Team Fortress 2 Halloween Events: Spooktacular Fragging

Every October, Valve Software gives a special treat to all the gamers who love the spirit of Halloween.  This treat is the annual Team Fortress 2 Halloween event.  I must say, whether you love Valve or hate them, you have to admire the fact that they're still supporting TF2 all these years after its 2007 release date.  So let's dive in and look at all the awesome features of this event.

Back in 2009, Valve initiated their first Halloween event in TF2.  They released a new king of the hill map called Harvest, as well as a Halloween-themed counterpart called Harvest Event.  The event map is set at nighttime with various visual touches to get you into the Halloween spirit.  These include jack-o-lanterns scattered around the map, tombstones, and re-skinned health kits which are now represented by candies and cauldrons.

Also placed around the map are pumpkins with sticks of dynamite strapped to them, which will explode when shot.  The highlight of Harvest Event is its resident ghost, which spawns at various locations on the map and slowly wanders around.  If you venture too close to it, your character will shriek in fear and will be unable to attack for a few seconds, leaving you vulnerable.

The ghost freaks out the Demoman.

After the inaugural 2009 event, the TF2 Halloween specials have become more elaborate with many more new features.  Each year Valve will either release a pair of maps (one standard map, along with its Halloween-themed counterpart), or they will give a standard map a complete Halloween makeover.  One notable case is Mann Manor, which is an extremely detailed counterpart of Mountain Lab, complete with spooky library sections, dark holes with creepy eyes peering out at you, and hair-raising noises throughout.

Mann Manor.

Instead of a simple ghost wandering around, all Halloween events after 2009 have introduced boss monsters which will spawn at various intervals.  Notable bosses include a gigantic floating eyeball which fires missiles, and the Horseless Headless Horsemann (Valve's humor at its finest), who runs around the map swinging a giant axe.

These monsters contain huge amounts of HP and will attack all the players on the server, therefore the best way to defeat them is for both teams to (temporarily) put aside their differences and work together to take down the boss.  Defeating these bosses will give players a special item, such as the Horseless Headless Horsemann's head (makes no sense but that's the whole point), which is a wearable hat.

Speaking of items, there are quite a few Halloween-specific goodies to grab.  Through random gift drops you'll be able to pick up Halloween masks (really just paper bags with a TF2 character's face drawn on it), worn-out top hats, and even class-specific Halloween costumes.  Costumes must be collected piece by piece, but once you complete a set you're usually rewarded with humorous results.  For example, the Engineer has a costume resembling a giant fly, which causes his voice to sound extremely high pitched.  The Soldier's robot costume unlocks a whole new set of voice commands, as well as a new robot-dance taunt.

Speaking of dancing, what would Halloween be without Thriller?  The developers at Valve were awesome enough to give a special Thriller dance taunt to all classes, which can only be used when the Halloween events are active.


Last but not least, a recent addition to Team Fortress 2's Halloween festivities is Zombie Fortress, which is a set of new game modes that will have players controlling both regular classes and zombies, depending on their team.  I guess Valve wasn't satisfied with just Left 4 Dead?

If you're a fan of Halloween and online first-person shooters, you should absolutely check out Team Fortress 2 when this special event occurs.  The game is free after all.  The nicely themed maps and intense boss battles are something to behold, and we can only hope that Valve continues this tradition for years to come!

Have you guys tried out the TF2 Halloween events?  If so, which one was your favorite?

Count Batula: Conker the Squirrel Meets Dracula

It seems I can't stop talking about Conker's Bad Fur Day.  The game contains such a diverse set of parodies that you can't help but find one or two levels that you will remember forever.  Seeing as this is the month of October, let's take a look at the chapter of the game called Spooky, and its main antagonist: Count Batula.

Well, Grabbed by the Ghoulies had a vampire chicken, so why not a vampire squirrel in Bad Fur Day?

The chapter starts off with Conker taking a nighttime stroll and encountering Gregg the Grim Reaper.  There's a brief conversation involving zombies, which Gregg hates worse than cats because they are undead, apparently some kind of insult due to his job occupation as a reaper.  Gregg then gives Conker a shotgun and directs him to a zombie-filled graveyard, motivating the ever-greedy Conker by telling him he has a rich relative in the area (he neglected to say anything about that relative being a vampire though).

Yet another game with zombies in it.

After battling through the graveyard, Conker approaches a spooky mansion sitting in solitude at the top of a hill.  This is none other than the lair of Count Batula, where the Dracula parodies are in abundance.  Once Conker enters the mansion, we see Batula for the first time, slowly descending the grand staircase while welcoming Conker (and creeping him out a bit).  Batula has the stereotypical Dracula voice, complete with pronouncing his W's as V's ("Velcome to my house").  Conker humorously takes a couple cheap shots at the vampire's appearance, even sarcastically complimenting him on his hairstyle.  Despite this, Batula invites Conker in for dinner, giving him a tour of the mansion on the way.

While Conker is enjoying his dinner of chicken and wine (which allowed the game to use the famous "I don't drink....wine" line from Dracula films), Batula tells Conker how long he has lived in the mansion (around 300 years), causing Conker to get even more suspicious of this character.  The conversation is cut short by an unexpected attack on the mansion by the nearby villagers.  It is at this point that Batula reveals that he planned to kill Conker and drink his blood, but due to the circumstances he now needs Conker's help.

Batula proceeds to bite Conker, which turns him into a vampire bat.  As Bat-Conker, you get to fly throughout the various rooms in the mansion, picking up the attacking villagers one-by-one (after stunning them by dumping bat-droppings on them), and taking them to Batula's feeding room.  It is here that Bat-Conker has to drop the villagers into a gigantic meat grinder, which processes the villagers and dispenses the blood into an eager Batula.

Bat-Conker prepares to slaughter some villagers.

Batula happens to be hanging right over the meat grinder, and the more villagers he is fed, the fatter he gets.  When he's fed too much blood, his weight overcomes the strength of his perch, and Batula drops into the grinder, putting an end to one of the best parody characters in the game.

So what did you guys think of this chapter of Bad Fur Day?  Did you enjoy the Dracula parody?

Altered Beast: An Old-School Trip to the Underworld

It's time for some classic beat-em-up action!  Altered Beast was originally an arcade game back in 1988, and was later ported to consoles.  In this game, you play as a Roman Centurion who is resurrected by Zeus in order to save Zeus' daughter Athena from an evil god named Neff.  How's that for a mish-mash of mythology?

Anyway, as you side-scroll your way through the five levels in the game (yes, it's pretty short), you can obtain power-ups which cause the Centurion to "power up" as the in-game voice states (every single time you pick one up, it's actually pretty funny to hear).  After collecting three power-ups, the Centurion will transform into a level-specific beast, such as a werewolf or a bear.

During your quest to save Athena, you'll visit locations such as the graveyard where your character is resurrected, the underworld, and the so-called Cavern of Souls.  In the graveyard you'll encounter flying demons, along with hordes of (surprise, surprise) zombies.  The zombies are actually pretty entertaining; some of them will burst out of their graves in order to attack you, and a well-aimed punch can knock off their head.  There's also a variation of this enemy that walks around holding it's disembodied head in one hand.

A detailed background scrolls by as you make your way to face the boss, containing mass amounts of gravestones.  However, the whole level is set in broad daylight.  Why would the developers go through all the trouble to make a bad-ass graveyard, and not set it at night?

The underworld level is a step in the right direction, given that it's set in a dark cavern that appears to stretch out to infinity.  Here you'll be fighting giant leeches that love to latch onto your character's head and drain his health.

This isn't going to end well.

Other enemies you'll frequently run into here are large snakes that burst from the ceiling and floor of the cavern, which can be decapitated with a well-timed punch or kick.

I mentioned the Cavern of Souls level earlier, mainly because with a name like that it should be a pretty awesome level right?  Unfortunately it's not, the level is a bland-looking cave where you fight giant ants and snails.  Way to go Sega.

Yea...scary stuff....I guess...

The end of each level features a showdown with Neff, who transforms into various monstrosities.  Notable among these are his demon form, where he will continually tear off his head and throw it at you, while a new head grows back in its place.  He will also turn into a plant-based creature which proceeds to shoot out damage-causing eyeballs.

Altered Beast is a fairly short game that can be completed in twenty minutes or so.  It's fun to play co-op with a friend, but there isn't too much replay factor due to lack of depth (it is an arcade port after all).  Have you guys had a chance to play Altered Beast, and journey through the (mostly) hellish locations?

A Visit to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2

A while back I wrote about zombies in Valve games, and part of that article covered the zombie-like creatures in Half-Life 2.  Since I've already talked about the zombies themselves, how about we take a trip to Half-Life 2's peaceful, scenic town of Ravenholm, where you'll find the largest concentration of horrors in the entire game.

Ravenholm used to be a mining town before the Combine invaded, and was later converted into a refuge for City 17 escapees.  It was connected to the main base of the human resistance (Black Mesa East) through a series of tunnels for convenient and secretive access.  Things were all peachy (well as peachy as they can get with alien overlords enslaving humanity and destroying everything) until the Combine discovered this town of refugees.  The Combine proceeded to "shell" Ravenholm, by bombarding it with capsules containing the zombie-creating creatures called Headcrabs (see my previous article about Valve zombies).

A skull-crunching Headcrab.

The result was that a large amount of Ravenholm refugees were converted into zombies, while the remaining population were wiped out by these terrors.  At some point after all this chaos, protagonist Gordon Freeman is forced to journey through Ravenholm (at night!), and we witness the destruction first-hand.

Signs of the zombie battles are everywhere, from barricaded doors, to blood-smeared rooms, to zombie and human corpses littered everywhere.  Zombies lie in wait in various buildings and alleyways, shuffling over to attack whenever you come near.  Needless to say there are some great jump-scare moments during your trip to Ravenholm.

As you continue your tour, you discover that not everyone was killed after the Headcrab shelling occurred; a lone survivor named Father Grigori somehow found a way to stay alive through makeshift zombie-traps.  You'll find car engine blocks which power spinning blades, cars suspended in the air by winches (which can then be dropped on zombie hordes), and even electrified chain link fences.  You can interact with all of these toys, making for an enjoyable way to dispatch enemies without using up your ammo.

It slices, it dices!

Ravenholm is one of the best levels in Half-Life 2, due to its immensely frightening atmosphere, as well as the fun-to-use zombie traps.  What did you guys think of this level?  Did you find it somewhat frightening, or have scarier games battle-hardened you to the point where this was nothing?

The Mutant Descendants in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

No one can deny the success of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.  Its large-scale levels, set mostly in ancient ruins full of hazards and treasures, feel like a throwback to the Tomb Raider games as well as the Indiana Jones movies.  And just like Lara Croft and Indy, Nathan Drake encounters some elements of the supernatural on his adventures.

Drake has no idea what he's in for.

About 80% of Uncharted consists of exploring ruins and gunning down rival treasure hunters.  For the most part, the ruined temples and other various structures look incredible, yet wildly implausible (I seriously doubt some of these giant structures could have been built without advanced technology).  Despite this, the game feels like it is grounded in the real world, and a few hours into Uncharted you'll think you've nailed what the atmosphere of the game will be like.

These illusions are shattered later on in the game, when we are introduced to mutant zombie-ish characters known as the Descendants.  It turns out that the main treasure Drake is looking for: El Dorado, a giant statue made out of gold, contains some sort of virus/curse/(insert your favorite magic voodoo here).  This curse has enough potency to rapidly turn a person into a mindless, vicious zombie.

Apparently a group of Spanish settlers who came into contact with El Dorado (and moved it to an island where the game later takes place) were all infected.  These mutants continued to breed for hundreds of years until Drake encounters them in their current horrifying forms.  While this does add some variation to the combat, I couldn't help but feel that adding zombies was out of place for this game (also, do we really need zombies in so many games?!).  To the game's credit though, there is one dark, spooky level involving the Descendants attacking Drake at different intervals, which is actually quite good.

What do you guys think? Should they have left zombies out of Uncharted, and kept it as a straight-up tomb raiding game?

Resident Evil 6 Announced!

Hey guys, just thought I'd share this news in case you haven't heard yet.  Resident Evil 6 has been announced, with a release date of November 20th.  Capcom has even released an official trailer, and I have to say that I'm really excited, because the series looks to be returning to its roots with actual zombies (but it looks like the parasites from RE4 and RE5 will still put in an appearance).  Enjoy!