I’ve spent most of the weekend playing Team Fortress 2. I haven’t done that in years.

I hadn’t intended to. Team Fortress 2 exploded into my life as a near-obsession back in 2007. Playing almost every evening, hour after hour into the night, even dreamed about it during the height of the passion. I used to wander around the maps on my own in private servers just to look at the artistry of the world, and watched countless hundreds of YouTube videos of how-to jump videos and devastating frag runs when not actually playing the damned thing. But then, as always with multiplayer shooters, I fell away from the servers, and as with all the other competitive games that came before it, I became a stranger.

Team Fortress 2 has gone free to play, in a typically Valvian rug-from-under-our-feet move. While superficially a bit of a shock (albeit one a few people guessed), at the same time it makes perfect sense. Some four years down the line, ongoing sales of the game were surely pretty minimal, making the only real options to restore Team Fortress’s big money-making potential either to move onto a sequel or larger, paid upgrade packs. Neither of these would have been popular with the fanbase (which isn’t the same as saying the fanbase wouldn’t have bought them, of course. You know you would have).

The other reason for the free-to-playisation, I half suspect, is getting there before someone else did.
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Hot on the heels of free: a comedy short. It’s Meet The Medic, which I’ve posted below. It’s the tender tale of the medical relationship between the medic and the heavy. It features pigeons doves, severed heads, dodgy accents, blood, blood, and a broken heart.

The details of the Medic update are here. He’s getting a new gun, a new Ubercharge, and an ability to see enemy health.
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Not exactly a surprise, because we’re the geniuses who called it earlier in the week. Valve have made Team Fortress 2 free to play. The future is free.

Announcement trailer below.

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Ooh, we didn’t mention this yesterday, but it was apparently Timbuk Tuesday, which revealed Sniper and Demoman stuff, and today is World War Wednesday, which reveals three new packs for the Soldier. No, wait. THAT was yesterday. Today is Thursday, that’s right. More on that later.

But there’s already more! In Tuesday there was hidden stuff for the Scout, too. He gets a radiation-imbued bat that enabled triple jump, with the third jump deal damage. (And other stuff, too!) Oh, there’s also this Pyro stuff.

But what’s this? Some kind of number. 85.236.100.200:27015 What could be it? Possibly the address of the RPS TF2 server? We’ll have to investigate.

Good morning, world. Speaking of Team Fortress 2, how about some actual Team Fortress news? It’s a fine day for the first details on the “most ambitious update in the history of Team Fortress 2″. The first part is a free weekend (starting now, for some reason), and an initial Mafia themed update, complete with a new Payload map. But what else? Valve say:

We don’t want to ruin it, but we’ll give you four clues to get you guessing:

1.) It IS a “Meet the” short.
2.) It involves ONE of the two remaining classes.
3.) It’s NOT the Pyro.
4.) It’s the MEDIC.

So it’s anyone’s guess. More news on this as it happens. I guess I’d better get the RPS TF2 server online, eh? Right, let’s do that.

Whether or not there’s any weight whatsoever to the theory that Team Fortress 2 might turn free to play, it appears someone else got there first. You might find Final Combat to be just a little bit familiar. Just a little. Or a lot. Yes, an awful> lot.

This video? This is quite the video.
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While there are rumours flying around about Valve’s DOTA 2 project being the first in-house game to embrace the free-to-play model recently made possible on Steam, there seems to be (scant) evidence that another title could be beat it to the accolade: Team Fortress 2.

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I’ll admit to some cynicism when the first round of public voting in the Team Fortress 2 Saxxy Awards kicked off. Probably because the quality of the entrants meant it was like picking through poison sea urchins with your bare hands. But all that’s changed! Now we’re down to the final nominees, the ten videos with the most votes in each of the film making contest’s twenty categories. Click here to take part in the final round of voting, or just peer at all the talent on display. I’ve even dropped one of the better ones after the jump.
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Depending on how much fibreglass you ate as a child you may or may not remember that the last two weeks saw Valve encouraging people to use Team Fortress 2′s new editing suite to submit videos in a whopping twenty different categories. The deadline for this competition is long gone but the fun is just beginning, as now anyone with a Steam account can start judging those videos via this very link.
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