Pyromania Hits Team Fortress 2

It’s a question gamers everywhere have been asking for years now: Where the hell’s the “Meet the Pyro” video?

Well, as you can see above, it’s finally here as part of the Pyromania Update. Not happy to just drop another patch (along with the requisite hats), Valve has added a whole new game mode the their excellent, nearly five-year-old shooter: Special Delivery. The mode only has one map right now, Doomsday. Here’s the official description:

Doomsday pits BLU against RED, with only one team getting the honor of transporting a suitcase nuke full of recalled Mann Co. Australium to American monkeynaut Poopy Joe’s rocket, so he can blast off and hunt down Soviet space chimp Vladimir Bananas. It’s the same spirit of competitive enterprise that stalled the moon landing by three years when Buzz Aldrin suplexed Neil Armstrong into a pile of folding chairs at Astromania ’69! Both teams will attempt to get the necessary fuel up a preposterously slow-moving elevator and into Poopy Joe’s Australium-powered rocket to the stars.

The game mode plays like some strange mix of King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, and Payload, and I’m curious to see how it will play once people figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. You know, beyond Red shooting anything Blue that moves and vice versa.

Also added are a few new weapons, as well as a set of Pyro Vision goggles, free to all players (in “Vintage” quality, no less) who play any time until July 5. These goggles transport players of any class to Pyroland, the magical land of sunshine and happiness the Pyro inhabits (at least in his/her own mind).

Oh, and don’t forget the Pyro’s lovable friend, Balloonicorn.

Oh my goodness! Is it Balloonicorn? The Mayor of Pyroland? Don’t be ridiculous, we’re talking about an inflatable unicorn. He’s the Municipal Ombudsman. Between you and me, Balloonicorn’s a joke down at City Hall. Gary Brottman, the inflatable Sewer Superintendent, is sleeping with Balloonicorn’s wife. Anyway, when he’s riding around on your shoulder don’t mention ANY of this to him, because Balloonicorn is on a hair trigger and he’s usually pretty drunk.

I still love you, Balloonicorn. If you ask me, Ombudsmanship is an underrated public service.

The last piece of news to come from this update is that little bit at the end of the Meet the Pyro video. Steam will be releasing the Source Filmmaker tools, which were used for all of the “Meet the…” videos, along with most of the other cutscenes from their recent games and trailers. You have to sign up for the beta and hope for an invite at this point (like I am), but if you get in, not only do you get the toolset, but also the working project they used to make the Meet the Heavy video to play around with. Seriously, this could be big.