creating gizmos and tools out of anything is available. It’s a very fun book, it really rubs the nerdy insides. On Monday he was in NYC so I went to the signing. The guy is really smart and funny, a great geek. No wonder there are so many XKCD comics about him

On the professional level (at work, that is), I finished my first ever iPhone app. Which means that now I have the basic know-how to create applications for both Android and iPhone. I want get into this in my own time as well, so I’m planning buying a Mac in the near future (you can only do iPhone development on a Mac, grrrr). It will be my next gadgety purchase so I’m already giddy about it. It’s gonna be great

This weekend I started to catch up with some of the shows I recorded on my DVR the past days, most notably History Channel’s World War II in HD. Which is absolutely great, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WW2 history out there. Think Band of Brothers, minus Holywood, plus realism. An extraordinary documentary. Speaking of Band of Brothers, looks like HBO is preparing another WW2 miniseries, The Pacific. Can’t wait.

The little free time that I had this week was spent in Borderlands, a co-op FPS/RPG I got on Steam. I preordered it with some friends last week and since Monday – when it came out – we’ve been visiting it’s arid landscapes, armed to the teeth.

I can’t say much about it’s singleplayer – probably plays a bit like Fallout 3, but more boring – but the co-op multiplayer is definitely a lot of fun. It has the adrenaline-filled action of a FPS combined with the obsessive-compulsiveness of Diablo loot (or WoW, for that matter). The weapons are procedurally generated, meaning that you can get really exotic combinations (like a shotgun that fires rockets that deal lightning damage on impact) and the world is pretty interesting, with a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max theme.

But the most important aspect is that it’s just… fun. It’s been a while since my last LAN party (or multiplayer StarCraft, after work ) so this brings back all the good memories. Nothing builds teamwork like yelling expletives while running for your life, shooting at some huge monster poised on turning you into rice pudding. Then the blasted sniper rifle reloads, you aim, score a headshot and the whole screen lights up: LEVEL UP. Good game.