Thursday, April 17, 2014

Team Fortress 2: a great community

I felt like playing an online shooter, but I'm not sure where my copies of various Halos are and I've not bought a Call of Duty game since number 2 (and that was in Portuguese).  I've completed Portal a number of times and have made my way half-way through Half-Life 2 (as described the last time I wrote about it - the last bit I remember was playing with Alyx's dog and then being separated from her by a tunnel collapsing, but that was a good few months ago), but have never played Team Fortress 2.  I decided to change that.

I'm really glad I did.  The game's not particularly friendly to newcomers, with the different classes seeming bewildering, but I decided to just jump in and try to work it out as I went.  Of course, this meant that I died a lot, but that just meant I could experiment more with different playing styles.


I quickly realised that the best class for me was the pyromaniac, which was surprising since in most games I don't like getting up close to enemies.  The pyro has an advantage in that the weapon - a flamethrower - doesn't need to be completely accurate, though it relies on an extended contact with enemies.



I also played a few games with the spy, which was great fun - trying to act like a member of the other team in order to prevent getting discovered, while sneaking in to the base to steal the documents.

The thing I found most difficult was learning the maps.  I only played on two different areas, one with two forts with identical mazes within (on which I played capture the flag), and one where the idea was to make progress through the level.  I was on the losing team on every game but one, and I can't help but feel my participation may not have helped on that.



The thing that struck me most about the game was the community.  Everyone was playing as a team, not boasting about kills, and a couple of people actively helped me - I managed to get the documents back to our base while two others protected me.  I said thanks, they told me I was welcome.

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