Having a cold and generally feeling miserable, I have spent the last 
couple of days basically playing TF2 around the clock to try to take my 
mind off the stabbing pain in my head.

This game is really quite special. Seriously. It was a real sense of 
*fun* to it. Even when you're loosing it's funny.

For anybody who doesn't follow computer games: TF2 beta has just been 
released by Valve (those guys who made HalfLife and HalfLife 2 and 
CounterStrike: Source and so forth). It's a (loosely) team-based 3D 
first-person shooter. Unlike most such games, it has a deliberately 
cartoon like of graphics. You can play as any of 9 different characters, 
each with special abilities. I will briefly enumerate these:

Scout - Runs quite fast, and can jump absurd distances. Low on weaponry 
and armour, but great for getting in and getting out again before the 
enemy even knows you're there.

Soldier - Armed with a rocket launcher. Special move is rocket jumps, 
which I can't figure out how to do.

Heavy Weapons Guy - Big strapping Russian bloke with a huge rotary gun 
that mows things down, takes ages to spin up, and eats ammo like candy. 
The slowest-moving character in the game.

Pyro - Armed with a flame thrower. It was a very short range, but once 
an opponent is on fire, it just keeps sapping their health until they 
die. (Or they find a health powerup.)

Demo man - Has various grenade launchers. Great for taking out sentry 
guns hidden round corners. Speaking of which...

Engineer - Builds sentry guns. And "dispencers", which heal your 
teammates if they stand close enough. Also supplies you with the "metal" 
you need for building things.

Sniper - Guess what he does. His gun is actually pretty rubbish. It only 
does significant damage if 1: you zoom in, 2: you fix the target for 
about 15 seconds, 3: you get a direct hit to the head. Otherwise it just 
tickles slightly.

Medic - Crazy German guy in a white suit. He has three weapons. One is a 
bizzare bottle full of needles, which shoot out and cause a small amount 
of damage to whatever they hit. Another is a bone saw (?!), which you 
can slash things with. But of course, the main "weapon" is the health 
charger dealy.

Spy - Probably the most hated character in the game. Can disguise 
himself as any member of the enemy team. Can also become invisible. And 
can place "sappers" on the devices the Engineer builds. This disables 
them and after a few seconds destroys them.

Right from the word go, this game is loaded with fun. Obviously, the 
graphcs are very stylised. The Scout is a skinny little guy with a 
baseball cap so runs like the wind. The Demo Man is a black guy with an 
eye patch and an evil grin.

Let's go over a few other things that make the game amusing.

- Death. Doesn't sound very amusing, does it? But when you die, you see 
your corpse for a second, and then the camera zooms in on the guy who 
killed you and freeze frames for a second or two. (So if you walk down 
some empty road and suddenly drop dead, you'll know what killed you. 
Usually a sniper 3 miles away, or an invisible spy standing behind you! 
Or maybe a sentry gun...)

- If the same person kills you several times, when the game freeze 
frames it plays a little signature tune and flashes up "You were killed 
by __o_oO-):(-Oo_o__ again! NEW NEMESIS!" If you succeed in killing this 
guy, it plays the tune again and flashes up "REVENGE!" And, typically, 
your character says something. ("Thanks for standing still, ****er.")

- Sometimes, if you get hit by a rocket, say, your body gets flashed 
into a thousand pieces. And sometimes when it freeze frames, a little 
label will pop up next to one of the bits of flesh and say "your kidney" 
or something. Or just "another bit".

- Stats. Lots of stats. When you die, sometimes it says "on the bright 
side, you killed more people that round as demo man than your previous 
best" or some similar statistic. While you're waiting for a map to load, 
it shows you a big stats table that you can analyst while you wait.

- The pyro. He wears a full body flame-proof suit and face mask. It just 
amuses the hell out of me how everything the pryo says just sounds like 
"mm, m mmmm, mm mmMMMmmm!"

- The anouncer. She's like something out of Austin Powers. You hear her 
voice echoing over the announcement system from time to time. For 
example, when you capture a control point, you hear her smug voice 
calmly say "We have been awarded additional time". But when the enemy 
captures a control point, you hear here irritatedly sulk "The ENEMY has 
been awarded Additional Time".

- Winning. Loosing. If you win, the anouncer's smug voice says 
"Victory!" And you hear a blast of music, and the sound of hundreds of 
people cheering. And you feel like a hero! But if you loose, she gasps 
"You failed!" And you hear some sad music, and a load of people yellow 
"boooo!"

Having played the game for quite some time, a few less-fun things are 
emerging.

- ctf_2fort. If you ever play CSS, sooner or later somebody will ask to 
have the map changed to dust (de_dust) or office (cs_office). If you 
play TF2, people will endlessly ask for ctf_2fort. It's actually quite a 
good map, but personally I don't like playing the same map forever...

- cp_dustbowl. Otherwise known as "oh good, it's spawn-kill time..." 
Basically the red team have to defend some control points, and they get 
60 seconds to fortify the place before the blue team get let out. 
Naturally, the result is that when the gates open and the blue team 
emerge, 6 or 7 sentry guns instantly mow them down and half a dozen 
snipers (who've been zoomed in on their targets for ages) take their 
heads off. One particular stage has the blue team run up a ramp, meaning 
demo men can fill it with grenades a second or two before the gates 
open. Basically, it's 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... the entire blue team is 
now dead. It seems... slightly unbalanced to me. (!)

- Spies. Everybody hates spies. Now I've tried playing as a spy. The 
invisibility thing only lasts about 10 seconds, and disguising yourself 
seems to fool nobody. Basically, if you're a spy, you die within about 5 
seconds of leaving your own base, if not very much sooner. And yet, the 
*enemy* spies manage to stay invisible for 20 minutes or more. They 
manage to walk all the way into your base, and casually walk around 
destroying every device your engineers build, and commit mass murder, 
all without ever being detected. It just isn't FAIR!

- Sometimes the game in general doesn't seem fair. Like, you're a heavy, 
another heavy comes towards you. You both start firing. You drop dead in 
a pool of your own blood, and the enemy heavy carries on. Er, hello? 
Same character? Same weapon? What the hell is THAT about?!

Random unresolved points about the game:

- The medic's healing gun. It fires a stream of glowing energy that 
replenishes whoever you point it at. There's also a little meter on your 
screen that says "UBERCHARGE" on it. As you heal people, this fills up. 
When it gets right to the end, your character yells "I am fully 
charged!" I don't know *how* you do this, but somehow there's something 
you can do at this point that makes both you and the player you're 
healing invunerable to damage. (It also makes you glow like a neon 
sign.) Only lasts a few seconds though...

- As a spy, you've meant to be able to place sappers on enemy devices to 
destroy them. I have yet to work out how to do this. You can't place 
them while invisible, and if you try to sap a sentry gun while visible, 
you get mowed down before you can place the sapper.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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