If for some reason you haven’t played Team Fortress 2, today’s TF2-for-$10 promo leaves you with no excuses. That’s 50% off the regular price until the day ends, a promo coordinated with the addition of new features to the game. Sure, the Steam platform responsible for serving the game has some kinks that Valve really really really needs to work out, but no one can fault the software company’s games. But don’t take my word for it: TF2 is available to play for free until May 25.

Of course, you could’ve bought The Orange Box, a five-in-1 package featuring three Half-Life 2 games, and TF2, when it was $10. But I can assure you that even getting Team Fortress 2 all by its lonesome for $10 is still money well-spent. Besides, misery loves company; I thought I got a good deal when Valve was selling Left 4 Dead for $20. About a month or so later, the company discounts the game again—selling it for $10!

“I got the game running (sic) on my small 10″ 1.6Ghz Intel Atom based laptop with GMA Intel 945 Chipset.”

Thus began the interesting—but unverified—account of Steam user “The Neighbor”, who describes the results of his tweaks as instructed by a Steam forum thread (which apparently details how to run games on the dreaded integrated Intel GPU).

More of an experiment rather than a desperate penny-pincher trying to get the popular multiplayer shooter running on his basic netbook, the tweaks hardly produce an optimum gaming experience. Neighbor warns that framerates drop to as low as 10 per in outdoor environments, and that the “Discolorations with the characters is bad that you sometimes can’t tell the enemy. (sic)”

Still, chalk one up for Filipino ingenuity! It’s not the kind of original thinking that Takipsilim-haters would love to see, but any Filipino who steps up always makes me teary-eyed.

(reprinted with permission from Technograph)