Remember when The Passing was scheduled to come out this March? Well, I don’t see any DLC anywhere, so I guess valve time wins again.

In the meantime, distract yourself with this rather well made fan-made engie update.

Jolly old Gabe Newell blurted out a bit of info on CVG recently regarding how he envisions a future game of theirs. Notice, he wasn’t referring to EP3.

“I feel like we’ve gotten away from genuinely scaring the player more than I’d like, and it’s something we need to think about, in addition to broadening the emotional palette we can draw on.”

I for one welcome our new pants-shitting overlords.

While ‘The Passing’ will be available for both L4D2 and L4D1, it seems they’ll kill off one of the old cast members by the time you’re done with it. If you’re playing L4D1, you’ll have to choose which team member to leave behind. But if you’re playing L4D2, the character that dies off will actually be the true choice.

Predicted spoilers? I’m seeing Bill kicking the bucket, seeing as there’s rumors of his voice actor going AWOL.

A TF2 update just rolled out, following a string of unknown items drops reported yesterday. While the patch notes were relatively uninteresting, the community hats and weapons included got found pretty much right away. The three new weapons are:

- The Dalokohs bar – Heavy lunchbox, adds +50% max hp for 30 seconds.

- The Pain Train – Demo/Soldier melee, adds +1 capture speed while increasing damage received from bullets by 10%

- The Homewrecker – Pyro melee, 200% damage against buildings, -25% damage against players.

There’s also several new hats.

I mean, check out who the guest in their latest video is.

Also, those of you who play BC2, you may notice there’s a new patch out. Funnily enough, balance remains untouched and the only things that have been fixed were some really blatant bugs caused by their haste to throw the game out as quickly as they could.

Here’s Gabe Newell’s Pioneer award acceptance speech. One of the best parts is when he touches on the subject of DRM. Considering the state of PC gaming this year, you have to wonder if he’s the only guy that actually knows how to properly sell a game to a client.

Yeah, there’s a secret message in there, gist of it is “SUSPEND UNTIL EEE”, meaning more interesting Valve stuff is gonna be at E3.

New TF2 blog post, this time answering a few questions about the Mac version of TF2. Gotta love their tone.

Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2?
A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren’t getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.

In other news, CEVO season 5 starts next week, and registrations close on Sunday. More info on this here.

Portal 2 is officially confirmed. It’ll also have co-op. More coverage here. You can almost feel the excitement violently emanating from me.

New TF2 blog post discussing one engineer unlock Valve has been thinking of. Truly, the engie is very hard to balance or modify without breaking something else severely.

Portal got updated again, this time with “Added valuable asset retrieval” being the only change. Goes without saying the steam forums are already looking into this incessantly. Edit: One hour later, a new endgame sequence.

Valve is also not so subtly hinting at the steam platform coming to the Mac. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but some ads seem to poke fun at the Mac’s shortcomings.

Valve updated Portal a few moments ago with this cryptic line being the sole change.

Portal

• Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

Don’t ask me what this means, but there’s a new achievement for the game, and Steamforums posters are already all over this. For now all we know is that there’s rumors of a radio in each chamber, and they play different messages, in morse code or whatever. As an European, I can’t check it out, as Valve updates always come at the darnedest times.

EDIT: More decodes. Cheers for the link, Lunch.