If you haven’t tried the chaotic fun of Team Fortress 2’s Scream Fortress Halloween event before, now’s your chance. The free-to-play shooter’s annual event kicked off yesterday, and it’s even madder than previous years. Scottish wizard Merasmus and his evil carnival makes a return, and he infuses the traditional TF2 gunplay with a bit of magic, creepy Halloween visuals, the usual gifts and… bumper cars.
That’s right, this year’s event has playable bumper cars that players can drive into one another for the lulz. I can’t wait to try them out.
I love how Valve takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to these events; the justification for the arcane zaniness of Merasmus’s “evil carnival” is that through a miscommunication with his contractor, it wasn’t built on a burial ground, which naturally severely limits the amount of corpses present. To rectify that, he has employed an “unstable group of hired killers willing to rack up a body count fast”, which is to say, TF2 players.
Check out Scream Fortress’s official website for more detail, and head over to Steam’s TF2 page to download it if it’s piqued your interest. It is free to play, after all.
Valve has also seriously revised the gift system. In case you don’t know, their annual events give players the chance to earn gifts, which are little things like hats and skins that reward players for playing. In a post on the game’s official blog, Valve said they noticed last year that a small fraction of farming accounts ended up with the vast majority of gifts, so this year they’ve changed how they distribute gifts so that everyone gets, on average, more gifts than average.
This year, simply logging in all players get a gift bundle, and then secondary gifts when they complete in-game achievements. That makes farming for gifts impossible, and provides a better rate of reward for all players than in previous years.
The event happens from the 29th of October to the 12th of November, so there’s plenty of time to get in on the action.
[Source, Image – TeamFortress.com]
