Last week, we posted about our GamerSushi Community Night in Team Fortress 2. After getting some feedback, we decided to host the game tonight, at 10 PM CST! Give us a roll call in the comments, and let us know if you’ll be there or not. And if you’re late, no worries, you can drop by whenever.
So, who’s joining? And feel free to leave suggestions on what we should play for our next community night! Go!
Update: Server is: 173.62.11.99:27015, we’re playing now!
Last month, our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game night was a rousing success. There were around 20 GamerSushi folks in and out of the server over the course of the night, and at one point we had a pretty healthy (although maybe a bit one-sided) 9 versus 8 match going.
Getting the crew together was so fun, we thought we’d try to start doing it twice per month, especially now that KillKill’s server is up and running. For our next game night, we’re eying Team Fortress 2. We expect mayhem.
Here’s how to sign up: if you haven’t joined the GamerSushi Steam Group, you should do that. Then in the comments, tell us what days/times would be best for you next weekend. We’ll do our best to set up a game time that works for as many of you guys as possible.
Also, you should wish Anthony a happy birthday today. Go!
2/23 Update: We’re playing this tonight at 10pm CST. Who’s in?
Once Valve officially released Source Filmmaker to the public, it was only a matter of time before some fans would do some truly great things with it — after the slew of derivative “x movie in Team Fortress 2” videos, of course. Well, it seems we finally have a worthy machinima entry, straight from the fan community.
Sort of. Although James McVinnie is a Team Fortress 2 fan, he also happens to be a cinematic designer at Bioware. Which probably explains why his new short, Practical Problems, is so well done. In addition to spending 130 hours in both Hammer and Source Filmmaker to get the job done, James also worked with his friend Zach to do some motion capture work via 2 Kinects.
So, yeah. The results are rather entertaining, and quite faithful to the spirit of Valve’s own work with Team Fortress 2.
Thoughts?
Any day that I get to use alliteration in a post title is a swell day for me, and perhaps all of mankind. OK, probably not.
I’ve taken this brief break from my weekend of playing Skyrim until my thumbs fall off to point your attention to a hilarious post I saw over on Ranker. This humorous list chronicles the 13 Greatest Moments in Video Game Griefing History, and I think it’s worth every second you spend looking at it.
While griefing is a mostly vile and contemptible practice, I can’t help but laugh when griefers really get creative and think beyond the box of the typical racial and homophobic slurs. Case in point: the number one entry on the list, where a clever Spy in TF2 posted sprays of models in order to knife other players in the back when they stopped to oggle.
What are your favorite entries on the list? Have you ever seen some creative and hilarious griefing that you couldn’t help but admire? Go!
Source – Ranked
Valve certainly is doing everything they can to make up for a lack of Half-Life 3, now aren’t they? After dropping Portal 2 on us earlier this year, they’ve turned their attention towards their other critically-acclaimed darling: Team Fortress 2. With this week’s Uber Update promising tons of content and a new Meet the Team video to boot, Valve also announced today that Team Fortress 2 will be free forever. Now isn’t that quite the how-do-you-do? As you might except, Meet the Medic is filled with blood and guts, albeit in that Team Fortress style, so use discretion if necessary.
Not my favorite Meet the Team video so far, but the Sniper and Spy trailers would be hard to top. So there it is, more loving from Valve to all of us. Apparently there’s some discontent out there concerning Team Fortress 2’s new price tag, but this game has been around since 2007; chances are, you’ve gotten your money’s worth by now. What do you guys think of the new trailer and Team Fortress 2’s low, low price?
This is sort of a week for excellent dance-themed machinima, it seems. First we get the sublime krogan dance off in the form of Mass Effect 2’s Dance Dance Redemption, and now we have Dance Fortress 2. This little beauty of a video was made by a talented man who goes by the name of James Benson. This project started two months ago, and the culmination of his efforts can be seen below. This was apparently made as a resume to Valve, so best of luck to you, Mr. Benson.
The transition from a video game to a movie is a tricky one, a notion that we have explored in the past on our sweet podcast. It seems that the only people who are capable of making a movie based on games are the developers themselves, but they lack either the necessary components or the capital to make a feature film. Valve Software, who we all know as the studio behind Half-Life, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, has stated that they’d like to try their own hand at making a Half-Life movie, saying that they were approached by a bunch of Hollywood types with horrible interpretations of the Half-Life saga. Here’s part of the quote given by the man himself, Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell, on what happened with the Half-Life movie:
Where we got into this direction was after Half-Life 1 had shipped. There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.
Sound like typical Hollywood, doesn’t it? So, if Valve didn’t want Half-Life handed off to a big studio, they would just have to do it themselves. Gabe also explained that the Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Team” shorts were a small part of the build-up to a full-fledged film.
That’s when we started saying ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.’ And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.’ But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that
Valve has been stating for a while that they would like to get into the business of comic books and movies, and recently they’re been taking a lot of steps in that directions. The Meet the Team shorts are getting longer and bolder, and almost every Team Fortress 2 update has had a comic associated with it. What’s your opinion on Valve’s stance towards the Half-Life movie? Do you think they could pull it off? What sort of stuff would you like to see come from Valve in the future?
Source: PC Gamer
Child’s Play, started by the Penny-Arcade guys way back in 2003 to not only give toys to sick kids in the hospital but to also dispel the negative image of gamers created by mainstream media, has been a runaway success since its inception, raising over six and a half million dollars in seven years. While every year more and more great fundraisers step up to plate to donate to the foundation, I’ve never seen one that actively encourages item destruction.
For those who are unaware, the last Team Fortress 2 class update came out a short while back with the Engineer as its focus. To celebrate the new content, Valve release 100 golden-colored wrenches to the community to use in game. Now, given the large player base and the rarity of the item, almost all of the lucky 100 have been faced with in-game harassment for simply having good fortune. Well, one user named “WiNG” decided to do something unusual with his wrench. Instead of simply destroying it to be rid of it, he started a fundraiser for Child’s Play, pledging to delete his golden wrench on August 23 and donate all of the proceeds. So far, ten more wrench owners have joined him, and the donations have crested over twenty thousand dollars.
I think this is a really inspiring bit of gaming news, showing that we gamers do have a heart, albeit deep, deep down for some of us. Although the wrenches are worth nothing, and were simply made by Valve to reward a few of their players, WiNG and his ten followers have turned a bit of code into a hefty amount of cash, all with the aim of better the lives of children in the hospital. If you want to check out more on this charity, visit Top Tier Tactics.
I thought I would interrupt the madness of the day to post this, because this video is worth noting.
YouTube dude TrueOneMoreUser has posted a couple of videos which I found terribly impressive, given what he did with these TF2 characters. Basically, he re-edited live action footage of the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen and replaced the real actors with the characters from Team Fortress 2. The result is the amazingly awesome Law Abiding Engineer.
He’s also posted a vertical comparison video, which shows the original and the new trailers next to each other. I’d recommend checking that one out as well.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjGrHBpfqCo[/youtube]
It’s been a while since I asked what you guys were playing in your free time, so I thought I’d give it a shot, especially since the Summer brings lots of free time with it.
Right now, I’m tackling Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Team Fortress 2, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel and Halo Wars. I’ve been doing my best lately to finish more games, so I’m hoping to be done with Sacred 2 and Star Ocean over the next couple of weeks. After that, I’d like to try out the Wolverine game, or maybe even move on to Fallout 3 finally.
What about you guys? What are you currently playing?
While I hear that this hilarious video is based off of a Strong Bad e-mail, it doesn’t change the fact that this TF2 inspired Every Class is Different skit is awesome. Narrated by the spy, it’s a quick run down of all the Team Fortress 2 classes, and whether or not you’ve played the game, I think you’ll find something humorous. Good stuff, give it a watch.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFAnrdZvUtU[/youtube]
Hope you dudes all had a great Memorial Day weekend, for those of you that got to have some free time, anyway. Me, I played tons of video games including Sacred 2, Halo Wars and Team Fortress 2 (apparently I dominate as a Pyro). I also saw Terminator: Salvation, and yes, it was as disappointing as everyone says.
I was totally with the movie until a certain point about half way in, and then everything just takes a huge nose-dive plot wise. Seriously, I’ve never seen a movie tank so hard, so fast, but this one did. I don’t often give in to the idea of “deal breakers” in a movie, but this one definitely had a couple of deal breakers that got in the way of my enjoyment.
It got me thinking about deal breakers in terms of video games, actually. Something that is so inexcusable that you instantly stop enjoying the game that you are playing. I think for me deal breakers are multiplayer games that are unbalanced or full of exploits (hello Gears of War 2), or single player campaigns that pull you out of the fun and make you do boring puzzles again and again.
What about you guys? Do you have any gaming deal breakers?
My favorite game seems to always be switching. I’m not talking about favorite of all time, but rather, my current favorite. A few months ago, it was Left 4 Dead, and right now, it’s Team Fortress 2. For a time it was Halo Wars, and for another time, it was even Valkyria Chronicles. I cycled through each of these relatively quickly, considering my normal habits.
Whenever I get into a game, I really sink into it for months at a time, unable to let go of its pixely goodness. I tend to become obsessed with it, playing it several nights a week with room for nothing else. And then suddenly, I get completely sick of it out of the blue and I don’t even want to play it anymore. However, the game that was able to shy away from this the longest had to have been Counter-Strike or Halo 3. To this day, I could still pick either of those games up.
What about you guys? Which favorite game of yours has lasted the longest as your favorite, and which games did you grow quickly sick of? Go!
If you were unaware, the Orange Box is only $9.99 for the weekend on Steam. So if for some reason you’ve been holding out on this game, it’s probably time to steal it for this low price. Since I’ve only ever played it via other people’s computers, I figured it was time to buy it for myself. And let me say, playing Team Fortress 2 over the weekend has been incredible.
I know many people have already played (and gotten tired) of this awesome game, but I’m experiencing it for the first time really almost 2 years later. I’m really enjoying the team play, and somehow, playing as a backstabbing bastard (aka The Spy) seems to really suit me.
Have you guys ever jumped on to a game years after its release to discover what everybody else already knew? Go!
After playing Left 4 Dead versus like an addict for the last couple of months, I’ve started thinking about what makes it so fun. I mean, it’s not all that different from a game like Halo or Gears of War, right? At its core, it’s still just one team versus another team, so why am I enjoying it like crazy?
To be honest, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it is, in fact, different. While most games rely on the “kill-or-be-killed” mentality, Left 4 Dead, even in versus mode, is a co-operative beast.
Continue reading GamerSushi Asks: Favorite Multiplayer Modes?
