After the rousing success of our first Community Games Night, our regulars have got together and organised for another one! And we are of course only too happy to bring it to your attention.

So! Tonight, Monday the 18th, starting at 8:30 PM AEDT, you can enjoy hot, hot Team Fortress 2 action on the following servers:

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

Remember, all-talk will be turned on and staff and admins will be popping in to share the fun. Come and join us for some guaranteed good times!

Lovers of classic multiplayer games, rejoice! Games.on.net have just announced that we are deploying a number of servers for some older classic games. These servers are here to stay and will never be shut down!

These public servers will run as is, with little to no customisation. So what games are to be catered for? Well, let’s look at the list. We’ve got the original Call of Duty, as well as Call of Duty 2, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 3. What a list!

So next time you have a LAN with a few friends, fire up some old classics. The servers will be rolled out over the next few weeks and as they’re public servers, if you could let us know when they’re down or broken or otherwise not working, that’d be great. Check out the forum thread for more info.

Source: Cas!

It’s time for another GONlympics — which, as you may have guessed, is our clever portmanteau of “GON” and “Olympics”. Yes, it’s the GONlympics, that time of year where we all sign up to take part in events and then jump into regularly scheduled sessions of gaming to see who comes out on top.

This year we’ve got more categories open than ever: Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Source, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Day Of Defeat: Source, Call of Duty – Black Ops II, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, League of Legends, DOTA2, Live For Speed and BF3.

All you need to do to sign up is head on over to this forum thread and leave your Steam Community ID in there, telling our fantastic organiser Tera which events you’re going to be signing up for. Easy!

Our first event will be Team Fortress 2, kicking of on March 10th. Be there (sign up first, though!). Signups close on Sunday 3 March.

Our very first community games night is happening, tonight!

From 8:30 PM Sydney/Melbourne Time we’ll be all piling onto three dedicated 24-slot servers and shooting each other in the face with all sorts of outrageous Team Fortress 2 weaponry. The servers you need are:

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

Remember, all-talk will be turned on and staff and admins will be popping in to share the fun. Come and join us for some guaranteed good times!

As we outlined in our roadmap, 2013 will see the kick-off of regular Community Game Nights — and our first one is coming up on Monday, February 4.

To start off this fine new tradition we’ll be running with an old favourite: Team Fortress 2. Special servers will be set aside for the occasion, with the festivities taking off from 8:30 PM EST that night. Pencil it in your diaries! Then, grab a pen, and write over the pencil because you will be there.

We’ll have all-talk turned on and admins and staff members of all kinds jumping in, so put some time aside and watch this space for more details on what server to join. And get TF2 up to date, if you haven’t already! You monster.

games.on.net will be going offline between 10AM and 11AM tomorrow (Adelaide time) as we update the site, add in some changes, re-grease the pig, and generally twiddle the whatsits that makes whatever this whole thing even is work.

Our game servers will continue to be functional, but the front page, forum and file library will be unavailable for this hour. Please plan accordingly!

Check out the official advisory notice for more information.

We have been working hard to make games.on.net the number one destination for gamers in Australia, and we agree that there is still a significant amount left on our plate to address.

If you have critical ideas or suggestions that can be considered we would love to know, — bonus points if you’re a developer yourself, and it’s possible to assist us in seeing those ideas come to life. So please do leave your comments below for discussion or for a more direct approach, via our contact page.

Let’s get into it!

As it is Christmas Eve, we’re Officially Pulling the Plug on games.on.net’s front-end news coverage for 2012. Our forums and game servers will of course continue to be operational, but we’ll be running on low-power mode here at the front page until early January.

Throughout the rest of this week, we’ll be posting our games.on.net Staff Picks for 2012, and stay tuned in 2013 when we’ll roll out our 2012 Reader Awards: our annual massive hardware giveaway in which you, the readers, get to win some spectacular hardware prizes in exchange for voting for your favourite games.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff here at games.on.net for their passion and dedication, all our tireless moderators and games admins for stepping above and beyond the call of duty, and of course you, the readers, for helping to make games.on.net what it is today. On a personal note, this marks just over a year since I stepped into the job of Editor-in-Chief, and it’s been great to be a part of this amazing site and to be a part of such an important Australian gaming community. Thankyou all for putting up with my rambling nonsense!

It’s been a big year for us, and 2013 is going to be even better. We’ve got some amazing stuff waiting in the wings, and I can’t wait to talk to you about it soon. From all of us here at games.on.net, have a safe and happy Christmas, and a ridiculously good new year. Catch you on the flip-side!

Once again, we find ourselves at “that” time of year. You can almost smell it in the air, as if the whole year has been building itself up to this point.

No silly, not Christmas. The games.on.net STEAMY SECRET SANTA of course!

The Steam Sale we all love to hate to love is just around the corner, and as is tradition, I’m taking expressions of interest to make a circle of friends and acquaintances with the single aim to help spread a little random Christmas cheer through the giving of random steam gifts.

As we head into Christmas, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to iron out more and more bugs and improve the way we do things around here at games.on.net.

Today we’ve very proud to announce that we’ve rolled out a major release from our development environment — here’s some of the things you’ll notice around the place.

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Regular readers of games.on.net will notice that we often like to link to Green Man Gaming — for the simple reason that the site delivers what are nearly always the best possible prices for Australian gamers.

Now, we’ve been working with the green men to take our relationship a step further. Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve entered into an affiliate relationship with Green Man Gaming.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means cheaper games. We’ll be able to offer special deals to games.on.net members, organised directly through Green Man Gaming. And for us, it means that we’ll receive a small percentage of any sale price, that will go directly back into making games.on.net a better experience and supporting the growth of our servers and file library.

We’re very excited to be able to finally announce this, and we hope you’ll join us in supporting fair game prices for Australians, as well as supporting what we believe is one of Australia’s best gaming sites.

As a side note, until December 14 at 11:00 PM AEDT you can get 25% off nearly ever game on GMG with the following code: GMG25-CZPYL-D5MQ6 — and that’s on top of the sale prices you can see here!

Hello, friends! We’re pleased to announce that today marks the rollout of a bunch of improvements to the games.on.net site, including a proper mobile theme, as well as some various site upgrades to improve performance.

Mobile visitors will now see a slightly modified version of WPTouch, which provides slick, ultra-fast mobile browsing to anybody cranking their games.on.net from a smartphone. While this only works for the front page, we encourage anybody looking to do mobile forum browsing to grab the Tapatalk forum app for their phone of choice, as our forum is set up to support it.

Meanwhile, we’ve also deployed a jQuery UI upgrade (thanks, ginji!) and made some other various tweaks. If anything’s on fire or not working as it should be, please let us know!