The other day I was thinking about games in which you would occasionally fall out of the bottom of the map. San Francisco Rush was good for that, on the console toys. You could spill out of the map and race around in infinite pale green. “I remember when games used to be full of glitches,” I thought to myself. And then I saw Portal completed in ten minutes and realised that they still are. You just need to find them.

In other news: Why would you find them? > Unless you were playing Söldner! or something, where that was the point of playing it. Ten minutes of your life below. Imagine what that means in minutes of his> life. (more…)

Valve have announced the new Team Fotress 2 beta: “As you’ve probably seen by now, we like to change things in Team Fortress 2. A lot. And while we’re perfect most of the time, we occasionally get something wrong. One reason for this is we just don’t get enough data from internal play testing, and another is that we spend too much time watching Tom Bui serenades on Youtube.”

It seems that with the game being patched so regularly, a beta phase of the game is going to need to run, concurrent with the latest version. More info on the official blog, and forum pages here.

Just clearing out my phone and found some footage and shots I took at the MCM Expo last weekend. It’s of a Portal cosplayer who caught my eye because she had a remote control Companion cube*, which is pretty fancy. Also, now I look again, looks a lot like a teen version of Ex-Edge Ed now-designer Margaret Robertson. Spooks! Click through for the full photo, and find the snippet of MOVING CUBE is below… (more…)

EDIT: The first trailer’s out! Watch below.

Do you care about Poker Night At The Inventory, Telltale’s upcoming cheapo comedy poker game featuring Strong Bad, Tycho from Penny Arcade, Max from Sam & Max and TF2′s Heavy? Not so much? What about… now:

Valve has revealed the five equippable TF2 items you’ll be able to unlock playing Poker Night At The Inventory, plus the Poker Visor you get if you pre-order, making this the first time a non-Valve game has unlocked content for TF2 which affects the game proper. You can peruse these goods after the jump. (more…)

We all like the art mods, right? Good – glad we’re in chin-stroking, beret-topped agreement. Earlier this week, Eddie Cameron got in touch to poke me in the direction of his new Half-Life 2 mod, Tedium, which I finally got round to playing yesterday. And, oh my, it is> interesting. (more…)

Grab your Jarate bottles, it’s about to get all Halloweeny. In the second, and thus now annual, All Hallows Eve update for Team Fortress 2, the game has added its first ever NPC boss monster. He’s the Horseless Headless Horsemann (indeed, a long lost member of the Mann family), and only appears in a new spooky map, Mann Manor. He’s randomly generated, and DOESN’T HAVE A HEAD… OR A HORSE. Cripes!

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Virtual millinery proves to pay off. Valve sent us this on the roaring hat-trade in Team Fortress 2, and the benefits for the community creators:

Five Steam community members participated in the initial round of content creation. Rob Laro, Shawn Spetch, Steven Skidmore, Spencer Kern, and Shaylyn Hamm created items for Team Fortress 2 which were then made available to other community members for purchase from the in-game Mann Co. Store. Today they received checks for the first two weeks of sales, with royalties ranging from $39,000 to $47,000 per person.

“It’s astounding that so many people want to purchase the items that came out of the community,” said Spencer Kern, TF2 community content creator. “The response exceeded my wildest expectations. There really is no doubt at this point that there’s a huge demand for community-created content in TF2 and, hopefully, more games will start to tap into this demand.”

Yep. Astounding is the word.

So with the biff and swish of an amusing comic, a reason to use the Steam Wallet is born: The Mann Co. Store. It’s going to allow players to trade TF2 inventory items in-game using their Steam Wallets. So hats and stuff can now be sold off or purchased for real cash. Here’s another thing: “Additionally, community contributors will receive a percentage of sales on items they’ve created!” Ooh, you say. Hmm, I mutter, my beard aflutter.

What does it mean? And why? Well it doesn’t look like it will change the game much, aside from people being able to get the kit they want for cash. It seems to be a way of generating a bit of extra cash with purely cosmetic items, essentially allowing the completely capitalist Valve Corporation to have a reason to keep developing TF2′s free updates, aside from being nice. FAQ here. Also PCG point out the prices. That’s a pricey knife.

Do you remember pro-animator James Benson’s dancing Team Fortress 2 characters? Of course you do. You commit everything RPS publishes to memory and, if your feeble mind fails, tattoo it onto your body. Anyway, you may remember they were all work in progress. James has finally finished the whole thing, which can be viewed below… (more…)

With Valve talking about making the Half-Life movie themselves, you have to wonder whether they might be well advised to hire this chap for the process. His trailer for short film I’m The Freeman looks about as good as we could hope a Half-Life movie to be. Assuming it was to CG, in the spirit of the TF2 shorts, of course. Go take a look, if you’ve not seen it already. Hell, go watch it again. I can’t wait for the full thing. (And the other movies on the guy’s site are quite something, too.) (more…)