Valve have added a replay editor to team-based FPS Team Fortress 2! Replay-enabled servers will now record matches in their entireity, allowing players to go back and cherry-pick clips, and even add “sexy motion blur”. How are Valve celebrating? With an award ceremony, naturally.
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More sites should interview mod-makers, I feel. If one of this week’s picks is anything to go by, they can have some interesting things to say. Modding might not usually be quite as huge a process as making a full-on indie game, but as a modder you face your own unique problems, ones we don’t always get to hear about. Maybe we should take note of that at RPS. Either way, read on for this week’s roundup.
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Well, this perhaps goes some way towards making up for the whole over-priced robot hats thingy. Official word has just arrived in our inbox from Valve that the first full-on DLC for the lovely Portal 2 will be free (on all platforms), and promises “new test chambers for players, leaderboards, challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes, and more.” That news again: free. The list of planned content also suggests there’ll be something a little more challenging than in the main game (the arguable ease and signposting of which we had a slight but affectionate moan about in our verdict yesterday), and a chance to really push Portal 2′s crazy physics as far as they’ll go.

A smart move in terms of goodwill generation, I suspect, and hopefully it’ll be top-notch content too. No exact release date yet, but it’s “this Summer”. Doesn’t Summer start on Monday? Maybe it will be Monday! (It won’t be Monday).

Things that are good + LEGO = Happiness. It’s a sum we were all taught in school, and it’s as true today as it ever was. So when a clever person, Catsy [CSF], builds a customised GLaDOS and Chell out of LEGO, I’m so sold. Have a look at a couple of the splendid results below.

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In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
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Okay, what. All this diligent, web-wide meta-potato-harvesting to apparently> get Portal 2 unlocked early, and now something’s gone all weird, just when the end was in sight. The GLaDOS@home site is showing the work so far seeming being undone at a rate of knots. We don’t know why, we don’t know the result. But we damned well hope people haven’t spent money on a collection of indie games purely because they thought it would win them early access to Portal 2 that they now may not get.

On the other hand 1) the site now lists ’9 test subjects’ as having been found and 2) the chaps on the ValveARG site are claiming the G-Man can be seen in the background… No. C’mon. We’re being gamed, right? That one’s been removed already, which I take to mean it was trolling by someone. Unsurprising, given its lack of subtlety. Additional: the ’9′ appears to be the ARG’s most successful players being taken to Valve to play the game.

While the GLaDOS@Home distributed potato-collecting event is still ongoing, hints are emerging that there may be even more to come following its conclusion. Portal 2 being released early is the apparent plan, but could there be something more?

The latest Steamcast (an unofficial fan radio show) apparently aired with a brief Morse Code signal playing over the chatter, which the hosts claim to have been unaware of. You can hear it for yourself below and ponder upon its authenticity, but if it’s real this is what it says:” it’s not over the others have been compromised.”

Ah.
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Cripes. You may remember us reporting that as of some two weeks ago, Valve were selling a variety of hats and noisemakers in Team Fortress 2 with prices ranging from $0.49 to $100 (that’d be the one on the right, there) in the name of raising money forAmerican Red Cross’s disaster relief fund for Japan. Those items vanished from the game’s Mann Co. store on Wednesday last week, but Valve have today reported on the official Team Fortress 2 blog that fans bought a total of $430,543 and 65 cents’ worth of stuff. Good work, gamers!

To mark the occasion, I’ve arranged for Sambomaster to play us out after the jump.
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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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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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