It doesn’t take a lot for me to get obsessed. I’d managed to pull away from Team Fortress 2, but then Valve introduced the Strange category of weapons, stat-tracking guns and melee weapons that report how many kills each has, and I got into it all over again. I’m almost embarrassed by how easy it was to hook me back into the mainframe. Worryingly Valve have just added a new category of unlocks to augment the Strange weapons counting abilities: Strange Parts.

Only found in crates, Strange Parts will help you study specific aspects of your performance in battle by letting you customize your favorite Strange weapon. Now you’re free to track the number of enemies you gib, projectiles you reflect, heads you’ve shot, and more.

They’ve also dropped three new hats into the game, and that number is a more descriptive than you realise: there are only three in the entire game, and to get one you’ll most likely need to spend a significant amount of money. (more…)

Remember the bit in Fight Club where Ed Norton is sitting on a plane and he explains to the guy sitting next to him his theory of “single-serving friends”? Well, something similar is true in multiplayer games. > (more…)

After looking at the cost of Guild Wars 2 and feeling a muscle in my eyeball involuntarily spasm, I started considering my spending habits. I’m currently splitting my money in three ways: indie games, Steam, and funding in Kickstarter. I don’t have any MMO subs, as I’m mainly action focused, and obviously my Steam account is already crammed with games. But none of this made me twitch. Instead it’s because as PC gamer I’ve never > had to spend much on games, and in this odd, new free-to-pay future, in my eyes the cost of games feels like it’s getting cheaper. At least that’s what I thought. The one consistent expenditure I have is when I want to buy something in Team Fortress 2′s store, which saves every transaction. Going over my purchases I realise it’s not cheaper at all, and, in comparison, £50 on Guild Wars isn’t that bad. (more…)

Uh-uh they did-uhnt. Valve did not >just add a boombox to Team Fortress 2 that plays sounds whenever a Scout taunts… I think they did. Just let me check the server over here [opens server door] WELL, NOW I CAN’T HEAR AND I NEED TO CHANGE MY PANTS. BUT I CAN CONFIRM THAT THEY WENT THERE. They’ve released a paid for (£6.99! – too rich for my roots) community item called the “Boston Boom-Bringer“. Whenever the Scout taunts, it’ll play one of four phat beats. If you want to prepare yourself for the aural wreckage that the game’s about to throw at you, there’s a video below.

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Any new Team Fortress 2 Payload maps are relevant to my interests. My interests being defending my themed house from carts of explosives while wearing a very silly hat. I rarely stray from Badwater Basin, but when I do it’s for more Payload fun. So I’m eagerly awaiting the entries of the newly announced TF2Maps.net Dynamic Payload competition, to add a little excitement to the bomb on wheels. (more…)

Celebrated crazy-em-up Saints Row: The Third is handing out a freebie to all Steam players tomorrow, and going a teeny-tiny bit further than most. You know how Team Fortress 2 likes to gives you hats from other games? Saints Row 3 gives you the TF2 gang’s entire heads>, to wear and do with as you will. Fight, dance, love, laugh. The first and the last ones at least.

But you know what else can you expect from this TF2 intrusion?

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Back, back, back, back even further, back a bit more, keep going, yes, not much further now and… there we go. You are now back in the most dim and distant past of the then tiny baby website Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a mere three months into our making-it-up-as-we-went-along existence. You will see ancient typos. You will see only glimmerings of understanding of how the internet works. You will see Kieron Gillen. And you will see The Go Team!, a multi-part mega-feature in which the four RPS founders present their assorted thoughts on Team Fortress 2′s classes, based on our delightfully haphazard experiences in the original beta back in September 2007. (more…)

They said it couldn’t be done, but they did it anyway: Valve’s free-to-play FPS, Team Fortress 2, has been updated with new items and stuff! Seasonal weapons are now available, with “naughty and nice” crate gifts appearing across levels in the game. You can learn about the new stuff in detail here, or just jump into the game and get automatically updated with Christmasness. And I have to admit, it does seem like the time of year to spend your hours blasting people into chunks with exotic weaponry, doesn’t it?

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 3 of 7.>

Of everyone I spoke to, Magnar Jenssen is the only one still actively working in the game industry as a level designer at Avalanche Studios. Before, he also worked on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) and Bionic Commando at GRIN, up until the studio’s demise. When he isn’t raking in all that sweet map-stamp money from arena_offblast for Team Fortress 2, he tinkers with some less profitable but absurdly polished single player Half-Life 2 mods.

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