If you pre-order Deus Ex: Human Revolution on Steam, you'll receive eight new, Deus Ex-themed items in Team Fortress 2.

These items are available separately from Team Fortress 2's in-game Mann Co. Store, and through item drops and crafting.

Half of the Deus Ex items are cosmetic: Deus Specs (glasses), The Company Man (baseball cap), The Nanobalaclava (helmet - Spy only) and The Purity Fist (robotic arm - Heavy only).

The other four items affect gameplay. The Machina sniper rifle is for the Sniper class and, at full charge, adds 15 per cent damage and player-penetrating bullets. But The Machina uses exposing tracer rounds and will only go bang when zoomed.

The Diamondback hand gun (looks like a Magnum) is for the Spy. This grants a critical shot for each building destroyed with your sapper attached. But in general use, The Diamondback has a minus 15 per cent damage penalty and no chance for random critical hits.

The Widowmaker and The Short Circuit are for the Engineer. The Widowmaker (is it a shotgun?) adds 100 per cent of damage to ammo and requires no reload. But the ammo cost is expensive: -60 metal each shot.

The Short Circuit attaches to your hand and fires an electric field that damages projectiles and players. But there's chance for random critical hits and you'll lose 35 metal each shot.

Team Fortress 2 has turned free-to-play, which means you've little excuse not to at least try it. Then consider Eurogamer's recent 10/10 Team Fortress 2 re-review, and you have even fewer excuses not to dive in. Most old PCs can handle it.

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You can now trade in virtual items for other virtual items through Steam.

Steam Trading Beta lets you do that, and trade Steam gifts: games on Steam you've bought but not yet added to your Games Library.

Currently Team Fortress 2 items and Steam Gifts can be traded.

You can try it out now by going to Steam, then Settings, then opting into Steam Trading Beta.

"Now your Steam Community profile will have an item inventory, and you'll be able to view the item inventories of every public profile in the Steam community," Valve said.

You can invite people to trade through Group Chat, and trade with anyone in your Friends List who's also opted in.

To do so, you need to right click on their name and select Invite to Trade. Once the offer is accepted, a trade window will open up.

There's more on the Trading Beta FAQ.

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In the introduction to our very first Game of the Week, I wrote this: "If there's nothing at all we can recommend that week - hey, it might happen - we'll take the opportunity to highlight something from previous weeks that you (or we) might have missed."

How about something from previous years?

It's not even like there really is nothing to recommend this week. Ms. Splosion Man definitely has its fans and would be a worthy contender, right? So why am I just not feeling it?

I suppose it's the suspicion that, as Simon wrote, this sequel has simply been "freshened by lipstick and a bow". Until I read his review, I had no idea that Ms. Pac-Man was an unauthorized rip-off made without Namco's permission by its impatient distributor Midway. Sure, she's canonised now, but it's a dangerous spirit for Twisted Pixel to invoke.

Me? I returned to Gran Turismo 5 this week, after a friend told me about the Seasonal Events: effectively new single-player playlists for the racer that dole out unbelievable quantities of experience and money. That 1967 Lamborghini Miura Concept is within reach at last!

I've been having fun, and am struck by how exciting a drive Polyphony's grand folly remains. But I'm also feeling a little uncomfortable. I just need to do 30 laps of Le Mans to get my shiny new fake possession... Maybe this recovering World of Warcraft player isn't quite ready to bring the grind back into his life.

But it made me think. Most of us games writers don't stick with games long after release, because something else comes along that requires our attention. I suspect the same is true for many of you readers, being people of taste and curiosity with an insatiable hunger for everything gaming has to offer.

But few are the games that stand still now, and even in some high-profile cases like GT5, it's only those games' communities that are keeping track. In 2011, a game doesn't have to be a subscription-funded MMO to be an entirely different proposition four years down the line.

That's why, when a reader emailed us requesting a re-review of a multiplayer shooter from 2007, I was only too happy to organise it.

Team Fortress 2

"Now Team Fortress 2 has gone free-to-play, you should do a re-review of it. I came across your old review of it from 2007 and it almost reads like a review of some older, forgotten game that inspired TF2," wrote Ollie Fox.

Rich Stanton's Team Fortress 2 re-review agreed with Ollie, booting Tom's original 9 up to a 10 and dropping some other heavy numbers: 200 updates! 29 new maps!

"There isn't one game called Team Fortress 2. There are hundreds," Rich wrote. "Its famously long development time used to see it compared to Duke Nukem Forever, but that doesn't hold water any more: Duke's finished. The development of TF2 goes on and on... It understands that persistence is as much about personality as power, and is one of the most consistently surprising and inventive games you'll ever play."

Team Fortress 2 players - and sadly, that means players of the PC (and now Mac) game, which has long left the static console versions behind - don't need us to remind us how great a multiplayer shooter it is. Some would claim that all those guys playing Halo, COD and Battlefield are, in a sense, kidding, and looking at TF2's razor-sharp dynamics and never-ending fountain of free content, you can see what they mean.