'Team Fortress 2' celebrates 10th birthday with jungle update

Multiplayer action game "Team Fortress 2" introduces six new jungle-themed arenas and a four-minute animated short courtesy of its wealthy Australian adventurer Saxton Hale.

First released as part of a Valve Corp package deal that included "Portal 2" and a second storyline expansion for "Half-Life 2," Valve's third famous sequel "Team Fortress 2" soon became a defacto standard in multiplayer action.

Launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it's the Mac, PC and Linux version, availabe through Valve's Steam platform, that has been the most diligently updated.

It went from a paid retail game to free-to-play in 2011, some two years before studio sibling and phenomenally lucrative eSports title "Dota 2" arrived on the scene.

With cartoonish visuals, frantic action, a blend of official and community servers, and a host of studio-developed and player-created maps to blast about in, "Team Fortress 2" eventually became Valve's test-bed for not only the free-to-play model but virtual economies to boot, as players traded digital items for real world items.

Sizable content updates have continued to flow, usually arriving in the second half of the year and often timed to coincide with seasonal holidays -- Halloween becomes Scream Fortress, Christmas becomes Australian Christmas or Smissmas, for example.

This October 2017 update arrives in staggered fashion over a four-day period, with Valve unveiling its internally developed, "Jurassic World" style, Yeti-inhabited Mercenary Park in conjunction with several new character emotes and a clutch of community-created maps which likewise stick close to a similar jungle theme.

The update is accompanied by a four-minute animated short, the Aussie-accented "Jungle Inferno" (youtu.be/YHf7e67T54Y,) offering some explanation as to how Mercenary Park became the latest battleground for the eternally squabbling Red and Blu teams of "Team Fortress 2."