A mysterious countdown? Some teams? A fortress? I’m not sure if there’s a soul in the world who doesn’t> know what this means by now: new Team Fortress 2 update. The latest multi-day reveal-stravaganza is called Love and War, and it’s kicked off its grim march not with new weapons or maps or colors other than red and blue, but rather, um, dancing. Also other expressions that will allow you to wordlessly communicate with and/or taunt your fellow players. There’s a new short film below, and it’s Valve’s longest ever, clocking in at a whopping 15 minutes. The topic? Inevitable, creeping death. Cheery!

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Evolve is the next game from original Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock, and that alone should be enough to turn an eye or two or however many you happen to have. I was a giant firebreathing space mutant recently, so I can’t judge. I got to go hands-on with Evolve’s second batch of Hunters and gameplay options, and I came away with opinions. Powerful ones, beastly thoughts that couldn’t be caged by mere words alone. So I made this video for you instead. Watch it below.>

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Rust is already a purring, slurring engine of human depravity, but there’s no denying that it’s all rather barebones at the moment. You can explore, you can build a house around other people’s houses and take them prisoner but mercifully feed them tuna every couple hours, but Garry (of Garry’s Mod fame) and co have much bigger plans for the future. At this particular moment, that means a whole slew of improvements including a new UI, farming, and an item editor modeled after the one that produces Team Fortress 2′s infamous headwear selection.

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2014 would seem to be the year in which the games industry has another crack at making primarily multiplayer shooting games work all over again. There’ve been a few false starts in the past, but Destiny and Titanfall are some super-big, super-fat attempts at achieveing enormous mass market success from shooters where narrative takes a backseat. Now Evolve joins the ranks of big games looking for a piece of glossy, next-generation COD-seasoned pie, and it comes from Turtle Rock Studios, those former Valve chums who did the heavy lifting on the original Left 4 Dead. (more…)

The Saxxy Awards are Valve’s annual celebration of the Source Filmmaker community and their efforts to make short films using the Source engine and Valve’s game assets. The community has been producing better and better stuff since the tool was released three years ago, and this year’s winners, nominees and honourable mentions are all worth ruining your productivity over.

Here’s the deserving Overall Winner for this year. (more…)

OK, time for a truth bomb: I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 in age– *KATHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMSPLURSHHHHHH* Oh jeez, wow. That was actually a regular bomb lightly sprinkled with truth. My bad. I’m gonna need to un-bury John and Alec from the wreckage momentarily (Graham was out, and Adam is immune to explosions), but quickly: I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 in quite some time, but I still get excited about updates. Why, you ask? Because Valve always delivers brilliant laughs on top of them. Go below for delightful text and a gruesomely enjoyable video of the new, Medic-immortality-granting Two Cities update.

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James McVinnie has been making machinima for years, for the Half-Life modding community, for BioWare as a cinematic director on Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and more recently for himself. His Source Filmmaker short, Practical Problems, was a finalist in the comedy category at the 2012 Saxxy awards.

His latest project is End of the Line, an eight-minute Source Filmmaker short due out early next year. It again stars a cast of Team Fortress 2 characters, but it’s more ambitious than any SFM short I’ve seen before. A minute-long trailer released in August garnered so much attention that Valve have asked McVinnie and his team to explore creating an official community update for Team Fortress 2 to coincide with the film’s release.

I spoke with James about his time with BioWare, and his process for making films within videogame engines. In response to one of my questions, he made an illustrative video. (more…)

I don’t want to make any jokes in this post, because doing so would make me feel like the rubbish, nervous compère trying to entertain the crowd before an amazing comedian, for instance Bruce Forsyth or Jim from Neighbours, comes on. TF2 is a funny game, with funny promotional material around it. It is definitely funnier than I am. Funny like a clown, yes. For instance, this comic, heralding Valve’s shootybang game’s mysterious but surely impending Halloween update. By page two, it’s triumphed with its concept of ‘toilet wine.’ On page five, it’s got bald ghosts pinching each other’s noses. Then there are raccoon sanctuaries, and wills made of human skin and… And, well, yes, very good.

There’s also a teasing mention of portals to the nether realm, which may or may not be the next big thing in TF2 itself. (more…)

The trailer for End of the Line, a Source Filmmaker short, was released in August and has 600,000 views on YouTube. Since we’ve never posted about it and around 500,000 of those viewers were me, I’m betting there’s plenty among you who haven’t seen it yet. This is your chance to correct that. (more…)

Get your secret decoder rings out, make sure you have access to a librarian with a murky past, and would it kill you to put on some tweed? Team Fortress celebrated 17 years of being Team Fortress on August 24th, which Valve completely missed. To sort-of-but-not celebrate this occasion, they’ve made a new comic starring everyone’s favourite sky-diving CEO, Saxton Hale. Part one is long and here, and there’s more to follow. This is typically when Valve pulls some sort of trick on everyone, so I’ve saved the blogpost, and sent a copy via carrier pigeon to CERN. If they can’t figure out if anything’s been secreted away, then no-one can. Valve also added a new crafting tool into the game, and it’s pretty Strange.

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