The newest PC of mine finally arrived from Newegg and is put together. It was about time to upgrade my tower, but with the strafeRight LAN coming up, I decided to build a Shuttle to take instead of my Thinkpad. Spending a week gaming on the laptop would be OK, but I’d much rather have something a little more powerful. Here is the rundown of what I got:

One of the things that customers have been consistently requesting from us a better method of finding game servers with the specific settings that they like. Some players want servers with friendly-fire on, or TF2 birthday mode, or 24/7 Dustbowl, and so on. Other players specifically want none of these, asking us how they can find servers with no changes. At the same time, we’ve watched as server operators have increasingly filled out their server names with descriptions of their custom settings.

On Thursday, February 14 at 11 am PST, all PC versions of Team Fortress 2, the class-based multiplayer action game named PC Game of the Year by Gamespy.com, will receive its largest update since the product was first made available on October 10, 2007, as part of Valve’s best-selling Orange Box compilation.

The free update includes global optimizations for networking, graphics, and player statistics, plus improvements to Source TV for tournament viewing.

Digsby is a new multi-protocol Instant Messenger client (like Kopete, Pidgin, or Trillian) that is currently in private beta. I got an invite code for it the other day and have been using it recently and so far I like it. My favorite IM would still be Kopete, but I think digsby is already better than Trillian and Pidgin. If you are interested you can head over to digsby.com and request an invite code to try it out. Also check out some screenshots of digsby while you are there.

Championship Gaming Series™ (CGS), the only worldwide professional video gaming league, today announced its official four games for the upcoming 2008 televised season. CGS will be announcing its official slate of 2008 online games in the coming weeks.

The official PC games to be played in the 2008 season will be Valve’s Counter-Strike: Source, returning for its second season and EA Sports’ FIFA 08, which represents an update from last season’s use of FIFA 07. On the Xbox 360 console, Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 4 will also return for its second season and Microsoft Game Studios’ Forza Motorsport 2 will debut as the League’s new official racing title.

Haven’t really seen anything to post the last couple days, so I thought I would just write a random news update about a few different things that I’ve seen lately. Premier League games around the world; idiots posting screenshots and forgetting to turn off their hacks; Arsenal playing today; all that and a few more thoughts, just a click away.

Major League Soccer, together with its national television networks – ESPN2 and ABC, Fox Soccer Channel/Fox Sports en Español, HDNet and TeleFutura – has unveiled the 2008 Regular Season schedule. Major League Soccer’s four national television partners will again combine to broadcast 113 games.

In the League’s 13th season, each of the 14 clubs will play 30 Regular Season games over 31 weeks, for a total of 210 matches from March 29 – Oct. 26. Each team will play each other twice (home and away), for 26 games. The remaining four games will be played against different intra-conference teams (two home and two away), with consideration given to rivalries.

Valve® today announced that Steam®, a leading platform for PC games and digital entertainment, has surpassed 15 million accounts and realized year-over-year sales growth of 158% through the holiday season. The year also marked the debut of the Steam Community and launch of several best-selling and critically-acclaimed titles such as Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, and The Orange Box. Throughout 2008 more Community features will be introduced to support existing games as well as new titles such as Valve’s Left 4 Dead.

The U.S. Men’s National Team continued their dominating undefeated streak at home against Mexico this evening with an exciting 2-2 draw in front of 70,103 fans at Reliant Stadium in Houston.

The match was a high-paced affair, with the U.S. jumping out to a 2-1 lead at halftime, only to surrender the tying goal just two minutes into the second half to Mexico’s Jonny Magallón, who had both goals for the Tri-Colores. The U.S. goals came from defender Oguchi Onyewu and 18-year-old Jozy Altidore, making his first start for the United States.

Chris Willaims over on Goal.com has written a great editorial about how soccer’s biggest clubs have outgrown the domestic game, and it is time for a European Super League. The thing about the article that got my attention though was a little bit about the Big Four in England.

Since the beginning of the 2004/2005 season, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester United combinded have played 236 league games at home to sides not in the Big Four. Out of those 236 games, they’ve lost just five! And of the five defeats, three of them were at the hands of West Ham!

Below is a little snippet of the editorial, be sure to read the full editorial.