Posts Tagged ‘valve’
Left 4 Dead Demo Confirmed on PC and Xbox 360
Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve (the greatest gaming company ever), confirmed at Videogamer.com that the demo of Left 4 Dead will be for PC and Xbox 360. Gabe, while unsure of the final content that will be in the demo, assures gamers that both singleplayer and co-op will be in the demo as a taste of what the game will be like. The game itself is due out on November 18th in the US, and November 21, 2008 in Europe.
The Pxl Lab is also planning on reviewing both the PC and Xbox versions of the game, so be sure to check our reviews of the game when it’s released!
Good Grief, it’s Team Roomba
A scout runs and jumps while inside the spawn, jamming himself in the door, and preventing it from opening. The rest of his team looks at him strangely, waiting for him to move. Then a pyro asks, “Is he glitched, or just being a douchebag?”. A medic answers, “I think it’s a little of column A, a little of column B.”
They call themselves Team Roomba. A group of gamers who take it upon themselves to make the game a little more difficult for everyone who happens to be on the same team as them, with frankly hilarious results. Team Roomba is a clan in Team Fortress 2 who devoted themselves to griefing (i.e. making everyone’s lives miserable), and filming it. I wouldn’t recommend clicking the link to their site. It’s just another display of their offbeat sense of humor, but at the same time hilarious.
Team Roomba stands out from the griefing crowd by replacing simple voice spamming with much more creative approaches to the noble art. Engineers building turrets under the map and killing the enemies from complete safety? Brilliant. Jamming the doors on teammates and making them answer trivia questions to open it? Hilarious. Team Roomba has also done griefing Insurgency, though its not the same high quality work as they did on Team Fortress 2. All in all, I’d highly recommend you watch any of their griefing videos. It’s quality fun for everyone not involved.
Half Life 2 Modder Hired By Valve
Half Life 2 has long been the modder’s choice game to work with. Adam Foster, creator of the very popular singleplayer mod Minerva: Metastatis, finally gets to live out his dream of working alongside the creators of Half Life 2 themselves. Valve hired Adam, to begin working in October, because of his work on Minerva. Here’s a bit of what Adam had to say about the whole thing:
What does this mean for MINERVA? Right now, I don’t know – I’ll initially be working on Valve’s own Episode Three, but after that, who knows? I seriously suspect this isn’t the end for this particular chain of experiments in designing single-player Half-Life 2 maps, all conducted for fun in my spare time.
If you are looking to get into Half Life 2 modding yourself, there are some great tutorials over at Moddb that teach beginners how to mod HL2.
Team Fortress 2, The Greatest Multiplayer Game of the Year, Now Free
To celebrate their latest patch to the amazing game Team Fortress 2, Valve is allowing anybody with a Steam account to download the game for free and use it for the weekend. After the weekend (June 20-22, 2008) you can no longer play the game for free unfortunately. The new patch adds 3 new unlockable weapons for the Pyro class. There’s a shotgun replacement called the Flare Gun, which is basically just what it sounds like. It shoots off a flare to allow you to ignite your enemies at long range, but takes a very careful aim to get it right. It also adds a new flamethrower into the mix, called The Backburner. It removes the Compression Blast ability, but the Backburner always has critical hits when burning an enemy from behind, as well as adding 50 points of health to the Pyro wielding it. The final unlockable is a new axe, called the Axtinguisher. This weapon critical hits any enemy who is on fire, but does considerably less damage to those who remain in a state of not on fire.
The patch also adds 35 achievements for aspiring Pyros to unlock. One of my personal favorites, is called BarbeQueQ. You obtain it by causing a dominated player to leave the server. Other fun achievements such as Freezer Burn (provide enemies with freezecam shots of each of your taunts), make it worth your while to try for the achievements. There are also two new maps added, A capture point map called “Fastlane”, and a Capture the flag map called “Turbine”. All of these factors make it an excellent weekend to play TF2, and if you aren’t already a player, to join the phenomenon.
Team Fortress 2 Pyro Update Announced
Valve announced in their weekly update news that the Pyro would be receiving the next major update with 3 new weapons to unlock along with a lot of achievements. For people worried about how this will effect the game as much as the Medic update did, here’s a quote that should put your mind at ease:
We’ve spent time looking at how the recent Medic release went, and have rolled feedback from that release into the new item designs for the Pyro and into the design of the achievements required to unlock those items.
The Axtinguisher, as pictured to the left, is one of the three new unlockable weapons for the Pyro. This axe will only do half the damage of the standard axe in a normal situation, but if your enemy is on fire, then the Axtinguisher will always hit a critical. For those of you who aren’t into the whole unlocks thing, then Valve has some news for you too:
Along with all of the new content, we’re also going to be making some significant changes to the Pyro class for everyone, regardless of whether they have unlocked any new items.
Valve did not announce an official release day for the update, but expect it to come this month.