Team Fortress 2
So Sammy and I like to play a game called Team Fortress 2. We like to play a lot it. While the game came out well over two years ago, Valve, the company behind the game and the same company behind Half Life and Left 4 Dead, keeps updating the game with new weapons, maps, and, best/worst of all, achievements. Sweet, sweet achievements, the pure white Afghani heroin of modern video gaming. Even the incredibly well made and honestly hilarious character bios they keep releasing keep me coming back.
I think I can now honestly say, after two years of semi-regular playing, that Team Fortress 2 has usurped even Zelda III as my favorite game in the universe.
But more than any of this, with Valve you have a game company that seems to actually think about how games are played and what makes them fun more than any company since Nintendo. Just check out their post on the trials and errors of trying to come up with an Engineer expansion. I might be out-geeking myself here, but I find it absolutely inspiring to see a group of smart people put so much thought into something as benign as how to build a truly fun and balanced game.
So with Valve announcing that all of their titles are being ported to the Mac in April, we expect to play even more TF2. It’d be pretty awesome if you did, too. You can buy the game for $20 from Steam, which is a pretty rad way to buy games cause you can install them over and over again on any machine you log in to.
Note that, unfortunately, you X-Box/PS3 users are of no use to us as you play on shitty console networks full of racist homophobic 12 year old shitheads. To my knowledge, Valve has no plans of ever integrating the networks. We’re stuck over here in PC/Mac land (and all the more glad for it! I can’t headshot you worth a damn without my mouse).And should this post actually convince anyone to get the game, join the scrabbled group and friend us all here:
Comments
I’ll buy this as soon as Steam for Mac is released. I do have windows installed on my iMac but switching just to play a game doesn’t work for me…no matter how awesome Sins of a Solar Empire is.
I played the X Box version when it came out and never ran into any of the typical racist twelve year-olds. The TF2 players are actually pretty cool.
I played Modern Warfare 2 for about five hours yesterday and only ran into two of the bad apples.
aren’t you also an xbox user?
I am! But, as I explained in the thread, I need a mouse for these types of games. So I don’t play TF2 on there.
I read the post, I was just checking.
I played this game on Xbox for about 5 minutes. I think I’m thinking of the right game, it came on the same disc as Portal right? It reminded me about why I hate most video games.
Jay said:I played this game on Xbox for about 5 minutes. I think I’m thinking of the right game, it came on the same disc as Portal right? It reminded me about why I hate most video games.
Yep. So what do you hate about most video games?
I always thought they were very detailed-oriented. They are conscious of “fun” too.
John said:Yep. So what do you hate about most video games?
I dunno. I just feel like every modern video game is the same core with a different shell. Shooting things gets very boring very fast.
Jay said:I dunno. I just feel like every modern video game is the same core with a different shell. Shooting things gets very boring very fast.
I don’t know, man. There happens to be, at least with the Soldier and Demoman classes, a pretty serious physics engine at work. The cartooniness of the game allows for straight silly stuff like rocket jumping and launching yourself across the board and to extreme heights.
I find rocket jumping itself to be fun, let alone trying to perfectly time through-gap/window projectiles whilst flying through the air. During these moments I wish that were a minigame itself; I could do without the being shot to death while trying.
While rocket jumping places I often find myself leaning in the direction to which I’m trying to get. You know that’s a good sign right there.
Nice thing I can say about TF2: the art style is really great!
I played this game for a few hours, but thought it was brain-meltingly boring. I got the impression that I was skating on the surface of a timesink that would eventually offer up enjoyment if I dropped immense amounts of time into developing painstaking precision and learning the tiny incremental strategies of a dozen skillsets so I wouldn’t step on the toes of a bunch of invisible online people who have already sunk hundreds of eye-strained hours into learning the inside-out of everything.
Totally a matter of personal taste, I’m guessing. I prefer something like Borderlands, where I can pick it up for 10 minutes and feel a sense of progress and then log off without disappointing the other players that plan to keep going long into the night. This is why I’ve never been able to understand MMORPGs… the idea of making plans ahead of time to spend a specific amount of time in a videogame, overlaying a chore-like template atop something I enjoy as a distraction, is pure anathema to me. It’s like married yuppie couples with decaying relationships that schedule fuck-time into their calendars.
I have this burgeoning distaste for multiplayer-centric experiences in an age that seems to be tilting towards them very heavily. I tend to avoid the internet outside of work, which makes me a pretty slim minority, I guess.
I have noticed, lately, that Xbox Live is filled with pretty decent people if you’re not playing Halo.
Justin said:I played this game for a few hours, but thought it was brain-meltingly boring. I got the impression that I was skating on the surface of a timesink that would eventually offer up enjoyment if I dropped immense amounts of time into developing painstaking precision and learning the tiny incremental strategies of a dozen skillsets so I wouldn’t step on the toes of a bunch of invisible online people who have already sunk hundreds of eye-strained hours into learning the inside-out of everything.
this is exactly why i don’t play online, either. i like to play & level-up in my own time and have no desire to disappoint or be grumbled at by people who are far more into it than i am.
however recently, i have gotten really damn good at FPS and if i had an Xbox, would totally join the Battlefield 2 squad of my friends at work.
Definitely sucks to hear that you guys feel that way cause, frankly, it’s two less people I like that I’d get to play with. But in all honesty, I’ve never had that impression. It could very well be because I’ve been playing FPS games since the first time Quake made me switch from arrow keys + ctrl and alt to wasd and the mouse (/jokesfornerds), but with TF2, everything has seems pretty natural to me.
Certainly, there’s a learning curve in figuring out how to do things well. I can’t tell you how many times I got killed trying to figure out how to sneak around as a spy without getting myself killed right away. And I still suck as a Sniper — I’m just not fast enough to get those long-range headshots. But learning all the other classes have felt less like a chore and more like an exploration which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. It certainly helped that there are more than a few n00b servers (yes, I’m more than a little embarrassed at having typed “n00b”) for me to fuck around on. Hell, most of the time Sam and I play on this low-gravity bullshit server that’s the same board all day and we just jump around and shoot people till the sun comes up.
Literally.
Anyhow, I think the obstacle is much more so being willing to sit at your computer to play games. Sam and I rarely make plans to play — it’s usually just that we’re both online and go “TF2 in an hour?” and that’s that.
Which, in turn, makes me sad that I don’t see more of you on IM. I’m on pretty much 24/7. I prefer it to phone calls and texts cause there’s no interruption.
Anyway, lots of beer. Talking, Video games! boomheadshot.
Opinions.
Hutch, I’m the exact opposite of you I can’t imagine playing a FPS with a keyboard and a mouse. blech.
Also, I’m tired of FPSers. Boooooorrrrriiinnnngggg. I’d rather play street fighter.