For anyone who grew up in the era of cartridges, floppies, and discs -- physical media -- you'll know the nostalgic feeling of being able to loan games to friends. Pass off an Atari or NES game and let someone else play it, maybe even borrow one of theirs in return. Those times died with the advent of online distribution and the obsessive approach to combating piracy. Steam is a blessing and a curse: It's got great sales, improves accessibility to games, and is a convenient form of DRM that most people can agree with; at the same time, we're putting all our eggs in one basket, support is questionable, and the DRM is still, well, DRM.

Valve announced today the Beta for Steam Tags, a new way to help players discover products. The player community and game developers now have the ability to tag games with genres, themes, and attributes.

Tags will only appear on games if a certain amount of other users have also applied that tag to a product, reducing the chance of flooding products with countless irrelevant tags. If you can't think of a tag, but agree with one that already exists, you can reapply those tags. Also, if you were thinking of tagging something less-than-friendly, swear words are automatically filtered out and will not appear.

Right then. We'll see how long that lasts.

Necrophone Games has announced that its upcoming first-person adventure-comedy game Jazzpunk will be available for purchase through Steam and other sites on February 7.

Jazzpunk is set an alternative Cold War universe that integrates cyberpunk themes and gameplay. Players assume the role of Agent Polyblank and are tasked with a variety of missions, puzzle solving, and mini-games.