At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don’t have to make them, and b) they’re generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don’t have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like “Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards” keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)

It turns out that not only do we play other games–other game developers play ours. Last year Telltale Games‘ TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about “picking up my kids somewhere” and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they’re big fans of TF2, and we’re big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.

Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We’re doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max’s new adventure, The Devil’s Playhouse, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We’re going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.

That’s right: one week only. It’s like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:

Max’s Severed Head

• It’s not often you’re given the gift of a beloved character’s decapitated head by the very studio responsible for that character. Still, we’re not complaining. It’s soft, it wicks away moisture in the heat of battle, it highlights our eyes. It’s got us thinking about all the other game characters we could be wearing around as clothes.

Max’s Pistol

• Who wouldn’t want to squeeze off a couple rounds with the murder weapon of choice of a sociopathic cartoon rabbit? Probably quite a lot of people, when you get right down to it. Luckily, those people are all well-adjusted contributors to society with no police records, spotless credit ratings and few unresolvable moral failings. They also probably have no interest in playing TF2, so that means more murder-rabbit gun shooting for the rest of us.

Sam’s Revolver

• This might look like an ordinary revolver, until you realize that it helps a talking dog solve crimes. How many crimes has YOUR dog solved lately? And let’s face it, his revolver kind of sucks too. Man, we want to talk about this gun more, but we can’t get over how much your dog sucks.

So there’s the loot, folks. Get over to Steam and take a look at The Penal Zone. (And to answer your question, no. We asked. It doesn’t mean what we thought it meant.)

Source Continue reading It is a good day to be giant man →

Updates to Plain Sight have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

New Content

• A new pirate-tastic map! Space Ships!
• 2 new achievements! “Proud Of Yourself, Little Man?” and “Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s hope some robot doesn’t kill everybody.”

Other stuff

• Dedicated servers have been updated to allow for multiple servers running on the same machine. Administrators can now allocate IP’s. Game now runs on multiple ports. See ports.txt for more information.
• Fix for Intel and NVIDIA 7xxx graphics cards

Numerous crash bugs (including XML issues) fixed.
Source Continue reading Plain Sight 1.0.1.0 Update Released →