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Kill Valve in 360 TF2

Also, lag patch due soon.

You might imagine they fancy a night off after ten years making it, but the boys and girls at Valve are actually quite happy playing Team Fortress 2 - and now they want to take you on.

With this in mind, they will be celebrating the launch of The Orange Box on Xbox 360 this Friday by going online to make you cry some more. So if you're a Gold subscriber, make a note of the 12 gamertags below. Between 3 and 7pm PDT (11pm to 2am in the UK unless my maths sucks) you should be able to invite or be invited by any one of them.

Beware though that some people are experiencing a fair bit of lag playing TF2 on Xbox Live ahead of launch (EGTV's own Johnny Minkley reckons it's diabolical), and that a patch (sorry, Title Update) is racing its way through certification to sort out the problems.

They reportedly arise when attempting to join six-versus-six or eight-versus-eight matches where "connection to host lost" messages pop up often and games become impossible to play due to lag. 1UP reports that Valve expects that the patch designed to sort this out will be released as soon as the weekend or early next week, so if you do suffer, hang in there. You can always use the time to play Half-Life 2: Episode Two or Portal, after all.

If you fancy braving it anyway, the 12 Valve gamertags you need to note down can be found by reading beyond the end of this sentence.

  • gamewithdev1 (Matt W.- Level Designer)
  • ValveArtist1 (Matthew S. - Artist)
  • ValveAnim (Matthew R. - Animator)
  • ValveProg1 (Vitaliy - Programmer)
  • ValveProg2 (Adrian - Programmer)
  • ValveProg3 (Kerry - Programmer)
  • ValveProg4 (Robin - Programmer)
  • ValveProg5 (Jim - Programmer)
  • ValveLevelDes2 (Dave - Level Designer)
  • ValveArtist2 (Nick - Artist)
  • ValveLevelDes3 (Scott - Level Designer)
  • ValveProg6 (David - Programmer)
  • ValveWriter (Chet - Writer)