This is just a short post - I hope everyone had a great Halloween this year!  I know I did, and I didn’t even go trick-or-treating!

I was quite surprised when I fired up Steam yesterday and found that on Halloween, Valve released the intro movie for Left 4 Dead, a game which looks like it’s going to be tons of fun.  The video looks good and scary, and it makes the wait for this game even more tough than before!

There are so many games coming out lately though…  it’s getting difficult to spend time on all of them.  Hopefully after the holidays are all over we’ll get some sort of reprieve while game developers get back to working on next year’s line-up of hits.

I’ll be back here later to post about tomorrow’s elections, I think.  There’s just too much going on not for me to comment about it at some point.  Until then, thanks for reading, and enjoy the L4D video above!

With the latest Team Fortress 2 update, which includes the new Heavy class achievements, weapons, and a new game mode, Valve has also released another short trailer for the game: Meet the Sandvich.

The “sandvich” made its debut in the Meet the Scout video, where it changed hands between the Heavy and Scout after a scuffle, and continues to be the source of conflict in the newest video.  It’s also a new unlockable item for the Heavy class. It can heal 120 health, and the Heavy who has it equipped has an unlimited supply.  The downside is that eating it makes a considerable amount of noise, and leaves the Heavy vulnerable for four seconds while he consumes it.

Watch the video below!

In all my excitement over the Spore Creature Creator and trying to fit my game playing / creating time into the remainder of the day, I nearly forgot that Valve had announced a Team Fortress 2 update, along with the release of a new character vignette!

Meet the Sniper is another brilliant clip introducing the playable character classes from TF2, this time, quite obviously, for the sniper.  The short video follows the sniper around his “workplace” as he guns down and machetes enemies, drives his truck, and…  talks on the phone with parents (who, by the sniper’s own admittance, don’t like his job).

The camping scene and the ending are also fantastic, but I won’t ruin it for you - watch it for yourself, below.

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Yeah, yeah, I know - right on the heels of my “CGI Trailers are Trash” post comes another about how great a new CGI trailer is… Well, this is a bit of a different case than what I brought up in my other entry, so I’ll hear no complaints.

So in case you’ve not heard about or seen it already, Valve has released another Team Fortress 2 character vignette, this time for the scout, and I remain both impressed and excited for them. To date, we’ve seen videos for the soldier, heavy weapons guy, engineer, demo man, and scout, and my only complaint so far is that we’ve had to wait so long in between each video.

If it means that we will continue to see such high-quality stuff, however, the wait is fine with me. In contrast with the ridiculous marketing materials I complained about in my last post about CGI trailers, I feel that these vignettes show that Valve truly cares about their Team Fortress 2 project. The visuals are rendered with expertise, the dialog is genuinely funny, and the voice acting is excellent. Most importantly though, they maintain the same attitude and style of the game, and they don’t insult my intelligence by trying to masquerade as actual gameplay footage.

Well done, Valve. I’m looking forward to future character profiles!

I’ve re-encoded and uploaded all the previous vignettes below (and after the break). If you haven’t seen ‘em, I highly recommend watching them. They’re instant classics, whether you play the game or not!

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