A post on the official Saints Row: The Third site reveals that the PC version will come with exclusive character customisation options, including free, bonus "oversized bobblehead masks" of Team Fortress 2 characters. They haven't released any pictures of the new items yet, but if they're anything like the mental image I have of a giant, grinning Heavy mask, they'll be brilliant. The new trailer above unveils Burt Reynolds, too. Which is a bit of a spoiler, but if Burt Reynolds is in your game, it's hard not to shout about it. Saints Row looks great, and is only a couple of weeks away. It's out in the US on November 15 and on November 18 in Europe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8H1RjjoGKs

There's more to the Team Fortress 2 Halloween Update than we first thought! It seems that equipping the entire Tin Soldier costume gives the wearer new lines of dialogue, and they're as hilarious as ever. Check the video for the full voice set. Thanks to ThisGuy_83 for the tip off!

Have you noticed any other mysterious bonuses readers? Let us know in the comments!

Quick, open your Team Fortress 2 backpack! We just checked ours and found great big shiny cauldrons inside. Upon opening our cauldrons, we all found a seal mask, for some reason, and a few of us gained some extra accessories, including some gleaming arm-pipes for my Soldier. YES. It's all part of the Halloween Update, which kicked off today. Did you get a cauldron? What's inside?

The Team Fortress 2 halloween update is here! Do you like eyeballs? Of course not. Kill a giant, evil one now as part of the Team Fortress 2 Halloween Update. The map, Viaduct, is now haunted by the Demoman's lost peeker, and is now called Eyeaduct! If that's too much terror for one sentence, here are a few reassuring comments from the Team Fortress 2 blog to calm your nerves.

"There will be no ENORMOUS HAUNTED EYEBALL to terrorize you around an island filled with tons of SECRET LOOT, and a GIANT SKULL!"

"There will be approximately zero percent chance of you getting your trembling hands on a spooky costume FOR EVERY CLASS!"

Phew! Read on for a list of terrifying features that definitely haven't been added as part of the Team Fortress 2 Halloween update. There's a comic, too, explaining the origins of the entirely non-existent giant evil eyeball.

Halloween 2011 Event

Viaduct has been haunted and is now... Eyeaduct!
One full multi-piece costume set has been added for each class
Random gifts containing costume pieces drop in Eyeaduct on registered servers
2 new Halloween 2011 achievements
Any unusual hats uncrated during the event will be Halloween-themed
New Halloween-themed items are available in the Mann Co. store, but only for a limited time!
Updated effects for The Cow Mangler 5000
Updated in-game abuse reporting tool to include option for reporting abusive game servers
Added mapcycle_halloween containing all Halloween event maps
Fixed team colors and styles not updating properly in store previews
Fixed bug in reputation trend status display for registered servers
Fixed a problem that could cause repeated stutters after joining a server
Fixed the Spine-Chilling Skull not appearing when equipped by soldiers
New Halloween-themed community-created items submitted to the Workshop are now available in the Mann Co. store!

 

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave a fascinating insight into the pricing experiments Valve have been running with Steam at the WTIA TechNW panel in Seattle recently, revealing that Team Fortress 2's shift to free to play quintupled its player base.

During the course of the seven minute aside, covered on Geekwire, Newell also revealed that the conversion rate of the number of free players who go on to buy something is "20 to 30 percent" for Team Fortress 2, much higher than the 2-3% conversion rate seen by other free-to-play games.

Newell said that he thinks the announcement of Team Fortress 2 as a "free-to-play" game, and not just outright "free" was part of TF2's successful shift of payment model, perhaps underestimating the power of the raw, uncontrollable human drive to acquire and hoard sweet new hats.

"Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have," Newell said, suggesting that the implication that a free-to-play Team Fortress 2 would exist as a continuing service was a key motivation for new players.

It's likely that Valve's reputation for providing free updates and ongoing support was even more of a factor than the "free-to-play" label, but Newell admits that Valve are generally stumped by their observations. As an example, Newell commented on the remarkable but confusing success that Valve saw early on with Steam sales, saying "we do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40.

"Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40, Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."

"We don’t understand what’s going on," he added. "All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us."

Team Fortress 2 players are currently gearing up for the incoming Halloween Update, which among other things, is sure to add new hats.

The Team Fortress 2 Halloween Update is fast approaching, the first since it went free to play earlier this year. To prepare new players for the sheer terror of the annual TF2 event, Valve are recommending that players return to the Mann Manor map to battle last year's boss monster, the Horseless Headless Horseman. They also indicate that the TF2 modding community has started their own unofficial Halloween event, a week long Night of the Living Update.

The modders' update is set in a haunted house. A different room is revealed every night, revealing of some of the great item models we mentioned in our look at the Steam Workshop, including the brilliant Mad Science pack for the Engineer. They can be downloaded as reskins for existing weapons, and the Steam forums post announcing the event suggests that many of the items in this "fake" update might even see their way into the "real" one." Valve say that the "real one" is going to arrive sometime this week. But they won't say quite when, because it's Halloween, and they are masters of suspense.

Among the many additions made by the recent Manniversary update for Team Fortress 2, the Steam Workshop may well turn out to be the most important. The Workshop is a hub that lets community item creators show off their creations so that they can be rated by other players. The best ones rise to the top, where they can be cherry-picked by Valve for inclusion in the game.

If you haven't had chance to browse some of the community-made items vying for dominance, it's well worth doing so. We've picked out some of our favourite items, including an umbrella-gun for the Spy, a beserk rocket launcher for the Soldier, and a couple of wonderfully mad Engineer packs.



The Mobile Engineer Pack

The Mobile Sentry Gun is deservedly the very highest rated item on the Steam Workshop right now. The model for the Engineer's shoulder-mounted cannon is fantastic, but it also forms part of a larger pack that includes designs for a number of different shoulder cannons, and a bionic hat made up of infra-red vision equipment.
 
 


The Bird's Eye Bomber

The physics of the Bird's Eye Bomber don't make any real-world sense, but it's just the sort of mad contraption you could imagine the Soldier endorsing enthusiastically. The idea is that a secondary rocket can be fired downwards for easy rocket-jumping, and to bombard foes below as you fly overhead. Perfect for Soldiers obsessively seeking air superiority.
 



The Aristocratic Assassin Spy Umbrella

The best part of this inventive pack gives the Spy a gun hidden inside an umbrella. For some reason the vision of a Spy running around with an umbrella just works, and it gets even better when you discover that the Spy can open it up to break long falls. Watch this video of a Spy doing just that. It's like Mary Poppins. If Mary Poppins was French. And a trained killer.
 
The Frankenstein Curios Engineer Pack



Nothing suggests mad science more effectively than a brain in a jar. The Frankenstein Curios pack for the engineer contains a fantastic sentry gun powered by one such brain.

Items are submitted to the Steam Workshop without rules attached. When Valve adopt a new weapon, they decide how it will work in a way that hopefully won't unbalance the game. That leaves the doors wide open for speculation on this one. What attributes would you give to a sentry gun that has a brain? There's also a brain-powered shotgun and a Mr. Freeze style dome helm that makes the Engineer look genuinely quite menacing. See for yourself in this video of the pack in action.





Best accessories

These items should nicely fill the extra spare accessories slot that Valve added in the latest update. They wouldn't necessarily have any effect on the game, but who's pass up on a chance to carry around a pair of Spy voodoo dolls? There's a hilarious moustache for the Heavy. We're unsure whether it's supposed to turn him into Stalin or Freddie Mercury, but damn, what a 'tache.

Have you had a chance to browse the Steam Workshop? Got any favourite items of your own? Can you think of any good rule-sets for the items above? Let us know in the comments.
 

A monster update has hit Team Fortress 2 to celebrate the first birthday of the Mann-Co store, which started selling hats and weapons to players almost exactly one year ago. The Manniversary update adds new community-made items, Portal 2 style high five taunts, a new map called Gullywash, slow motion and shaky-cam for replays, customisable load-out presets for each class, the Steam Workshop community item hub and extra miscellaneous item slots that will let you live the Abe Lincoln dream and wear a hat AND a beard at the same time.

The typically hilarious Manniversary Update page mentions that community item makers have earned two million dollars in total so far from item sales in the Mann-Co Store. The Steam Workshop hopes to encourage people to make even MORE items. If you've made a hat, you can submit it to the workshop, and it'll be rated by players and Valve. The best items then stand a chance of making it into the full game. Then, profit! Team Fortress 2 is the only game listed in the Steam Workshop for now, but it looks as though the system is designed to support other games in future.

The new weapons and the taunt are now on sale in the Mann-Co store, and many items are on sale as part of the Manniversary festivities. You'll now also be able to try out each item for six days before buying. The weapon will land in your backpack, and look and act exactly like the fully purchased version, then after six days it'll make like Keyser Soze and drive a fast car outta town, unless you throw down cash, of course.

Log in to TF2 now and you'll receive a Manniversary crate with a free gift inside. If you're curious about making items for Team Fortress 2, check out Valve's guide to creating an item, and their recent blog post detailing the creation of the skull cap. TF2 went free to play earlier this year, and we think it's better than ever. Read our Team Fortress 2 review to find out why, and check out our look back over the last year of Mann-Co madness.

As reported on Gamasutra, a bunch of Valve's writers have been taking part in a roundtable question and answer session at GDC Online.

Read on for some insight from some of the most talented writers in the industry.

Valve might be famous for its use of silent protagonists but according to Mark Laidlaw, one of the writers at Valve, it can be a restrictive on a studio's creativity: "Now that some of Valve's most popular protagonists are silent, there’s no turning back. “At this point we’re fully committed to it and taking it as far as it possibly could go.”

Eric Wolpaw, another writer at Valve, also provided some insight. Referring to Valve's hugely successful free to play game, TF2, he said: “that whole game is us desperately trying to keep our jobs."

“Comedy stuff is tougher because it’s more subjective and it’s really hard to gauge peoples’ reaction," he said. Wolpaw added that sometimes it’s a bit depressing, when people playtest a part in a game that’s supposed to be funny, and there's little reaction. “Pretty much no one that played Portal 2 cracked a smile, but testers still said the game was funny... It’s hard to tell if a joke is failing or not.”

Laidlaw was equally humble when referring to his own work: “We fail all the time, we just don’t advertise it too much...we always want to feel like we’re on the edge and challenging ourselves and growing all the time.”

What's your favourite example of writing in games? Let us know in the comments.

Let's be honest, Dungeon Defenders does not look like an iPhone port. We mean that in the nicest possible way. But the multiplayer tower defence game was originally on iPhone. And the PC conversion will let you play with iPhone users when it gets released next week. Weird eh?

Pre-order Dungeon Defenders and, as is tradition these days, you'll get a bunch of Valve goodies in-game including The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device for the Huntress hero class and four Team Fortress 2 familiars. We're not familiar with how familiars work yet, but their roles sound very familiar...

The Heavy uses his Gatling gun to shoot at enemies from afar, The Engineer repairs groups of nearby towers while you’re on the offensive, the Medic heals nearby allies and the Pyro sets dudes on fire with a flamethrower.

Dungeon Defenders lets you defend your dungeon as one of four classes, which range from ranged sharp-shooters to magic users and close-up, bashy sorts. Killing invaders lets you level up and gather materials with which to forge more powerful weapons. You can show those off in four-player PvP and survival co-op modes to earn bonus experience XP and GLORY. It's out on October 19, and will cost £9.99 / $14.99. It's now available to pre-order on Steam at a 10% discount.