A free Portal-themed set of cosmetic items and flourishes will arrive in Rocket League [official site] tomorrow. There are gel trails for your nitro boosts, cake hats and decals, and heart-breaking Companion Cube antennae. There’s plenty more along those lines as well, and it’s all free, but I’m perhaps unfairly disappointed by the lack of actual portals. I hadn’t even considered how amazing it would be to attach a portal to the area above my own goalmouth, causing stray shots that enter to emerge right by the opponent’s goal. And if the cars could dash through portals as well? Beautiful chaos.

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Scammers! They’re everywhere nowadays. Cheats! Hackers! Frauds! Phoneys! These rogues and more want your precious wizard hats and shark guns, to plunder your Steam account of its cosmetic goodies and steal them away for their own nefarious ends. CS: GO guns and Dota 2 wizard hats can be worth a lot of money, you know. Valve are sick of folks doing this, and probably sick of the headaches it creates for their support department. To reduce this, they’re soon adding trade holds that’ll hold things up by a few days – unless both parties are using the Steam app‘s Mobile Authenticator.

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When is a ban not a ban? That’s a question which cropped up twice this weekend as League of Legends team Jin Air Green Wings and Smite team EnVyUs each passed up an opportunity to ban a character from a competitive match.

No-bans or skipped bans happen in the phase before the main game starts. At this point the teams are working out which characters their team will play and which to remove from play. Choosing NOT to remove something is vary rare but it does happen. It’s well worth trying to understand what’s going on in those scenarios, whether it’s to unpick the strategic thought behind them or to nod sagely over the capacity for humans to make terrible blunders on the global stage. So let’s take a closer look at no-bans, what they are and how you can use them to your advantage:

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“Laughter is the best medicine,” say people who are about to discover laughter actually makes a broken nose worse. Laughter’s pretty okay, though, as are other emotions – and creative mediums can help stimulate them. Valve have rolled out the red carpet (it smells rusty?) for the year’s finest Source Filmmaker machinima, little films mostly starring Valve characters, declaring which are the bestest best so you too can easily experience such human emotions as Action, Comedy, Drama, Short, and Extended.

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Each year, Valve honour the finest Source Filmmaker creators with an imaginary gold statuette of a shirtless imaginary man with chest hair in the shape of imaginary country Australia. Ah, the Saxxy Awards! Saxxy season is upon us once again, and you – yes you! – can join movers, shakers, and thinkfluencers like Steven CP_Steelberg and Shia LaBadlands. Valve have opened up public voting on submissions to whittle down entrants to the finalists, so you can watch and vote on machinima shorts to your hearts’ content.

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The special seasonal event modes Valve create for Dota 2 [official site] are slightly less novel now that all and sundry can make their own modes, but Valve’s are always jolly fancy. If you fancy a good Spooky Week spooking, venture into their the Haunted Colosseum. Diretide begone! Haunted Colosseum is a 5v5 point capture mode in a new map with deadly traps and nasty pumpkinmonsters, and it’s out now.

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Sell your pumpkin heads! Team Fortress 2‘s [official site] Halloween event has launched. Scream Fortress runs from now through till November 11th, comes with a new comic, and introduces themed items, maps, taunts and an event that lets you win items from all previous Halloween events – presumably tanking the market for them in the process.

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If you were a Mega Driver back in the day (or Genesis-er if you live Stateside) then you’ll know Sonic 2 was the best Sonic. The original Sonic the Hedgehog introduced the concept and set the tone, whilst Sonic 3 tried too hard with its dodgy boss melodies and pain-in-the-arse bonus levels. Anything after that was mince. Sonic 2 was the sweet spot in the series.

Why is this relevant here at RPS’s House-O-PCs, I hear you ask? A ROM hacker has given Sonic something very cool from our home: an Aperture Science portal gun.

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After getting the Rick and Morty announcer pack treatment back in August, Dota 2 [official site] will receive a Fallout 4 crossover courtesy of the series’ three-armed mechanical waiter Mister Handy.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every weekday of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Not the original mod. Not Global Offensive or Condition Zero. I’m talking about Counter-Strike: Source, the remake that brought terrorists and counter-terrorists to the Half-Life 2 engine – and for some reason, was never fully embraced by the audience.

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