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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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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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…)

The internet has too many wonderful things to look at. Stop it, internet! Stop having too many wonderful things! The sad consequence of this is that we’re sometimes a little late at showing you particular wonderful things, such as this wonderful stop-motion, papercraft animation of wonderful Half-Life and wonderful Half-Life 2 by the wonderful Stepan Yurov. They’re quite wonderful. Wonderfully, you can watch them both below. How wonderful! (more…)

It’s hard not to think that musical blocks weren’t added to Minecraft with the sole intention of ensuring a trillion new YouTube videos that we all can’t resist posting. Double that down with the internet’s endless love for Portal’s Still Alive (how will they ever compete with that in Portal 2?), and you’ve got a post that has to be there first thing on a Monday morning to correctly start your week. And this isn’t a half-arsed job. Incredibly only taking five or six hours to put together, this is a remarkable piano rendition of the Coulton song.

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How is everyone fixed for some shooting of men from around 7pm GMT on Sunday 16th? We shall play Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

The Team Fortress 2 Server: 85.236.100.107:27315, and you can find the RPS BFBC2 server by searching for “Rock”. I’ll create some Steam group event reminders and see you lot there.

Also, a splendid, selfless community type has volunteered a server for some games of Warsow. Anyone interested in that (for another night)?

The other day I was thinking about games in which you would occasionally fall out of the bottom of the map. San Francisco Rush was good for that, on the console toys. You could spill out of the map and race around in infinite pale green. “I remember when games used to be full of glitches,” I thought to myself. And then I saw Portal completed in ten minutes and realised that they still are. You just need to find them.

In other news: Why would you find them? > Unless you were playing Söldner! or something, where that was the point of playing it. Ten minutes of your life below. Imagine what that means in minutes of his> life. (more…)

Valve have announced the new Team Fotress 2 beta: “As you’ve probably seen by now, we like to change things in Team Fortress 2. A lot. And while we’re perfect most of the time, we occasionally get something wrong. One reason for this is we just don’t get enough data from internal play testing, and another is that we spend too much time watching Tom Bui serenades on Youtube.”

It seems that with the game being patched so regularly, a beta phase of the game is going to need to run, concurrent with the latest version. More info on the official blog, and forum pages here.