The Saxxies are great - don’t get me wrong. But it is the way of copyright law to stamp pop culture reference into the carpet of obscurity, and Valve are left with little choice but to ban some of the wildest and wittiest Source Filmmaker creations from participation.
Inter-game reference is the best thing. It’s the hip hop soul on show in Super Meat Boy and a thousand arcade fighting games that sees the familiar flipped on its head, the solemn made hilarious and the trite made meaningful by new context.
Referencing makes two games stronger. And sometimes, it allows you to watch TF2’s Heavy and Total War: Shogun 2’s iconic samurai duke it out on a cartoon race track.
GDC 2013 will feature not one, but two talks from Valve about porting Team Fortress 2 to VR doohickies. But don’t pull on your homebrew flying goggles just yet, because it doesn’t sound like the experiment was entirely successful.
Valve-watching is a sport that requires patience and a good eye. Sometimes years will pass without any discernible sign of movement. Until by some divine insight, the monolith steps forward and plants its foot in precisely the right place.Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Batter’s helmet. Soldier’s stash, Pyro’s beanie. Demoman’s ‘fro. Football helmet. Mining light. Prussian pickelhaube. Trophy Belt. Fancy Fedora.
If the hats whose names I've read out could please step forward, I'd be very grateful.
None of you have a part to play in TF2’s brightly-coloured future. I’m sorry.
Between an Android-based handheld device that streams Steam games and a reported Linux-based living room device that, ah, plays Steam games, you could have been forgiven for cheekily dubbing us PC Games ‘n’ Hardware this morning. But to paraphrase the Ting Tings, that’s not our name. Rather, the site alias I’m pushing this afternoon is PC Games ‘n’ Heart. It begins with the touching news from Valve that TF2 map makers are likely to be better rewarded for their work from now on.![TF2 Mixup 5: What happened when Day[9], Yogscast and Tay Zonday opened fire for charity](http://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/tf2-mixup-5.jpeg "TF2 Mixup 5: What happened when Day[9], Yogscast and Tay Zonday opened fire for charity")
Remember that day in early December, when you paused during breakfast? As the milk dripped sullenly from your spoon, you became acutely aware that something terribly exciting was going on elsewhere, and were momentarily inconsolable that you weren’t part of it. 
This might come as a surprise to you, but even in covering the ultra-pulp papier mache world of PC games we rarely have a chance to write ‘Mecha-’ as a prefix. And so it brings me great pleasure to announce that Valve are taking advantage of their Christmas mecha-update to introduce the mecha-engineer. Mecha mecha mecha.
We’ve been eyeing Steam’s metrics with no small interest since the sales this weekend. Though the games that make up the lower rungs in the Top 10 Games by Current Player Count chart come and go, one thing has remained constant - Dota 2 is far and away the most-played game on Steam, beating its closest rival TF2 by a player ratio of 3:1.
Back in August, when sun was sun and Jessica Ennis was the new Joey Essex, Valve released a new mode - nay, a new game - for Team Fortress 2: Mann vs Machine. And lo, it was new and exciting. Unfortunately, it later transpired that they’d gone and shipped the thing with only one difficulty level. And lo, it was Hard. But that’s all to change.
That's right, after Dota and DayZ, TF2 is the latest game to get the Minecraft treatment. Click through for a video of it all in action.
Halloween is creeping up on us in a frankly comical manner that stopped being scary around the time that technicolour started being used in films. But nonetheless, the goofy scarefest is an excuse for Valve to put out a big update for Team Fortress 2, which allows it to be just about as silly and comical as it wants to be. But to do the update, they need input from the community, so they’ve put out a call on the Team Fortress 2 blog for their incredibly productive community to start making scary items for them to include in the update.
By the end, it was somewhat inevitable. Both teams in the i46 final - Classic Mixup and Leviathan Gaming - were of yank blood, and short of a double disqualification we were getting a yank winner. And despite jetlag, despite unfavoured maps, despite an unfamiliar ruleset, that winner was Classic Mixup.
Robots are bastards. Terminator taught us this. I, Robot taught us this. Wall-E didn’t teach us this, but there was always something suspicious about that little bugger. The point is, when you’re being swarmed by a hundred of them, and one has a bomb, and there’s also a big tractor with a bigger bomb in it, the previously ludicrous firepower at the disposal of Team Fortress 2’s nine classes doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous. It seems a little inadequate. 
Normally when there’s a Team Fortress 2 promotional tie in, it’s just a few hats. If you’re lucky you might get an extra gun or two, but for the most part it’s just more hats for you to carefully place in your dedicated Hatdrobe, sorted by size, prestige and dashingness. Square Enix, publishers of Sleeping Dogs, have gone a step further to present you with The Triad Pack, all but a whole new update for Team Fortress 2. 
Today’s patch to Dota 2 has filled the hole in the Store that was announcer shaped, bringing with it Doctor Kleiner from Half Life, and a pair of Dota 2 appropriate announcers in Nature’s Prophet and Juggernaut. But this is hardly the end of it, and it’s not going to be surprising if other Valve characters start popping up all over the place, commenting on your minor failures, and critiquing your terrible use of Fissure in blocking off your entire team from a fight. 
So, you’ve been playing Team fortress 2 for a while and you quite fancy one of those fetching hats that everyone seems to be wearing on the public servers. Yet you don’t have 500 hours to spare in the hope of finding one (at random) and have lots of crap sitting in your inventory. Rather than playing til your thumbs bleed, why not have a go at crafting one for yourself? We’ve designed a simple yet comprehensive starter guide to help you learn how to do just that. I present to you the Official PC Games N Beginners’ Guide To Crafting Hats!
