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Those of you who spent the weekend Tokyo drift-racing your way to a rap battle—or whatever it is people do when they go outside on the weekend—probably feel pretty good about yourselves right now. At the end of the day, though, what do you have to show for it? Vague memories of changing lanes. Twenty-five of the people who wisely chose to stay home and craft items, on the other hand, now have shiny new ultra-rare golden wrenches that they can keep. For a weekend? No. For a lifetime. Eat it, drift-racers. Eat all of it.
Luckily for you wrenchless unfortunates, there's still time to get one. A further 75 golden wrenches can be found through crafting all this week*. We'll also be teasing Engie's new weapons (the first of which, the revenge-critting Frontier Justice,, is currently on display)—with all of this culminating in the long-awaited Engineer Update this Thursday!**
*Note that we've disabled the Smelt Reclaimed Metal & Smelt Refined Metal recipes. They'll work again once the Engineer Update goes live.
**Also note, wrenches can be found up until the 100th wrench has gone out. There is no per-day limit on the number of wrenches found, and distribution has been designed to be fair to all timezones. Every 25th wrench found will result in the release of more information on the Engineer Update.
Since our announcement of Team Fortress 2 on the Mac, we've received literally thousands of emails from over seven people, curious as to how the Apple comic shown in the update fits into the ongoing TF saga. Did Saxton Hale really buy the Apple company? Can Heavy's gun actually shoot email bullets now? Who was that mysterious figure? And why were Valve's lawyers so insistent that he remain mysterious?
Some good questions. Good enough, anyway, that when we angrily confronted our writers with them, they got that look animals get when they're walking across a road in the middle of the night, headlights appear, and they realize they're about to lose their jobs. Following a frantic search through the internet for fancy excuse words, they came up with an answer.
Apparently the Apple comic was non-canon. Think of it like a "commercial". Then imagine yourself removing the quote marks around "commercial", because it was a commercial. "Ah, now I get it," you're saying. Just in case you're lying, here's another example: Say Team Fortress was Hercules. Our class updates would be all of those times that Hercules fought gorgons or suplexed an evil king into a mountain. The Apple update would be like the time Hercules enjoyed a jalapeño popper platter at Applebees.
Since this announcement creates a canon-shaped void in the lives of TF2's biggest story fans—our writers—we let them "imagineer" (their words) an epic Engineer story spanning three generations.
The item system in Team Fortress 2 generates a ton of data. Up to this point we've provided access to this data through some hacked-together scripts that, frankly, were old and creaky before they went live. Ah, but now...
Pow! Shiny new web APIs that are officially supported. (Find out how to use them here.) This new system comes with a few new features:
Do you hear that? That ominous, otherworldly silence? That's what we in the game biz call the calm before a storm. And keep listening... do you hear that distant rumble? We call that thunder. It happens during a storm whenever it's not quiet.
All of these portents can only mean one thing: Something big is happening. The fact that everybody else on the team keeps telling me that it's only weather, and that weather can't talk to you, tells me they're all in on it. (And possibly not human? More on this later.)
Perhaps it's the upcoming Polycount Pack update making the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the Australia-shaped hair on my back matte itself back down, since it means we'll be shipping the best of the amazing Polycount Contest entries. Be glad you're not one of us, forced to order that list of magnificent items into some kind of hierarchy. Maybe we'll just announce they've all won first place.
Or maybe it's the release of the Official TF2 Wiki that's made weather choose me as its emissary on Earth. Developed by the administrators of the unofficial TF2 wiki, it's a perfect place to find out everything you ever wanted to know about TF2, but were too afraid to type into Google. Head over there and see if you can help them out. If you're a useful enough contributor, the weather might talk to you too. It might even point out which of the people on your team aren't real humans. Then we could compare notes.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's something else entirely.
So you've been taking advantage of Training Mode and Offline Practice Mode all week, and you think you're pretty hot stuff. What better way to find out how wrong you are than to watch some pros in action at the Steam Powered User Forums' "Battle of Both Worlds" match this week? Also known as the "Pros vs Pubbers" event, the match features a team of competitive players versus a team of highly skilled public-server players. It's a perfect opportunity to see a whole bunch of truly great TF2 players have some truly great fun. Check it out.
