Valve’s in-game TF2 item store is about to become an out-of-game item store. They’re trialling something called Steam Trading, which primarily involves swapping your TF2 unlocks (i.e. those damnable hats, mostly) for other games.

It’s an old-fashioned barter system in new-fangled clothes. What happens is you invite someone on your Steam friends list or who you’re in a group chat with to trade, and can offer up your various TF2 items to the other guy. In return, he or she can offer you other TF2 items – or to gift a game to you. You can’t do this with any old game in your Steam library – only games you’ve purchased from the store as a gift, or received as an Extra Copy.
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The internet’s appetite for dressing up as videogame characters and acting out the activities we usually play on screen is boundless, as is evidenced by this rather high-quality live action Team Fortress 2 video. It’s a familiar tale of sapping a sentry gun. The film was made by some chaps called Corridor Digital. Go watch, below.
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Well, that was quick. Only the other day, rockets were spotted in assorted Team Fortress 2 maps, and now Soldiers everywhere are tooled up with sci-fi weapons designed by the special-effects geniuses at WETA Workshop. (You may have seen their work in movies like Lord of the Rings, Avatar, King Kong, and about half the other blockbusters in recent years.) Read this comic to see their discovery, and visit the Mann Co. store to witness the might of Dr. Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators, and the inevitable hat that goes with them.

But, we hear you ask, what are> Dr. Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators?

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Another mystery is why it just took me five> tries to spell ‘mystery’ correctly. A better msytery is why some new and rather large new scenery objects have started showing up in selected Team Fortress 2 maps. They look like rocket ships, or possibly just rockets – but what do they mean>? I put ‘mean’ in italics there, so it would sound like I was whining like a pitiful child who wants everything nownownow. Did it work?
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Valve have posted an bunch of the outtakes from Meet The Medic over on the TF2 blog. These are genuine outtakes, and are animated storybaord mock ups and rough animated sequences, rather than the “comedy” outtakes that the animated films now so often bookend their credits with. Valve explain some of the process behind the decisions made, and how the story told in the final movie came to be: “Instead of the medigun we’d explain the origin of the ubercharge, giving us a chance to explore the Heavy and Medic’s relationship a bit, not to mention a few gross-out surgery gags. Better yet, this new opening segued into our big finish far better than our old story ever had: The significance of the big ubercharge moment had some dramatic heft to it now. Even the doves were now explained, instead of just being a neat visual effect.”

I’ve posted Meet The Medic below, just in case you needed cheering up.
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Over the last few years, Valve have been quietly honing the fine art of viral marketing in an online age, and comics have been a big part of that. A cartel of in-house writers and the excellent pencils of Michael Avon Oeming (and others) have created some rather splendid words’n'pictures. Of course, they were merely digital. HOW DARE YOU INSULT OUR EYEBALLS WITH YOUR CRUMMY JPEGS? Why, that’s for philistines> and people too damned lazy to turn paper pages. This horrendous oversight and offence to everything that some angry guy somewhere probably holds dear is about to be corrected, thanks to a hardback compilation of Valve’s various Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 comics due from august comic publisher Dark Horse later this year.
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I’ve spent most of the weekend playing Team Fortress 2. I haven’t done that in years.

I hadn’t intended to. Team Fortress 2 exploded into my life as a near-obsession back in 2007. Playing almost every evening, hour after hour into the night, even dreamed about it during the height of the passion. I used to wander around the maps on my own in private servers just to look at the artistry of the world, and watched countless hundreds of YouTube videos of how-to jump videos and devastating frag runs when not actually playing the damned thing. But then, as always with multiplayer shooters, I fell away from the servers, and as with all the other competitive games that came before it, I became a stranger.

Team Fortress 2 has gone free to play, in a typically Valvian rug-from-under-our-feet move. While superficially a bit of a shock (albeit one a few people guessed), at the same time it makes perfect sense. Some four years down the line, ongoing sales of the game were surely pretty minimal, making the only real options to restore Team Fortress’s big money-making potential either to move onto a sequel or larger, paid upgrade packs. Neither of these would have been popular with the fanbase (which isn’t the same as saying the fanbase wouldn’t have bought them, of course. You know you would have).

The other reason for the free-to-playisation, I half suspect, is getting there before someone else did.
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Hot on the heels of free: a comedy short. It’s Meet The Medic, which I’ve posted below. It’s the tender tale of the medical relationship between the medic and the heavy. It features pigeons doves, severed heads, dodgy accents, blood, blood, and a broken heart.

The details of the Medic update are here. He’s getting a new gun, a new Ubercharge, and an ability to see enemy health.
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Not exactly a surprise, because we’re the geniuses who called it earlier in the week. Valve have made Team Fortress 2 free to play. The future is free.

Announcement trailer below.

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