As a flipside to that though, when Lofty and Peckerston end up on my time I’m secretly very, very happy. Even if they are jerks…

That’s just not true. The medic is the natural predator of the scout, most medics just haven’t been informed yet.

I really need to talk to you about SupCom. I have embarrassed myself in an awesome way.

Please note the irony: The biggest, tied-for-least-teamworky asshole in the game is also the most trustworthy guy (i.e. not a Spy, provided you’ve seen him move).

Because the Scout is a Spy without disguises and with his running pants on. He’s small, he’s irritating as shit, and people are faced with two choices – ignore him and get worn down, or waste a lot of time taking him on.

There’s also that lovely moment of decision that every non-Scout class has to make – will I make an ass of myself trying to kill you? Because moreso than any other class, The Scout makes moments of being outwitted even more likely. If you peel away from a winning attack, only to dance around like a corpse on a trampoline and then get scattergunned in the face, you feel very silly indeed. Even that can be a repellent.

Enjoyed reading it. Cheers. :)

The players have got better too, but that’s a bad thing. A lot of cheap tactics that were really fun are no longer viable, which is fair enough, but the net effect is that the game is more predictable than it was at first. Winning teams keep winning, inter-class fights go the way you expect them to, and I’m just spitting out my figurative beverage in hysterical surprise much less often.

I think the improvements to the game itself outweigh that. I think the dynamic nature of it, the lunatic community and the constant prospect of really interesting new stuff counter-acts that predictability element, and just makes it a really exciting and sociable thing to be a part of. Even when I have reservations about the changes, like the Jackass Achievements, I can’t wait to take them for a spin and see how everything changes. If I were re-reviewing it today, I’d up TF2’s score by one percent.

Interesting what you say about reading people. I don’t think I’m that good, versus straight combat classes, but I can read Spies like Roald Dahl. It’s not in how they move or where they are, it’s all in what they look at.

I agree it’s got reams of psychological subtext. That’s the main thing that good players do that normal players don’t: they learn to read what other people are doing. And since this is computer games we’re talking about, and the ability for the player character’s to emote is limited, it’s certainly a skill to be able to look at someone’s avatar and check his speed and his heading and ask what he’s thinking considering the lay of the game at that point.

The best thing about TF2 is that it can be relatively tactically complex, even though it’s not a hardcore tactical multiplayer game in the strictest sense – like CounterStrike. The trouble is that it relies on you playing with good players who actually have some level of awareness – otherwise it’s like playing Poker with people who’ve never played it before, they’re just blank slates and you get a load of false reads off them. The good thing is that you can still have a lot of fun (as long as you’re not just totally trouncing the opposition). In terms of multiplayer gaming, I think that’s quite a rare facet to have – most games are dull if you’re much worse or better than the other players.

To be honest, I think that if all journalism was as passionate and in depth as your posts about TF2, we’d be much further along. As it is, I think (in fact, having played with loads of them, I know) that many games journos aren’t playing games at that high a level, and yet they’re still expected to review them. To really give a good review of a game you have to get into its guts and care about it. You can’t really do that if you’re not great at a game. The trouble is, as I guess it always has been, the scheduling of print and electronic journalism means that critical reviews only have a limited window of opportunity, and so you can only spend SO much time with a game. Gamers who play it for weeks and months and years later will ultimately have an entirely different perception of the game.

I like how Gamer largely instigated taking a second look at games months or years later – but there’s not enough of this.

I imagine you have a different appreciation of how good TF2 is (or what it does ‘right and wrong’) after all this time?

In fact, when I think of how vindictive I can get as scout Valve nailed that video perfectly.

That was the match when I first noticed that somewhere inside the Medic’s healing ray, there’s a tiny factory that makes points.

You know you’re in too deep when you take a screenshot of your score as proof of how much you owned.

Yeah, I love the scout. I’m still pretty crap, but at least with the scout I can have fun being crap.