So, I’ve been playing with the sticky jumper recently, and as you all know there’s been a patch just a few hours ago.

The Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper now have no max health penalty, and have damage vulnerabilities instead.

I see this and I’m thinking “Great, they finally realized that those weapons were fun but horrible to use because of their health negatives”.

Then I look at the disadvantages, and now you take double damage from everything. So effectively you’ve got 87hp now. What the fuck.

By the way, double drop week.

Valve’s promising three big surprises within the next 12 months. Of course, they refused to give out any details that would even hint to what those surprises may be. But wait, since it’s supposed to surprise us, that means it’s not supposed to be Episode 3. Well, I guess I’m waiting to be surprised then.

On the other hand, Gabe has said said they’re working with biometrics in order to… do fancy unspecified things. I’m just hoping it doesn’t turn into some wii-fangled accessory that monitors your heart rate or something. They have said they’re trying to come up with a lightweight noninvasive method of gathering data like this, but I just want my HL2EP3. And the polycount update.

Huge source engine update out, and a lot of TF2 changes up along with it. Hold your horses, there’s barely any gameplay changes. A lot of map changes though, the most noticeable of them being the famous Thundermountain spawn vulnerability being fixed and Hightower’s ramp now easier to push.

However there also was an some update sometime in the past that increased the maximum resolution for sprays from 256×256 to 512×512. I don’t recall it ever being jotted down in any patch note. The maximum permitted size as also been increased, allowing for more frames in an animated spray. It’s weird that Valve actually cares about sprays, it’s something you almost never see in any other game and it’s not exactly a feature you’d use to get copies sold, but I sure as hell am glad there’s someone on the dev team that cares about them!

The TF2 part of  the Steam forum now has a Trading board. Come on, Gabe, stop teasing and give us that polycount update already.

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.

So you wake up one day and you find out your Steam friends list has been deleted. Something must’ve happened in the Valve offices, probably someone falling onto a server. I’m not going to make any more fat jokes on this subject for fear of HL2:Ep3 being delayed even more, so let’s talk about that new TF2 update.

You know that spot in 2fort on the Blu battlements where there’s a tiny tiny slit you can see through under the corrugated iron? Yeah, it’s gone. Doublecross got clipbrushed even more now so you can scratch your head and wonder why the crap you can’t rocketjump to that perfectly accessible spot. And flares can be reflected by the pyro yet again. Oh, who am I kidding, the only interesting thing going on on Steam right now is everyone complaining about their friends list!

Not harboring any ill will towards anyone, but I kind of enjoyed all the drama created by the friends fuck-up. Meanwhile, I’ll be playing Bad Company 2. If you’re played Battlefield 2/2142, I strongly suggest checking it out. You won’t regret it if you’ve had fun with those two games.

Edit: Well, logged on this morning, everything’s back to normal on Steam. Also, a beta.