Last week, Valve reactivated TF2's five previous Halloween parties, and now the main event—the sixth—has gone live. Scream Fortress 6 adds a spooky carnival map, an evil hypnowizard controlling it, plenty of Halloween gear and achievements, oh and bumper cars, because why not. You have until the 12th of November to make the most of it, at which point TF2 will return to its regular, sadly bumperless self.

The new Carnival map is based on Doomsday, and contains a cornucopia of activities seen over by the wizard Merasmus. If you're wondering why you're fighting those dastardly blue/red guys there, you'll want to read the event's prequel comic. To cut a long story short: Merasmus forgot to build his carnival on top of an ancient burial ground, so he's hoping to create one with our corpses. A strongman, spells, curses, copious amounts of urine, and bumper cars feature heavily in his plan.

Valve have made big changes to the way gifts work in this latest Halloween event: you'll now receive a bag of items just for logging in, with the chance to earn a second during the event. You can read the reasoning behind this decision here, but it's basically an attempt to inject some fun back into proceedings.

For more information, check out this poster for the event, or, y'know, log in to Team Fortress 2.

More Valve; more Halloween. Team Fortress 2 feels more suited to the festivities than Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and already has a back catalogue of five previous scream-filled events.

In preparation for the sixth, the TF2 team are now reprising these events. "If we threw you into the 900-mile-an-hour hellride we've got planned this year without warming you up first, you'd essentially be going from an idle state of terrorlessness to a shrieking nightmare of solid 100% terror almost instantly," write Valve, who write this sort of thing. "It would be the equivalent of going from seeing zero skeletons to seeing a thousand skeletons at once."

As a result, you can now Quickplay any of the five previous events—providing easy access to terrifying scares comedy bosses. Expect details of TF2's sixth Halloween event to surface later this month.

The Valve community hive-mind has spoken—well, pulsated—and the best Source Filmmaker films have been chosen. Unless they were wrong, which would fundamentally undermine Valve's entire business strategy for the last few years. Probably.

Here, then, are the official winners of the Saxxy Awards 2014:

Best Short

Best Comedy

Best Action

Best Drama

Overall Winner

A strong selection, I'd say. Rivalry Rush is a particular highlight of mine, with the winner, Animation vs. Animator, also providing a healthy amount of laughs. Still, it's a surprise to see that the winners are all TF2-based. Valve opened up a few different games for this year's competition, and there were some great entries for a few of their other games. I wonder if the community is just too heavily entrenched in the game, or if film makers are just more comfortable playing with TF2's cartoon-oriented antics.

If you've got a favourite that didn't make it into the winners list, post it in the comments for others to enjoy. You can see the full list of nominations here.

Hey, you! Do you like frittering your life away on the internet, in a near-fugue state of YouTube videos and silent judgement? If so, you're needed for the 4th annual Saxxy Awards. Voting for Valve's Source Filmmaker awards has begun, meaning there's a big ol' pile of action-packed, funny, dramatic or, er, "short" videos to be seen.

The voting is taking place through

Steam's Saxxy page. It's a modified Steam Workshop page; modified so that you can't generate a list of the most popular videos. Instead, you'll be shown a random queue of hopefuls and asked to up or down-vote accordingly.

This year, the rules have expanded—the Saxxy's no longer being a specifically TF2-based award. Before the submission process began, Valve released a series of content packs for the tool, allowing users a greater range of both Valve and third-party assets. It will hopefully lead to some unusual cross-game situations...

Voting will end on 11:59pm PDT on Monday, 29 September. You can see last year's

Saxxy winners here

.

Hey, you! Do you like frittering your life away on the internet, in a near-fugue state of YouTube videos and silent judgement? If so, you're needed for the 4th annual Saxxy Awards. Voting for Valve's Source Filmmaker awards has begun, meaning there's a big ol' pile of action-packed, funny, dramatic or, er, "short" videos to be seen.

The voting is taking place through Steam's Saxxy page. It's a modified Steam Workshop page; modified so that you can't generate a list of the most popular videos. Instead, you'll be shown a random queue of hopefuls, and be asked to up or down-vote accordingly.

This year, the rules have expanded the Saxxy's no longer being a specifically TF2-based award. Before the submission process began, Valve released a series of content packs for the tool, allowing users a greater range of both Valve and third-party assets. It will hopefully lead to some unusual cross-game situations...



Voting will end on 11:59pm PDT on Monday, 29 September. You can see last year's Saxxy winners here.

Image source: http://tjournal.ru/paper/1tv-team-fortress

As part of an effort to show how the United States uses propaganda to influence the mindset of its citizens, a historical documentary recently aired by Russia's Channel One offered up what it said was a First World War poster portraying German soldiers as monsters who literally eat babies. One problem: It wasn't a soldier, it was the Soldier, and the poster is actually Team Fortress 2 fan art.

The show, which presumably came about as a result of rising tensions between the US and Russia, offered the poster as evidence of US efforts to demonize its enemies, "regardless of any logic or common sense," according to the International Business Times. "The American public had to firmly acknowledge that Germans were evil," the narrator says.

And the guy on the poster certain looks evil. "Soldiers eat babies. That's a fact," it states, before exhorting readers to join Team Demoman, a giveaway that clearly eluded the show's non-English-speaking creators. TJournal.ru picked up on it, however, and noted that it was actually created by DeviantArt user TankTaur for a Team Fortress 2 propaganda contest.



We weren't certain at first that this was real, but the image posted by TJournal carries the Channel One watermark, and even better, we also managed to track down the program on YouTube. It's in Russian, but you don't need to speak it to get it.

Okay, congratulations indie games, you did it again. For a while I thought Capy's Super Time Force wouldn't make it to PC, which given the reviews of its Xbone version would have been a shame. Naturally, I was worrying over nothing. Not only will the 2D action time-travel-'em-up release on Steam on 25 August, but it'll arrive in a special Ultra edition.

Super Time Force Ultra will, according to the developers, bring "50 new Helladeck challenge levels, inter-dimensional Ultra Force powers and 3 super-awesome, super-secret new characters". Those characters appear in the trailer as silhouetted figures. The second looks extremely like the TF2's Pyro, and the third like TF2's Saxton Hale. The first? If we stick with the TF2 theme, it could be Miss Pauling. Otherwise, I've no idea. If you think you know, jump into the comments.

In Super time Force, you get to battle through levels. You also get to rewind time switching characters to re-battle through levels with your past self at your side.

Team Fortress 2 has shown that people will pay good money for virtual headclothes that sit upon the crown of the cartoon murderers they control in first person. Now Valve are trying something daring: seeing if people will pay for non-hats not in the game, but in real life. The TF2 Workshop is now accepting community designs for new lines of merchandise to be sold through the Valve Store.

As per the regular TF2 item popularity contest, users can upload their designs to the Workshop to be judged by the community. "We ll curate the top-rated entries," write Valve, "and the best of the best designs will be made available as official merchandise at the Valve Store and various online retailers. You won't just be ensuring your place in history: You'll also get paid a handsome royalty for every unit sold."

If you have a question, and if that question has been frequently asked, you can find the answer here. Otherwise, take a look at the current submitted designs, and perhaps dream of the day when they'll swaddle your fragile meat-frame.

The Saxxy Awards, Valve's annual Source Filmmaker competition, is now in its fourth year, and to shake things up a bit they're encouraging players/directors to make films about something other than Team Fortress 2 - namely Portal. All of Portal 2's assets (minus, er, the portals and a few other things) can now be downloaded into SFM as free DLC, enabling that Spy vs Wheatley crossover animation that (probably) hasn't been able to exist until now. That isn't the only content pack headed to the program either: Puny Human are offering up select assets from Blade Symphony too.

The deadline for submissions this year is September 24th, giving you just under two months to create your masterpiece. You'll find the guidelines for the awards here.

If you need inspiration and/or films to compare your efforts to, be sure to check out the winners from last year. This one won best short:

Valve took a three day run-up to its Love and War update, with daily teasers for what, in reality, amounted to some new taunts and weapons. You'd think, then, that the introduction of a new game mode would warrant something spectacular. Instead perhaps fittingly for a game made by the company responsible for Steam it's being launched into Early Access. Yesterday's TF2 update added two new "beta maps" to the game. They're rough, unbalanced, and, in some cases, untextured, but one of them is our first taste of the new Robot Destruction game type.

In Robot Destruction, teams are tasked with taking down the robots that patrol the other team's base. These aren't the deadly bots of Mann vs. Machine mode, but rather rotund, defenceless machines that attempt to flee your aggression. Once killed, they drop points, which can be collected to increase your team's total. In addition, each team has battery, which can also be captured to steal some of the enemy's collected points.

The new mode takes place on a map called Asteroid. As the name suggests, it's set in space. At least it probably is there's no skybox at the moment. Valve previously revealed concept art for a moon base map, suggesting that the Mercs might soon be leaving the precious gravel of their own planet. Also in this update is a new Payload map: Cactus Canyon.

The new maps can be found by selecting the 'Play Beta Maps' checkbox from the 'Multiplayer' menu. Alternatively, you can find them in the server browser. Valve say you can expect plenty of iteration as the maps are tested anything from moving a medpack, to rebuilding entire sections.

For more details, head over to the TF2 blog.