Category: podcast

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After months of closed Betas, Open Beta and Hype, Steam is now finally available on Linux, along with it TF2 is now available on 3 different platforms. Then to add some icing on this moment, Valve have added a new promotional item in TF2, for those of you who manage to log onto TF2 in linux before march the 1st. The Tux.  But will this become the new earbuds?

However that wasn’t the only item to creep into the game. If you pre-order BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (Yeah that is a really long name for a game) then you’ll receive genuine Buck Turner All-Stars. There are also a pile of Ruskeydoo made Medals for those who played in any league this season

In the world of Valve, we talk about how 15 people have all left Valve at the same time. Is it a mass culling, is it a mass upheaval, who knows….actually Gabe does and has assured us no projects are being cancelled. That is of course when he wasn’t sitting on stage talking storytelling with JJ Abrams.

To top the show off we talk about an item not yet in the game (although due to the length of time it took for me to edit the episode….it is now in the game) That’s right, its the Brutal legends promo items, featuring (as far as we can recall) the first taunt you can acquire via a promotion. Want it yourself, then click here and pre-order Brutal Legends before February 26th.

PS – Stick around after the “Credits”

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You may recognise our guest from such episodes as KK#200 and videos as the TF2 Wiki, we welcome Benjamoose to the show.  Ruskeydoo has checked out the Import tool and found it to be good. Better than good, he’s really rather excited about it. We’ll let him explain how it works and what makes it so great. One thing that was snuck in recently was the TUX item for Linux users. At time of recording it was a rumour but that’s never stopped us talking about something, has it? Speaking of things we know very little about, NECA, the creators of the 18″ TF2 models have remade chess. This NextChess design features TF2 pieces with interchangeable hats! Another thing that was implemented without our knowing was the “show marketable borders” for your backpack.

Lord Illusion went all out this week. He played 24hours of Team Fortress 2 on our servers in aid of Prostate Cancer UK. You can show your support by dropping a donation in his pot (if you pardon the phrase). You may even bag an Atomizer bat, signed by Robin Walker himself or an Unusual Birdcage with bubbles.

Back on the rumour mill and several items have been discovered in SourceFilmmaker. Everything from a Sword Van to an original cartoon, to the hospital set from Meet the Medic. We’ll let you discover those for yourself in this Tumblr blog.

Oh so much information and so little confirmation. Gabe and J. J. Abrams may soon be working together on a film, if this report from joystiq is to be believed.

Lastly, we’ll leave you with this video. With everyone is jumping on the Harlem Shake meme bandwagon it should come as no surprise to find someone has made a TF2 version too.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOrc2SvdvkQ]

Kick back, relax and listen to the show.

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For some reason Gabe Newell could talk about anything and make it sound like the most interesting topic in the world. Lucky for us, earlier this week, Gabe was speaking at the University of Texas. He spoke about the path that valve have taken, the path they may follow in the future and how the changes in TF2 rocked the gaming world. He talks about valve being the 4th largest bandwidth user in the world. He talks about……You know what. we talk about him talking in the episode. But if you’d like to listen to it yourself (we highly recommend you do) you should watch the whole thing here……plus a little extra here.

It’s not all about Gabe though. Over at Facepunch some wonderful people stumbled upon some new “TF2” items in Source Film Maker. We’re not sure what they are exactly. Some of them look like old unused designs, Some look like tributes to TFC, others….just look crazy. Either way, its something for us to play with while we wait for our TF2 Action figures to arrive in the post. You may already have yours if your lucky enough. If you do, you’ll realize that they come with a Genuine quality Glengarry Bonnet for the demo and Brigade Helm for the Pyro.

As for the community, this week you guys have been busy. The Robot Boogaloo pack we talked about last week managed to get its promo video after all. Check it out. its really good and makes you want to wear robot hats. eXtv have finally put out a teaser for their documentary about i46. If you look really closely, you can see Ruskey’s foot. Plus ETF2L are running a 1 day cup to see how good the vaccinator really is in competitive TF2.

Of course we couldn’t go this week with out thanking our new Sponsor, TF2shop.net. Thanks guys.

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We are joined by the man who’s name we cannot show, oh all right then it’s… the BEEPsman [Damnit Doug, stop editing my posts!] He’s here to talk about the TF2 Robitic Boogaloo where item makers have remade their hats for the robots. There will be a comic (hopefully) and so much other good stuff.

The Cave promos items and Smissmas cosmetics are now craftable. Menpo and the the Last Straw are paintable and the Digvulger has new styles. Valve has updated their Import Tool, lucky we have some item makers on the show to talk about that. You can get your hands on Bot Killer and Vintage items in the Steam Market. While we’re on about websites, Steam Chat is live in beta on a website. ozfortress’ League admin, bladez has created LiveLogs a site that will allow you to watch server logs as they happen. NECA’s action figures are available directly from the Valve store.

We have two videos for you this week. The first comes from STAR_ with whom we played a few hours of the new server mod, The Hidden.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgdtfWMeTQ]

The second belongs to our player of the week, Dr Face, with his SFM short called “Man vs Martians”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcDk_9PmGq0]

I can’t tell you how close this episode came to being called “Gordon Freeman’s ass”. Good taste won out. For once. That said we did spend a disproportionate period of time looking at the new model from Gaming Heads.

In more sane moments we looked at the news that some items (festive sandvich, buff banner, huntsman and robo-sandvich) are now being allowed in Medieval mode. The Steam guides have gone live. ETF2L is running a Basket Ball tournament with teams of two having signed up across the world. It’s too late to enter now but there will be plenty of exciting viewing ahead. Speaking of which the ETF2L Season 3 Highlander grand finals have been played out. That Sonic All Stars racing game featuring a TF2 team is on Steam now.

Community Invasion – where KritzKast raids another community’s server ever Wednesday has begun. You can volunteer your community.

Best of all we have HelenAngel from SteamRep in the show with us. We plague her with questions about the latest scams and what you can do to protect yourself from being ripped off.

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Hold on to your hats lads, we’re losing a few species of unusual headgear. Valve are messing with the status quo a little and taking the hats first introduced to the game, back out of the game. Never fear though, there’s new items on the way. The Cave has promo items,  Last Straw, Grizzled Growth and Prize Plushy. You’re in luck if you need to raise some dosh to buy Steam games as the Steam Community Market is now accepting Genuine items too.

On to the awesomest news we’ve heard in 2013; Gabe Newell has fessed up to The Nerdist Podcast (at the 1hr, 1min mark) that a 15 minute TF2 film is in the works.

In other steam news valve showed off their first official Steam Box – the Xi3 Piston at CES 2013 and there are more boxes in the works. Gabe takes the time to explain why a full on body suit controller isn’t the best solution.

Ruskeydoo gets his name in PCGamer with an article about item makers. We also get to see what Robin Walker looks like in a second article. No pics of this brother Kevin though.

News on MagicalKillaCow‘s mini marathon for Cancer Research UK: over £1111.11 was donated on the day, far exceeding his original aspirations. Our thanks to everyone who donated or came alone, or both. Special mention to Helene for working tirelessly to make sure everyone showed up and had a good time.

Speaking of fun on our servers, and Helene, we’re now running a KillCam comp. The idea is that the admin of the week will be wearing an orange Max head called First Among Equals. Get yourself killed by them, take their pic and post it here. The best/funniest/weirdest image wins the prize of the month.

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That’s it everybody. Smissmas is over. No more presents, No more festive keys, No more festive weapons. Don’t worry. there is no need to panic. We are here for you. Why don’t we all sit down and watch the latest TF2 Mix up together  That’s right, Its out. to celebrate, we’ve grabbed Evil Ninetales (one of the lucky raffle winners in the match) to join us this week. After less than a week, the videos have already racked up half a million views. To watch them, Either click here for the first video, or head over to TF2Mixup.com for all the details surrounding the match.

Strangly, that isn’t the only charity event TF2 is associated with this week. We also want to tell you about MagicalKillaCow’s 12 hour stream of TF2 on Saturday the 12th. As you can see from the picture above, some people who might be dropping by included ourselves, Sal, Byte, Kiptv, Star_ and Stabby Stabby. If your part of our steam group, facebook or twitter, we’ll let you know exactly when its happening and how you can help.

Other news in the world of TF2 this week include the UGC Allstars matches, featuring our very own Ruskeydoo. Ready Steady Pan Season 2 will be starting on Monday the 14th and even have a fancy new poster and website to celebrate it. Plus we ask why did somebody delete Golden Wrench number 38

Please don’t forget that you have a chance to win yourself a Vintage Lo-Fi Longwave by surgesting questions to ask brad pitt of Backpack.tf fame. Click here for more details

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We’re back! Following our moments of insanity breaking into song for the KK200 show we’ve much to catch up on. Tempest didn’t quite make it through Smissmass unharmed so we were happy to have Helene, our head admin step up to fill the void.

Valve’s Mecha update brought with it new weapons in the form of the Vaccinator, Loose Cannon and Rescue Ranger. There were warm winter wears in the Nice Winter Crates and weapons wrapped in fairy lights in the Naughty Winter Crates. Though you could bypass the drop system all together and grab the lot, including reindeer hats and reindoonicorns in the Smissmass Bundle.

While we’re on the topic of buying things, it’s now possible to buy in game items outside of the game Mann Co. has finally broken free of TF2 and is running their own store website.

Aside to one side the Mecha Update also brought with it a new MvM map, Big Rock, the Engineer Robot (we thought it would never happen) and a slew of fancy new giant robot types (in hats); Giant Burst Fire Soldier, Captain Punch, Sergeant Crits and Major Bomber. Oh and a new comic too.

Map makers, the unsung heroes of the TF2 creator community finally get some love in form of the stamps. When you taunt on a map a trail of stamps follow in your wake, assuming you’ve bought a stamp for that map. The more your buy the longer your trail. I wonder if you leave a trail of invisible stamps if you’re playing as spy?

Adult swim see a little more of their work appreciated in TF2. Someone at Valve must love these guys as there’s now an entire pack of items with hints of characters you may recognise from the mad genius animators. We didn’t though..

The previously closed beta for Steam on Linux has been opened up to the public. It’s only a matter of time till we get Neon Genesis Evangelion style pet penguins in game now.

It’s too late to make a Smissmass present now but that’s okay since there aren’t any left but Mann Co. branded GameCom Commander headsets were briefly available on the Valve store.  Technically you can still get your hands on (should this be “your ears on”, or “on your ears”, no probably not) them directly from plantronics.

Lastly, a quick update on our hat, the Lo-Fi Longwave. We gave out close to 700 of these beauties following the release of KK200. Twitter, facebook and Steam each received a budget of 200 (plus a few more). They have all now been distributed, largely due to the speedy and efficient coding of JimboMcB. Please join these groups if you haven’t done so yet. We’ve already got things brewing for 2013 and news of them will surely break there first.

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It’s good to have someone on the kast who actually knows what’s going on, we have Ruskeydoo. He’s made a fair crack with experiments to figure out what the Ullapool caber changes mean.

With Christmas (in Tempest’s case literally) round the corner, Valve add back in the Naughty and Nice Winter crates. A search function is added to the Mann Co. store. Players who owned the the free Faerie Solitaire game before December 13th get the Genuine Faerie Solitaire Pin. Steam Game Guides appear on the beta version of Steam. But the biggest story this week is the Steam Community Market. Finally there’s a legitimate way to buy and sell 2nd hand items. All money goes back into your steam wallet and Valve takes a share of the profit, again.

In other Valve news, theirs reason to believe that the Steam Linux beta will be opened up soon and Value opens a studio in San Francisco.

Finally, back to the community for news that the next Ready Steady Pan Tournament will see 70 teams for North America and Europe, though only 5 teams have signed up in Asia to date.

PotW goes to SuperSoupy for his festive video entitled “How the Spy Sapped Christmas”, shown below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhylS96mREk?rel=0]
This week’s show was edited by our new guest editor, DougRattmAnnThEpyRo – our thanks to you good sir.