THIS IS A TF2 BLOG NOW GUYS
So it's been 30 weeks since my last entry. That's something like 7 and a half months. Keepin' the tradition strong of posting every solstice!
This scintillating new post is about my new timesink, Team Fortress 2. I quit playing Warcraft a couple of months ago, mainly due to not being able to afford the monthly fee. I was pretty okay with having to do it; I've gotten kind of burned out after about 18 months of playing it and creating a level 80 character on both Alliance and Horde side. I've definitely had fun over the last year and a half so I don't regret having to take a break and I'm definitely picking back up on it when I get a job again. But until then, no WoW for me. I'm actually proud of myself because I do have avenues with which I can play WoW: I can play on free servers or I can access Christian's account and play it when he isn't. But I've restrained myself pretty admirably having only played maybe 1 or 2 hours in the last two months. I've been playing a bunch of random games over the gap: Command and Conquer 3, Alien Shooter 2, Maw, KotoR 2 and trying to hold onto MMOs to the last with City of Heroes, FFXI, a bit of RO and Shin Megami Tensei Imagine. I'm eventually going to play Sims 3 but I have to get a copy of Steve's so it's going to be next weekend before I can get a hold of it.
But mainly, I've been playing TF2.
For those who don't know, Team Fortress 2 is a really popular FPS made by Valve using the HL2 engine. The precursor to TF2 was Team Fortress, which was a mod for QuakeWorld. When the Team Fortress developers joined Valve to work on TF2 they brought along TF which was redone using the Half-Life engine and released as Team Fortress Classic. It was really popular and featured nine different classes: Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Sniper, Spy and Medic with the choice of fighting on the side of red or blue teams. Though the game didn't have the lasting power of Counter Strike it was really well-received and people were excited when Team Fortress 2 was announced at E3 in 1999 but Valve reported in 2000 that development on TF2 was halted.
Then silence.
Over the next six years nothing was heard of that had to do with the game and it became vaporware, spoken in the same breath as Duke Nukem Forever. Poor Duke.
Anyway.
Finally in October 2007, Team Fortress 2 was released to the public. The design was radically different than what Valve showed off back in 1999 with large cartoony character models and sprawling maps that looked like they were built by evil geniuses. Using the 2Fort map as an example, it is a intelligence capturing map. The intelligence resides in underground bunkers on the RED and BLU sides, with the entrance to the bunkers being disguised by old farmhouses and industrial buildings. This is a radical departure from TFC and it made TF2 explode in popularity. Aside from the gameplay itself, the story of the game and the personality of the characters also is amazing. Rather than just fighting for red or blue teams, you fight on the side of Reliable Excavation and Demolition or Builders League United. Both entities control separate halves of the world governments and contract mercenaries to fight their turf wars, capturing points and enemy intelligence. Each class has their own unique personality: the Demoman is an irate drunken "black Scottish cyclops", the Soldier is a stereotypical Army meathead and the Pyro is, well... a pyro. Hundreds, probably thousands, of machinima have been made about TF2, the most popular being official videos released by Valve collectively called "Meet the Team", where we get to find out more about each classes personality quirks straight from the source.
But you may be saying "Ike, why are you doing all this when you could have just linked us to the Wikipedia articles?". I don't really know, I guess I kind of got carried away since I haven't even started talking about what I was going to talk about. I'll put this entire entry behind a cut when I finish with it. You guys actually got lucky since I was planning on making this a whole crapload bigger than it is, replete with images and all that good stuff.
The point of all this is that I like TF2. A lot.
I started out playing as a Pyro because I just liked his character and the fact that he has a friggin' huge flamethrower. Over time I realized I'm not totally fit for Pyro because it requires ambushing your enemy to get them in range of your flame and a wm1 Pyro isn't much of a Pyro at all. I fooled around with meatshield classes like Heavy and Soldier but finally settled on the Scout. It's really an antithesis of who I am but I do love the quick little bastard. The Scout's main strength is his speed coupled with double-jumping allows him to get out of most any situation unharmed. Add in his scattergun which does retarded amounts of damage at close range and a pistol for taking out people mid-range and he's a class I really enjoy playing and think I'm fairly decent at. Unfortunately, decent isn't going to cut it.
I've mainly played 1v1 matches with Seth which are fun but the problem with these matches is that my skill isn't getting any greater if I just continue to do them. I've done a few public servers and with the exception of one where I totally owned some face, I didn't do so hot. I've decided to start a kind of daily training regimen, just playing as a Scout on some random pub for an hour each day. I really want to do well at public matches and I figure the best way to do so is to play them a little bit each day and hopefully I'll continue to ramp up my Scoot skillz.
So the entire point of this friggin' huge entry that I started like an hour and a half ago?
I'm making a Scout training blog, here's the linkage.