Hello everyone, and welcome to another exciting episode of “It’s A MOBA But…”! Today’s mystery game is Battleborn! It’s coming from that Borderlands gang Gearbox Software, and certainly not to be confused with Bethesda’s BattleCry, From Software’s Bloodborne, or Battlezone. Now we’re all settled, our first round is, as ever, Name That Twist! So, is Battleborn’s twist:

a) destructible voxel terrain,b) a first-person view,or c) it’s a roguelike?

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It’s like they say, Internet gonna Internet. Thanks to a new and very good Mario Kart, kart racing is once again all the rage these days, and Dota 2 is more popular than all the cool kids in high school put together>. What happens when you combine the two? It’s called Dota Dash, and it looks like it works maybe a little. Apparently, however, there’s still a whoooooole lot of work to be done. Video below.

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“Furion’s playing rat doto” – four words full of meaning to the well-informed Dota 2 player but to most people, half of those aren’t even words.

Valve’s Dota 2 tournament The International later this month will be by far the highest-paying digital sports competition yet, with a prize pool currently sitting at $10,466,388. It’ll also be the most confusing digital sports competition. What a weird game Dota is. But the pageantry and big numbers will surely lure in the curious and confused, so Valve are planning a special commentary stream aimed at newcomers.

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Every dog has its day, but can the same be said of mods? For every celebrated success story there are twice as many polished, lovingly crafted amateur works that never found the audience they deserve. NeoTokyo is one such example: a Half-Life 2 mod set in a near future Tokyo inspired by Ghost In The Shell. It had lush, detailed maps, a soundtrack of “brooding cyberpunk electronica” (Spotify, Bandcamp) that one listener (Alice) called “redonc”, and combat mechanics that one player (me) called “tops guns.”

Five years after its original release, NeoTokyo is now available as a standalone install via Steam. It’s still free and mostly unchanged since its last major update in January 2013, but hopefully this brings a new audience to the game. Perhaps every mod does have its day. Trailer below.

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How long is it before everyone copies Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update structure? The latest addition to the venerable multiplayer shooter is called Operation Breakout, and it adds six new maps for everyone to play for free. For those willing and able to pay $6, you then get a now-familiar bundle of upgrades including access to mission drops with the chance to unlock “45 exclusive weapon finishes”, a Challenge Coin which tracks your achievement-y ‘mission’ progress, and a new weapon case containing new community designs.

Given how most other games split their multiplayer communities by selling the maps directly, and given how that split is bad even for the developers, surely it’s only a matter of time before we’re covering our Battlefield and Call of Duty weaponry with paid-for and unlockable stickers and baubles. More details on the update and its maps below.

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It’s day two of Team Fortress 2′s latest hyper-elaborate update, Love and War. Yesterday we got love in the form of dances and other taunts/expressions, but today, well, I’ll just let Futurama handle this one. This isn’t just any old regular war – the sort you might find at the bottom of the bargain bin at your local War Mart – though. No, no, this war has, um, bread. Oozing green teleporter-mutated bread, because Team Fortress 2′s sense of humor is nothing if not incredibly> specific. You will find deet meats for this information sandwich below.

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A mysterious countdown? Some teams? A fortress? I’m not sure if there’s a soul in the world who doesn’t> know what this means by now: new Team Fortress 2 update. The latest multi-day reveal-stravaganza is called Love and War, and it’s kicked off its grim march not with new weapons or maps or colors other than red and blue, but rather, um, dancing. Also other expressions that will allow you to wordlessly communicate with and/or taunt your fellow players. There’s a new short film below, and it’s Valve’s longest ever, clocking in at a whopping 15 minutes. The topic? Inevitable, creeping death. Cheery!

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Valve games have become more and more dependent on the Steam Workshop for introducing new content and fuelling play. That’s never more the case than in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is as much about unlocking, buying and trading gun skins as it is familiar CT vs. T battles. So it’s interesting to see how Valve deal with copyright infringement within that community. After receiving a DMCA takedown notice about two items, the M4A4 | Howl and a community sticker named Howling Dawn, those items have been swiftly removed from the store and action taken against its creators.

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One problem with using Let’s Plays and livestreams to fill video game-shaped longings in my life when I can’t summon the will to actually play one myself–and there may be several problems with this–is that so many are terrible. While good players or good performers can be genuinely entertaining, if they’re not I can’t pretend I’m not trying to fill a gaping emotional hole with ‘content’ and human voices. So huzzah! Twitch is tapping its Steam connection to use magical metadata so viewers can find the good stuff, starting with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

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Evolve is the next game from original Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock, and that alone should be enough to turn an eye or two or however many you happen to have. I was a giant firebreathing space mutant recently, so I can’t judge. I got to go hands-on with Evolve’s second batch of Hunters and gameplay options, and I came away with opinions. Powerful ones, beastly thoughts that couldn’t be caged by mere words alone. So I made this video for you instead. Watch it below.>

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