I wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a ghost. That’s rude and, worse, trite — like saying “Aha!” to Steve Coogan. No, if I e.g. met a ghost rattling chains I might ask “What’s shaking?” Top gag. My problem is a short temper with ghosts. The last time jangling disturbed my sleep, I woke the whole block yelling “Hey! That’s enough of your ghost nonsense! Get outta here, you!” I’m not proud, but come on: it’s well out. With Halloween looming and spirits rising, I’d better practice patience if I’m to stay chill.
Helpfully, Valve have resurrected all past TF2 spooky events (this year’s is still to come). A few scraps with the Horseless Headless Horsemann, a little Ghost Fort, and I’ll be cool as a corpse.
“Hey, remember Team Fortress 2?” I think to myself, sometimes. I played that game every day for months, squeezing rounds into lunch breaks and evenings till eventually I lost interest. “The big updates slowed,” I explain to myself. “The steady stream of community content made each release feel like less of an event, and eventually time moved on and everyone’s focus moved elsewhere, right?” Right.
What definitely didn’t happen is that the game continued to grow in popularity indefinitely. It certainly didn’t become the third most played game on Steam, with tens of thousands playing it at any moment. Absolutely there is not a regular and regularly excellent series of free comics about it, with a fourth part that went online earlier this month. That’d be mad.
Whoa. Hey there. Sorry, I’m just coming round following the Saxxy Awards on Wednesday. I don’t even remember Thursday. There I was, seated between Morrissey and Prince, then I have a vague memory of Mozzer whipping out a hip flask that smelt like paint stripper and… nothing. It’s a blank. I don’t even know who won. I awoke in a cemetery this morning.
The Saxxies, of course, are the annual fan-voted awards for short films made in Valve’s Source Filmmaker. They’re short flicks about TF2, Portal 2, and Dota 2, but with the care Valve puts into developing characters and recording odd edge-case lines of dialogue, folks can be jolly creative.
Whoa. Hey there. Sorry, I’m just coming round following the Saxxy Awards on Wednesday. I don’t even remember Thursday. There I was, seated between Morrissey and Prince, then I have a vague memory of Mozzer whipping out a hip flask that smelt like paint stripper and… nothing. It’s a blank. I don’t even know who won. I awoke in a cemetery this morning.
The Saxxies, of course, are the annual fan-voted awards for short films made in Valve’s Source Filmmaker. They’re short flicks about TF2, Portal 2, and Dota 2, but with the care Valve puts into developing characters and recording odd edge-case lines of dialogue, folks can be jolly creative.
Each year, the Saxxy Awards rally the Source Filmmaker community together to make funny, dramatic, wonderfully-animated short films. The best time to watch those videos is when the winners have been announced and the list of submissions has been whittled down to the very best. The second> best time to watch those videos is right now, when all the submissions are in, viewable, and you can be one of the people to decide which are the very best.
In almost every strategy, management or sim game I play, I will immediately turn off the music which comes with the game in favour of my own. That means that Steam Music Player sounds like a good idea to me even if I long ago abandoned mp3s in favour of streaming. The built-in functionality, which lets you browse your music library and control playback from in-game using the Steam overlay, has just left beta after its initial announcement back in February.
To celebrate, Valve have made the soundtracks for some of their games freely available to those who own the associated games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and its Episodes, Portal, Portal 2, and the Dota 2 documentary Free to Play.
Super Time Force launched on Monday, while we were off enjoying the holiday (I sat in a park in St. Albans in torrential rain with a bottle of wine, because reasons), so have a reminder that it’s out.
The time-twisting shooty platformer’s port from Xbox is fancied-up, as one would hope. Capy Games bunged in a new mode and more levels, renamed it to make a most entertaining acronym, and also teamed up with some other folks who play loose with time, Valve. See, Super Time Force Ultra (what wags!) on Steam also has Zoey from Left 4 Dead and TF2′s Pyro and Saxton Hale.
Team Fortress 2‘s Steam Workshop is a font of creativity, introducing all manner of new models and maps to the now seven-year-old multiplayer shooter. But what if you’re tired of new guns in-game and instead want more real world materials you can stick to your wall or wrap around your meatform?
Valve are now accepting Steam Workshop submissions for proposed TF2 merchandise. Anyone can submit a design, the community will then upvote/downvote as is their wont, and then Valve will swoop in and select the most popoular few for production and distribution via WeLoveFine. As always, the original creator receives a cut of the profits, and players get new dresses to wear like the one above.
I’m three columns into this series of Oculus Rift round-ups, and it’s telling that so far I haven’t covered anything that would fit the formalist description of a game. No, I’m not getting involved in anyone’s tiresome war about Proteus or Gone Home, but sticking to a more universal whipping boy – the first-gen Oculus’ issues with readable text, usable HUDs and motion sickness. Clearly VR still being the wild west plays a major role in keeping devs from making large-scale games for it, as does there being a limited install base for now, but the real problem is getting any of this stuff past experiment status. Let’s look at some of the games which try to regardless. … [visit site to read more]
Every year Valve hold the Saxxy Awards to encourage and round-up the very best Source Filmmaker creations, and every year the submissions are almost solely set inside the Team Fortress 2 universe. That’s perhaps because they’re Valve’s most expressive characters and because TF2′s manic world is most easily bent towards drama and comedy, but for the just-announced 4th annual Saxxy Awards, Valve are encouraging submissions from other games. Mainly: Portal 2.