When you’re Valve you don’t even need to officially hint any new things you want to introduce, you just have to put a hint to it somewhere in the game files and it’ll explode all over the internet in a few hours.

For instance, in the recently updated kill icons, there’s a nice little laser-pointing sentry in the bottom right corner.

New weapons axe and machete thing yadda yadda.

Two things bother me here. I distinctly recall Valve saying they didn’t want the medic’s poison mechanic from TFC because they were avoiding degenerative mechanics. Well the new shiv sure bleedin’ looks like poison to me.

Second thing is that I’m never getting any new weapon drops and I don’t have spares to craft. Dammit Gabe.

Yep, not much happening right about now.

Well, a recent patch came out and they finally fixed that one bug that slipped under the radar since the spy update.

- Fixed a case where the Spy could start taunting and cloak at the same time

Sad that they went to town on it with an axe, I really loved this bug. Other changes include CSS beta tweaks like actually being able to see on dust and a supposed engine crash fix.

They also buffed the pyro just a little bit, his flamethrower does 10% more damage and afterburn has been reverted to 10 seconds. His flaregun also crits burning enemies at longer ranges. Exactly how long? Well, I’ve tested it a bit and found it to crit past roughly 800 units. That’s around one and a half granary containers or most of the 2fort bridge. Also, a flaregun crit does 90 damage, while a minicrit does around 40.

A good friend of mine finally managed to secure me a SC2 beta key, and I have to say playing against humans makes the game a lot more interesting. Though I still have this preconceived notion that there are some units that won’t see the light of day in regular matches. Let’s hope this won’t happen.

I’ve only played the practice league and the bit where there’s rocks on your only exit is a bit pants-on-head retarded. You can’t scout for crap early but you only play like 5 games in there so I guess that’s not much of an issue.

Anyway, I’d like to direct you to this Polish chap’s channel. Discovered several months ago after he replied to that one Mass AI vid I did, I’ve been looking at his videos from time to time. He basically writes code that generates script files. Those script files can abuse the TF2 engine in rather impressive ways such as drawing a propaganda poster out of shovel hit decals or emulating a dot printer using snipers.

As with a lot of actually worthwhile things on the ‘net, he’s got relatively little exposure, so here’s hoping that he’ll make some more fine techie stuff.

Valve changed a few things in the crafting system with a recent ninja patch. For instance, one scrap metal requires only 2 weapons now. You can also fabricate the new community weapons with two specific items, like the Critcola being made out of a kritzkrieg and a bonk drink. Check TF2items’ page on crafting for more.

They also seem to have upped the weekly item cap a bit, but I can’t be certain. Hats are becoming more and more common, so maybe people will finally stop making such a huge deal about them.

As you may have already noticed, there’s a CSS beta out, which adds a few new things such as achievements, a killcam system, a domination/revenge system…and not much else. Me? I’ve played it and I got bored of it within the hour. But for the people who are still wondering, here’s ghetto screenshots of every achievement and the new stat pages after the jump.

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• Updated the Homewrecker
  
  • It now damages enemy sappers on friendly buildings
    

Valve’s just switching around class roles like nobody’s business.

Edit: Hahah holy shit it kills sappers in one hit

I’ve been flu’d since monday, and the headaches were pretty much the reason why I didn’t really post anything lately. But now that my noggin’s fine I finally finished the vid I was working on. Click on trendy entrepreneur Gaben to proceed.

Coincidentally, I found out about the not-so-secretly announced Engie update just as I was rendering the newest vid. Also platinum medals now available for people who preordered TF2. Remember when the pyro had to light people on fire with a pocket lighter?

The Wolfire humble games bundle caught my eye this week. You don’t often get to pay anything you want for 5 games, much less pick where you want the money to go.

Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve been using a shoutbox to chat with authors that were on the site back when they were active, but since it hasn’t seen much use lately I decided to make it available to subscribers. Anyone that has an account here should be able to use it. Just scroll down, and you should see it.

Yeah, I’m well aware of the updates, but I don’t like the medals that much. I’ve got a gold but it only seems to look nice on the soldier. I think the rumor that Gaben didn’t actually intend to release the balance patches is a lot more funnier. No, no link here, I forgot where I’ve heard of it and I’ve got a headache after not sleeping a night.

I was supposed to enter that one Madballs video contest but shit got complicated and it never got finished. Fun thing is it was going on for months, but I only found out about it around 5 days before the deadline. Either way, I do have recordings of the past few days; expect a vid any day now.