Much like in the historical documentary 300, we have evaluated all of your movies and thrown the weak ones down a well, keeping only the Gerard Butlers. Now it's up to you, the TF2 community, to select the Gerard Butleriest.

"This is madness!" we hear you say. "No it is not!" we reply, just like in that immortal scene we always fast forward through to get to the fight scenes.

That's right. Unlike at other awards shows, where the winners are necromanced by magicians, the Saxxy Award winners in all twenty categories will be picked by YOU, the discriminating TF2 player, as well as by magicians.

Each player gets one vote per category. You can change your vote right up until the voting ends this Monday, June 6th, at 11:00am PST.



Click here to start judging!

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added the Magicka promotional item
  
• Fixed the targetID panel not drawing in first-person spectator mode
  
• Fixed the main menu showing through the shopping cart menu when running at 2500x1600
  
• Updated some of the tips that are displayed while the server is changing maps
  
• Updated the webapi output to include the names of the attached particles
  
• Updated the gamehaptics.txt file
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed a client crash when disconnecting from servers with sv_pure set to 1
  
• Fixed a client crash in the material system
  
• Fixed a client crash caused by using alt-tab while playing
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added the Concheror and the Fishcake to the list of weapons allowed in Medieval mode
  
• Fixed a few server crashes caused by the replay system
  
• Fixed a server crash caused by the vote system
  
• Fixed the notification text being clipped when you receive items
  
• Updated the localization files
  

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php"><img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/battle_voting.png" height="180" width="420" border="0"></a>

At the close of the submission deadline last Thursday, we'd received tens of thousands of videos—many of them amazing, others less amazing but at least following the rules, and still more of them clips from King of Queens with Linkin Park songs dubbed over them. While we appreciate the passion of that final group, we should remind you that the King of Queens Metal Maelstrom contest isn't until next month.

For the rest of you, this is a reminder <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php">to get voting</a>. As of last Thursday the Saxxys entered the all-important Battle Voting stage, with your choices bringing the strongest videos in each category to the top of the heap. Battle Voting ends Thursday, May 26th, so if you've got opinions, vote now while they still matter!

Once Battle Voting's culled the weak, Kevin James-based rap metal entries from the herd, a panel of immortal Valve combat film critics will descend from their monastery at the top of the Space Needle to choose a set of final nominees from each category. They will then bang an important-looking gong, thus re-opening the voting to the community. Each user will get ONE vote per category to help determine who will be taking home Saxxys.

Lastly, some clarifications: 1:01 IS a valid length for submissions, since it turns out YouTube is adding a second here or there during upload. Also, flagged videos ARE being screened and removed. We're listening and our fingers are hovering over the DELETE button, so keep flagging.

That's it! Thanks to the TF community as a whole for taking the time to vote, and specifically to the many talented folks out there who were willing to take the Replay Editor out for a spin and make some entertaining shorts in the process.

At the close of the submission deadline last Thursday, we'd received tens of thousands of videos—many of them amazing, others less amazing but at least following the rules, and still more of them clips from King of Queens with Linkin Park songs dubbed over them. While we appreciate the passion of that final group, we should remind you that the King of Queens Metal Maelstrom contest isn't until next month.

For the rest of you, this is a reminder to get voting. As of last Thursday the Saxxys entered the all-important Battle Voting stage, with your choices bringing the strongest videos in each category to the top of the heap. Battle Voting ends Thursday, May 26th, so if you've got opinions, vote now while they still matter!

Once Battle Voting's culled the weak, Kevin James-based rap metal entries from the herd, a panel of immortal Valve combat film critics will descend from their monastery at the top of the Space Needle to choose a set of final nominees from each category. They will then bang an important-looking gong, thus re-opening the voting to the community. Each user will get ONE vote per category to help determine who will be taking home Saxxys.

Lastly, some clarifications: 1:01 IS a valid length for submissions, since it turns out YouTube is adding a second here or there during upload. Also, flagged videos ARE being screened and removed. We're listening and our fingers are hovering over the DELETE button, so keep flagging.

That's it! Thanks to the TF community as a whole for taking the time to vote, and specifically to the many talented folks out there who were willing to take the Replay Editor out for a spin and make some entertaining shorts in the process.

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php"><img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/francis.png" width="420" height="195" border="0"></a>

<i>Allo, mes amis! Ho ho ho!</i>

Valve took a film class last week so they would be qualified to judge the many great entries in the Saxxy Awards contest! So many unfamiliar terms! <i>Mise en scene! Auteur! Avante-garde! Montage!</i> Even <i>cinéma</i> itself!

What do all of these words have in common? Un: They sound complicated enough that Valve decided they had no business judging <i>cinéma</i>. Deux: These words were all invented by <i>me</i>, Francis the Talking France! And so Valve has spared no expense in flying me tout de suite to the French-sounding town of Bellevue to judge the entries myself! <i>C'est magnifique!</i>

But <i>onh-honh-honh</i>. Why the sad French sounds? Because I see now this is too big a job for one talking France. So I am writing this <i>poste de blog</i> to announce that <strong>judging of the <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/">Saxxy Awards</a> is now open to <i>tout le monde!</strong> Le jugement est fantastique!</i>

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php">Click here</a> to start your voting adventure! À bientôt!

Allo, mes amis! Ho ho ho!

Valve took a film class last week so they would be qualified to judge the many great entries in the Saxxy Awards contest! So many unfamiliar terms! Mise en scene! Auteur! Avante-garde! Montage! Even cinéma itself!

What do all of these words have in common? Un: They sound complicated enough that Valve decided they had no business judging cinéma. Deux: These words were all invented by me, Francis the Talking France! And so Valve has spared no expense in flying me tout de suite to the French-sounding town of Bellevue to judge the entries myself! C'est magnifique!

But onh-honh-honh. Why the sad French sounds? Because I see now this is too big a job for one talking France. So I am writing this poste de blog to announce that judging of the Saxxy Awards is now open to tout le monde! Le jugement est fantastique!

Click here to start your voting adventure! À bientôt!

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed another case where the $ignorez material flag could be used as a cheat
  

Team Fortress 2

• Extended the Saxxy contest deadline to 11:59:59 PM GMT, Friday, May 20th, 2011
  
• Fixed the third-person camera options dialog not displaying correctly in the Replay performance editor
  
• Fixed a rare case where users running Service Pack 3 on Windows 7 64-bit with graphics driver version 12.42 saw a graphical glitch on the main menu Options button
  
• Updated the Three-Rune Blade, Hero's Tail, and Sign of the Wolf's School items so they can be crafted and traded
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Important notes

• If you were previously crashing on startup, please have Steam verify the integrity of your game cache
  
  • Update your game to the most current version
    
  • Right-click on the game and select "Properties"
    
  • Click on the "Local Files" tab
    
  • Click on the "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" button
    
• If you were previously crashing when connecting to a server, please run once with "-autoconfig" to reset your graphics state
  
  • Update your game to the most current version
    
  • Right-click on the game and select "Properties"
    
  • Click on the "General" tab
    
  • Click on the "Set Launch Options..." button
    
  • Add "-autoconfig" to the launch options and click OK
    
  • Restart your game
    
  • After doing this, you should remove -autoconfig from your launch options
    

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed several client crashes on game startup, shutdown, and replay interaction
  
• Updated the materials used on models to ignore the $ignorez flag, to make it harder to create wallhacks on sv_pure 0 servers
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added an Advanced Options button to the main menu to allow tweaking of many gameplay options
  
• Fixed server crashes related to replays and new items
  
• Added "per_class_loadout_slots" and "attribute_controlled_attached_particles" sections to the GetSchema WebAPI call
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed a server crash caused by a mismatched items schema