GuildCom

While looking on Steam yesterday, I saw that LucasArts has *finally* made available the original  Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in the Steam store.  And as a reasonable price of $10, no less.  Even though I still have my beloved KotOR disks sitting upon my shelf, I was happy to see the game on Steam. 

Too bad that as of this writing, the old widescreen hacks from the retail version don’t work on the Steam version from what I hear.  Hopefully, that will change soon.  Still, other than that, it seems a pretty solid deal.

So about an hour ago, I decided to try out the latest beta for the newest release of Steam.  The major new feature is an in-game web browser.  Although its extremely lightweight (this think makes Chrome look obese by comparison), it is nice knowing I can go to GameFAQs or some such without Alt-Tabbing out of the game (which in my experience with HL2 on Vista, it usually causes you to be unable to return to the game).  So it is a nice little touch.

The way it works is when you bring up the In-Game Overlay when you’re playing a game in Steam, there’s an option called ‘Web’.  Click that, and a barebones ‘browser’ comes up with just Back/Forward, Refresh, Home, and Stop buttons and an address bar (that I couldn’t seem to type in).  Luckily, it defaults to use Google as a homepage, so not being able to use the address bar (at least I couldn’t) wasn’t terribly inconvenient. 

I didn’t have any problems, but I didn’t actually try to do much with it either.  There are several ways to crash it right now (see here), but do understand it still is a beta and they are updating it regularly (and opting-in to the beta is completely optional). 

The most important thing is I didn’t have any trouble launching my games, and my downloaded Steam skin still works.  For more information on the Steam Client Beta, look at the thread here:  http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=bea4d054accec803b956bc7e54be3be5&t=767207

I’ll keep this story updated if I find any bugs in my own use.  But so far, I really like this idea, if for nothing else it makes referring to a walkthrough or cheats list a lot easier.