Team Fortress 2: Some thoughts.

[aoanla]

For those of you who have unaccountably missed this: Team Fortress 2 is the class-based team tactical shooter which comes in The Orange Box (itself, the best value for money game collection in some time - five games for £35ish, on the PC

Comments

[starkruzr]

I really should just buy the Orange Box already, shouldn't I?

[aoanla]

You mean you haven't already?

Yes, yes you should.

[fetishman]

tf2. first heard of it a bout a year ago and have pined for it since then. i'm probably too busy to be allowed it.

[aoanla]

It is a beautiful thing, and you need to own it. You know you want to.

[mcmartin]

I'm not TF2ing over vacation, but I too am a Medic/Pyro type, with Scout and Soldier as needed.

The semi-clan I run with (clan-marker: [<3]) has a decent spy, though I've noticed he mostly only uses the cloak to get to a hiding point while a bunch of guys runs past, and then he follows, disguised.

A team with sufficiently active voice chat and attack plans should be able to thwart a spy just because Bob isn't supposed to be where this guy claiming to be Bob is, ergo, that guy's a spy.

The "exploit lack of friendly fire" part of TF2 also means that you can just cheerfully greet your teammates with a shotgun blast to the face, or by setting them on fire. Handy for Engineers, but they have their work cut out for them, too.

(I suspect the reason Engineers are played so much is that everyone needs one; Medics and Spies are both more situational classes.)

Finally, I conclude you haven't gotten into melee yet with your Medic or you totally would have brought up the Bonesaw killtaunt.

To wit:

"Saw-rry."

[jordanis]

It must be the server I'm on, but it usually takes for the teams to get down to 6v6 for there not to be at least one medic on each side. I've seen some very successful three-medic tactics, too. It's hard to take out that Heavy when he's got either three medics on him directly or a chain of medics healing each other.

[mcmartin]

I tend to bounce around the pubbie servers; the medic breakdown is much as you describe, but I've also had occasional situations where I (as the only medic) have had to swap out to a more offensive class because everyone else was playing support/non-assault, or were such horrifically bad shots that even I could do better.

That said, I am a bit surprised that Medic was ranked so low, since any reasonably full public server seems to reliably have two medics on each side.

[aoanla]

Yes, I enjoy Medic-chains too - also pretty good against Pyros who know about setting Medics on fire...

[moltare]

In order, Sniper/Engineer/Spy :)

[rimspace]

Y'know, looking at those stats pages, something really stands out at me: at best, 50% of the people who bought Ep1 or Ep2 actually finished them O.o

[mcmartin]

There's stuff in the Orange Box besides Portal and TF2? >_>

[aoanla]

Yes, this keeps being brought up by various game reviewers on their blogs. Valve think that this is probably a universal property across all games - one of the reason they're making shorter games is to try to get more people to finish them!

[rimspace]

Y'know, I'm actually cynical enough to believe you might be right there. I'd be interesting to see the stats for Portal, but they don't seem to have or publish them.

I was going to say that I couldn't really understand the mindset of people who buy a game and then not finish it, until I remembered that I haven't finished ep2 myself yet: I get to the map with the strider attacks on it and just give up in irritation.