Those who own Team Fortress 2 can pick up an all-important hat - and a very useful skillet - free for use in that game if they go grab Left 4 Dead 2 before 7 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday).

What's more, the game is $6.79, (roughly 6.47 times the price of freedom), so you can see, Valve's keen to sell some damn Left 4 Dead 2. Grab it and you get a trucker hat worn by Ellis, the alleged friend of Whitaker, who runs the gun shop across from Liberty Mall in L4D2. The skillet is, well, you've seen what it can do in Left 4 Dead 2.

Already own Left 4 Dead 2 and TF2 on the PC? You'll see the items show up shortly.

Free Hats! [TF2 Blog]

No longer will you have to endure hours of Team Fortress 2 play just to unlock the game's hidden weapons, defensive items and wearable accessories. Today, Valve opened the Mann Co. Store, which lets you buy goods with real-world cash.

The update not only introduces a way to buy new guns, hats and fish-wrapped-in-newspaper melee weapons, it includes the long-promised Polycount Pack update. That's the community created item sets, which add 17 new items for five of the game's classes. Players can blow real-world cash on those items starting today. Prices range from 49 cents to $4.99 USD. Funds can be deposited to the newly launched Steam Wallet.

Update: It appears that the TF2 store is full of items priced higher than $4.99 USD. Some hats run $7.49, $9.99 and even a ludicrous $17.49. Yikes.

What's not in this update? The new game mode that Valve had previously promised.

While Valve stands to profit from selling in-game items, so does the community. The in-game store FAQ notes "community contributors will receive a percentage of sales on items they've created."

The Mann Co. Store may be goods news for the lazy, but the miserly needn't be overly concerned about the change. Valve notes in its new Mann Co. Store FAQ that the Polycount Pack items are unlockable and craftable through normal means, just like other items.

Read more about the new "Mann-conomy" in the service's newly released FAQ and peruse the new item sets at the Team Fortress 2 official site to see if that five dollar Spy knife is something you'd like to buy.

Probably not a big deal, but... [TF2 Blog]

Garry Newman's crazy physics sandbox for the Source engine, the one that lets you manipulate, animate and torture characters from Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, has joined the list of Mac games on Steam.

"What's Garry's Mod?," you might be asking yourself, dear Mac owner. It's the playground with which hilarious and spectacular videos like Half-Life: Full Life Consequences, 100 Ways To Kill Yourself in Garry's Mod and epic Rube Goldberg machines are created. It's not a game; it's a tool. And, like most new Steam releases, it's cheap. Just $4.99 USD.

Newman admits the release has its share of bugs, warning and pleading that we should "please treat this as a beta release." So, buy accordingly or sit it out until Garry's Mod for Mac matures.

Also note that you're going to need at least one of these Source games to use Garry's Mod.

If you want to dive into Garry's Mod, now that you can do so at your nearest coffee shop while on your MacBook Pro, get up to speed with Machinima's handy video tutorials.

Garry's Mod [Steam]

It's a shame Lee Camara isn't making any more of these replica Team Fortress 2 weapons, because I would not just buy one, I would buy 18, and enough coloured jumpsuits to go around.

As an artist, all were made on commission for various cosplayers and Team Fortress 2 fans. Such a tease, that we got to see these four, and not a sniper rifle or medi-gun.

[Props By Fev]

Meet the Heavy and ignore, for a minute his massive weight loss instead listening to his monologue about his gun, his wonderful, wonderful to-scale gun.

Thanks to reader and cosplayer Logan Birch and a very special shout out to Sasha.

Whether you're seriously low on ammo or just want to make someone's life completely miserable, there's nothing quite like bringing a hammer, crowbar, or chainsaw to a gun fight. Here are some of our favorite gun alternatives.

Over the years, melee weapons in first-person shooters have transformed. They started off as a way to add an element of tension to the early, single-player shooters, giving players something else to worry about than the enemy. You didn't want to take on the hordes of hell with only your fist...well, not at first.

With the rise of multiplayer, the melee weapon slowly changed from an instrument of desperation into a tool of humiliation. There's nothing quite as humbling as having your killing spree ended by a guy sneaking up behind you with a knife. The pain comes not only from the blade, but also from knowing that someone got the drop on you, and your mad skills didn't save you.

Here are several of our favorite humiliation tools, in no particular order.

Half Life's Crowbar

Okay, I lied about the no particular order bit, at least in this one case. The crowbar is almost as much the star of the Half Life franchise as Gordon Freeman himself. In a way it's a reflection of Freeman. Both have applications that have nothing to do with combat and therefore should, technically, have no place on a battlefield. Yet again and again they show up together. It just goes to show that the right man and tool in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

The Chronicle of Riddick's Ulaks

Riddick wasn't a big fan of guns in the two live-action movies that inspired the two video games from Starbreeze Studios, so once you get your hands on his signature weapon, the cruelly-curved ulaks, it's as if everything suddenly comes together. So central are these weapons to Riddick's universe that finding them unlocks an achievement in the Xbox 360 version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

I actually own a pair of these in real-life, and can attest to the fact that they feel incredibly nice in your hands.

Unreal's Impact Hammer

You've got to love multi-purpose tools. The impact hammer is a pneumatic mining device. It can be an extremely deadly weapon. It can deflect incoming projectiles. It can make you jump higher. I'm sure if the inhabitants of the Unreal universe took some time away from killing each other to do a little research, they'd find it adds two to three inches to the penis.

Team Fortress 2's Baseball Bat

Team Fortress 2 contains a plethora of lovely melee weapons, from the Engineer's wrench to the Medic's bone saw. There's just something supremely satisfying about running about hitting other people in the head with a baseball bat. Maybe it's that satisfying metal clunking noise, or the fact that most of us have at one point or another held a baseball bat in our hands, and can relate to how it feels.

Or maybe we're just being completely arbitrary.

Gears of War's Chainsaw

The Lancer's chainsaw attachment nearly didn't make the list, mainly because it's attached to a gun. Then I spent an hour watching videos of Doom's chainsaw compared to the Lancer's chainsaw, and decided that the main reason I liked it was because it's attached to a gun. It's a chainsaw, on a gun.

And then I remembered I was compiling this list mostly on my own, and the only guidelines I really had to follow were my own, so the Lancer's chainsaw stays in the picture.

Doom 3's Berserker-Powered Fists

Fists are generally the weakest possible melee weapon in a first-person shooter. Doom 3 changed all of that by making the berserker-powered fist capable of smashing through all but the toughest enemies with a single punch. And if you feel like pointing out other games that have featured powered-up punches, note that none of them were accompanied by an ear-piercing infernal screaming that actually made you want to punch things as hard and fast as humanly possible.

Halo 3's Gravity Hammer

Blah, blah, blah Energy Sword. Yes the Energy Sword is impressive and powerful, but can it knock a rocket back at the person firing it like a baseball? Can it propel a Mongoose all the way across a multiplayer map? Can it make you believe a fully-armored boy can fly?

No, it can't. That's why the Gravity Hammer is our great Halo melee love. Stop - hammer time.

Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast's Lightsaber

It's a lightsaber.

You need more?

It's a lightsaber you can throw, and it comes back to you. Luke Plunkett informs me that with a cheat, it lops off limbs in the process. I'd pay $60 for a game that only featured that particular game mechanic.

And there's our list. Now it's time for you to tell us what we missed, even though we specified that this is a list of some of our favorite first-person shooter melee weapons.

Go on and hit us with your best shot.

The hilarious, universally acclaimed "Meet the Team" shorts for Team Fortress 2 are more than fan service or game promotion. Valve founder Gabe Newell says they're experiments in movie-making, because the studio would prefer to do a Half-Life movie itself.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Newell says Hollywood bombarded Valve with story pitches for a Half-Life movie, not long after the first game shipped in 1998. "Their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst," Newell said. "Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of."

Newell said the team reached a consensus to not sign a movie deal, because the only way it would be don right was if it made the film itself. "And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that's impossible,'" Newell said. "But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that."

It's a leap from animated, comedic shorts to a feature-length science-fiction drama, so at this rate, it's more likely that Half-Life: The Movie doesn't get made. But good on Newell and company for staying committed to seeing something done right, if it's done at all.

"As a [World of Warcraft] player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right?" Newell said. "I like Sam Raimi, I've been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie. We think that customers are like, ‘OK, we're kind of sick and tired of the way you guys are slicing and dicing the experience of being a fan of Harry Potter, or Half-Life, or The Incredibles, and you need to fix it.' And the people that fix it will be rewarded, and the people that don't will be on the rubbish heap of history, or whatever the phrase is."

Valve Want To Make The Half-Life Movie Themselves [PC Gamer]

The Knights of the Round Table song is one of the highlights of the film The Holy Grail. It's now also the highlight of your weekend, Team Fortress 2 fans.

In the same week that Python's Holy Hand Grenades turned up in the game, Unlimited Productions have released this homage to Grail's medieval ditty, replicating the choreography if not in location, then definitely in spirit.

You can see the actual song below, in case you wanted to compare the two.

[thanks Valk!]

Telltale, the team behind the new Sam & Max and Monkey Island series, have a new game on the way. One that's teasing a crossover of epic proportions.

What could it all mean? We'll find out this Thursday, according to the trailer. Feel free to sound off with your wildest dreams and wishes below!

To celebrate the launch of Worms Reloaded, Valve will be handing out the game's (well, Monty Python's) trademark Holy Hand Grenades to anyone buying the game on Steam. Sadly, they're just for show.