The Team Fortress 2 Engineer Update continues, building up to its end-of-week release, with the Wrangler. If you've ever wanted manual control for your sentries and a shield to protect 'em, this is the item for you.

The Engineer will swap his trusty pistol for the Wrangler, should he choose to equip it, which will hand over a sentry's automatic aiming to the player. While that may sound like a raw deal—sitting back and letting the sentry do your work for you is the whole point, right?—the Wrangler has a few pluses. When using the Wrangler, your sentry will get a fancy, damage-absorbing shield and a faster firing missile launcher.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to the Wrangler might be giving the Engie something to do. You know, instead of frantically whacking those dispensers with a wrench over and over and over and over...

The Wrangler joins the shotgun replacement known as Frontier Justice as part of the Engineer's arsenal.

Head over to the official site for your first look at "Upward", an "all-new, Valve-designed Payload map."

The Engineer Update [Team Fortress - thanks, jerkbot!]

The Engineer update in Team Fortress 2 continues. As promised, with the first 25 golden wrenches unlocked by players, a new weapon for the support class player has been unveiled by developers Valve.

It's a new shotgun called "Frontier Justice", which trades magazine size and random critical hits for ties to the Engineer's turrets; as you can see, if you mess with an Engineer's robot guns, his new shotgun will mess with you.

That's one upgrade down, two to go, with the next due for release whenever the 50th gold wrench is unlocked. Here's hoping for a turret that shoots bees.

It's Engineer Update Day One, and twenty-five lucky Team Fortress 2 Engineers have already found themselves on the receiving end of the fabled Golden Wrench, forever enshrined in the Official Wrench Log. Only seventy-five remain. Do you have the golden touch?

Now I have to be honest here: I've not been following the lead-up to the Engineer update for Team Fortress 2. I know there's something about Australians or Australium, which I approve of, and there's some sort of comic going on, plus a shotgun of some sort, but I'm really in the dark when it comes to this Golden Wrench dealie. I mean, I've seen the vid, but I couldn't tell you how to go about picking one up.

I mean, I could tell you, but I'd have to resort to lying, and we like to try and avoid making up news.

It's not that I don't like the Engineer, mind you. It just seems complicated - the sort of complicated I can easily screw up, making me look like even more of an incompetent dork in the process.

So no, I leave the Golden Wrenches to you folks, or at least the twenty-five crafting Engineers who managed to score the twenty-five given out today. If you weren't one of the lucky twenty-five, then perhaps next time you'll remember never to leave your computer when there's a Team Fortress 2 update on the way.

Engineer Update: Day One [Team Fortress 2 - Thanks Joshua!]