TF2′s Christmas update is a Big Rock one. The new Big Rock map will contain the Mecha-Engineer, expanding the roster for the Mann Vs Machine mode. Valve explain: “These Grinch-like Smissmas cakewalk destroyers can skip huge areas of the path with their teleporting ability, and also teleport other robots forward instantly with their “telling other robots about the teleporter” ability.”

There will also be new weapons. But you knew that. Right? There’s also a new comic. Hooray for holidays!

Do you fancy yourself a go-getter? Someone with big, earth-shaking ideas and the wide-eyed capacity to realize them? Well then, go save/destroy the world, you mad genius, you. But for everyone else, Valve’s now offering the opportunity to salvage your savaged entrepreneurial dreams. By selling hats, naturally. Yes, the real-money-based Steam Community Market‘s now open for business, and Team Fortress 2′s its all-too-willing test bed.

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Sometimes, modding is a delicate, subtle art – its inspirations many and nuanced, and its results unexpectedly evocative. It’s akin to the flap of a butterfly’s wings – barely even a whisper on the wind, yet capable of breathing pollen-dappled life into countless fields and genres. Other times, modding’s about taking one crazy and thing and cramming it into another crazy thing to make a third, orders of magnitude crazier thing. Which brings us to a completely insane Binding of Isaac mod for Team Fortress 2. The objective, so far as I can tell, is to do normal TF2 stuff (teamwork, friendship, murder) while also dealing with an onslaught of decidedly un-bound bosses. It looks completely wild. Traverse the break’s treacherous dungeons to check it out.

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What happens when you put Notch, Gearbox, Yogscast, Day[9], Bethesda, Valve and more in a room together? You’ll find out soon in a new release from Vivid Video. (DON’T Google that if you don’t already know what it is and/or are being observed by anyone). What about when you just put them in a virtual room? Well, then they play a Team Fortress 2 match for charity. (more…)

By way of careful study and hundreds of hours of naturalistic observation, I’ve ascertained that some PC gamers actually don’t> like Windows 8 all that much. Which – in retrospect – seems like a pretty tremendous waste of my time, because it was punch-me-in-the-eyeball obvious all along. But while everyone else becomes vocally enraged, outraged, and other directions of rage, Valve’s actually trying to do something about it. The king of swing (and also PC gaming) is pushing to build Linux into a viable gaming platform with Steam for Linux, and now, it’s taken the oh-so-crucial step of, you know, letting said masses use it.

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This year’s Team Fortress 2 Halloween event has been stripped of its cobwebbed shrouds and revealed to be one of supernatural shenanigans: there will be spells, there will be zombies, there will be spooky achievements, and there might owls. (I can’t tell if that’s just for illustrative purposes.) Relevantly: there’s a new King Of The Hill mode featuring a wizard, and a new Man Vs Machine mode where the robots are “800″ zombies, which is called Wave 666. Both look enticing, in a “don’t touch that green glow!” sort of way.

You can read more about it here. And there’s a comic here. And the event kicks off today. Good luck, freemarines!

Valve are looking for community prop makers to furnish the shooter’s October update. From the Team Fortress 2 blog:

Scariness doesn’t just happen, people. It’s serious business. That’s why we’re giving you until October 1st to fill the Steam Workshop with horrifying Halloween-themed cosmetic items. If you’re not an item-making sort of person, you can still keep busy. Why not visit the workshop and rate other people’s Halloween-themed items? Rating terrifying items will also help you build up your resistance to being scared before we unleash this year’s Scream Fortress update.

Thanks to everyone who sent this link in. Now make us some hats.>

I finally managed to dodge the queues and get some mano-a-machino time in with Mann Vs Machine, the new game mode for Team Fortress 2. Valve have remixed their combative cartoon shooter so the warring Red and Blu teams are fighting together against a robotic horde. It’s hard. So very, very hard. > (more…)

Just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in again. I’d uninstalled TF2 and everything was going well: other games were getting attention, my girlfriend showed me this thing called ‘Outside’, that didn’t have people setting me on fire or asking me to give them stuff, and then Valve announced Mann Vs Machine. I could just give it a try, yes? I can always uninstall it? I knew I was lying to myself, but it needn’t matter: it’s not like I’ve managed to get into a game. (more…)

Here we go! After years of speculation, Valve have finally taken the wraps off a recently-hinted new mode and third faction for their game of ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatboomdead.

‘Mann vs Machine‘ brings a co-op horde mode to Team Fortress 2, as five players battle legions of robots shaped in the image of TF2′s familiar classes. They are the Gray Horde, and they’re there for you to kill in incredible numbers. “Band together to survive all of the robot waves in a variety of missions to earn incredible loot and unlock new achievements,” it says here. And you get to do that from August 15th. That being tomorrow. Here’s a trailer for the new mode. It is a good trailer. It has good music. It has a Heavy with a head of steel. It has the suggestion of an enormous> foe. It has me thinking “this is probably a very smart way to get people (back) into the game who’ve been put off by the all-knowing frenzy of the devout playerbase.” It also has me thinking “AI officially in TF2? Someone’s going to do fascinating things with that, eh?” (more…)