Happy gaming!

Here are some shitty iPhone photos.

Michelle’s desk with Team Fortress 2 and Starcraft 2 posters:

Jesse’s desk with Half-Life 2 Episode Two and Warcraft III

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.

Look here for the Engy Comic.

Check out the following links for info.

Steam Client Update Released

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Fallout MMO: www.fallout-on-line.com

Find out more about Fallout: New Vegas pre-purchase packs here.

Monday’s game: Crysis and Crysis: Warhead

Gordon Freeman is the greatest video game character ever…….at least that’s what Empire thinks as they have just published their list of 50 Greatest Video Game characters. Mr. Freeman takes the plaudits away from ‘best character’ stalwarts like Mario, Link and Sonic in a poll that is sure to get you all talking and debating.

Mario finished 2nd, System Shock’s Shodan 3rd, Planetscape: Torment’s Nameless One in 4th and Lara Croft in 5th.

The top ten is completed by Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII), Lemmings (Lemmings), Master Chief (Halo), Guybrush Threepwood (Monkey Island) and Link (The Legend of Zelda).

Solid Snake came in 19th (He should have been in the top 5 IMO)

Read the whole list here. Congrats to Gordon. I’d ask him to say a few words about his win, but as you know, he’s not exactly the talkative or loquacious type.

Thanks to KritzKast for finding this great study: The Aesthetics of Unique Video Game Characters

We’ll be back Monday with another episode of Monitor Tans. Until then, happy gaming.

As promised here is a link to the interview on 5 By 5 with Gabe Newell and Jason Mitchell of Valve including John Siracusa from Ars Technica.

5 By 5 – The Conversation: iValve

Yes, my ringtone is TF2 also. What?

TF2 iPhone Wallpapers

For those of you who haven’t listened to the newest podcast, don’t see why you haven’t, or those who wanted to read the announcement for themselves, here it is.

Speaking in a press release, Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed a July 27 worldwide release date for its highly-anticipated real-time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. While the date is only for retail sales, the title will be available on the developer’s download service “shortly after” launch.

“We’ve been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we’re excited that the time for that is almost here,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “Thanks to our beta testers, we’re making great progress on the final stages of development, and we’ll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months.”

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the sequel to Blizzard Entertainment’s 1998 hit StarCraft, which has been hailed by players and critics worldwide as one of the top real-time strategy games of all time. Sporting a vibrant new 3D-graphics engine, StarCraft II will once again center on the clash between the protoss, terrans, and zerg, with each side deploying legions of veteran, upgraded, and brand-new unit types.

The title is currently in a closed beta test with users on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

We are pleased to announce that The IP Factory will be releasing a statue of the Heavy, which is the first in their 12 inch Team Fortress 2 line of collectible statues. The Heavy will come in both BLU and RED team versions and numbers are strictly limited which is now taking pre-orders!

To grab a sneak peak of the Heavy statue in all of his glory visit their website at GamingHeads.

Site is experiencing horrible outages and overload, so please be patient.

If you don’t own it yet, go buy it. Now. Seriously.

Then play with us on Steam.

Special thanks to Fusion for the heads up!

I love Valve.

Earning your sword: the magical inner sanctum of Blizzard

Anyway, CoD: MWII is free to play this weekend! Check it out (or be like me and say NO just because we’re so behind in many, many other games).

Play Modern Warfare II for Free!

Borderlands on Steam

Just say it’s for your “friend” who you want to get into the game! Then add us to your friends list and join our Steam group.

Grab L4D2 for only $24.99! Not sure how long this sale is for. Thursday maybe?

Buy me now.

Thanks to Michael for giving us the heads up! You ruled my Tuesday afternoon, dude.

~M

Check out Charlie’s Games to download Space Phallus and other great games.

A rare good move on Microsoft’s part: they actually put a current game up for sale.

If you haven’t banned giving them your gaming dollars you can pick up Batman: Arkham Asylum for $12.49 at Microsoft’s Games for Windows site until March 1st.

Batman: Arkham Asylum – $12.49

Thanks for the heads up, Dusty.

Trine $5.00 on Steam

Supposedly this mod also includes 32 Steam achievements. We haven’t tested this out ourselves yet, though.

Check out the video!

EA has announced that the rumors about a Dragon Age expansion, called The Awakening, is true. The expansion will launch March 16th, 2010 and will cost $40.

However, late last night (1/4/10) BioWare announced that the DLC set to launch today (1/5/10) was delayed on all platforms for unknown reasons.

Stay tuned, Dragon Age fans.

They are also having five games each day at super savings!

Today’s super sales:

Mirror’s Edge: $4.99
Defense Grid: The Awakening: $2.49
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising: $19.99
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl: $1.99
Grand Theft Auto IV: $7.49

As promised, here is the link to the R18+ rating discussion papers in Australia.

Check out the official TF2 site for more details: Team Fortress 2

I love this picture they made!

So get in there and blow some suckas up!

Expected in early spring 2010, “The Passing” will include new arenas for Survival, Versus and Scavenge mode. Arenas? Very interesting. I’m hyped!

There will also be a new co-op challenge play mode as well as more uncommon zombies.

My trigger-happy, zombie-killing hands can’t wait to snatch this up!

Check out this great guide over at WoW.com: The OverAchiever: Guide to Winter Veil