Blades made this amazing video of his l33t sniping skills on our TF2 servers.  Check it out.

Nice Work Blades! Higher resolution version is available here. 

Its been almost a year now since Eternal Silence released an update to their wildly popular Multiplayer Space Mod.  Behind the scenes they have been working very hard on a new release Beta 3.0.   Over the summer, the mod has gone through a rather large paradigm shift after extensive beta testing.  Balance between space fighting and battling it out inside the ships as infantry has been achieved by splitting the game up into stages to promote objective game play.  This has helped coordinating attack, defend and capture phases of the maps into unique portions of the game that really has helped in the teamwork. You can now look forward to true capital ship battles as the ships have weapons that shoot at each other, shields and corvette escorts. Interior impact effects to  knock you off your feet as computers spark, hulls rumble, and items explode around you as your capital ship takes damage to its exterior.  

Combine this with 2 new ship classes, 5 new ships total and a redesigned interface and 3.0 will be the biggest update to Eternal Silence yet   Keep an eye on their website for new art and design to be released every week.  Here is a preview of 2 of the new ship redesigns for the UTF team.  The developers are expecting to release in Spring of 2008.  

Set on the modern battlefields, Insurgency simulates modern infantry combat that doesn’t just encourage the use of teamwork and tactics, but makes it a requirement of survival. On the streets of Iraq it is not safe to be alone. Engage in urban warfare where every window, doorway or road block is a potential ambush point and every object on the street needs to be watched with care.  Real world experience on the part of the developers as well as the community have helped shape this mod to what Andrew "Argyll" Spearin envisioned over 4 years ago. Before Argyll stepped down, he passed the torch over to Jeremy Blum, the founder and director of Red Orchestra.

In order to get deep into the world of Insurgency, you need to have patience, use tactics, and understand that this is not Counter-Strike. Your guns have stronger recoil, you run out of breath, and if you’re shot, you don’t lose 25 health points – you die. In Insurgency, you are either an order-giving Commander or an order-receiving soldier. Commander orders are processed through the chain of command, brought to the attention of everyone in the unit.  Your either join a squad (US Marine) or a cell (Insurgent) consisting of 8 players.  The maximum server capacity is 32 players, which is 16 player teams, or 2 squads/cells per team.  4 different game play types include Battle, Push, Firefight and Strike which are map based.  The guns you'll use have unique firemodes that are easy to use to change the rate of fire or deploy Bipods.   Check out their manual for a quick overview of the game.  Planet Half-life has a review of the game and is hosting the download .  

One of the Bethesda Blog level designers has created his very own level for the PC version of Portal, entitled Ren Test2.  Its pretty sweet.  Kind of small, somewhat difficult, but packed with surprises.  To download the level for yourself, visit here, and then follow these instructions to install:

• Extract the files with the “retain file structure” (or something like that) check box checked to your “Steam\steamapps\’username’\portal\portal\maps” folder.
• In Portal click on “Bonus Maps” and you should now have a new category called “maps/RenTests”. This is where you’ll find all your Ren_Test maps.