If you tuned into our Monday night stream this week, you may have noticed we were playing some new characters in the cooperative roguelike/dungeon crawler, Dunegon of the Endless. Developer Amplitude Studios added the familiar Team Fortress 2 characters to the game for FREE; that's right, if you own the game, just fire it up and play as the Pyro, Heavy, Medic, or Engineer.
Scream Fortress is an anual "event" set in Valve's free to play first person shooter, Team Fortress 2. This year though, things are a little different, thanks in part to an additional co-op mode that was added over the summer. The free update includes a haunted map where random spells are cast on players, for both good and evil purposes. The two-week-long event, which starts now and ends on November 8th, will also let players cast their own spells to buff their equipment like "shifting paint colors, ghost summoning, flaming footsteps and more."
It seems so long ago that we got that surprise free update for Team Fortress 2, one in which added the Mann vs Machine co-op mode for 6 players. In reality, it has only been two months. One complaint we had with the mode was that it was pretty friggin hard, combined with some match making difficulties, it didn't quite catch on with us as much as we thought it should. A new update for the game directly addresses both issues and adds new content to boot.
Is cooperative gaming a counter towards the development of potentially violent behavior? Studies have shown that it’s true! Video Game psychologists have looked into the opposite spectrum of video game violence to discover if playing violent video games under certain circumstances will ultimately lead to more cooperation and trust in real-life behavior.
Team Fortress 2 is an incredibly popular game from Valve that has had pretty consistent content updates for the better part of the last 3 years, and I don't just mean the hats. Now the game is getting what some might consider the biggest update since release - and entire new "faction" of of characters have joined the game. Except these aren't Reds or Blues, rather these are machines and it's time to team up with your friends against them in a survival mode.
Right on schedule, Eric Ruth has released Team Fortress 2 Arcade to the masses. The four player beat em up de-make of Valve's shooter is available for anyone to download for free. TF2 Arcade features all nine character classes for players to choose from as they take on the role of the Blue Team on a mission to take down all nine reds - each a boss of the game's nine levels.
Team Fortress 2 is arguably one of the most popular games available on Valve's Steam service. It consistently competes with Counter-Strike for the game with the most active users, has taken on a life of its own with items and microtransactions, and features some pretty amazing personality. Now the game is getting a retro style beat-em-up/shooter courtesy of Eric Ruth Games called Team Fortress 2 Arcade. If that name sounds familiar that's because they also created the 8-Bit Left 4 Dead game.
"Probably," says Geoff Keighley, in his new iTunes app/article: The Final Hours of Portal 2. The multimedia piece offers a striking look at the inner workings of Valve Software, the makers of such industry staples as Half-Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and their sequels. The Final Hours of Portal 2 is an online article currently for sale at the iTunes store. To access it you need only to follow the link above. The most intriguing portion of co-op news come from a conversation Keighley heard between between Gabe Newell, Valve's founder, and Erik Johnson, the company's project manager:
Ever wonder why PC gamers are so vehement about their dedicated server support? For this month's Battlefield Report, guest writer Dan "Jackel" Greiner enlightens our readership about what makes dedicated servers so popular among PC gaming communities.
