By Pentadact

So the Demoman and Solider are getting three unlockables each next week, and there’s a seventh weapon that will go to whoever kills the other one more. They racked up 2.7 million kills of each other in the first sixteen hours of this competition, and currently the Soldier’s in the lead. I was trying to remember what I hoped the Demoman and Soldier unlockables might be, a year and a half ago, so I dug it out of the archive.

Both my suggestions for replacement melee weapons encourage and reward mid-air whacking after propelling yourself at the enemy with your explosives. I strongly suspect this seventh unlockable weapon, the one that could go to either class, is a melee weapon that critical-hits if used during or shortly after a rocket- or sticky-jump: it’s niche enough not to give the class it goes to a large advantage, and it’s one of the few areas of common ground between them.

My only suggestion for the Grenade Launcher at the time was its complete and permanent removal. I still hate it, but if I had to take a guess at a viable replacement, it’d be kind of cool to have one whose charges stuck to players and walls, detonating after a short delay regardless of enemy contact. Less useful for direct hits, but more useful for injuring pursuers while retreating. Here’s the others:

Wee Creepers: sticky-bombs that roll slowly towards nearby enemies, faster the closer they are. If an enemy’s close enough, they’ll follow him at Demoman walking-speed (very slightly slower than most classes). He can only lay four at a time, and they stop for a while if shot.

Why? Almost every situation involving these conjours an entertaining mental image.

Why not? This would allow players on your own team to screw you over by luring stickies towards you. It’s hard to say how much of a problem that would be, because to an extent it would require the enemy Demoman’s co-operation. If you’re close enough to them to lead them at walking speed, he’s probably just going to blow you up straight away.

The Good Stuff: alternate whiskey bottle which, if not yet smashed, temporarily adds 50 health when doing the drinking taunt – even if it takes him above his usual maximum. The boost decays over fifteen seconds, during which time the Demoman is also immune to fall-damage. The bottle always crits while the Demoman has been airbourne for more than a second.

Why? Bracing yourself for a good sticky-jump, whacking people at the end of it.

Why not… that swingy dynamite he had in the first trailer! I’m only guessing, but I would think that made it too easy to take out an Engy, all his kit and everyone defending him without actually entering line-of-sight. The swinging charge-up animation was interesting, though – I wonder if you had to stay still during that.

Last Ditch Digger: broken trench-shovel whose damage and attack-rate are proportional to the amount of health the Soldier has lost.

Why? Apart from encouraging unlikely comebacks, it makes rocket-jumping spade-attacks more effective. And fun things should always be made more effective.

Imploder: rocket launcher whose blasts suck people in rather than knocking them away. The actual damage radius is smaller than a standard rocket, but the ’suck’ radius is larger than either.

Why? Lets the Soldier cluster large groups of people into a tight space for maximum damage, but sacrifices his ability to juggle enemies, keep them at bay or rocket-jump – though some wall-climbing and ceiling-sucking is doable by firing the rockets above you.

Skeet Shooter: shotgun which only and always crits on airbourne opponents. Can be drawn, fired and holstered by pressing Right Mouse, whichever weapon the Soldier is currently holding.

Why? If you manage that, you deserve a crit.

Why not… grenades! Hey, good idea! It looks like Valve completely forgot to put these in TF2, despite how fun it is to get killed by speculatively flung munitions bouncing arbitrarily around corners by trigger-spamming morons! Thank God we reminded them!

Why not… heat-seeking rockets! Because aiming highly explosive projectiles to hit within a few meters of a target is still too hard! Not only should the modicum of skill required to play a Soldier successfully be removed, but it should be removed by an unlockable weapon that only the most skillful players will earn. Perfect!

Why not… a rocket-launcher that’s more powerful but has to be reloaded more often? Reloading all the damn time is the least fun part about playing as a Soldier, and dying in one hit is the least fun part about fighting one. Let’s not exacerbate either.

The rest of that post was here. War Were Declared is from, apologies for shakeycam, this.

I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.”

I approve. It’d be a shame for anyone to hear a couplet so painfully double-edged as “When you touched a friend of mine / I thought I would lose my mind” and miss the grim joke.

Oh yeah, good news: I’m working on a really long post about a really esoteric subject that involves lots of strong opinions about game design ideas I have no experience working with.

Truffle fries in San Fran.

The restaurant of endless meat, with 2K’s Karl Unterholzner and Jordan Thomas.

Mr Gish unwisely shows his daughter the drawing Mr World of Goo did of him naked.

Dylan Moran, yesterday.

France’s pimary exports are textiles and macro photography.

Space Invader ice cubes.

Kim arranged I think my first ever surprise birthday party.

Halloween.

In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it.

By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (“stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go.

The gnome in his prize box: you have to score over 750 points in a shooting gallery game to win him, which isn’t actually easy in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

When I finally did win him, I discovered that he has something of a violent side:

Smokers want him:

He doesn’t like to look at zombie guts:

He’s afraid of rollercoasters:

He’s calm under pressure:

And while he doesn’t see dead people – or indeed anything – dead people see him:

It took several runs to even get to the finale. Twice I ran out of time in real life, and when I did have an evening free, I got so caught up apologising for accidentally setting everyone on fire that I played through a whole level before realising that I’d lost him.

Once I got into a few games that worked, with people willing to help, we found that Rochelle hates him:

Ellis worries about him:

Coach is serious about him:

And Nick doesn’t fucking trust him:

But through it all, the gnome is serene, the gnome is beatiffic, the gnome is- is the gnome strangling Rochelle?

It looks like the gnome is strangling Rochelle.

She seemed to like carrying him even less after that, but she did it anyway.

It eventually became apparent that my quest was under some kind of curse. I got into so many bad games that I eventually settled for playing with one quiet European stranger, who played virtually the entire campaign using only the katana, and showed no interest in the gnome. His businesslike dispatching of the slavering hordes seemed to say “I have more important things to do.”

He was good, though, and at last we made it to the finale.

(In case anyone mistakes this for a screenshot that doesn’t involve a gnome, he’s in the bottom right.)

In all my cursing of attempts cut short or failed through distraction, I never really considered that I might just not be able to do it. But Quimby and I immediately hit real problems with the final battle.

On our best run, we lasted until the rescue helicopter arrived, with enough time to spare for me to truly panic: where’s the gnome? I’d left him in the mosh pit, but all I saw were corpses. Dying I could live with, but succeeding? Without the gnome? Unthinkable.

Suddenly, over voice chat, the previously silent, previously gnome indifferent Quimby stated in an unplacable accent: “I have the gernome!”

He did, but he fell. And though I snatched the gernome from his body, a Tank barreled into me on my last hitpoint, and I lay dying, alone, inches from the helicopter, that ceramic asshole beaming obliviously by my side.

We needed help.

Happily, that’s about when freelancer Will Porter showed up:

Along with Craig:

And even the gnome seemed unusually pleased.

The fight that followed was still hairy:

Sometimes very hairy.

Sometimes not far off an actual nightmare.

But after three or four attempts, and an appallingly timed crash, we made it. I climbed aboard the chopper, gnome tightly in arms, and watched guiltily as the other three struggled to survive. I couldn’t provide covering fire with the gnome in hand, and I wasn’t about to try setting him down inside a moving helicopter with no doors after coming all this way. Craig made it, as did late joiner Dark Wolf, but Will was too fat or crazy to escape the fray.

Sorry lady, the class where your head stays intact is all booked up.

We might have something in economy though.

My prize. It’s over. I’m exhausted. The added stake of all the work it takes to get the gnome to that final battle charges it with a terrifying pressure, which triggers a wildly inappropriate surge of adrenaline. The very real possibility of losing him in the chaos at the last minute is horrible to contemplate.

Now that I’m finally done with it, I just want to relax. But I have a nasty feeling that chipped-hatted twat is going to drop from the skybox ten minutes into Episode Three, and I’ll be forced by my own idiocy to go through this dark ritual once again.

Finally had to throw out my Halloween pumpkin yesterday – he was not in a good state.