Although somewhat belated, SnarkPit makes it into 2012. Hurray for us! While there have been much happenings in the world of mapping and of everything Valve since August (our last news posting), I'll only touch on the most recent event that has caught my attention. And also because, you know...... we're not much for news postings. And maybe I should stop talking in the 2nd person because I'm the only one who writes for these things... Big surprise? -I know.

Well in recent news, the ever popular Combine Overwiki, the seemingly premier wiki for everything Half-Life related, has taken up shop with its very own URL, thus finally leaving the tight grips of the ad-driven Wikia network. Everything moved, and status maintained, the wiki deserves some recognition over the past several years for being quite the stand-up site it's been. Contained within its pages are some highly unique articles and details on facts and trivia about the Half-Life/Portal Universe and their development, that this is the place to go to become the local Half-Life scholar of your community. It's definitely one of my favorite HL sites to visit.

The site is currently running noticeably slow, but much is to be said for moving an entire wiki to an independent domain, and should improve eventually as work is not finished. The old Wikia version will remain intact for the time being, but I don't believe it will be supported any longer by the creators.

Enjoy the new year, and I plan to get back into the swing of keeping semi-regular updates for the main page.

If you haven't been keeping up with the rumors, then this will be a complete and total surprise. Unless you're really good at guessing surprises. Valve announced yesterday that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play for everyone forever!

Check the free-to-play splash page: here

Oh and also, the new Meet the Medic video has been released! This is the largest update the game has seen yet, and it only keeps getting better and better!

Now go make maps for it already!