Scammers! They’re everywhere nowadays. Cheats! Hackers! Frauds! Phoneys! These rogues and more want your precious wizard hats and shark guns, to plunder your Steam account of its cosmetic goodies and steal them away for their own nefarious ends. CS: GO guns and Dota 2 wizard hats can be worth a lot of money, you know. Valve are sick of folks doing this, and probably sick of the headaches it creates for their support department. To reduce this, they’re soon adding trade holds that’ll hold things up by a few days – unless both parties are using the Steam app‘s Mobile Authenticator.
The hand of Hale giveth, the hand of Hale taketh away. And then it probably punches something. That wacky, violent Australian. In a strange move for a game that’s built around the notion that people want to buy hats, Team Fortress 2 is retiring some of its headgear from sale, drops, unboxing, and even crafting. The only way to get them is through trading. I guess that’ll include the Steam Marketplace as well. What hats, you ask? Well, unless you click this link, the only way to find out is to look below. There is literally no other option. I’d prefer you went below. I have a treat waiting for you if you do. Read the rest of this entry »
Team Fortress 2’s sinewy neck of content has been slashed open once more, pumping forth a bloody torrent of hats and features. It’s the third annual Halloween update, and it brings full-body costumes for every class (including a fantastic “teleporter gone wrong” Brundlefly for the Engineer), an update for classic King of the Hill map Viaduct turning it into Eyeaduct, which features dimension-jumping slipgates and a spooktacular boss fight with the Demoman’s demon-posessed eyeball, and finally another superb Halloween-themed comic book depicting the origins of said demon eyeball. It’s all still Free to Play of course, with the new costume items being found randomly throughout the map or available to buy immediately in the MannCo store. A short demonstration of the boss battle is after the jump.
As Jim and I played through the first couple of chapters of Portal 2‘s co-op, we spied a strange sight. The “Robot Enrichment” option on the main menu transformed from doing nothing to opening up a page featuring the two little robots, P-Body and Atlas, and a collection of itemisable slots. Oh heavens.
Indie games and hats: two things which are very much RPS’ bread and butter, yet never the twain shall meet, which seems an oversight. David Lien wants to change all that. He plans to create an indie merchandising business, and as such has already snagged the blessings of the goodly gentlemen of 2D Boy to make these semi-official World of Goo hats. Hats!
But what else from indieland could and should be merchandised? A full, quivering tentacle suit for Octodad (to of course be worn beneath your own tuxedo)? A selection of cutlery shaped like Minecraft tools? Rock of Ages bowling balls?
The hats are preorderifiying here, by the way – $15 to $20 with free postage, and you can optionally lob on $5 more to get World of Goo itself.
Man, World of Goo seems a long time ago. Please hurry up and release a new game, 2D Boy.
For those wondering if it’s abstractly possible for a developer to be owned by the largest third-party publisher in the world yet still be involved in Indy game development, then we have an answer for your troubled brow: Yes! Abstractly. If they make an Indy game*, anyway. Which they won’t. It’ll be Star Wars again, and everyone knows it.
It seems that Electronic Arts purchasing Bioware (and Siamese-twin developers Pandemic) recently hasn’t put an end to their long standing relationship with Lucasarts. Bioware and Lucasarts have announced they’re working together on an undisclosed game. What sort of game will this be? Our inside sources (that is, sources inside our head) tell us that it will prominently feature graphics and sound and gameplay. It will also come out on the PC, as we’re perennially optimistic. And for a more serious educated guess: A Star Wars MMO from their Austin Studio, maybe? And for further baseless speculation, head thee to the comment thread.
*(Oh – Indy/Indie game joke courtesy of Consolevania.)
And we got it from Sierra and they got it from whoever they got the hat from. THIS HAT.
(Plus a friend hat, non-pictured)
You may remember last week we ran a competition to win this World in Conflict-o-garment. All your had to do was to reveal to us a secret which was confided to you. The most amusing, heart-breaking and generally “Oh, God, You soooooo shouldn’t have told us that. They’d kill you if they found out, and in an entirely unmetaphorical way” secret would win. As would the second best, as we had two hats. We were quite overwhelmed by the response. Overwhelmed by how many of you would sell out your friends for a cheap old hat, which is probably polluted by my head-germs. You’re bad people.
That said, the stories were good. Main themes include accidents in masturbation with house-hold fluids, several misadventures in the military of a certain middle-eastern power, improvised hair-pieces, several ironic playful non-secrets, accidentally pooing themselves in front of a minor pop-star and a frankly disturbing use for a Bioshock Big-Daddy Statuette. And many more.
But, after extremely careful and length deliberation lasting almost a whole minute, RPS’ verdict was unanimous.
The winners are Mr Caplan and Mr Dartt, who will both receiving a hat. We hope it lets you sleep at night, Betrayers most Foul and Perfidious.
(Er, I think we need your mailing addresses, guys – Jim.)
