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The first day of GDC is usually pretty slow but there were a few bits of cool info today including the Serious Sam 3 reveal. Neat stuff.

• Steam has new automatic updates for Painkiller Redemption, Race 07 and the Steam client.
• Google continues to push high end PC gaming in a browser.
• Watch a non-gamer get frustrated at playing Portal. Cool.
• Read an interview with the makers of a Half-Life 2 mod based around school shootings. Not cool.
• Do Portal 2's achievments give hints about Half-Life 2 Episode 3?
• Devil May Cry's movie rights have been bought by the same studio that does the Resident Evil film series.

There was lots of media attention on other tech web sites this week with the launch of Google's Chrome Web Store. The big internet company hasn't paid much attention to the games industry but it's possible that the launch of this web-based software store could change that. All apps and games are downloaded and then run directly from the Chrome browser and it's certainly a push for the browser-based trend in PC games.

Unfortunately, the Chrome Web Store is mostly about casual gaming at the moment with titles like Plants Vs Zombies and Farmville. There is one big exception; the demo for 2001's Serious Sam first person shooter from Croteam. So is this new effort going to make Google go up against Steam in the PC game download genre? Or is this just another one of the many projects that Google will just cancel after a few months?

The internet is all abuzz today about a report from tech savvy blog TechCrunch that claims through unnamed but "multiple sources" that Google is about to charge into the games business with, what else, Google Games. The story claims that Google has been prepping for such a launch by "secretly" investing in high flying casual and Facebook-based game publisher Zynga.

The story claims that Google has put in between $100 million and $200 million in Zynga which if true is something neither company has admitted to, at least so far. Zynga's games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and the recently launched Frontierville will serve as the core for Google Games which, according to the article, will launch later this year. Google hasn't had much success with previous game and game-related products. In 2008 it launched a Second World-like online game service called Lively but shut it down only a few months after it went live.

Sometimes when you play a fairly graphically intensive game on a web browser you have to download some kind of plug in or another similar file to get it to work. Now the Unity Engine folks have announced they are developing a web browser based version of their game graphics engine that will eliminate the need for any file downloads.

The new venture is being worked on in association with mega internet company Google. On their official blog site the company states that if you use the Google Chrome web browser you will be able to play Unity Engine-based games "using just default access and no additional installation or user interaction. It's kind of wild!." Unity is already calling this move a"potential game changer for rich web applications and games in particular." There's no word yet on when these features will go live but Unity says more info will be revealed in the coming months.

We have a feeling there's a big negative effect on office work productivity around the world today. Google's front page has a fully playable version of Namco's original Pac-Mac game to celebrate the arcade game's 30th anniversary this weekend. The game will be live until sometime early on Sunday morning Eastern time.

Users of Google know that the company likes to do special logos on its front page for holidays and other occasions but this is the first time the company has put up a playable game in the logo spot. A post on Google's blog page has some notes on how the Pac-Man logo game was made by its programmer Marcin Wichary. He states he was careful to recreate as much of the original game's programming as he could, and that includes bugs that showed up in the original release.

Mega internet company Google apparently wants to have a foothold in the web-based PC game market. Today our sister site Engadget reports that during a Google developers conference, the company revealed an upcoming web-based store for their popular Chrome web browser and their upcoming Chrome OS. The store will have many different kinds of apps and naturally games will be a part of it.

The screenshot above shows off several examples of games that might be available on the Chrome store including Plants Vs Zombies, Lego Star Wars, Bejeweled 2 and more. There's little info on how the web store will work but it should open for developers "soon". No launch date for the public has been announced.

id Software's games are ported over to nearly every platform, in part because it freely provides the engine code for most of their older game titles (hey id, when are you releasing the Doom III engine as open source?). Now some enterprising folks from Google have found a way to put id's 1997 shooter Quake II in a web browser that's running HTML5.

As you can see from the above YouTube video the game looks pretty good, even if the frame rate is a bit dodgy. HTML5 is the web site coding standard that is being used as a possible competitor to Flash for things like videos and, of course, games. While this Quake II experiment is just that it could lead the way to having more games ported to HTML5.

[Via Shacknews]

One of the biggest issues critics have with upcoming streaming cloud-based PC game services such as OnLive is that they feel the bandwidth for such a service to work isn't available yet to most people in the US. Well, Google is trying to change things in that regard. This week, it announced plans to establish trial versions of a new high-speed internet network that will give consumers speed up to 1 gigabit per second.

Downloading games, even massive ones, should only take a few minutes under such a network. It would also make cloud-based streaming PC gaming a breeze and multiplayer online play virtually lag free. Google is planning to establish trials for such a service at various locations in the US and is currently taking suggestions as to where to establish the networks. You could be lucky enough to be selected for Google's network trial (and if you are can we move in with you?). As many as 500,000 people in the US could have access to 1 gigabit internet access when and if Google's trial launches.

The After-GDC announcement buzz for OnLive continues to hit the Internet with many still very skeptical that the proposed streaming PC game service will actually work. But now some are speculating that OnLive's real goal might be to be bought out by a larger tech company that will be able to use and expand its service.

Techradar reports that Guy de Beer the CEO of a rival "cloud computing" company, Playcast Media, says, "As superbly funded as OnLive may be, they are no match to compete with the Comcasts, Verizons and AT&Ts of this world." He adds, " . . . they want to develop this model (which would work in small scale), and sell it to someone bigger who may be able to find the business case to compete with the Comcasts and Verizons. Maybe someone like a company that starts with an M, ends with a T, is based in Redmond WA, and has been trying to build such a parallel private network for a product that starts with an X and ends with a Box?" de Beer also mentions Google as another possible suitor for OnLive.

[Via GameDaily]

It wasn't exactly an MMO game; more of a graphical chat room. But it was created by one of the biggest Internet based companies in the world. Yet even the power of Google couldn't get people to try out their Lively virtual world. This week the company announced that Lively, launched in beta form last July, will shut down by the end of the year.

Many people believed that Lively could have been the first step in a plan by Google to get more into actual PC gaming but as Google's blog site states, "...we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. " As it turned out not many folks showed up to participate in Lively which may mean that Google's low key approach didn't get the attention it first expected

[Via Massively]