Gears of Madness

Team Fortress 2 update 12/11/08

Team Fortress 2 got a somewhat big update last night. It didn’t really focus on any one particular class or game mode, but there were very noticeable changes. I was playing last night (eGO servers or NO HEROES I usually play on), and there are mixed reactions to the update. Here is the update information Valve gave us last night, straight from the big dogs.

The Engineer’s teleporters can now be upgraded to level three. It will recharge faster the higher level it is

The Engineer’s dispensers can now be upgraded to level three. It will give out metal and heal faster as it is upgraded

Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground or from health cabinets (spies are much more crippling to a team now, it is really annoying when they sap your level 3 teleporter entry)

Some changes to the second part of the first stage of Goldrush to give the attackers more of an advantage (the map doesn’t look different, but much more difficult for RED now)

Any weapons that fire bullets (shotguns, sniper’s machine gun, heavy’s minigun, etc.) can now break apart the Demoman’s stickybombs

The icon on the HUD for a person calling for Medic will now give more information to the medic (if the target is low on health, on fire, etc.)

Added an achievement tracker that will allow people to choose specific achievements that they are trying to get

There is now a custom icon for death messages when the player was killed from a critical hit

Added a new particle effect for when a player enters the water

Added smoke to the feet of a rocket jumping soldier

Players will now have some particles swirling around them so other players can see when they are overhealed (plus signs float about the player visible to both teams)

PlayStation Home Open Beta

I should have said something on Monday, when I learned about this, but I have a trigger finger for Team Fortress 2 at the moment. PlayStation Home is now officially in open beta, and is going to come out with it’s final release within the next few week. This doesn’t go to say that it won’t have patches, it will; these will have bug fixes and other garbage too.

I own a PlayStation 3, and I will be trying this out tonight as I have been away from it for about 9 days now.