It is a dimension of pure violence.

Two teams of nine men wage total war over a tiny patch of deserted land, shooting, stabbing, burning, exploding, and pummeling each other into paste. In this nightmare there is no death, only a blink of void before another clone is fed into the grinder. There is no rest, no ease, and no mercy. It is senseless. It is brutal. It is Team Fortress 2, and if you haven’t played it yet, you’re missing out on some of the best multiplayer FPS action ever conceived.

In this edition of Saturday Morning Cartoons, we examine the official Valve Software introductory movies for each class (except for the Pyro and Medic films, which haven’t been released yet). The first video, Meet the Heavy, was an animation test that Valve decided to release to the public, so it’s less complex than the ones that followed. Although the videos aren’t in chronological order of release, and I inserted a little break with Meet the Sandvich (reputedly a voice actor improv session someone caught on tape), I ended with what I feel is the most detailed and sophisticated TF2 film yet released, Meet the Spy. You can watch these twenty or thirty times and still be surprised at the detail, nuance, and humor. Make sure to turn on HD, and use headphones if possible.

As usual, Valve’s gone above and beyond in their characterization, artwork, and music–each video is a little wonder. As with all Valve films, they give you something so incredibly fun, that you don’t even realize you’re watching a tutorial. Each film is a solid introduction to the play style of each class, going so far as to (subtly) make specific suggestions of where to place traps, ambush enemy players, and how to aim your shots.

Each movie is filmed within an actual level of the game, using voice taunts and sound effects from the game itself. The immersion, detail, acting and art are stunning, but there is (or was, until recently) a complete dearth of backstory, leaving the players and fans to interpret the characters in any way they see fit. It was an experiment in character, sans context, and it is a triumph.

With TF2, Valve inspired one of the largest and most creative fandoms of any movie, television show, or game. I’ve included a couple fan videos at the end of this playlist, but the real stuff will have to wait until next week. This week, just familiarize yourself with the characters and style, and you’ll be primed to enjoy what’s coming next.

Yeah, I was a space marine. 3rd Bughunters, and boy did we squash bugs. And all the idiots giving us crap for never really fighting in the war can go suck a cock. I’d like to see them crawling around in the service ducts of some navy liner, armed with a can of space raid, hunting Mercurian blood roaches because some idiot officer got his head torn off.

All that Arcturian pussy made up for it though.

Wowshank [War of 2345 Veterans Thread : Something Awful Forums]
ducts. [crossmyheart : DeviantArt]

Previously, from the War of 2345:
Scary as Hell and Better Than Sex
Close Encounters
Robophobia
Babykillers
Left Click and Pray
Google Droid Dustoff
Jetpack Bottleneck

Hey there, one from the 3/2701 checking in, anyone out there?

Anyway, I was the green WO in the 3rd, so I was in the rear of the formation. This is the only thing that saved me from their fucking auto turrets on mopup. Really “saved” is a euphemism for covered in the debris and detritus of thousands of bodies and ships. A lot of people call what the survivors did heroism. It was sheer stupidity. Instead of using maneuvering thrusters to drift out and away, we picked a convergence point, and over the course of two days rendezvoused 30 or so dropships in position to assault the capital. We didn’t have the defensive capabilities necessary to effect ship landings, so spacejumps were our only ticket to the surface.
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[Editor's note: Please welcome new Ectomo writer Rick Gauger: cartoonist, scholar, and author of science fiction novel Charon's Ark. It is an extraordinary honor to have the story on our front page, as it is the first creative writing Rick has done in ten years, and the first time he has written about his experiences as an intelligence officer with the First Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War. A warning to sensitive readers: this story contains descriptions that you may find disturbing. Everything in this story is true. --EG Gauger]

This is one of the things that happened at LZ Pony.  The LZ had been in place four or five days by the time this happened.  There were about 30 American soldiers at Pony, including my little interrogating team.  Fighting was going on elsewhere, so our helicopter support was sparse.  We didn’t have our jeeps, our tents or our other luxuries.  We were by ourselves on a bare hilltop surrounded by little hamlets and rice paddies in a valley in the mountains.  We lived under our ponchos.  For two weeks our luck held out.  The weather was good and there was no enemy except for a sniper who used to fire one shot at us from a great distance every evening at 5 PM.

The LZ commander sent out small patrols of seven or eight infantrymen, to explore the hamlets that dotted the big valley and its tributary valleys.  I wasn’t supposed to go on these patrols, but I did anyway.  I was curious about this exotic place, the infantry needed interpreters, and it’s smart to scout around when you’re in VC country.  My Vietnamese Army interpreter, Sgt Xuan, was willing to go too.

I’d been operational long enough to know this was Vietcong country.  It was clean, orderly, and motor-scooter-free.  Nobody wanted to sell us anything or wanted to come anywhere near us.  There were hardly any people who weren’t elderly or taking care of small children.  There were nontraditional kilometer-wide paddy fields on all sides where the VC had forced the villagers to collectivize the villagers’ smaller fields for greater efficiency.  The hamlets were like islands of jungle dotted across the flat paddy fields.  Once you got out of the hot glare and into a hamlet, your eyes adjusted and you saw mazes of pathways though jungle trees and bamboo, beautiful thatched-roof houses, gardens, tea hedges, fruit trees and animal pens.  You also saw pits with sharpened stakes, prepared defensive trenches, dugout bunkers, tunnels and booby traps.  We were lucky we caught this place by surprise.
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K-9 Andy, originally uploaded by Army.mil.

An U.S. Army military working dog, Andy, searches among rubble and trash outside a target building, during a joint operation with the Iraqi army and U.S. Soldiers of 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, in Rusafa, eastern Baghdad, Iraq, on Feb. 28. The Soldiers are searching for weapons caches and targeted insurgents.

[thanks jwz]

OF WARS & WITS & POWER 02

Stunning bookcases by Daniel Loves Objects; your tomes encased in the silhouettes of towering missiles balanced on the backs of golden, AK-47 toting toy soldiers, frozen in time as they march off to face the enemy. I’m not sure how functional something like this would be, but then again I don’t particularly care, either.

DANIEL LOVES OBJECTS! [coroflot] : core77

This was going to be included in a Saturday Morning Cartoons post but really, it deserves to be seen alone, in “high quality”, not shoved inside some standard quality SMC playlist. And while it it has already spread across the tubes, it deserves to be enshrined here.

Cat Shit One — Apocalypse Meow in the U.S. — was a Japanese manga that came out in 1998. It followed the day to day routine of an American recon unit in Vietnam called, yes, Cat Shit One. The various nationalities involved are represented by different animals: Americans are rabbits, the French are pigs, the Australians koalas and so on. Interestingly, the final chapter of volume 1 is titled “Dog Shit One” and features humans.

The proposed series takes place, not in Vietnam, but in Iraq and features turbaned, terrorist camels and “middle eastern music”, which consists of women wailing in a musical way. This makes the moment when the terrorist camels gun down a kidnapped rabbit especially poignant.

Whether or not this is meant to be serious at all is unknown but I have a hard time imagining it as such. It has as much to do with the animals as anything else I suppose; the gravity of the situation undercut as it is by images of a bunny firing an RPG into a truck as camel-terrorist fly through the air with A-Team-like aplomb; and close quarters combat looses some of its oomph when Mr. Flopsy is the one wielding the M4A1. Still, we can perhaps look forward to scenes of hooded camels hooked up to electrodes. That will be fun, won’t it?

Cat Shit One Movie Trailer – The Animated Series [YouTube]