It’s here! It’s very funny! It’s absurdly violent! It’s like Poirot with more splattered brains! It’s one of the most incredibly-animated things I’ve ever seen! It even includes ‘your mum’ gags! It’s been unofficially leaked in low res! It’s… Meet The Spy!
Another thing I really like about this: it’s the Meet The video that’s most like the game itself, as opposed to the more abstract settings and stories of the others.
Related Stories:
Naaah, why would Valve remove friendly fire only to put it back in?
Epic fucking win. Valve outdo themselves at funny movies. Again.
Even though I’m terrible at playing him, The Spy is by far my favourite character. So this was great.
@Shadowmancer
If the characters you named were fat women under makeup I wouldn’t care, so long as they were compelling characters.
Why, would you care?
@optimaximal
Don’t read so much into it mate, the soldier shot the spy because it was funny, not because they’re teasing a new play mechanic.
I predict the scouts mum is actually the pyro.
http://forum.game-central.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2267&start=100
Turns out this is a fake update. Sorry for any confusion.
(Thank you the Hammer)
Hun23, that picture has “fake update” right at the bottom. :P
I like the ‘clue’ of the Scout not being able to open the door. “Yo, a little help here?”
The Scout’s shocked little throat noises when viewing the pictures of his mother are absolute comedic perfection.
I only skimmed, but amongst the arguments about cauliflower’s gender, no-one seems to have noticed that he said “petit” and not “petite” (which is a mistake if using “ma”), or the fact that he pronouced it “chaufleur”, or the fact that it’s spelled chou-fleur.
*stops being too anal about french*
Did anyone notice the box the Sniper’s Kukri was on? It was an urgent delivery box for the Razorback. You can see “Urgent – ….
a picture of a boar
“Razorb….
“by”
“MAI…”
I think that can easily translate to Urgent Delivery Razorback by MAIL.
Come to think of it, here’s hoping the Heavy gets a new unlock to charge people with his gun, knocking them out of the way.
And the Spy’s new melee weapon? Kung-fu!
best line in the movie is the heavy’s “AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaalllrightthen….”
I hate Alyx, i felt like the had a chain tied to my balls and walked me like a freaking dog, specially since she is immortal (except to plot related injuries) and has unlimited ammo, i just let her get mobbed by zombies and threw grenades at her feet (slightly hoping i might blow her up too :D)
About a single player TF2, they have the engine, a lot of characters, animations and other resourses done, it wouldnt be that difficult to write a simple story, make some levels and run with it
how about a Silent Storm/Jagged Alliance like game where you play a mercenary group with the guys and just go on standalone missions (making it easy to release more in the future and even leaving the possibility of a making short campaigns of several missions stringed together) ?
JKJoker: Jesus god, did Alyx run over your dog or something, dude? In the game I played, she let you set the pace and was a formidable, likable and entertaining ally. I hope the next game you play spontaneously manifests five escort missions in a row with allies who gormlessly walk into explosions, get eaten by monsters and make you start the level again and scream the same two lines over and over. Then you can talk about balls and chains.
I don’t understand all this Alyx hate at all; I adore her.
At any rate, for a game studio, the Valve guys sure as hell know how to animate a thing.
@Nano: well, im still preparing myself mentally for Resident Evil 5 PC: the escort mission
Dude, she takes all decisions, chooses where to go, how to get there, who to kill and what to shoot it with, i didn’t say she felt like a full time escort mission (she doesn’t only because she is in godmode), i mean that it felt like the game was about her and i was just tagging along (in a leash) and i just hate that
@Gorgeras:
He’s also a PhD because the people at Valve are massive nerds, and they wanted an excuse to control a theoretical physicist (pointdexter/nerd/geek) who uses a crowbar to beat the living snot out of a bunch of narcissistic, athletic, “All-American” soldiers (jocks).
@JKJoker
Er – but that’s the entirety of the Half-Life series, basically. That’s just the mechanism the devs decided on in order to hand you objectives, hints and facilitate Gordon Freeman’s awesomeness. If it’s not Alyx telling you what you’re meant to do next, it’s Eli Vance or Barney or Isaac Kleiner or Magnusson or the G-Man or some nameless rebel or Odessa Cubbage. Gordon’s a player character, that’s his lot in life. You still get to do all the coolest stuff in the game. I don’t get hatin’ on Alyx specifically for that.
@Nano, but thats exactly why i hate her, because she is the dev’s tool to kick me around
one thing is to nudge you in the right direction with a little hint here and there at least giving you the illusion of choice, and another is just openly saying “This game is ON RAILS, suck it!”
if you get told to destroy a boat in farcry or crysis you can’t reply, but you can choose the direction to approach from, if you use stealth or not, if you snipe everyone or blow everything up with explosives etc, in HF2 ep1&2 Alyx would say “hey, lets blow that up, come though *this* door, take *that* explosive, place it *there*, use the rifle to shoot *that thing*”, i have no choice whatsoever i cant even use different weapons, it has to be “that one” and since she is the one that more often tells me what to do, i hate HER
the worst of all is that it seems the player is *supposed* to care about the bland token mission-giving character, that makes me want to blow her the hell up even more
LB has cracked wide open: “Ma petite chaud fleur,” “My little hot flower.” Hot as in fire? As in pyro!
How can you argue with that? All those guys saying it was a spy update were right, which means we can never again ignore the clues.
@JKJoker
I still don’t get why it has to be Alyx specifically that you hate. All the characters do that; she just does it most of all because she’s your partner. That isn’t her fault, it’s the devs. It sounds like you just hate Half Life itself or linearity or something. Making Alyx the scapegoat burns me because I think she’s actually a reasonably well-written female character and they just get far too much shit. Do you blow up Barney? Did you blow up the scientists following you in the original?
I’m liking that detection computer thing at the beginning. (There’s like hundreds of different alert combinations there.)
@Nano: she is the one always there to take the hate, but yeah, i accept i dont like HF2 much, too many boring zombie areas and those
*SPOILER!!!*
scenes where you lose control and someone gets killed/kidnapped in front of you and you are just screaming, LET ME SHOOT YOU #@$%#@!!
*END SPOILER*
were gamebreakers for me, you just can not pull that crap and stay on my good side, its the only plot device i know worse than Dead Space’s (and many others) “unbreakable glass protecting the bad guy while he rants”, i could accept it for something like the game intro (like Prey) but that’s about it
@JKJoker:
Ah. Well, fine then. I disagree on a fairly massive scale about that, but that’s a subjective issue and it’s too damn cold here. Just…could you not blame and persecute the one female character for a device you don’t like? It gives me an uncomfortableness.
…Man, and all I wanted to say was that Meet the Spy is like the most perfect miniature murder mystery ever. God, Valve, don’t ever stop.
ok, ill try to hate Valve from now one (but somehow the image appearing in my head is Alyx’s face)
and yeah, Meet the spy was awesome :P (meet the soldier and sniper were pretty good too, demoman was ok, scout was just average and the heavy sucked)
All this talk of whether or not the pyro is female or such and such proper usage of french is distracting from the absolute best of the short: At the end when the spy is taking out the heavy and the soldier, he times his stabs with the outro theme,.
Ba! Ba! Ba-da-da-da-dum!
This point alone probably merits another front page post to the blog.
@JKJoker
Pah. Ingrate. Picture Gabe Newell instead, he’s less pretty. (For the record. I don’t mind being called one, but – I’m not a dude. :D)
@Tonic
…You’re absolutely right, and that is awesome.
I’m liking that detection computer thing at the beginning. (There’s like hundreds of different alert combinations there.)
I’d love to see the Big Board in a future map. Have the announcer record every word on the board and then, depending on the players’ actions, say them throughout the match. Adlib TF2 style. “A [team] [class] is [verb] a [team] [object].”
(Reminds me of TFC server admins making vox say stupidly immature stuff throughout the round.)
One of the first little things I immediately noticed and liked would have to be the engineer going “sentry down” in completely believable game-style. Theres so much brilliant charactarization going on in these, I cannot wait for Pyro and Medic .
Also
ALARM-O-TRON (5000?)
Apparently Valve let slip that the Pyro is female on the blog saying ’she will be inconsolable’ (it’s now been fixed).
As for the Spy’s poor French, Valve has never striven for accuracy (listen to the other accents)- in fact it’s somewhat deliberate, and adds to the ‘comic’ feel.
Great vid. and I love Valve’s continued teasing about the Pyro’s gender. I don’t think they’ll ever tell us and I’m not even sure if I’d want them to. The prestige is never as fun if you know all about it (I watched the Prestige last night, anyone guess?)
@JKjoker
Are you sure that Alyx is immortal? Granted she seems a fair bit tougher than even Gordon “HEV Suit” Freeman, but I could swear I had her gunned down at one point in Nova Prospekt, forcing a reload. (Failed to protect mission critical resources, I think)
James G I believe it was “Mission critical personnel”
I’ve killed/ had killed Alyx on multiple occasions. I was playing on Hard (and sometimes normal) for most of HL2 + episodes.
Ever since the “secret” spy update proved to be the one thing out of dozens of outlandish theories that the community got right (and wasn’t even that farfetched, considering the clue in the official source was pretty blatant) everyone and their mother is coming up with the silliest ideas.
Can’t we just enjoy the video for what it is rather than theorizing that the Spy isn’t actually fluent in French and therefore misconstrued the woman was the Scout’s mother and was ACTUALLY the disrobed Pyro who is a female that speaks Portuguese and wears an American football helmet in the off-season?
@James G: I have never be able to kill Alyx and i tried, i swear (i think i was playing on normal), it might depend on the version you played, i did have to reload quite a lot for destroying my damn car
@Lack_26 : tell me your secret :D
Still as awesome as I thought yesterday. fantastic. The music for the Red Spy’s motage is wonederful.
(Alyx is still rubbish, mind)
“@Serenegoose the only reason the community believe the pyro to be female is that on the trading cards it says “no one knows if even he is a man”, valve are just trolling with us and you believe them, here is proof he is male http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0060794/, the pyro is a tf2 version pf deadpool who constantly uses pop cultural references and breaks the 4th wall if no one knew the gender of deadpool would you want that character to be female?”
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004813/
Riposte!
I see so i needed to post nancy’s imbd page to get that point across :)
Alyx is immortal to your own fire and extremely resiliniant to enemy damage but not invincible. Shes tough enough to ignore most bullet based weapons, but she can die if she gets mobbed by melee attacking characters. The area with lots of zombines in ep.1 is the only place where thats a serious threat though.
Jeanyuss.
if you know french you’ll understand that he says at the end. ” Mon petit chau-fleur.” Chau-fleur translates derectly to hot flower. In my opinion the scout’s mother is the blue pyro. Chou-fleur is indeed cauliflower, but he doesn’t say chou-fleurs he says chau-fleur.