The voice actor for Team Fortress 2’s Soldier character died earlier this year after contracting the Covid-19 coronavirus, leading Valve to add a pretty extensive tribute to Rick May to the game. The prominent bronze memorial statues and title screen update only lasted through the month of May, but Valve have now updated the game with a smaller, permanent tribute.

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AI bots are technological marvels. To think! We’ve imbued blips and blops with a semblance of sentience, turning code into pseudo-autonomous agents that can chat as they run around a virtual world. Unfortunately, people have been using this power to spew racist bots into Team Fortress 2. Players report seeing these bots enter their games, deploy game-breaking hacks, and spam the chat with racist slurs.

Valve haven’t explicitly acknowledged the problem, but they have introduced some measures that might help.

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Half-Life: Alyx is out, and where talk of Valve and Half-Life goes, so too does Garry’s Mod follow. You know Gmod for all the silly Source games the players made with it: Prop Hunt, Trouble In Terrorist Town, Jazztronauts, and the like. Original Gmod maker and Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman has jumped on the Valve-talk train with a tease that they’re currently working on Garry’s Mod 2, which it turns out is something called Sandbox that they’ve been developing for quite a few years.

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Spooky season is upon us. I know this, in part, because someone has already covered the treehouse windows in cheap cobwebs and I can’t gaze broodingly at the completely normal, not at all unsettling events of the outside world in 2019. But the real clue is Team Fortress 2‘s Halloween event, back once more with two new maps, a buncha hats and a temporary re-opening of every Halloween event from the past eleven years.

It’s nothing special, really, beyond an excuse to dip back into backstabbing as the Spy. This is good enough for me.

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The first report arrived five days ago. Three figures: recorders in hand, cameras in beard. While we fought, they watched. Crouched in their corners. Minding their own business, scrutinising ours. We’d be hypocrites to call them hostile, but could you blame us? Nobody knows what they want.

Even I don’t, and I’m the only Team Fortress 2 player who’s managed to make contact.

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Last week, famous hat-collection game Team Fortress 2 suffered from an influx of Unusual hats. These particular cosmetics drop rarely in TF2 s loot boxes, and are equipped with particle effects, making your Scout or Pyro or whoever look especially fancy. They re also big-ticket items in the Steam trading economy. Or, they were, until a glitch meant they were guaranteed to appear in certain loot boxes, creating a glut, pushing the price down, and generally causing havoc in the markets. Valve responded last night, apologising for the bug and outlining how they re going to attempt to minimise the economic effect.

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I’m going to make Have You Played history, and do a game wot we’ve already done. I know! But this is roughly the 1054th entry (going by our terrifying spreadsheet), and Brendy said we’re allowed to revisit games if we’ve got a good reason to [I’ll let this one slide. But never again – Brendan]>. He’s already asked if you’ve played Garry’s Mod. I’m asking if you’ve played Garry’s Mod on Fretta servers.

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Most battles may be fought royalley nowadays, but some still like to fight in the olden ways. Team Fortress 2 is alive, kicking, and hosting a 6v6 tournament explicitly for beginners. It’s called the Fresh Meat Challenge 2, it begins in a couple of weeks, and if you’ve ever thought about playing competitive TF2 then you should absolutely consider signing up. I dipped my toes into those waters many years ago, and it was wild.

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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…)

Multiplayer games are the best type of games, because they’re built around the most interesting components known to humans: humans. Men, women, and an awful lot of children.

Internet strangers aren’t always the friendliest bunch, but they can surprise you in ways that a static system can’t. People form the living, beating hearts of the gaming moments I value the most. Join me, then, as I point at the games that encase those beating hearts best. (more…)