You can also find the prettier HD version here at Valve’s website.  The video officially came out last week as part of the Sniper/Spy surprise joint update for the PC version of the game, but it leaked via some canny person finding it in Valve’s YouTube profile last weekend. (the funny story and hilarious repercussions of which are well worth going back through the last few day’s of the TF2 team’s blog to read for yourself).   And now, finally, I’m putting it up here.  Because I like to think of this site as the terminus point for the relevance of things on the internet.  You’re welcome.

Inspired by the all the wit and personality Valve have spent the last two weeks pouring in to characters, I’ve dipped back in to the 360 version of the game several times over the last few days to remind myself of why, before the arrival of Left 4 Dead it was my favorite multiplayer videogame.  The game is still the same (sometime to it’s detriment – none of the PC upgrades or new maps have found their way to the 360 yet, due apparently to a memory issue who’s fix is taking the long way around), but the players have changed – the games in progress at any given time are nearly half what they were a year ago, and those playing them (at least on the teams I ended up on) seem to have forgotten the absolute crucial value of communication and planning out your moves rather than rushing in guns blazing.

It’s not entirely surprising, seeing how the game has gone over a year without a significant update or add on, and the creators should be praised for creating something that remains so fun with only four maps to play on and just the original weapon sets to kill each other with, but it’s still a bit sad to see.  I love playing the game, and when my hands remembered what it meant to be a Pyro on my second match in it was like I’d never left, but I can’t see it beating out the siren song of Left 4 Dead that goes out when my usual group comes online and is eyeing an Expert run.  I have hopes for a resurgence in the community when Valve finally finds a way to bring all their mad new ideas to the console, but with each passing month, it’s harder to believe it’ll be anything more than a casual fling when it comes.   Team Fortress 2 will always have a part of my heart, but at this rate, I’m not sure the same can be said for my time.  Not that I’m worried about that now – the fleeting nature of love is of little concern when there are spies to set alight.

And it looks like this has turned in to a proper post after all.  Oh, and did I mention the comic introducing the most horrible weapon of all, the Sniper’s debilitating Jarate?  No?  Well shame on me, then.

Not so much playable as edible, the sandwich is yet another of the new weapons rolled out for the PC version of TF2. You know what says “Merry Early Christmas”, Valve? The chance to deck my Pyro out in super fun new weapons and take him (or her!) out for a spin on Xbox Live, that’s what.

Regular service (ha!) should resume shortly, as work and life are both returning to something like normal speeds. In the meantime, a treat that appeared in the long months between then and now for the maybe two of you who haven’t seen it yet. From Valve with love, meet TF2‘s Sniper.

Boom. Head shot.

Boink!

So what am I playing? Smaller games, mostly, or at least games I can play in smaller chunks. Games like:

No More Heroes
While one of the longer games I’m playing at the moment, No More Heroes is perfect for tackling in small chunks. As Travis Touchdown, otaku with a heart of… something and a beam sword won off the internet, there are eleven professional killers standing between you and being the top-ranked assassin in the world.

Which turns out be perfect for spending a couple of hours with here and there. In about an hour, I can jump into the game, spend some time getting together the money necessary to go after my next target by performing odd jobs for a man who insists on reminding me of the coconut’s godliness, tool around the surreal landscape of Santa Destroy, and still have time to brutally kill the next whackjob in line after an epic, occasionally earth-shattering battle. No More Heroes rewards both long and short form play, perfectly happy to have you for as long as you can spare. I’m ranked number four at the moment, having just killed some sort of magician guy in the middle of his act, and am now a bit down at the idea of running out of such incredibly unique freaks of nature to laser sword into little bits. There’s always hard mode, I suppose.

Rock Band
Rock Band has effected my gaming habits like nothing else since Animal Crossing: Wild World (and both Brain Ages, though for not nearly as long) – I play it every day, for at least twenty minutes a day, and usually first thing in the morning. Looking to replace your morning cup of coffee? You could do worse than a plastic guitar and ‘When You Were Young’ by the Killers.

And there’s more to it than that. My girlfriend and I have a standing date to play as our band Kara & Her Special Destiny in World Tour mode, despite her having that whole “studying for med school” thing looming over every bit of her free time (we’re now in the Hall of Fame, thankyewverymuch). Two weeks ago, in the name of our band moving past the fan cap of 260,000 for playing on Medium, I retaught myself how to play the guitar to make finally breaking through into the Hard difficulty level possible. Nothing in Guitar Hero 1 or 2 inspired the same push, but then, nothing in those games had the chance to play in Tokyo as the carrot to balance out the stick of introducing that orange button. Most importantly, though, is how easy Harmonix have made it to play every day – in twenty minutes I can play four or five songs, waking myself up while essentially learning how to play the game all over again. In two hours on a Saturday, Kara & Her Special Destiny can blaze across the country and end up on Europe’s door step. It’s all about creating as much of a player friendly experience as possible: how I progress and the challenges I take on are almost entirely up to me, making Rock Band one of the most freeing experiences to be found in games.

Team Fortress 2
TF2 continues to enthrall for many reasons, chief of which being it’s still one of the only multiplayer games where I don’t feel ostracized for not dedicating every waking moment of the last five years to the fine art of the headshot. It’s still the premiere team experience, still the one game I’ve been apart of where good communication will win out over a team of experienced but uncooperative players almost every time.

I’ve already talked at length about much of what works with TF2, and believe me, I could go on. Suffice to say that the game has delivered on the greatest promise of its design – while the Pyro is still my first choice for who to play as, the last few months have seen me cozying up to the Soldier in a big way. His slow, methodical pace, the swiss army knife of destruction that is his bazooka, and his ability to switch between offensive tank and rocket firing turret make him an excellent first step of the comfort zone I so often establish in games. More than this, though, is how TF2 lacks any trace of the aforementioned disappointment games, largely because it’s exactly what it says it is. It never claims any of the realism or moral dilemma that other games advertise and never quite deliver on, it doesn’t sell itself as the next leap forward in anything in particular. It’s just a way to play with friends. Granted, it’s one of the most fun, most well-balanced, and most insanely addictive ways to do so, but it’s happy being just that. And more and more often, that’s all I really want.

Call of Duty 4
And the CoD 4, the game I never expected anything from only to get nearly everything I wanted. I just finished plaything through it again for the second time a week or so ago, and it’s every bit as thrilling and fun as I remembered. Great as it is to open up on the enemy with an airborne howitzer, the real appeal is less the gameplay and more it’s bite-sized nature.

Everything about CoD 4 is built to take as you want it. Missions are peppered with generous checkpoints, saving your progress every few minutes at natural lulls in the action. Missions themselves, while made up of intense, edge-of-your-seat firefights, are only fifteen to thirty minutes long, the perfect length of time for blowing off steam between getting home from work and dinner. I haven’t spent much time with the multiplayer (no flamethrowers = FAIL), but by all accounts it’s every bit as good – and possibly better – than the single player campaign. CoD 4 was clearly built from the ground up for all kinds of players, which speaks to great design in and of itself, but more importantly it was built with players with realistic schedules and free time in mind.So what are the trends here? Short games, or at least short play times, as mentioned before. Games that are happy to be games first, giving me the freedom to play how and when I want to. Strong designs that maintain their focus rather than muddying things up with good ideas half-realized. Welcoming experiences built with the understanding that all kinds of people games, and the more accessible you make your design the more of them will come your way. All things to mull over, and possibly even expound upon next week.

I don’t have time to do a regularly updated news site about games, as I’m often too busy making them to stop and talk about interesting bits of news as much as I’d like to. So the idea is at the end of each week (probably on Fridays, if this catches on), I’ll post links to stories by people who not only have time to go into the finer points of a story but do so with more ability than I could probably manage. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the bigger stories of the last week involves Mass Effect, the frothier bits of the far right, and the death of intelligent debate in general. Several of the more fundamentalist members of the religious right have spent the last few weeks up in arms over the sex scenes in Mass Effect, blowing moments that would appear tame compared to a Lifetime movie into (to quote one article) “the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game ‘persons’ hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of”. While the original article was (sort of) corrected for it’s glaring inaccuracies, the imagined uproar of it eventually wormed it’s way to that bastion of truth and reason, FOX News. Geoff Keighley, long-time journalist and host of Spike TV’s Game Head, was invited on to the network to discuss the apparent rampant sex in the game. A video of the segment can be found here, but it doesn’t take much to imagine how things went – Keighley was of course ambushed, bombarded with out right lies and misunderstandings of the game by both the host and an “expert”, and hardly allowed to get a word in edgewise. That said, he still managed to hold his own, offering up a number of good counter points for those actually listening. EA, parent company of Mass Effect developer Bioware and publisher of the title, sent a fantastic letter to the network requesting – not demanding – an apology and correction to the hundreds of people who worked on the game and have had to see something they’re deservedly proud of slandered in front of the whole world. Since then, Fox has refused a correction, instead asking EA to send a representative back in front of the firing squad to “set the record straight”. EA have taken the quite reasonable position of not being interested in walking into an ambush, and would not be willing to appear without a correction being issued first. And so the cycle continues. (Thanks Kotaku for the links)

Somewhat related to all that mess, Meagan VanBurkleo, a graphic design student with aspirations of working in the videogame industry, has created Beyond The Hype, a site dedicated to tracking the various attempts at restricting videogame sales and distribution through legislation and attempting to educate people on the many, many misconceptions surrounding the ESRB and sale of violent videogames to minors. It’s something that’s long past due, particularly as violence in videogames becomes more and more of an issue in the forthcoming election (sure, it’s no impending recession or war in Iraq, but still) and far too many of the candidates are perfectly happy to support unnecessary and restrictive laws if it means not telling their constituency they’re poor parents. The ESRB works just fine without being turned into an official government body – it fails when mom or dad drag into the store to by their kid that M-rated game the clerk said they were too young for in the interest of an afternoon to themselves.

Enough with the soap boxing, though. Via Boing-Boing, a directory of wonderfully tiresome anti-DRM rants and misunderstandings of what “steampunk” means, comes this genuinely cool video from the alternate universe that is Japan. Two guys mashed an old hand-recognition system with Super Mario Bros., creating a version of the game that’s played by nudging Mario along with your fingers and sending him flying with a flip of your hand. The truly awesome bit comes towards the end, when they create an unstoppable flood of Marios and send them pouring over world 1-1. If there’s a hell for Goombas, this is it.

Tom Francis of PC Gamer UK has journeyed into the hallowed halls of Valve’s base of operations in Washington, as has emerged with stories of treasure. Talk has circulated for a while of “major changes” coming to Team Fortress 2, but until now we had no idea just how major they meant. Starting “soon” (and in Valve-speak, “soon” could mean anything from next week to just in time for the heat-death of the universe) with the Medic, each class is getting two alternate versions of their current weapons load outs that are earned by getting half and then all of that Class’ in-game achievements. While the new weapons will remain in keeping with the role of each class (no Medics running around with rocket launchers, then), the effect these new toys stand to have on gameplay is unimaginable and very, very exciting. Valve being Valve, they’re proceeding with great caution, with the plan calling for new weapons to be rolled out slowly to allow a better gauge of the reaction from players. The changes are only confirmed for the PC version of the game, but given Valve’s new approach to console support I can’t imagine they’ll stay that way for long. Please oh please oh please give something involving napalm to the Pyro. It’s only fitting. (Thanks, RPS for the Wednesday morning present)

Clive Thompson of Games Without Frontiers has declared his yearly “Best Of” column for Indy games dead, as there’s just too damn many of them. It’s a shame, as I love year-end lists, but he’s also got a fair point. The explosion of excellent independent games for the PC in the last few years has produced some truly amazing experiences, to the point that keeping track of them all is nearly impossible. In many ways this surge in small, cheaper to produce and digitally distributed games could well be the ideal future for the platform, particularly as super expensive, super high profile titles like Crysis and Unreal Tournament are failing to make back even a fraction of their development cost and any MMORPG that isn’t WoW has to fight tooth and nail just to survive it’s first year. One look at the IGF finalists for this year is enough to see the sort of diversity and pure creativity that’s out there, just waiting to be tapped. In the future, there’s a game for every one, and it’s starting right now.

And finally, XBLA portfolio planer David Ederly discusses the value of creating a strong downloadable demo for your game. I’ve thought a lot about this lately, particularly in light of the confusing and frustrating demo for Burnout Paradise discussed earlier and the fun but constantly interrupted by cut scenes one put up this week for Devil May Cry 4. He doesn’t mention it by name, but the demo for Crackdown is still one of the best sales pitches for a game I’ve seen in a long time – after its hour of play, all I could think about was getting my hands on the full version of the game. Valuable reading for anybody trying to sell anything, particularly games.

But then came Team Fortress 2, and with it the Pyro.

Team Fortress 2, as mentioned before, is a class-based game unlike any other. Rather than “class” being a fancy word for “has a different gun than you”, each of it’s nine characters are fully-realized roles that, when filled by the right person, can build into a nigh-unstoppable machine. A big part of every new player’s first few matches is finding that first comfortable role, and from there branching out into the other classes as you learn how they work and see them in action. Like many other newcomers, I started with the Medic – he’s the perfect fit for new players, giving them a chance to see the map while paired with a more experienced player and an important role to fill – but it didn’t quite fit. Even after killing an enemy Medic and Soldier team all on my own by sneaking up behind them with my bone saw, something wasn’t quite right. I wanted to help my team, but I also wanted to be free to go off on my own and explore. And that’s how I met our friend the Pyro.

The Pyro, for all his apparent shortcomings – no long-range attack, average health, looking a bit like a pervert duck – is a fantastic Spy hunter, able to expose cloaked or disguised enemy Spies with a quick burst of flame that lights them up for all to see. Within moments of my first time spawning as a Pyro, I found a teleporter exit inside my team’s base, placed by some eager (and most likely now dead) blue team engineer. I had just turned my flamethrower on in when the thing whirred to life, creating a column of white light with the profile of a man growing inside it. I had just enough time to recognize his silhouette as that of a an enemy Spy before enough of him materialized to catch fire; I can only imagine what the last thing he saw was, but I’d guess it was nozzle-shaped. By the time it was over, with both Spy and teleporter pad reduced to smoking ruin, I knew it was love.

And so it went. I had found my first class to really be comfortable with, and I spent the rest of the night learning what he could do. Thanks to his flamethrower’s short but wide range of damage, I didn’t have to worry about accuracy as much – I could charge in, bearing down on them with my finger on the trigger till they fell, or I could drop down on a group of enemies, light them all up, and then make a break for it in the ensuing panic (Pyro’s are very good at causing panic, as suddenly dying from being on fire goes a long way towards breaking an enemy’s concentration). Later, when playing Capture The Flag with an entire team of work-chums, my little Pyro and Jim’s Engineer stayed behind to defend our base while the others focused on grabbing the enemy flag. There was an Engineer and Scout from the other team that met the business end of my flamethrower so many times that, but the time the match was over, I was guilty of a genocide of two. And it was glorious.

Since that first night with the Pyro I’ve begun to branch out a little, spending time with the Engineer on defense or taking the rocket launching-Soldier out for a spin whenever I want to try a bit of offense. I take Heavy Weapons Guy, the game’s slow-walking engine of death, out for a spin when the other team is dominating us with a bunch of fast moving smaller guys that are allergic to mini-gun rounds. I’ve even started dabbling with Scout and Spy classes to moderate success. But I always come back to the Pyro, one of the few classes who work nearly as well when played with a little finesse as when done as a blunt instrument. Just keep those bastard Demomen off me, yeah?