Lately there has been some rumours floating around to the effect that Valve has revived production of Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms.

Last year valve made its first announcement regarding the product since 2001, when they announced they would be transferring the project over to the Source Engine. The announcement in 2005 was primarily about Half Life 2 Episode One however Doug Lombardi did mention that the game was still in production and that more information would be forthcoming following the release of ep. 1, although as yet no further information has been given.

THe rumour that the game may be once again seen on the horizon has been amplified by the appearance of code related to TF2 in recent versions of the Source SDK.

Hopefully all this amounts to something, I for one would like to see team fortress back on thr LAN scene.

Another recent old game release is Half Life: Source Deathmatch, which came bundled with Half-Life 2 Episode One. Im not sure why I got excited about this, for some reason I expected it to be more than the exact same as the origonal but with more bugs and higher resource demands. Don't get me wrong I loved Half-Life DM I think it is probably the most entertaining DM game I have ever played, but if I were to play it I may as well play the origonal, which runs better and doesnt crash. Black Mesa Source will apparently feature Deathmatch, so hopefully this will better fulfill what I had expected of Half Life: Source Deathmatch.

On a related note I was personally disapointed with Half-Life 2 Episode One, I think they should have held off and released all 3 episodes as one game. The fact they didnt makes the game very short and makes the consumer feel ripped off. The Game is very combat heavy, which I dont mind, but because it was so short it lacked the variety of different environments and scenarios which made the previous games so engrossing.

SGL have decided to take the low road by putting on an event of the same day as BONG following Deans sincere and truthfull but possibly inappropriate comments on how little we enjoyed the last SGL event. SGL's organisers have tried to blame the clash on scheduling of their venue, but given that BONG's LAN dates were published over a year ago this seems like a weak excuse.

There is also a plan in the works to rebrand BONG as FragFest, the main reason for this is that the title BONG is discouraging for sponsors. Personally I am not against the idea and I dont mind the name FragFest on its own, However it has been used in recent history by another LAN group and I wonder if that may have any reprocussions.