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The Heads On Sticks guys have another video showing off some nice soldier rocket trick jumping.

The previous trick jumping videos they did were pretty cool as well.

Its Monday, and that means it time to watch some people getting messed up. Why? Because Monday is the hardest day of the week, and we switched to daylight savings time here in Australia over the weekend, and it fuzzes with my body clock and makes me cranky, and I feel like indulging in some mayhem.

So here’s a round up of a few Team Fortress 2 videos of various displays of ownage.

Spy Ownage

There’s a couple of good killing sprees in this one. Its a little older, from the beta. Most people are wised up enough to spies that you can’t get away with this stuff these days. Still cool.

Pyro Ownage

I love Pyro, I mean seriously. When you watch the kind of mayhem a single ubered pyro can inflict, it brings a smile to my face.

Heavy Ownage

The classic steamroller maneuver. A fat man charging toward you with a gun is a persuasive argument. The skinny nerdy guy behind him kinda helps as well.

Sniper Ownage

Usually I’m not a fan of sniper wankery. They tend to sit up on the barricades on 2 fort not doing much except killing each other and not really helping the game along (I’ll make an exception for ShanDogs, cause he’s actually not bad at it).

This guy has a some of that, but he gets out and stretches his legs a bit as well. The last shot is the coolest - hes a blue sniper who has the balls to snipe red engineers inside the stairs at the red base.

Random Messy Ownage

This last one is a bit silly. Its some duel map that is too small, and has too many people in it. Spawn camping taken to the extremes, and then some.

I think I like the red team the best in this one…

The guys from Heads On Sticks have put together a couple of videos showing off some of the tactical moves you can do with the Soldier rocket jumps, and Demoman sticky bomb jumps.

This stuff is always cool.

Soldier Rocket Jumping

Demoman Sticky Bomb Jumping

Team Fortress 2
Lots of fixes and improvements in today’s Team Fortress 2 update

• Improved compatibility for direct sound
• Deathcam screenshots now move the player id panel to the lower right, and hide other hud elements until the freezecam fades
• Improved autobalance calculation code when determining who to switch
• Improved networking compatibility for some routers
• Fixed a crash during level init related to model loading
• Fixed issues on Dustbowl and Hydro that could occur when a server emptied in the middle of a round
• Fixed a bug in the clientside player avoidance code, and smoothed it a little more
• Further crash fixes related to paged pool memory usage
• Fixed scoreboard team scores label getting cut off
• Engineer buildings now explode when the Engineer dies during sudden death
• Fixed a spy backstab exploit where you could stab a player who was not facing away from you
• Fixed flailing at the low end of the cloak meter when the player gets uncloaked automatically
• Fixed texture detail level setting “Very high” not being preserved
• Improved various error messages, and added links to steampowered support pages
• Fixed scoring problem where destroying a buildable added a phantom point, not attributed to any scoring bucket but still included in total score
• Fixed honeypot server problems
• Fixed a rare crash caused by a medigun losing its owner
• Fixed an exploit that allowed disconnected medics to continue ubercharging their target until they timed out
• TeamMenu now disables the spectate button if mp_allowspectators is zero
• Added a missing “cannot_be_spectator” localization string
• Re-added class count numbers above class buttons for non-zero classes, in addition to the class images
• Removed prefixes (tc_, ctf_, etc.) from map names in various places where they’re printed
• Fixed some edge cases where grenades could go through player or buildings
• Fixed rocket/grenade explosions being able to impart damage through thin ceilings
• The Engineer’s “build X” commands will now behave properly when bound directly to keys

I don’t know what was going on here, but theres a lot of man-giggling, and the whole thing is hilarious.

Basically a bunch of guys got together and filmed some random messing around on their server. The crouching heavy punch up half way through is a crack up.

Update 9th November 2007

The finc guys are at it again and have posted a new video of their antics.

Its always on a friday. There is some loud mouth schmuck whos been on the turps for a good few hours and decides its a great idea to go and play some Team Fortress 2.

“I AM BULLET PROOF!”

They tend to use voice comms a lot. They swear at everyone. Berating those that don’t live up to their high standards. Then they run into a wall, and get snipered cause they are too damn drunk to actually play the damn game.

Take last friday night as an example. We had “Steve” (in game name changed to protect the drunk). Steve took it upon himself to guide the team in his wise ways.

“Come on guys… You gotta charsge the guns. F**k man…. (several seconds of burping and sound of a can being opened) I f**king go heavy and none of yoush doctors (burp) healed!”

After a couple rounds of charging at the sentries as a heavy without much luck, Steve switched tactics to demoman, and tried blind charging with the bottle

“haha, this f**ker has a whishkey bottle! demoman haha.”

That didn’t work either.

Steve went on like this for quite some time. Every now and then he’d spout out another pearl of wisdom on topics ranging from his in game skills…

“f**k I rock at this s**t, you guys are all screwed”

To how great he is with the ladies…

“I was at this bar and the chicks were all over me, but I’m like ‘nah I gotta play TF2!’” - sure.

To discussion of the best quality liquor…

“got paid today, and I found some of that $4.99 a dozen p**s and bought 4 slabs.”

To his intelligent analysis of current political events…

“yeah that Bush is a F**ker aye?”

Occasionally he’d chuck in a random groan or burp, and a couple of times he even started singing.

I admire his effort. He was either completely ignored, or politely asked to tone it down by a couple of more upstanding sober players over voice comms (“OH MY GOD. SHUT THE F**K UP YOU DRUNK STUPID DIPS**T!”). Many attempted to engage with him over global text chat, but I suspect that Steve was having a difficult time focusing the 2 sets of letters together with his eyes by that point and probably missed it.
From what I could tell, Steve was still going strong late into the night. I played early on when he was in full swing and vaguely coherent (at least the syllables were recognizable as English). Later when I logged in, Steve had grown a little more melancholy, but still had his lovable charm. He explained later on that he isn’t actually that great with the ladies at the moment. I wonder why?

By about 2am, Steve was gone. I’m guessing he either ran out of beer, or passed out and is probably still sleeping it off. I missed Steve. His well intentioned TF2 commentary made an entire evening’s play more colourful. Although it was nice to win a few games after he finally left.

Update

Luke Mckinney has been kind enough to put together a motivational poster based on our own heavy drinking guy.

Another one spotted at the TF2 Steam Forums

I feel sorry for the poor doc. He must have twigged to what was going on just as the knife went through his head.

Spotted this one linked from the Steam TF2 forums.

Its an excellently produced video, and is a great overview of spy tactics and techniques by Daedalus. Must see viewing for anyone wanting to pick up the sneaky arts.

The always hilarious Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame has cranked out one of his trademark reviews for the Orange Box and its contents over at The Escapist.

His reviews are basically one of the funniest things on the internet, so its well worth a watch.

“Mmmrrrghh rmmrarrr. Mmmrmmrw ggrrmmm!” - Pyro

I love playing pyro. I mean really, whats not to like? His muffled ramblings crack me up. Its kinda like Kenny from Southpark. You can’t really understand anything, but you fill in the details with your imagination, and somehow your brain attaches some meaning to it far more offensive than what it would have been. I’ve attempted to translate, and most of what the pyro says definitely refers to your mother and her choice of romantic partner.

Then you’ve got some of the coolest animations in the game. Depending on your weapon, you’ve got taunt animations with nods to star wars, street fighter, AND air guitar.

And you can set people on fire!

Which is great.

Unless you’re a spy.

Pyros excel at anti-spy patrolling. The flamethrower is perfect for random sweeps if you suspect a spy is lurking around anywhere. Just flame every single person you see (friendly fire is always off remember) to uncover any spies that may be disguised. If you stay aware you can listen for spies cloaking, and you can vaguely see a shimmer when they move. If in doubt, just flame in a circle around you and see if anything catches fire.

Just inside the bottom entrance of 2fort is a perfect spot to camp and intercept incoming spies. Occasionally you can check the sewer entrance to see if anyone is coming in. A random shotgun blast down the tunnel each time will hit any incoming cloaked spies. Don’t engage them at range though - they’ll own you. Retreat and wait till you can engage them at close range (either that or they’ll give up and go back - which is not your problem anymore).

Which is fun for a while, but if you’re playing in a public game then the spies will often get tired of getting burnt, and will switch tactics (or servers) leaving you without much to do - especially if you’ve got an engineer helping you out. A solid defence can be quite demoralising.

This is a bit of a dilemma. You can either change tactics yourself and try something else (maybe go offence, or change class). But as soon as you do, you can bet that there’s gonna be another spy sneaking in. It just takes one to take out your turret defence, and backstab a few decent folk. Eventually it becomes a bit of a chore.

But thats the way the game goes I guess. You really just gotta keep at it like with bathroom tiles. If you keep scrubbing, you can get rid of the built up mold, but if you stop for a while, then you’re back where you started.

Probably the best thing to do while waiting is to sit tight and spend some quality time with your Weighted Companion Cube. This is something you should be doing anyway, as it prevents it forming thoughts of stabbing you, or stealing your cake. Both of which will hamper your mold spy removal work.