There are now more gaming-related fundraising schemes for victims of the natural disaster in Japan than it’s possible to enumerate. Hopefully all have been of some use, even the ones that seemed to involve more than a little self-promotion en route.

Now it’s Valve’s turn to stretch some fanbase muscle: via the quiet microtransaction giant that is Team Fortress 2, they’ve weaved a limited edition set of hats and noise makers, all proceeds from which will go to the Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts in the suffering nation.
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If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that your copy of Left 4 Dead 2 would start updating. This is to add in the beta for a new campaign, Cold Stream. It has a few bugs, but that’s why God gave us betas. Wow, that’s such a succinct news story I need to add another.

If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that it would have updated to change its voice chat technology. As anyone who’s ever used Steam Voice will know, it wasn’t exactly as good as it could have been. It’s now been replaced with SILK, an audio codec developed by the Skype peeps, with what I like to call a “dynamic bit rate protocol”, meaning it can vary its bandwidth up to 30kbps (twice as much as Steam Voice would use.) Valve adds that the voice chat connectivity and reliability has also been improved, which is mighty fine news as we were increasingly finding ourselves opting for using non-Steam chat when playing together. Isn’t that all smashing?

I have no idea what to make of this, other than happiness. With confusion. Someone has taken Heywood Banks‘ song Toast, clearly performed live on an American radio programme, and animated it in TF2, and stuck it on Break.com. It’s a year old, millions of people have already watched it. It’s old. Thing is, it’s funny. Thus: post.

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As TF2 continues its transformation into a strange hybrid of Pokemon and ultra-death, another game has revealed exclooooosive in-game items for willing pre-orderers.

In this instance, it’s Total War: Shogun 2 or Shotgun: Total War 2 or Total Shogun 2: War or whatever the hell the naming order is now. There are eight different hats and Japanese-themed killing tools to be had if you punt some money Steam’s way for CA’s upcoming RTS, and they’re available as of today. Looks like you can also buy them separately if you like, too. How many hats are in the game now? All the hats, I guess.

The full list of items and a couple more pics are below, hat-fans.
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Aw, bless. I share the below video not because it gives much away in terms of when and if we’ll see Counter-Strike 2 (though it’s certainly not a denial, which is some kind of good news at least), but because of the charming awkwardness of Gabe Newell’s reaction when asked directly in front of THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE whether Valve’s evergreen man-shooter will be sequelised any time soon…
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The latest patch for Team Fortress 2 is out, fixing one server crash exploit and added THREE new maps. Yes. But not made my Valve. No. Nightfall (seen above), Lakeside and Frontier are three accalimed community made maps, and if you’ll let me I’ll walk you through all three in turn. Nightfall by Aaron “Psy” Garcha is set in a lumber mill during a storm, just like Sawmill, though unlike Sawmill it’s a Payload Race map. What are the others? Just GIVE ME A MINUTE, wil you? We’ll get there.
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If you read one article about gaming this week (er – that isn’t on RPS. Actually, even so…), it should be Simon Parkin’s excellent investigation into Axel Gembe, the chap who notoriously stole Half-Life 2′s source code long before the game was released. Not just a document of the before and after, it also explores the young German hacker’s thinking and intentions – which may not be entirely what you suspect. It’s a strangely sad and sympathetic tale which paints those notorious headlines of 2004 in a whole new light. Especially, the suggestion that being arrested by German police before US law enforcement could get to him actually did him a huge favour – in terms of learning his lesson as well as retaining his freedom despite his crime.
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Curious. Following The Sacrifice and The Passing, Eurogamer‘s got word that Valve will be releasing a third piece of downloadable content for Left 4 Dead 2 with a new Cold Stream campaign. Cold Stream is actually a work in progress fan campaign by Matthew Lourdelet, creator of the acclaimed 2 Evil Eyes campaign. According a post on Valve’s official Left 4 Dead 2 blog, Valve have seen Lourdelet’s work so far and decided to release it in a non-story driven pack containing the other three Left 4 Dead 1 campaigns not currently in L4D2.
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Unlikely commercial crossover of the month goes to Valve and Trion Worlds, who have set up a deal whereby people who pre-order the forthcoming fantasy MMO Rift will get exclusive melee weapons in Team Fortress 2: a “Sharpened Volcano Fragment” for the pyro and the “Sun-on-a-stick” for the Scout. There’s also a new TF2 achievement being added to the game, called “Riftwalker”, which you can earn to unlock a hat based on a frightening looking head-garment (pictured) that appears in Rift.

Presumably this won’t be the last time we will see creepy hats appear as consumer-incentives in TF2.

Attention, citizens. After a couple of ooh-missus-I’ve-gone-weak-at-the-knees trailers, the Half-Life 2 fan-film starring Him Out Of Opposing Force has arrived. Twelve minutes of live-action Combine vs Resistance gritty warfare awaits you below. Striiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiderrrrrrrrrrrr! (more…)