New Team Fortress 2 community items inbound

tf2 contest thumb

Valve have this nasty habit of regularly adding new content to Team Fortress 2, years after you bought it in a steam sale for £5, or in The Orange Box with Episode 1 and Portal. One of their latest ploys is to hold a big contest for modders - design an unlock, and if it wins, it gets into the game. My beloved Homewrecker was just such a winner, and now another batch from 3d modelling community Polycount are ready and waiting to be judged, polished, and shipped. Here are some of the more promising, exciting, or silly entries:

From the Expert's Ordnance Pack by Swizzle

I love the idea of a Demoman running out of ammo, switching to his melee weapon, and it's a grenade. That's like the Pyro having a flaming torch, or the Scout having a... well, a baseball.

From the Croc-o-style kit by Nrek

Not many people know that before Hrf Drfersn MA penned his Pulitzer-worthy exposé, " Ammunition Supply Point ," he wrote copy text for the Mann Co. catalogue.

This looks like a thrown weapon - it's sticking in a dart board, see how I worked that out? If there's one thing the sniper needs, it's another deadly ranged weapon.

From the Essential Clean Killing Kit by Mico27

This excites me. I really hope this wins. Imagine it - you fire the dart and it hits someone, but for two seconds nothing happens. Then they get a little damage over about five seconds, they move more slowly, and they waste time hunting for a Red Spy instead of following that innocent Blu Demoman down to the intel room.

The Olive Drab Update, by Elbagast

This just made me laugh. Take that, games set in the World War Twos!

From the El Gringo pack, by Monkeez

If there's one thing more delicious looking than a Sandvich, it's a thing made of beans, tortillas, and win. It doesn't actually say what this will do. Boost crits? Yeah, that'll do.

The wording in the latest TF2 blog post suggests that they're dangerously close to firing up their hype-o-tron again, most likely, and we'll be keeping our ear to the ground in case the fabled Engineer update breaks over the weekend. I mean, all I do at home is mash F5 on TeamFortress.com anyway, so it's not even real work.