So Valve finally got around to releasing one of the two final Meet the Team videos - the newest being for the Medic, and arguably the most epic video they've created so far. Watch below!
Oh, and if you didn't bother to watch all the way through, they've also just announced that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play for all! A generous move, surely, though I'm not sure if there are many people left out there who are interested in the game and haven't gotten it yet. Still, this is great news for the continuing popularity of the game.
And if it's proof of anything, it's proof that sales of virtual goods must be a profitable business for Valve. This wouldn't shock me at all.
Anyway, it's a great game by a great team. Get it for yourself if you haven't already!
Another thing that happened while I was gone was that Team Fortress 2 got video capturing, editing, and rendering tools, and me and my buddy Dave used them to become YouTube sensations!
Well, the first part happened, anyway. The second part almost happened, but alas, not many people watched our video. I've taken the liberty of including it at the head of this post, if you're interested in watching a Pyro and Medic take on a handful of bad guys. Spoiler alert: lots of people get burned.
I used a combination of Team Fortress 2's built-in tools, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere to create the video. Oh, and a little help from a tool called GCFScape.
Looks like the cat is finally (officially) out of the bag!
What was alluded to in a few obscure screenshots and then not very subtly in the YoYo Games Competition 5 rules has now been made official in a Glog post today; that YYG has been hard at work on a version of the Game Maker runner that works on PSP.
YYG also announced that they have hired Russel Kay as their Chief Technical Officer in charge of all future Game Maker development. Kay is the former Senior Software Architect for Realtime Worlds, and while his new post at YYG seems to imply that Mark Overmars may not be taking as big a role in future versions of Game Maker, Sandy (presumably) tries to lay those fears to rest in the announcement:
Also, don’t worry about Mark Overmars, he won’t be disappearing. Mark is too busy with his university commitments to take up a full-time role at YoYo Games, but he has recently strengthened his links with us and he has been fully involved in the process of recruiting Russell at every stage. Mark has already been working closely with Russell and he will continue to have a great influence on Game Maker and our community.
I'm pretty excited for YYG and Game Maker - I think that if they can successfully make the jump to consoles/handhelds they could become a very lucrative company (almost like Steam for consoles/handhelds). I also think that with new talent on board, we might see larger advancements in the power of Game Maker, and sooner.
Of course, if they can't make that happen it could spell the end of Game Maker. But with a lot of smart, talented people on board, I'm not concerned about that. Interesting news, anyway.
Though I haven't been staying up late enough to catch much of this last week of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, I have been keeping up with the whole debacle every day on the internet. A proud member of Team Coco, I've been hunting down the latest clips every day, and have been greatly amused by Conan's increasingly insulting monologues. I've also had good fun seeing all the other late-night hosts weigh in on the issue, as well as people completely outside the blast radius (Ricky Gervais had some awesome things to say at the Golden Globes).
Anyway, it's too bad Conan won't be doing The Tonight Show for longer. I always liked him on Late Night, and he seems like a much funnier guy than Tonight's former (and soon, once again) host, Jay Leno. Hopefully Conan goes on to something much better and stomps Leno in ratings. Leno deserves it for not taking the high road and bowing out, and to a greater extent, NBC deserves it for making crappy decisions at the whims of their affiliates.
Though I am not a diehard Google fan, I usually use Google whenever I need to search for something, and I take advantage of a few of the services they offer like Gmail and their online calendar. Lately though, I've been a bit intrigued with Microsoft's revamped Live Search, Bing. I've been frequently jumping back and forth between Google and Bing to compare search results, especially when I have trouble finding something.
So far, I've been pretty impressed with Bing - it almost always returns just about everything I would find on Google, and the image and video search function on Bing is actually a cut above those found on Google. And though I do enjoy the simplicity of the Google landing page, which is one of the reasons why I think it became so popular in the first place, I do find myself drawn to the Bing landing as well; they almost always have a beautiful image on display, and the fact boxes you can mouse over are usually interesting.
Bing has been running a contest over the last few weeks, in order to help them find a jingle for the site. The contest simply asked people to record their idea for a jingle, and then submit it to the Bing YouTube page, where the winner would be chosen based on number of views and quality of rating.
The winner was crowned yesterday, and while the video is odd and slightly disturbing, I have to admit - the song is kind of catchy. Catchy in the way that the simple tune gets stuck in your head for about an hour after viewing. Behold the winning video:
The winner, Jonathan Mann, has been creating (and posting on YouTube) a song a day, and the video he submitted to the Bing jingle contest was his 202nd creation. Sure, it's decidedly awful, but isn't that pretty much what's expected from contests like this? Isn't being awful a prerequisite for running a viral internet campaign?
Anyway, I got a kick out of it. And almost as big of a kick out of the sourpuss people posting about how terrible it is directly on the Bing blog. It's pretty easy to pick out the people who are seemingly just mad that Bing isn't the pile of garbage they hoped it would be. But their comments are funny, nonetheless.
Also, I'm happy to report that Twitter has been down for hours now. Apparently, it was taken out by hackers early this morning. Let's hope it stays down.
Update: It looks like it's tentatively back up now. The world has its largest collection of useless information back again.
I'm finally back from my Thanksgiving holiday at my parents' house, and I can hardly believe it's already December! Where has this year gone?
Anyway, I had a couple of things I wanted to post today.
A recent episode of The Simpsons took Apple down a peg, as Springfield mall got its first "Mapple" store. It was quite enjoyable. Of course, all the YouTube links are gone now, so you'll have to find the episode yourself.
The next thing I wanted to post, also a video, is a new trailer released yesterday for the Black Mesa mod - a Half-Life 2 mod that is looking to recreate the original Half-Life with the Source engine, but with more content, higher resolution textures and models, and environments that take better advantage of the engine than Valve's original port of the game. Normally I don't get too excited over Source engine mods, since they rarely make good on their promises, or even get finished for that matter, but the amount of polish that has gone into this trailer makes me hope otherwise for Black Mesa. You can view the trailer below and find out more about the mod at the official site.
I played through a huge chunk of Half-Life 2 this holiday weekend, so I guess I'm a little bit excited about Half-Life in general again.
I'm glad to see that people found my recent set of examples interesting too, and I hope to get a fixed GM6 version of the 3D Rain example up sometime tonight. Sorry about the slow rain example, I'll play with it and see if I can get something up that's a little easier on the older machines soon as well!
That's all for now - thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving (or just a good weekend if you're not from the U.S.)!
Update: I've made a new GM6 file that should run better than the previous rain example, and which should load correctly in GM6. The area that the rain covers is a bit smaller than the original example, and the rain is a bit more sparse, but you should get the idea.
You can download the new example at the link above!
This is just a short post - I hope everyone had a great Halloween this year! I know I did, and I didn't even go trick-or-treating!
I was quite surprised when I fired up Steam yesterday and found that Valve had released the intro movie for Left 4 Dead, a game which looks like it's going to be tons of fun. The video looks good and scary, and it makes the wait for this game even more tough than before!
There are so many games coming out lately though... it's getting difficult to spend time on all of them. Hopefully after the holidays are all over, we'll get some sort of reprieve while game developers get back to working on next year's line-up of hits.
I'll be back here later to post about tomorrow's elections, I think. There's just too much going on not for me to comment about it at some point. Until then, thanks for reading, and enjoy the L4D video above!
With the latest Team Fortress 2 update, which includes the new Heavy class achievements, weapons, and a new game mode, Valve has also released another short trailer for the game: Meet the Sandvich.
The "sandvich" made its debut in the Meet the Scout video, where it changed hands between the Heavy and Scout after a scuffle, and continues to be the source of conflict in the newest video. It's also a new unlockable item for the Heavy class. It can heal 120 health, and the Heavy who has it equipped has an unlimited supply. The downside is that eating it makes a considerable amount of noise, and leaves the Heavy vulnerable for four seconds while he consumes it.
