That’s all my girlfriend hears from me whilst I’m playing the side-splittingly hilarious Team Fortress 2 as the flamethrower weilding pyromaniac. Along with a few profanities when I don’t get my way, of course. 

As the game approaches it’s first birthday it has millions of players, myself included, completely hooked. Here’s how I like to think it all came about (and my opinions on the game too):

Imagine, if you will, the lead designer from Pixar Animation Studios (Wall-E, The Incredibles) sitting alone at a bar. A chap heads over to sit next to him and introduces himself as the creator of Team Fortress, one of the most popular computer game mods ever available. Pixar man is drained after completing another animated not-just-for-kids movie, while TF man is unhappy that his new game isn’t turning out to be as fun as a Team Fortress sequal should be. In walks a man from Valve who is currently in a team that has developed some of the most successful games of our time and certainly the best digital distribution network on the planet. After a few drinks, the conversation would go a bit like this:

Valve Man: “We’re all separately good at… stuff. How about we take our ideas…<hic>… and put ‘em together!”

Pixar Man: “Ha! That’ll never work. Think of the logis..logist-…money!”

TF Man: “We’d have to start from stratch!”

Valve Man: “Okay, that’s settled then!” 

After a few moments of blank staring, they would put a deal together, throw bucketloads of cash in and spend years making what is now Team Fortress 2 (widely claimed as the best multiplayer game of the year) and make millions of people very happy because of it (and a tidy profit of course).

In short, Team Fortress 2 has something to please anyone remotely interested in gaming; humour, great looks, explosive carnage, popularity, efficiency, player bonuses and regular content updates for free (in your face Xbox Live). They’ve taken the time to highlight the humourous visual style by releasing short introductory videos to a number of the characters too. You’ll find a couple below, but youtube will offer up all manner of TF2 goodness should you want more.

Speaking of the characters, although you’re bound to find a favourite (The Pyro is mine), they’re very cleverly designed so you can pick up and play as each of them very quickly and actually be useful to your team. There are always two teams, blue and red, often with 16 players each and although there are a number of different game modes, you usually only have to concentrate on a simple objective and kill members of the other team along the way. Easy for beginners to pick up. However, the more you play, the more you find out the intricacies of each map and character and once you start to apply your own tactics to the game based on how it’s playing out, you can really start to gel with your team and get the most out of the experience. Also, playing with or against your friends adds to the experience hugely, which is partly why I’m banging on about it!

The game runs on the Source engine (Half-Life 2, Dark Messiah) so if you have a relatively decent PC, something that happily runs The Sims 2 or WoW for instance, then I’m highly recommending TF2 to you. It’s a bargain as well for around a tenner ($19.99) over on Steam, but if you’re gonna go for it then I’d have to suggest the acclaimed Orange Box for absolute value for money. Just click through to the website yourself to see all the info on what you get for one price (6 games!).

On to the videos, all use in game graphics by the way:

The Heavy:

The Engineer:

The Sniper (what is that accent?!):

The Demoman (this accent is worse than Shrek):

Tags: Online, Source, Steam, Team Fortress 2

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.