The thing about special Halloween game modes is that they’re fun for a round or two, then the novelty wears off. The thing about Team Fortress 2‘s Halloween mode is that there are 18 of them.

Ok, so only 5 of those are new – but you can also play the 13 previous Halloween events, which would be enough to last you all year if the event didn’t end on November 14th. Valve have turned to their community for the new stuff in Scream Fortress X (not a sex thing), introducing five maps with their own game modes. I’ve spent the morning fuelling ghost ships, resurrecting corpses and running away from skeletons.

It is hot messy nonsense and I’ve enjoyed myself considerably. (more…)

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Team Fortress 2 jumping. It’s a lot like normal TF2, only rather the shooting people the goal is to propel yourself skywards using explosively powered movement techniques on custom designed maps. Yeah, it’s nothing like normal TF2.

Jumpers have tournaments too though. They’ve spent the past month hopping through three separate events in the Beginnings 5 competition. With the competition now over, they’ve settled down again – and left us with some impressive aerial highlights. I’ve gathered the victors’ videos below, and got a couple of the jumpers to sit still long enough to tell me about why they do what they do.

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Then the bus EXPLODED. Hello, this is the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and we are here to talk about the best game openings and intros. Whether they are cold opens or slow burns, we love a good first impression. (more…)

Ah, the non-player character. Stoic endurer of all our sadistic whims. It s time the monsters on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, made tribute to these humble little robots, whether they re annoying companions, side characters, or disembodied human heads. Let s talk about some of our favourites. (more…)

There’s a ‘this is the pinnacle of esports’ joke right there on the table, but I’m gonna say straight up that Ready Steady Pan is an absolute mess to spectate. But what a spectacularly daft mess it is.

This is 6v6 Team Fortress 2, where everyone is only allowed to attack with frying pans and food. And urine, for some reason. The community-run “semi-competitive tournament” is nearly done accepting sign-ups for its fourth annual competition, which kicks off at the start of next week. (more…)

It strikes me as very silly that anyone is trying to declare VR a failure or a success, given that we’re still working out the most basic of control systems for it. Valve’s latest VR project is a new alternate controller for the HTC Vive called Knuckles, and by all accounts it’s a big step in the right direction, allowing complex finger motions to be tracked, on top of offering analogue sticks and buttons. To demo the new hardware, Valve put together Moondust, a Portal-themed minigame collection designed to put the new hardware through its paces.

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I love discovering subcultures that occasionally spawn from videogames, and trickjumping is a wonderful example. Give Quake players the ability to propel themselves through the air by firing rockets at their feet and a momentum-building jumping bug, and what do they do? They make custom maps and challenge each other to perform feats of aerial ballet, of course. Delightfully, that scene is still going strong nearly 20 years on in Team Fortress 2.

The Beginnings 5 TF2 jumping competition began last week, and features three different events. There’s a speedrun competition on set maps, a trickjumping competition that involves doing something impressive on any map, and – perhaps most excitingly – a live race. (more…)

The best shooters endure. While the state of the art moves on in other genres and leaves old designs in the dust, it’s as fun to fire a well-made shotgun from an early 90s FPS as from one released today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you inside.

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Not every game needs to reinvent the wheel. Or even involve themselves in this business of wheels. Sometimes you need only grab a few universally beloved things and jam them together. If you had an arena multiplayer shooter that combined the best levels of Halo with the constant world-bending of Portal and added a dash of the best parts of Overwatch, well, that’s what Wormhole Wars looks like it wants to be. And that’s what I want it to be too.

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Ready Up opens with a shot of the CS:GO grand finals at ESL One. The size of the stadium dwarfs the players on the stage, who all wear deadly serious expressions. There are thousands of people in the audience, many of them frantically waving inflatable tubes covered in sponsorship scrawls. A member of one team makes a clutch pistol play, and the room erupts in a roar of screaming and thunderous chanting. The player solemnly acknowledges the applause with a showboating chef kiss, but he doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.

Then, we change rooms. A few dozen people are sitting in front of a screen, watching their friends compete at a Team Fortress 2 LAN event. The players seem focused, yet relaxed. “Ah, I’m dead” says one of them, half-grinning at his misfortune. At the heart of the competitive TF2 scene, it transpires, is a community with bonds that transcend the tribalism you might see in other esports. I spoke to Alex “Dashner” Pylyshyn over email, who co-directed Ready Up alongside Ness Uberchain Delacroix, about the past, present and future of competitive TF2.

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