The latest update has bucked the trend a bit, but before I get into why, I want to explain what I’m talking about. I often wonder why my play time with TF2 dropped off even as the stuff in it got much better, so I have expressed the relationship in the only way I know how to articulate any feelings: through the medium of graph.

Basically, I wouldn’t normally like a team-based shooter at all by this point in its life cycle, and that can’t help but have an influence. I don’t like competition because I’m too competitive, and I don’t like team games because I don’t like organising people. It’s a miracle I like TF2 at all.

The chunks of new content flying into the game have kept it fresher than it had any right to be, often because it genuinely made the game better, and the rest of the time just because it was new. That appeal ended with the money update: once they added a way to buy new stuff for cash, they no longer provided an easy route to get it for free. It ceased to be “Ooh, new stuff!” and became “Hmm, purchasing options.”

But the last update does have that kick of novelty: it’s a medieval mode where most classes are useless, since their high tech weapons are gone.

Only the sword-and-shield Demoman and the bow-firing Sniper are great, and a few other classes can work if they happen to unlock certain new items, like gloves that make the Heavy tougher against ranged attacks, or a healing crossbow for the Medic. What I like about it is this:

1. It’s very, very different.
2. It’s so new no-one really cares about winning yet.
3. No-one can bitch at me for going Sniper when we already have five Snipers.
4. The only map for it is small, focused, and channels people into a beautifully designed chokepoint for the finale.
5. No sentries.
6. No stickies.

I’m fine with getting skewered by an arrow, fine with having my head cut off, fine with being battered to death by a Heavy’s metal fists. Almost every other way to die in TF2, particularly by automated sentry fire, is just irritating to me. Nothing to do with the skill involved or lack thereof, it just feels annoying.

This mode pares back all of the ways to die instantly to a distant opponent, and so for the first time, my cause of death isn’t always “Walked round a corner, met three enemies”.

How long it’ll stay fun I don’t know, but variety like this is what I want from this game now. I think there’s as much value in taking things out as putting them in.

Roughly from left to right: Craig as Dexter Morgan, Kim as The Scout, me as The Spy as Graham Smith, Jim as a witch, Anna as a witch, Graham as Minecraft Guy, Lisa as a dinosaur, Tim as a Murloc, Laura as Red Riding Hood, and Amanda as Sully.

I’m actually grinning.

John made these amazing pumpkin desserts in little ramekin dishes, so he’s forgiven for coming as John Walker.

The wrap-around made this even scarier than I’d intended.

I eventually discovered for myself how disturbing it is to see someone else wearing your face.

Kim’s custom-made dog tags – “BONK!” and “I broke your stupid crap moron!”

I did not spend a lot of the evening with my mask correctly aligned.

Graham forgot not to sit down.

In reference to this.

Pumpkin carving the previous night.

This was mine, a dramatic departure from last year’s.

• The world has ended. No further world can be built.
• Oh wait, you can still get everything for free.
• This is fine, so long as they don’t make the free route slower.
• Hey, they made the free route slower!
• Man, now they won’t even want to make a drop system that doesn’t suck – one that lets me work towards what I want, or ever gives me a hat.
• I’m glad crafting the new stuff is pretty easy, though.
• Wait a minute: finding a load of stuff I don’t want, plus easy crafting and trading, wavy-equals working towards what I want?
• Yes – very, very slowly, and with no hope of getting a hat.

So it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. But I think it’s been mishandled: if the point really is to channel money to community contributors, only sell community items. Add your own when players demand it. And if you don’t want to make non-purchasers feel left out, launch with a few Valve-made weapons unlockable with achievements, and make them the focus.

Because that’s how I feel, as someone who doesn’t want to burn through a lot of cash on this. TF2 isn’t a game for me anymore – the only people who get to play it all are the ones prepared to pay. It’s nice that there’s a lot to unlock, but in practise, even the much lower crafting requirements are way too high for someone like me. It takes seven items I don’t want to make one that I do, and that’s more than I find in a month.

Even after months of play, I won’t have the +25 health that Scouts who pay do. The chances of finding all the items required for a set bonus, particularly the hat, are negligible.

I do really like the Black Box, though – a vampiric rocket launcher with a smaller clip. It limits your aggressive capacity, but suits the calculating way I play Soldier: safe distance, medkit near, Equaliser ready, Buff Banner steadily charging.

The item that’s closest to one of my suggestions, the knife that rapidly steals your victim’s identity, is a total bust. The ability itself is a satisfyingly stylish flourish, but they’ve paired it with a wildly disproportionate drawback: the inability to disguise at will.

That’s such a massive, constant pain in the arse for an advantage that’s really only useful when facing exactly two people, both of whom are looking the wrong way, and even then only if the second of them looks round less than a second but more than half a second after your kill. And doesn’t spy check.

They should have actually stolen my idea, rather than independently coming up with their own that has just enough in common for me to make false accusations about it on my blog. My knife had some trivial drawback that would rarely hinder anyone – it’d sell even better.

Engineer night was horrific. I haven’t seen this many stalemates since Hydro. Everyone’s desperate for the new unlocks, but the achievements that unlock them either require the unlocks, or are based around Engineering in the context of a normal game. Stuff like supporting a Heavy while he mows people down. When your friends and opponents are all just static installations of angry metal gun, there’s not a lot of scope for that.

For the lucky few who got them, the new unlocks looked amazing. You can Wrangle a Gunslung Combat Sentry, so your damage boost negates its reduced damage output, your shield negates its level 1 hitpoints, and your beam gives it seemingly infinite range. It’s as ridiculous as that collection of words.

In the end, none of the individual unlocks matched the specs of any of my suggestions closely enough to justify my mock accusations of plagiarism. But the set of abilities these give you – deploy small sentries quickly, move them, shield instead of repair, and direct their fire manually – is just what I wanted from mine. If I ever actually earn the damn things, I’ll be extremely happy.

Not really, of course: the newly announced Wrangler is a more intricate beast than my Laser Pointer or Shield Spanner suggestions. It sounds ridiculous: not only do you get to direct your Sentry’s fire, but it’s also nigh-impervious to harm and twice as powerful. But of course, if you’re using the Wrangler, you’re not using your Wrench. So your Sentry isn’t getting healed, and it has to shut down for three seconds if you whip out your spanner.

I won’t pretend to know how this will play out, but I actually think this is how Sentries should always have been. There should be no auto mode. Having the AI spot and shoot human players robs the Engy of the satisfaction of doing it himself, and the victim the knowledge that they were caught out by a real opponent. Instead, a computer has all the fun, and the players it kills don’t learn much: the computer simply out-damaged them. Most of the time I die to a Sentry, my only other option was to hang back and do nothing.

So I’m glad the Wrangler sounds crazy powerful, because I’d like everyone to use it, all the time. I’d rather have a tougher but fallible opponent, and one that doesn’t rapidly self-heal, than the alternative.

I’m taking some time off at the moment (which will hopefully translate to some progress with Private Dick), but Jaz and the guys have been running an amazingly good days-long liveblog of every snippet of information that’s come out about the Engineer update.

You can unlock weapons for a class by earning its achievements. That means everyone plays the same class when its new weapons are released, even before they’ve earned any of them. We’re bribed to play that class at the very time when TF2’s primary problem is inevitably going to be too many people playing that class. And we’re often bribed to play it in counter-productive ways to fulfill achievement criteria, some of which are just fun little jokes.

You can ‘find’ weapons and hats randomly. On the plus side, that sometimes gives you a weapon for a class you don’t normally play, encouraging you to try it out. On the down side, well:

• A lot of what you find is duplicates of what you already have, which means that little gold message comes to be associated more with disappointment and absurdity than excitement or pleasure.
• People’s fortunes vary wildly without any correlation to skill. Some people play for hours a night, rarely get a weapon, find only dupes, and have never seen a hat in hundreds of hours of play. Others consistently get unlocks every half hour or so, and have copious hats for classes they don’t even play.
• Consequently, very rare and exclusive class items like hats don’t signify anything when you see a player wearing them. What does the mighty Camera Beard tell you about a Spy? Nothing, he just got lucky.

You can ‘craft’ items by combining lots you have to produce one you might not. Presumably meant to tackle the dupes problem with the random drops, but what we understand of the current system is totally bizarre. If you don’t have the Eyelander, you seem to need six copies of the other two Demoman weapons, plus at least eight melee weapons, to craft one without losing anything you need. In a given time period, you’re about 13.8 billion times more likely to just find an Eyelander than what you need to make one.

For a hat, you’d have to find eighty-one weapons you don’t need just to make a random one. To have more than a 3.4% chance of crafting the one you want, it takes a hundred and twelve. At the end of which, you’ve got something a new player might find in his first hour with the game.

That’s what’s wrong with the current system. I think it needs a few changes to work as an addictive RPG, as a way of customising your characters to your tastes, and as a way of showing off your skill or dedication in the way you dress. The unlocks system ought to make the repetitive violence feel like part of a larger goal, and give you a sense of progress even if you lose. Here’s how I’d do it:

Unlockable Weapons: You’d be able to browse these from the main menu to see what’s available, and select one you want to unlock. Each requires somewhere between 250 and 500 points, and once you select it all the points you score in-game, as any class, count towards that. That’s about 2-4 hours play – the Flare Gun might be 250, the Direct Hit 500. You need to be in a game with at least four non-idle players or bots for your points to count, but beyond that anti-exploit measures are probably futile.

On top of that, every five hours or so you’ll get a random weapon unlock that you don’t already have. If it’s the one you’re working towards, points earned so far transfer to what you pick next.

The idea: Every match gets you closer to something you really want, and the items you choose first make you a different player to those around you. At the same time, you can still get something unexpected for a class you don’t normally play that might encourage you to try them.

Achievements: I think they should stay – I even think the silly ones should stay. In fact, I’d get rid of the sensible ones, and just leave the ridiculous accomplishments – taunt kills, ironic deaths, corpse dancing and tortured puns (Slammy Slayvis Woundya? That’s what you’re going with?). But they no longer earn you weapons, they’re just an acknowledgement for any time you do something remarkable.

The idea: Silliness absolutely has a place in TF2, and trying to get things like taunt kill achievements just makes the game hilarious for you and your enemies. But no-one should be bribed to go for them if they don’t want to.

Feats: This is where the sensible achievements would go. They’re things that genuinely benefit your team, so you’re rewarded each time you do them: some bonus points towards your unlock (but not your in-game score) and a little pop-up: “Medic Feat! Extinguished five team-mates, +2 points”. Things like multi-kills, capturing a point alone, setting light to a cloaked Spy, killing a fully charged Medic, or making the winning capture would always be rewarded.

The idea: By letting people know they’ll be rewarded every time they do this, it both teaches and incentivises intelligent play. Achievements already do this a little, but not reliably: plenty of the actions they suggest are actually pretty dumb.

Unlockable Hats: These are handled separately, but again you choose which you want to unlock. When you do, only points and feats earned as that specific class count towards it, and the number required is in the thousands – twenty hours’ play for most, more for some special prestige items. You still earn points towards your weapon unlock at the same time.

The idea: A hat says “I play this class, I play it well and I play it a lot”. A Camera Beard says “I am amazing or crazy.”

Crafting: No crafting. I don’t think the system is entirely unsalvagable, and Chris Livingston does a good job of salvaging it in a much shorter post than mine. But ultimately any full crafting system hinges on finding dupes, which I think ruins the “ooh, I found something!” moment by diluting it with disappointment.

When the inventory system went down briefly before the latest update, we were temporarily stuck with TF2 much as it was in 2007. The feeling was, “Where did the game go?” Compare that to something like Halo 3, released around the same time, which has functionally barely changed and charged a total of £20 ($30) for its new maps.

One thing that hasn’t changed since that article (funny to read in light of how much has) is the spirit of the updates, framed there: “The unlockables aren’t just beefed up versions of the weapons, they balance major advantages and disadvantages to fundamentally alter the role of that class.” While Steam forumites have turned that ethos into an imperative law to be screechingly enforced by the limp fist of internet tantrums, the gist is basically universal: the unlocks are supposed to change the way the class plays in a meaningful way. How successful have they been?

Medic (April 08): decent – the Kritzkrieg is a nice idea but badly needed the large charge-rate boost it later got. The Ubersaw set the standard for awesome new melee weapon ideas with negligible drawbacks that would continue to enrage weird forumites for twenty more months without ever actually making the game less fun.

Pyro (June 08): great – the Backburner turns the Pyro into the ambush class he was always meant to be, but they also added the airblast ability to the standard flamethrower to make the trade-off more interesting. To this day there are two distinct breeds of Pyro playing properly different roles. Also, the Axtinguisher is the second best idea Valve ever stole from me (and somehow implimented in 19 days).

Heavy (August 08): weak – the Heavy was one of the least played classes at the time, today he’s dead last. It’s not because he’s underpowered; he’s the second highest scoring class and the most deadly by a head. It’s just a very rocky experience getting those kills, because everyone seems to have an easy way of doing something horrible to you, and you don’t seem to have a way of avoiding any of it. He needed unlocks that would give him some flexibility, some get-outs or workarounds. Instead he got a gun that’s good against Scouts (rarely a problem in my experience), the admittedly neat Sandvich and some fun but impractical gloves. Needs a revisit.

Scout (Feb 09): mixed – the Force-A-Nature and Sandman get changed, patched and bitched about so much that I have to assume they haven’t been totally successful yet, but I can’t get a handle on them myself. People can do things with the Force that I don’t even understand – suck me towards them or one-shot me – and yet it’s utterly useless in my hands. Bonk tackles the main problem with the class, survivability against Sentries, but it’s still not useful enough that I ever want to play the class once turrets crop up.

Sniper (May 09): superb – the Huntsman transformed him from a stay-at-home trouncing twat to a roaming predator, powerful but vulnerable. Its viability at medium and near range leads to so many breathsnatching life-or-death snap shot moments against guys who’d kill him in a second if they didn’t have an arrow in their face. Jarate lets him help friends take care of threats he’s not suited to, or just insult his killer before an inevitable death. I don’t really see the point of the Razorback in a world where Spies can headshot, but whatever.

Spy (May 09): superb – the Dead Ringer creates an Action Spy subclass the likes of which we’ve never seen, and the Cloak and Dagger lets him be the methodical, oppourtunistic infiltrator his abilities always hinted at. Some clever thought about which kind of cloaks should recharge from ammo makes the choice a tough one, and better still, situational. Now that people have cottoned onto it the Dead Ringer noise is a little too loud – it might be fun if he masked it by calling out a random line of the class he’s dressed as: suspicious, but not conclusive. The Ambassador is effective but, if you ask me, too much of an overlap with the Sniper and pretty horrible-sounding.

Soldier (Dec 09): great – the Direct Hit finally makes rocket combat feel like a mindgame rather than a spamgame, and the Equaliser is way better than my idea: it’s the speed increase at low health that really makes it. It’s the one weapon I love to hear people complain about, because having been that Soldier who one-shotted them, I know how terrifyingly close to death he was. Bugle: indifferent.

Demoman (Dec 09): good – the sword and shield don’t make a new subclass of Demoman, they make the tenth class. His massive resilience to explosions demands proper restrategising, and I love the way the Heads mechanic makes him one of the few classes with something to lose. The more lives you take, the faster and tougher you are, so the more you want to preserve your advantage and therefore life. Charging is hilarious. I do think the sound and feel of melee combat in TF2 isn’t quite up to doing a big sword justice, though: it feels wrong for its blows to be met with a quiet crunch, for its swings to connect in much the same way as a bottle’s, and to be able to whack a Pyro three times without killing him. I also think it’s a crime not to have provided a Grenade Launcher alternative: is sucks for all the reasons regular grenades suck.

It’s an excellent track record. The mis-steps haven’t made those classes worse, just failed to improve them – a failure that’s default in other games. The way these unlocks are earned has also changed, but strangely. For the sake of the scrollbar, I’ll save what’s wrong with that and how to fix it for another post.

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.

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.

The new TF2 update is a bigger deal than expected: today Valve suddenly announced a huge list of balance changes and fun new touches, and also that the update was, like, out. We played around with it tonight, and the highlight by far is the new set of animations for the losing team running around after the match is won. At one point I broke into the enemy supply room and found a Scout, on his knees, just sobbing.

The new mode, King of the Hill, is excellent – exactly what I wanted Arena to turn into. One cap point, quick rounds, normal respawning. More than half the matches I’ve played, both on Nucleus and the snowy new map, Viaduct, have been preposterously close. The control point sometimes changes hands two or three times after both teams’ countdowns are at zero, just because it keeps getting retaken during overtime. This, or some other glitch, is causing the histrionic announcer to declare “Overtime! OVER time! OVERTIME! Oooover time!” frantically for the duration.

Oh, and I got my Shafted achievement for the Sniper – the one for killing someone with the taunt animation for the Huntsman bow. I’d cleverly fooled myself into thinking I already had it, because I have a screenshot of me stabbing a Medic through the neck with an arrow, but of course that was during the humiliation stage so it doesn’t count. Usually my quests for the taunt kills are more epic, but the Spy’s I got while cloaked – killing an Engy while his dispenser kept me invisible – and this one was just a spur of the moment decision. Terrifying nevertheless: sacrificing that gleeful certainty of killing someone who hasn’t seen you for the ridiculous risk of making yourself vulnerable, deep in enemy ranks, to achieve the same result in a more flamboyant way. Sorry VokKz.

More scenes from update night:

Also, holy shit, I’ve been nominated for another Games Media Award. I don’t have to nag you to vote for me this time, since it’s not a public vote anymore: this year it’s decided by a ‘panel’ of a hundred odd industry judges. Evidentally one or more of this mysterious cabal nominated me, and Graham, and PC Gamer, so if you’re reading this: holy shit, thanks!

If only I knew someone on this panel so I could show them an unrepresentative selection of my work and beg for their vote. Not whoring myself is weird, I don’t feel seedy enough.

Oh, that was the other thing, I’ve been made a Games Media Award judge. Anyone want to trade votes?

Ah, that’s better.

Skulch.

Schlunk.

Whunk.

Thunk.

Sklunch.

Ptow.

Nom.

Fwoosh.

Snick.

I appear to have been punctured.

Much as I suck with it, I’m still liking The Huntsman.

The new unlock system -whereby players are awarded a random weapon they may or may not already have every few hours – is terrible. I love it. Because very suddenly, it awarded me the Huntsman. I certainly lust more fiercely after some of the Spy unlocks, but the bow and arrow is probably the newest thing in this update. I punctured a few Scouts on Arena: Sawmill before a friendly Pyro happened to run past flaming wildly, and caught my arrow on fire. Ace! I shot a Scout with it. Ace! He caught light. Ace! He burned to death. Ace!

The Huntsman taunt involves thrusting an arrow rather nastily upside an imaginary victim’s guts. I plan to engineer a situation in which this victim is not imaginary.

It really grates not being able to work my way towards the unlocks I want, though. It undermines the main driving force unlocks bring to the game: progression. Since it came up in the comments to the last post, my ideal system would let players pick an unlock to work towards, and tell them how many points they have to score to earn it – 500 for the Huntsman, say. Then there’d be a little toggleable bar on the HUD showing their cumulative progress towards achieving it.

The sneaky Spy buffs in this update make him worth spamming even without the new unlocks: dressing as an enemy Spy, now that you appear to be wearing a mask, genuinely fools most players right now. It won’t last to that extent, but it’s nice that only one of his disguises is truly fallible now. Even their health is beyond suspicion, now: he appears as injured as the person he’s pretending to be, so no more blasting team-mates for being conspicuously half-dead.

I’m looking forward to using enemy teleporters, though I’d still love an unlock that let me use them in reverse: jaunt from the exit to the entrance. Speaking of which, Doctor Disaster’s Spurious Sentry Spraypaint is still better than anything Valve came up with for the Spy.

It is a source of sadness to me that the Spy’s killing joke – his fatal taunt animation – is the swishy knife fencing one. I’d suggested his flicked cigarette should permanently ignite anyone it hits, because it just seems classier. It is a source of some glee, though, that his murderous fencing can be performed invisibly: I taunt-stabbed a Sentry, then its Engineer, without being revealed.

This, too, makes me beam. Taunt a few times with your disguise kit out.

It’s early to judge, but I’ve taken a powerful enough dislike to Pipeline that I’m actively avoiding servers running it. It seems to have some uncircumnavigable chokepoints and the open areas don’t inspire me somehow.

Arena, on the other hand, is not as hateful as I remember. I can still never forgive a system that asks anyone, ever, to sit out a round. But it’s only happened once, and so far I’m really liking the two new maps: Sawmill and Nucleus. As I said before Arena first revealed itself to be terrible, the map format fundamentally appeals to me: last man standing deathmatch, with a single time-release capture point to bring things to a head if they drag on. The server we played on at lunch permitted teams of at least 11, so no whole team had to sit out, but individual players still did, and the next time that’s me, my renewed tolerance for this nonsense will end.

Which makes me wonder if they added one of these afterwards:

Lots more fun ones in there – stringing them together is the Team Fortress 2 equivalent of fridge magnet poetry.

Spoiler for the video: one of the characters in it turns out to be a Spy in disguise all along!

I’m not usually a fan of feigning death in multiplayer games, except as an entertaining way to fuck with ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 3. But the Dead Ringer dodges the two problems I usually have with fake-outs like this: 1) Trying to time your phony death to convincingly coincide with an enemy shot, which is fiddly at best and impossible with any degree of lag, and b) Having to shoot every damn corpse to make sure it’s not just pining for the fjords.

Here, the timing is automatic: when you’re holding it (presumably) the first hit you take appears to have killed you. And corpses are never going to get up: the uncertainty is just “Should he really have gone down that easily? Is he cloaked somewhere around here now?” It still might lead to a tedious amount of speculative firing, but we’ll see.

The Cloak and Dagger is more exciting to me. Being able to remain invisible indefinitely, staying still to recharge, suits my style: I’ve tired of sprinting to the front line and sap-spamming sentries or hoping I slip through a crossfire by sheer luck. My most interesting lives as a Spy have involved taking impractically long routes around and stalking the enemy team from deep within their base, seeing how long I can prey on them uncaught rather than how rapidly I can score. Currently this is only viable on certain maps, like Well, that have high alternative routes and gloomy corners to recharge in. I’m hoping Cloak and Dagger will let me be this much of a dick in every match.

It’s safe to assume that a) the Sniper update is still coming at the same time, b) these two are mutually exclusive alternatives to the conventional Cloak, and c) the Dead Ringer provides some immunity to being revealed by stray shots, or it might not be terribly useful.

As Chris also spotted, the screenshot accompanying the latest Scout update preview seems to show a game mode with a cart for each team, racing up a hill. Presumably the mechanics are the same: the more people near your cart the faster it moves, but it stops if an enemy’s in range. So your team is split between pushing their cart, shooting the enemies pushing their cart, and running over there to block the enemy cart entirely.

I like the sound of that. When the carts are close, there’ll be heavy crossfire and cart-blocking. Then when one gets ahead, both move faster as they’re less hindered by the enemy team. At that point, crossfighting is in the losing team’s interests because they can get back to their cart sooner after respawning. If it works that way, it could be really interesting. You have to wonder how big a part Sentries play in a mode like that, though.

As for the new items – the Sandman stunning ball, and the Bonk! bullet-dodging energy drink – there seems to be even more whining than usual about imbalances. I’m not as sceptical, they sound great. I was disappointed with the Heavy items not because one involved slowdown, but because I just didn’t particularly want two of them. Both the Scout ones so far are highly desirable, and it seems absurd to fret about their effectiveness when we’ve been told no specifics.

It’s: a huge open-world action RPG set in Washington two hundred years after a global thermonuclear apocalypse. Wilted fifties chic mixed with zombies being decapitated in slow-motion.

Defining experience: The Oasis

I’m not going to say anything about where or what Oasis is, and the screenshot above isn’t from it. Most people probably complete Fallout 3 without ever finding it – I know I did, first time through. Oasis is just the crowning example of what made Fallout 3 my favourite game this year, and the main thing it has over Oblivion.

I’d heard of it, but I wasn’t looking when I found it. I was just investigating some interesting rocks, as one likes to do on a Sunday. The wasteland is generally pretty flat, but I’d found a complex network of valleys and crags that looked like they might contain something interesting. They did.

Despite its size, and despite is apparent barreness, every interesting-looking place actually is interesting. It doesn’t have Guilds like Oblivion, so its content isn’t organised into neat little mini-careers your character can systematically complete. It’s sown evenly throughout its blasted landscape, leaving little pockets of story, character, treats, secrets and unique treasures.

It’s a brave choice. More people will miss more of Fallout 3’s most extraordinary moments than they did with Oblivion. But once you realise it, once your pessimism about this next house, cave or Vault being a generic one has been disproved often enough, it evokes an explorer’s excitement that I don’t get anywhere else.

But I wish: the skills were more fairly balanced. Small Guns and Repair are just flat out more effective than the others. Melee and Unarmed are crippled because you can’t target bodyparts, and Lockpicking gets its arse kicked by Science because most locked things have a hackable terminal to unlock them.
 

It’s: a co-operative horror shooter for four people, in which the tide of zombies and superzombies intensifies towards the end of each hour-long campaign.

Defining experience: “TANK!”
“I’ll throw a-”
“Oh God, I’m on fire!”
“So am I!”
“So am I!”
“Hunter!”
“So’s the Hunter!”
“I’ve got him. Look out for the Smo- ack!”
“I’m coming!”
“Help!”
“I’m coming!”
“Aaaargh!”
“I can’t move right now, and I’m still very much on fire, but I am coming!”
“Aaaargh! Look out for the-”
“Aaaaaaargh!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAHHH!”
“AAAAAAH!”
“AAAAAAAAAAHH!”
“Heheh. Again?”

But I wish: there was a difficulty mode where the first four levels are frantic, but the finale isn’t impossible. And that Versus mode was just the latter two maps of a campaign, and the Director would give the losing side the Tank earlier or at the same time as it did the winning side.
 

It’s: a squishy building game in which you conjoin sentient goo-balls with different physical properties to reach your goal.

Defining experience: A Blustery Day

Not my favourite level – that’s Red Carpet – but Blustery Day is more typical of World of Goo. A new style of art that the level’s theme exquisitely, a booming score far too stirring for a physics game, and a smart new kind of puzzle that seems impossible until it occurs to you, obvious thereafter.

But I wish: there were fewer simple levels. Early on this makes sense, but later there are one or two where the task is simple but daunting – building a very long bridge, or a very tall tower. I never hit a difficulty spike in World of Goo – it’s eerily close to flawless – but on these few the challenge felt fussy rather than creative.
 

It’s: a creative adventure in which you play every phase of a species’ life, from the microscopic to the interstellar, designing how it evolves along the way.

Defining experience: “Holy shit, what’s that?”

Spore’s riddled with Star Trek references, but there’s a more profound one that’s not explicit: here’s the game where you seek out new life. There’s an actual galaxy to explore, and you’ll meet species that perhaps one other human has ever seen: their creator.

I know a lot of people got pretty hung up on what they expected from Spore, or what else Spore could have been – and that is an interesting discussion. But I hope it didn’t blind anyone to what Spore actually is: an extraordinary exploration of human creativity, and the home of the most astonishing creatures I’ve ever seen.

But I wish: the other stages were integrated into the Space stage: fight an eco disaster by designing an anti-virus that you then control in the Cell game, impress a warlike race by beating their champion in the Creature game, claim a planet without a colony module by beaming down and starting a Tribe, or mind-control an enemy leader from orbit and take his planet by winning a Civilization game.
 

It’s: a sci-fi action RPG with guns and science-magic in which you captain a spaceship to search for a single evil alien.

Defining experience: “I’ve had enough of your snide insinuations.”

Actually that’s not the defining experience, but anyone who’s played it and said that line knows why it springs to mind whenever you try to nail down why Mass Effect is so much better than ordinary RPGs. For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, be sure to say it if you ever get the chance.

For me the defining experience was when I’d landed on a new planet, and was asked by security to surrender my weapons. I wasn’t going to do it. Thinking like a gamer, I’d assume the designers would never kill me while I’m defenseless. But I’d become so wrapped up in the character that BioWare’s writers, my decisions, and Jennifer Hale’s exemplary voice acting had collaborated to produce that I wasn’t thinking like a gamer anymore. I was thinking go to hell. You want my weapons? Come and fucking take them, see what happens.

I won’t spoil what the outcome was, but the moral of the story is this: trust Mass Effect. It’s so well written and exciting that you’ll find yourself slipping into a role that’s very much your own – stick with it, and you’ll find the story moulds around it beautifully.

But I wish: exploring a new planet felt a bit more like exploring a new planet. The Mako fun-bus was jarringly at odds with the serious tone of the game, I’d much rather have beamed down on foot.

Disclaimer: this expression does not faithfully represent my feelings on these changes.

Left 4 Dead has ceased to be a regular fixture in my schedule, but it somehow made TF2 feel old, or overfamiliar. So I’m mega-, perhaps even ultra-pleased with the timing of the pretty dramatic overhaul that just went live.

Also, Scout update is next, thank God. I was wrong about the Spy hint in the previous TF2 blog post title. I asked Robin about it a while back – he was amused by the extreme scrutiny speculators subjected his wording to. He just has the TF2 script doc open and selects a line at random.

• The Engineer’s teleporters can now be upgraded to level three. It will recharge faster the higher level it is
  Great news. They pretty much confirmed this ages ago, but it wasn’t clear if they’d work it into the Engy pack or release it as a separate tweak. It seems like this has to add more variety to viable engy tactics, and just as importantly, more variety to the litany of complaints we can level against our Engies when they inevitably ignore this new ability and hunker down behind their ill-positioned Sentry.
   
• The Engineer’s dispensers can now be upgraded to level three. It will give out metal and heal faster as it is upgraded
  Yay. But I’m guessing this still means placing it right behind you and your Sentry is still the only logical position. One of the main Engy changes I’d like to see is making it viable to place your dispenser where your team most needs it without crippling your own ability to keep yourself and your Sentry alive.
   
• Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground or from health cabinets
  The health cabinets thing has been suggested three times a day since the dawn of time, though I can’t say I’ve ever wanted it. When I run out of Cloak, I’m in the enemy base. Because I used my Cloak. You know, to get past enemies. Gobbling up ammo to replenish it is much more interesting to me, because it means less waiting around without encouraging me to walk all the way back to base.
   
• Some changes to the second part of the first stage of Goldrush to give the attackers more of an advantage
  Okay, but I can’t say this is the stage that usually gives me trouble as an attacker. It’s always, always stage 2 cap 2, and trying to assault a good defense of that point is the most miserably futile experience you can have with TF2.
   
• Any weapons that fire bullets (shotguns, sniper’s machine gun, heavy’s minigun, etc.) can now break apart the Demoman’s stickybombs
  Wow, okay, yes. Anything that’s bad for Demomen is fine by me, even when I’m playing Demoman. I didn’t expect them to do this particular nerf, though. One of the few things I like about Demomen right now is they don’t over-abuse their ability to place stickies where it’s impossible to see them before they kill you – more often they use them out in the open for area denial, warning people off a cap. If everyone can destroy them now, I’m a little worried that Demomen are going to learn to always put them in hidden places, and I’ve never discovered any way to anticipate or counter that tactic. Even if you’re looking in exactly the right direction as you round a corner, you’re surely not going to be able to destroy them all before the Demoman can right-click to kill you.
   
• The icon on the HUD for a person calling for Medic will now give more information to the medic (if the target is low on health, on fire, etc.)
  At freaking last! This seemed like such an obvious thing, I thought there must be some complicated technical reason why they didn’t do it in the first place.
   
• Added an achievement tracker that will allow people to choose specific achievements that they are trying to get
  omg tf2=wow ffs valve gay ferrets tldr. Actually this’ll be quite useful. But I’m still not doing most of those Medic ones.
   
• There is now a custom icon for death messages when the player was killed from a critical hit
  GOOD. Now the world shall see that not only am I killed by a critical hit every time I die, but it’s always in a situation and with an amount of health that would guarantee I survive an equivalent non-critical hit and Valve will realise their game is entirely random, sob for a little while, then remove crits forever and issue a public apology. (Hey guys, let’s get into a discussion about whether crits are a good thing.)
   
• Added a new particle effect for when a player enters the water
  +5% to review score.
   
• Added smoke to the feet of a rocket jumping soldier
  +10% to review score.
   
• Players will now have some particles swirling around them so other players can see when they are overhealed
  I heartily endorse this. I think everything mechanically important should be visually apparent (except Cloaked Spies). Now they just need a way to show how hurt players are.
   
• Attempts by player Pentadact to connect to any servers now result in immediate timeouts, ensuring he can no longer play the game at all
  This is the only one I’m not crazy about. I realise I’m inevitably biased, but it just seems unlike Valve to make such a specific tweak. And personally, it’s starting to diminish my enjoyment of the game.
   

It’s a moronic undertaking, of course, because the real one will be humiliatingly superior. He’s an easy target, because he’s basically made of dramatic irony – but that also leaves a minefield of awful clichés to step around. Anything that involves someone we believe not to be a Spy turning out to be a Spy is automatically dross.

I love the bit in Meet The Sniper when our man wonders aloud whether he’s been spotted – and is then copiously shot at. Acknowledging the concerns that go through your head playing as him felt truer and funnier than these scenes where the starring class automatically wins against all-comers.

So this script is mostly focused around the characteristic moments of playing a Spy. I reject the perception that he is unwaveringly aloof: aloof, sure, but he’s all about the wavering. No other class experiences more moment-to-moment panic or humiliation.

A warning, though: it’s long.

1. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The title card vanishes to reveal the edge of a table. With a sudden bang, a blue briefcase is slammed down onto it, then clicked open by two gloved hands.

SPYIntelligence, gentlemen. There are those who have it, the conoscenti (gesturing to himself faux-modestly, head bowed) – and those who do not. The – ahem – imbeciles.

Zoom out to reveal a Red Team SPY as he slouches down into a chair, Blue Team corpses of various classes strewn around the briefing room. He takes a wad of papers from the briefcase, licks a gloved fingertip for purchase, and leafs through them uninterestedly. As usual, his accent takes a drunken tour of Western Europe as he speaks.

SPYIn my profession, one is lamentably dependent on the latter.

He rips the topsheet from a dossier, draws his cigarette case, opens a small compartment containing tobacco and, in a deft yet impossible to animate movement, rolls it into a smokeable.

SPYWhen a leopard preys on impala in sub-Saharan Africa, he does not attempt to slaughter the entire herd.

He reaches down and lifts the nozzle of a dead Pyro’s Backburner and lights his intelligence roll-up on the pilot light. He takes a few puffs, then points it at us.

SPYNo! He isolates the slowest of the pack, and eliminates the beast alone. (Shrugging:) It is the same in my line of work, but it is those lacking in mental agility on whom I prey.

With a black loafer, he gently kicks the cranium of a dead Heavy at his feet. A lump of part-chewed Sandvich drops from his slack craw and his tongue lolls out.

SPYOf course, some are slow in both senses of the word.

2. EXT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our red Spy, running along a tunnel, cloaks. We can still see him as a red silhouette.

Blues pour in: a HEAVY, SCOUT, PYRO, DEMOMAN. The Spy has to flatten himself utterly against the wall to avoid brushing the Heavy, dash to the other side to avoid the Scout, dive clean over the Pyro just as he blasts a gout of spychecking flame, land into a forwards roll, and stand up face to face with the obviously intoxicated Demoman, who chooses that moment to stop dead and take a swig of his bottle.

The silhouette tries to go round him to the left, but the Demoman staggers in that direction as he drinks. He tries the right, with the same result. He gives up and stands impatiently as the Demoman glugs, and glugs, and glugs. The silhouette looks at its watch, taps its foot. At last the Demoman advances, veering drunkenly into one wall then the other, and the silhouette tiptoes carefully around him.

And slams into an identical blue silhouette, shimmering in and out of visibility.

SPY (VO)A hunter, of course, must be cognisant of other predators.

Both step back in apparent shock, draw their revolvers, then cautiously circle one another until they have switched. Then, without taking their eyes off each other, they walk backwards in their original direction, and eventually turn to run full-speed.

SPY (VO)They may not be your primary target…

The blue silhouette ducks round the corner and decloaks – a fully visible BLUE SPY, smirking. Simultaneously our man exits the tunnel…

3. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

…and slips away to the side, decloaks and straps on a paper mask with a Spy’s face on it.

SPY (VO)But it is idiocy to assume you are not theirs.

He waits until the Blue Spy also exits the tunnel in search of him, and gives chase just inches behind. As he does so, a blue MEDIC spots them and gives chase. The three run to:

4. EXT – DUSTBOWL, APPROACH TO CAP 4 — DAY — PAST

MEDICSpy! Spy!

BLUE SPY(Glancing over his left shoulder, just as our man darts right:) Please, doktor, endeavour not to tell everyone.

MEDICNein! Spy is Spy!

BLUE SPY(Muttering:) That is self-evident.

Meanwhile our man is swishing and thrusting his knife just centimeters from the enemy’s back, and finally he cuts a corner that his target does not. The knife sinks in, our man’s mask drops to the floor, the real blue Spy’s eyes widen, and he drops to his knees.

BLUE SPY(Dribbling blood, twisting his head to look back:) You might… have been… more specific…

MEDICIdiote!

Our man leaves his knife in his victim’s back, and instead pries the Blue Spy’s knife from his hand before he collapses.

SPYThat will do nicely.

We dolly with the Medic as he arrives on the scene, just in time to see the Spy take a different corridor back to Cap 3. We lose sight of the Spy just before arriving back at:

5. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

We cut to a close-up of his narrowed eyes as they scan his team for suspicious activity, then pan across the team itself:

A SNIPER squats on the control point on the far right, peering down his scope. A SOLDIER trundles forth from the trench in the center. On the left, an ENGINEER and a Spy wearing an unconvincing Engineer mask stand either side of a level three SENTRY, facing away from it in opposite directions. The Medic’s gaze pauses on them, then pans slowly back to the Soldier, none the wiser.

Before the Engineer leaves the frame, he turns and notices the Spy standing next to him. He reacts and thumps his wrench menacingly into his open palm. The oblivious Spy, without looking round, reaches back and slaps an Electro-Sapper onto the Sentry. We pan away before we see the Engy’s reaction, as the Medic suspiciously watches the Soldier rocket-jump over his head, but we hear:

ENGYBoys, we got a Spy!

And the sounds of vigorous Sentry-wrenching and sapper-fritzing.

MEDICVerdammen! It iz hopeless!

He turns and leaves for the front line.

6. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is lounging in the same seat where we left him, makeshift cigarette halfburnt and forgotten in his right hand, twirling an Engineer’s hardhat on his left. He contemplates the hat.

SPY(Absently:) One breed of impala wear ridiculous yellow hats, and construct robotic impala to compensate for their shortcomings as male impala – all the hurtful things the female impala said to them in impala college.

The hardhat slips from his finger and clatters to the briefing-room floor behind him. The sound snaps him out of his reverie and he sits up straight.

SPY(Reflecting:) At this point, I confess, the analogy falters.

7. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

The Engy chases the disguised Spy around the Sentry, the Spy slapping Sappers on the device, the Engy knocking them off with his wrench. By now they’re wading noisily through a heap of thirty bashed-in sappers on the ground. The Engy suddenly reverses direction to catch the Spy, but the Spy doubles back just in time to stay out of range.

ENGYDarnit! Where in tarnation are you keepin’ these motherlovin’ things?

SPYYour tiny mind…

He jumps to slap a sapper on top of the Sentry.

SPY…couldn’t possibly…

He ducks to affix one underneath it.

SPY…comprehend.

As the Engy pauses to reach each one with his Wrench, the Spy catches up behind him and shivs him in the spine. At the precise moment of impact, his mask drops to the floor.

ENGY(Whispering, face-first in the dirt:) Now how in all heck is that any kinda fair?

His eyes close. The Spy begins to brush dust from his suit and opens his mouth to speak, then…

SENTRYBEEPBEEPBEEP!

…his eyes widen in alarm, and he dives into the nearby hut under a hail of fire.

We cut to a Sentry’s-eye view: a green nightvision-style view of the scene with an overlayed wireframe. A box around the entrance to the hut is labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)LAST KNOWN LOCATION OF ELECTRO-SAPPER DELIVERY MEATBAG

After lingering on it for a moment, it pans abruptly to the corpse of the Engineer, draws a box around it, and adds the tag:

SENTRY (TEXT)FATHER. STATUS: DECEASED
…
NOOOOOO.

The view pans back to the hut, and our Spy is now standing exactly in the “MEATBAG” box wearing the Engineer mask again. The view zooms in on the mask and clarifies the resolution, then a box pops up labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)SEARCHING FACIAL RECOGNITION DATABASE.

We see gurning mugshots of each of the nine classes flicker past, the Pyro in a party hat, the Demoman holding up an identity plate at a police station, the Scout in the Heavy’s headlock, until it settles on the Engineer, which is labelled “FATHER”. A new line prints below this:

SENTRY (TEXT)DOES NOT COMPUTE.
…
…
UNCLE?

As it writes, the Spy approaches and withdraws another Sapper. This is highlighted in a box labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)BIRTHDAY GIFT?
…
REMEMBERED THIS YEAR?
…
CONTENTS: LUGNUTS?
…
OH BOY

The Spy slaps a sapper directly over our view, turning everything black except the text.

SENTRY (TEXT)!
…
SO COLD
…
SLEEP MODE

8. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

Our man has his feet up on the table, tapping ash into a Soldier’s upturned helmet on the desk.

SPY
Sometimes, to move among the impala, the leopard must become one. He must dress up in their skin, (gesturing:) become fat, oafish… (beat, then with a visible shudder:) Russian.

9. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our Spy is trundling along in a theatrical imitation of the Heavy’s gun-burdened waddle, clutching his tiny revolver in both hands as if it is enormously heavy, wearing a Heavy mask and bellowing for a Medic in a pitch-perfect Heavy voice. Soon the Medic returns from the frontline and latches on to him.

MEDICI am here, kamerad!

The Spy takes a moment to strap on a new Heavy mask that bears a broad grin.

SPY AS HEAVYTHANK YOU DOCTOR!

Soon they reach the four attackers the Spy passed on his way in. As our Spy approaches, we see a close-up of his grinning Heavy mask, and we move into slow-mo as he pointlessly slaps a baleful one on top of it.

His balisong rises gradually in his hand until it is poised to strike, then the three Heavy masks fall from his face in rapid succession: angry, happy, grim, then his real expression: a contorted rictus of fury and dark anticipatory delight. His knife curves slowly downwards, but before it hits we cut to:

10. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy swings his legs down off the table and leans towards us, eyes narrowed, intense.

SPYThere are occasions, of course, which do not call for such restraint. When a leopard’s characteristic savoir faire is simply inappropriate. Situations that need no subtlety, subterfuge or deception.

He draws his balisong from his blazer pocket and raises it for emphasis.

SPY

Situations, gentlemen, that demand (stabbing the air with each word for emphasis:) swift! Decisive! Action! In which the only possible course of action is a furious (swish!) blitzkrieg (swish!) of steel (swish!) and viscous spurts of hot (he stabs the table) red (he stabs again) blood!

With the final word he brings his knife down a third time, but an instant before we would see it hit, we cut back to:
 

11. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Close up on the Medic’s face – a vision of dismay. There’s the characteristic critical-hit backstab boom! and:

SCOUT
My scapula!

We see flecks of blood splatter the Medic’s face, causing his horrified expression to flinch. Another critical-stab sound:

DEMOMAN
Me lumbar!

Another stab, another splash of blood, another flinch:

PYRO
Mh mhmphmuh!

Stab, splat, flinch:

HEAVY
My braiaaaahahaaaaghahahaaaa! -ain.

The Medic’s face is now glistening with blood. His eyes narrow, he grits his teeth, spits a gob of swallowed blood to the floor, and we pull back to see him draw his Ubersaw.

Dolly with the Medic as he pursues the fleeing Spy. As they exit the tunnel towards Cap 4, we cut to the chase from the side: the Doc is clearly gaining. But when the Spy reaches the large rock near the cap, he suddenly trots to a halt, spins around and calmly draws his cigarette case. The Medic is an inch from him when he comes into view of a level three red Sentry on his right, which-

Sentry GunBEEPBEEPBEEP DAKADAKADAKADAKA!

-pummels him gracelessly into a rock.

The spy brushes at a speck of blood on his suit, and begins:

SpyYou’ve got blood on my-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

Hot spurts of blood geyser horrifically from the Medic’s gibbering corpse, splattering the Spy. The Spy irritably wipes his face with a gloved hand and starts again.

SpyI’ve made quite a-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

The spy glares at it, soaked in blood.

SpyI-

Sentry GunDAKADAKA!

SpyDo not make me silence your infernal machine, labourer!

Cut to:

12. TEAM FORTRESS 2 LINE-UP SPLASH

The usual suspects, the usual tune. Zoomed, of course, to our man.

Beat.

Sentry Gun (VO)… … DAKA!

Spy (VO)Very well.

13. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is still stabbing the table in a frenzy, woodchips and spittle flinging in all directions, when finally he senses us and looks up, suddenly aware of what he’s doing. His stabbing hand slows until the knife-tip is just tapping gently on the table’s lacquered surface, then he composes himself, flips the knife’s blade back into its housing in a complicated twirl and tucks it back into his jacket pocket.

SpyAh, yes, of course…

He tosses a dossier back into the briefcase, clicks it shut, takes it by the handle and stands up.

SpyIntelligence.

He tosses his lit cigarette over his shoulder as he leaves, igniting the Medic’s coat. He straightens his tie before approaching the camera. We zoom out to reveal:

14. INT — 2FORT, BLU INTELLIGENCE ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy steps through a perfectly Spy-shaped hole already cut in the glass wall between the briefing room and the intel chamber. A Spy-shaped piece of glass is propped against the desk outside. A Soldier, Demoman and Heavy guard the two corridors leading in, all facing away from the Spy, and he mimes an eenie-meanie-miny-moe game to decide who to stab first.

He’s interrupted by a sudden pop! as the now huge briefing room fire reaches the Heavy’s ammo belt. All three Blues freeze, and the Spy winces as a rapid series of small explosions causes everyone to spin round and glare at him. Finally, the Pyro’s propane tank blows the entire glass wall out.

The Spy stands frozen, mid-flinch, shoulders hunched, face screwed up, as the last fragments of glass tinkle to the floor and the three stare expectantly.

SpyFiglio di puttana.

15. END TITLES W/BOX ART

Team Fortress 2, available now, buy it I guess, yada yada.

Details and download.

Sorry Peanut, I know you were in the middle of your own taunty thing. But I had to try the Heavy’s kill-o-taunt.

I’ve also been punching people’s blood out a lot more lately, and can now see the point of the KGB. If you’re not familiar with Team Fortress 2 and its unlockables, that sentence may have sounded strange.

Having the Sandvich cleverly lures you into the business of punching, because your fists are now your only backup weapon. That in turn makes you realise it’s more viable than you’d expect, and suddenly the idea of getting a bonus for doing it is rather tempting. Five seconds is a long time in 100% critsville – switching to Natascha and spinning up probably only takes one and a halfish.

So the new game mode is a sudden-death single-control point mini-match, suited to fewer players. More like suited to no players! Because of how it might suck! Lol!

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the presence of a single control point negates what does suck about Sudden Death: the tendency for both teams to hole up at their base and wait until stalemate is announced. If you turtle up at the point, you can cap it and win rather than waiting for the enemy to come to you. If you turtle up before the point, the enemy can cap it and win rather than coming to you. I’m optimistic.

A delicious new environment for the chaps and Pyro! It’s quite, quite lovely – in some ways, even more stylised than the canyon motif we’ve been stuck with until now. The backdrop in this shot is just a few colours:

I’m a big fan of game environments that can feel cold without just blanketing the whole place in unconvincing snow. This definitely qualifies – can’t you just smell how brisk and bracing that mountain air is?

That set of tips from the SomethingAwful testers has now been proven so right that it’s had to be deleted from the Steam forums. In Arena’s case, knowing the broad picture wasn’t very helpful: the details that there’s a single control point, and it can have any number of players, completely change the prospect to a rather exciting one.

But if you still doubt that the last Heavy unlock will be a health-restoring munchable named the Sandvich that replaces the Shotgun, you are now officially delusional.

In theory:

In practise:

Wait, wait, that diagram is actually helpful. Obviously you need to see it full size. An awesome Valve-style video explains the basics when you first play the map, but what you really need to know is how to play it well. How many of the map-changing points should you try for until you make a dash for the final, game-winning one?

I’ve been playing it whenever I can, and I’m really enjoying it so far. At the moment it feels weighted towards the attackers: we had a perfect round on Blu this lunchtime, where it went into overtime as we were capping C, we got shot off C, all our progress towards capturing C was undone, and just as it hit zero a cheeky Scout lept on E: the only cap that matters. We couldn’t even hold that consistently, but I kept as many of them as I could busy at C and eventually our forces at E won out, and we won with zero seconds on the clock.

Then the teams switched and we got destroyed. So I think we were actually sucking on offense, it’s just an offense-friendly map. But blasting Scouts off that final cap in the middle of a chasm feels like what the Soldier was born to do, so defense is still fun.

In a rare act of trust, Valve told Craig and I back in February that they’d be lethalising the Pyro’s Street Fighter ‘Hadouken!’ taunt. We were asked to keep shtum, so that players would have to work it out for themselves when they saw there was an achievement for it. And in a rare act of journalistic nondickishness, we did.

But once the cat was out of the bag, I had to have it. The moment the new Pyro content went live, I arranged to meet up with my friend Al for a Hadouken duel – may the winner let the loser fireball him next time. But in the blazing madness of Pyro Night, where 10 of our 12-man teams were playing as the gasmasked deviant, all plans were forgotten. And in the course of joining in with that mayhem, I kept finding myself in situations where it might just legitimately work. Where I could actually Hadouken an enemy.

I failed. Again and again and again. But I’d got the bug now: I had to get this legitimately. No willing victims, no bots, no achievement-clinic maps or grinding servers: real, life-or-death play on maximum-population servers.

My first proper attempt was instinct, when I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a Heavy and Medic. I had a Medic friend healing me, and I happened to know a horde of my team-mates were right behind, so I jabbed the taunt button hoping that he’d be swamped by them long enough for my fireball to connect. When a Pyro friend did round the corner, he ran to my side and joined me in the taunt. I don’t know whether he was after the achievement or just thought this was a game, but the pair of us were shredded like so many kittens in a woodchipper.

The difficulty, obviously, is that the taunt takes some seconds to perform – during which, you’re rooted to the spot, unable to defend yourself or even cancel the action, and all but the slowest of wits can calmly stroll out of your way or murder you.

Later that round – on Gold Rush – I started doing pretty well. A Medic friend latched on to me, possibly Arq, and we had a good enough run that he earnt his Ubercharge healing the damage I took – and chose to use it on me. He timed it well, as we rounded a nest of Sentries and strong enemy presence on the final checkpoint of the second map, but when I bumped into an Engineer just standing there, I couldn’t resist. It was too perfect. I taunted.

Four, maybe six times. Every time the incoming fire bashed me back too far to hit anything with the resulting fireball, interrupting the animation, and every time I became more convinced I could get him this time. Before that faith was vindicated, our uber flickered off and my poor undeserving Medic and I were blown into the stratosphere. Sorry Medic.

Anyone will tell you the OMGWTFBBQ achievement is easy. It’s the first one they got. Right away they ran into an unwitting Sniper, and he just stood there and let them do it. I know. I’ve been in those situations as every class and their granma, up against people who don’t move or realise I’m there even after two seconds of being beaten about the head. It’s just that since this Pyro update, those people seem to be joining different servers to me. For days, I don’t think I met a stupid player.

The next time I played, I had a masterstroke. I was defending Gold Rush this time, and the attackers had progressed far enough that they’d set up teleporters to take them from their spawn-room to the front line. I’d made it all the way there with relatively little trouble, and now found myself camped outside their home base staring at the telepad they’d each jump on every time they spawned.

I tucked myself into a dark corner on a route no-one takes – even if they’re not going to take the teleporter – and waited. Soon, a Medic trundled out of the iron gates and set himself on the telepad. I charged, hit the taunt button once I was in range, and he stood staring dumbly forwards – right up until he vanished in a constellation of teleporter sparkles. My flaming fists passed uselessly through where he’d been.

If I lurked any closer or approached any sooner they’d see me, so I’d always be too late. But when the next person – a Soldier, a rougher customer – stepped up to the pad before it had recharged. I pounced again, and hit taunt long before the pad was ready to displace him. And gloriously, the whole animation played out in full. To no effect. The flames licked ineffectually at his sleeves, centimeters out of range, and the noise caused him to spin round, spot me with a flinch of astonishment, and fire a single, wildly inaccurate rocket of surprise before he was zapped halfway across the map by the teleporter. God freaking damn it.

It happened on Badlands: I’d just sneakily won the game by camping their final capture point. As their defeated team scurried from our super-critting weapons, I taunted vaguely at a group of them, and my fireball connected with a Medic. He drifted feathery and aflame across the room, and slumped against the wall. No achievement – it doesn’t count in the post-victory humiliation phase. And to add insult to injury, my victim messaged me: “Did you get the achievement? :)” He’d let me do it. My feat was doubly worthless.

It’s been four days now, and I’ve come to expect failure. I waited at the enemy gates, timed a taunt perfectly to flourish just as they opened, and their entire team made an executive decision to pause for exactly a second before charging past my immobilised, useless form and setting fire to me with critical flame from the unlockable Backburner I will probably never earn.

I found the perfect Sniper – utterly oblivious, utterly stationary, utterly alone. And I made sure I was virtually touching him before I started, and he didn’t flinch throughout the whole process. I, however, was blown to bits by a critical Demoman grenade to the back of the head just as my hands would have hit him. Without looking up from his scope, he continued to snipe from a room full of my blood.

Tonight I found an enemy Heavy blasting our team from a high window. I was coming up behind him, from inside the building, with no enemies around to intercept me or friends to steal the kill. Surely, I thought. Heavies are reknown for their lack of situational awareness when firing – it’s like a trance. I ran directly for him, and parked myself indecently close. Surely, I thought. I taunted. He kept firing. SURELY, I thought. His face broke into a manic cackle as his spinning gun tore through my team below – then fell, as a magical Street Fighter 2 reference hit him in the small of his back, set him on fire and ended his life. His bloated, burning, bent-backwards body flew spectacularly through the window, sailed over the battle below, and crunched into a fat-sizzling heap in the ditch below.

[PCG] Pentadact has earned the achievement: OMGWTFBBQ. At fucking, stupid last, it might have added.

The sense of triumph is ridiculous – even more so than the last utterly moronic thing Valve made me do by calling it an ‘achievement’. Perhaps because this victory was unique, and over a real person, and I really, really suck.

Of course, not halfway through writing this – and long before I got the achievement – Chris beat me to it with a post about exactly the same thing. Also, he got the achievement legitimately long before me, and he has 22 others, and all the unlockable weapons. Have I mentioned I’m never linking him or his stupid fat Frohman face ever again?

Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.

Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Sorry.

I’m more interested in ideas that would make you think about and play a class differently, than in trying to ensure everything is perfectly and exactly balanced. Partly because this is more interesting to talk about, and partly because I don’t think you can just intellectualise about balance and call the problem solved. If I’d never played TF2 and you just described it to me, I would have said the Spy’s near-perfect disguise system was absurdly overpowered, but today people groan that it’s virtually useless. They’re wrong, but still: there’s no substitute for trying this stuff.

I also have some ideas about how this stuff should be unlocked, but they tie in to another major change I’d like to see, so that’s for another post.

Shield Spanner: when whacking your own full-health structures, this thing builds up an uber-like protective shield around them that can absorb a few hundred points of damage before the structure itself is damaged at all. The Spanner can repair neither the shield nor your buildings, so once they’re up, there’s no point hanging around. Sappers take a very long time to eat through the shield, and don’t disable the building until they get through it. The Spanner can remove them, but again, not repair the damage. It can also add a much weaker shield to the buildings of friendly Engies.

Why? For fatalistic Engies bored of baby-sitting. Once they’ve set their stuff up, the Engy is free to roam around setting up dispensers elsewhere, helping out other Engies, and flanking those who attack his own stuff. A shielded Sentry is resistant to many of the best ways of taking down an ordinary one (Sticky pile-on, point-blank Heavy, sap-and-stab) but vulnerable to attrition.

Portable Sentry: mini Sentry that can never be upgraded past level 1, but which once built, the Engineer can pick up and carry with him. While carrying the Sentry, the Engy moves at 75% speed and neither he nor the Sentry can fire, but the Sentry is safe from damage. It takes one second to snatch up and three seconds to re-deploy elsewhere. If the Engy is also using the Shield Spanner, the Sentry’s shield is lost when he picks it up, but can be re-applied after deployment.

Why? Lets you play a harrassment Engy: reaping kills by quickly erecting small sentries in unexpected places, and moving them before the enemy has time to strategise around them. This is often more fun to do, and to fight against, than holing up beind a level-three hitting it repeatedly.

Mini Dispensers: Engie can build three smaller dispensers: one that only supplies ammo/metal, one that only heals, and a third that’s a booby-trap. The booby-trap explodes with the force of a crit rocket if sapped or damaged in any way, only damaging enemies. It looks exactly like a healing-only dispenser to enemies (so traditional dispensers are still safe to sap/attack), but to the Engie’s team, it appears as a cardboard box full of dynamite, with dispenser decals drawn on in crayon.

Why? The constant need for metal to take care of your Sentry leads most Engies to put their dispensers directly next to their gun, dissuading them from setting up a useful recharge point for their team’s forward troops. Here, he can do this without sacrificing his vital metal income, and partially protect that forward station against Spies by associating a degree of uncertainty and fear with sapping them.

Telepault: teleporter exit that launches the teleportee forwards and upwards, in the direction the Engy places it. The Engie sees the projected arc before placing, obviously, so he can see where they’ll end up. Teleportees are immune to fall damage until after they land, and trajectories that end in killer chasms like those on Hydro are considered invalid placements and disallowed. The nametag for the entrance pad indicates that it’s a telepault and, in addition to displaying its recharge progress, quotes something like “Safe landings: 3/5”. Players can crouch on the tele entrance to choose to be teleported normally.

Why? I think the virtue of a Heavy being flung over a train is self-evident.

Laser Pointer: replacement for the pistol – switches Sentry to manual mode while equipped, where it will not fire on anyone automatically, but will shoot whatever the Engy points the laser at when he clicks Fire.

Why? Lets the Engy spy-check and prioritise targets better, at the expense of automatically firing on unexpected enemies, and of being ready to repair the sentry when it’s damaged.

Neutraliser: techy shotgun firing sparkly blue electronic charges which defuse Stickies, knock off Sappers and drain enemy ammo – but do no damage at all. Defuses a Sticky in two shots at medium range, one at close (close enough to hurt if it went off). Sappers take four shots at medium, two at close.

Why not… a flame-thrower Sentry! I think the real question is: why?

Why not… an ambulatory Sentry! It kind of removes the strategic element of deciding where to put it. And would be rather costly to impliment.

Hmphalm Hmphs: shotgun that fires napalm globs. They do no damage, but each successive shot slows the target slightly more, adds a few seconds onto their burn duration if you then ignite them with the flamethrower, and renders them unable to put out any flames by jumping in water. Needs reloading after every shot, and this takes a short while.

Why? The Pyro shouldn’t have an effective long-range weapon, but could use a way to catch opponents, slow their escape to safety and force tougher opponents to seek healing rather than waiting for the flames to die.

Hire Hmph: a longer, heavier fire-axe that always critical-hits against burning opponents, but takes twice as long to swing.

Why? The Pyro could do with a satisfying way to end a fight, particularly when there are allies around who usually get the credit for killing those who would have burned to death if left alone. But it shouldn’t be easy – she/he’s got to get even closer than usual, to an opponent who knows he/she’s there.

Hmpherno: flame-thrower with a more fierce but briefer burn, whose forceful stream can be used as a makeshift jetpack if pointed directly down. The force also means he/she cannot move forwards while firing normally, and while firing heat builds up in the weapon that will eventually cause the Pyro to explode in a large and dangerous fireball. Five seconds of uninterrupted fire is enough to blow him/her up. Ten seconds is enough for a nearly-full heat bar to entirely dissipate.

Why? The Pyro needs a little more tactical flexibility, lends him/herself well to comedy, and was born for a firey suicide option. This also means (s)he can propel her/himself into an area quickly by walking into it backwards whilst holding fire – to which the drawback is hopefully obvious.

Why not… a longer range flame-thrower! A class with its defining limitation removed is a class improved, as my grandmother used to say.

Why not… smoke grenades! Not being able to see is fun!

Why not… ignitable oil slicks! You spray an area with oil, then set light to it, and it burns for a while. Leads to exciting wait-around for the enemy team!

Why not… the napalm rocket-launcher from TF! Then we could give the Soldier a flame-thrower, the Spy could have Sasha, and we could save everyone the confusion of having to pick a class!

Luba & Kiska: knuckle-dusters, knock the target flying but never crit.

Why? Pow!

Tatyana: mini-gun with an electromagnetic coil built around its motor which sucks in weapons from fallen enemies (or friends) any time the barrel is spinning. The added weight leaves the Heavy unable to move at all while firing. He can still move while spinning the barrel.

Why? Lets the Heavy perpetuate a winning streak by avoiding running dry on ammo, but hinders his rate of advancement so that it’s not easy to exploit this on offense.

Sonya: very obviously stolen Scout Scattergun to replace the standard shotgun. Obviously in that the Scout’s ripped-off hand and forearm are still danging from the triggerguard.

Why? I don’t have a good justification for this.

Why not… an assault rifle! The most boring weapons in all of first-person-shooterdom! Much of TF2’s design philosophy apparently stemmed from the notion that one guy just firing a lot of bullets at another guy is about the least interesting interaction two players can have.

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.

Not A Grenade Launcher: here’s an idea for the grenade launcher: REMOVE IT. It is a twat. The Demoman’s other weapon, the sticky launcher, is probably the single most devastating weapon in the game, the trade-off ought to be that he has no quick direct attack if an enemy gets past his sticky trap and confronts him. Instead, there’s no trade-off: he’s tough, and if he can aim worth a damn, he’s got a quick to use weapon that’s nearly as powerful as the Soldier’s rocket-launcher and litters the place with deadly spam fire if he misses – or just if he feels like racking up a load of talentless arbitrary murders.

Why? Why would anyone choose to unlock the ability to not have a grenade launcher? That’s the beautiful part; they wouldn’t have to! This excellent upgrade would be automatically applied to all Demomen free of charge.

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 half 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.

Slugger: full-size two-handed baseball bat that does 150% damage, but precludes all other weapons.

Why? It’s clearly an impractical trade-off, but I’d take it.

Freakin’ Crit Magnets: pistol rounds that do no damage, but successively increase the chance that the next hit against the victim – with a weapon that actually deals damage – will be a critical. A full clip of direct hits gives a 100% crit chance. On close inspection, the projectiles stuck into the victim’s body are small nails each skewering a Post-It note with “Crit me” written on it.

Why? It gives the Scout an option to be more of a team player, or to have the satisfaction of running at someone with his bat and knowing the hit will be a crit. It’s also kind of an interesting risk tradeoff to decide when to stop building up your next attack and actually make it.

Nutcracker: leaner Scattergun that always crits when fired directly down on a target from above, but never crits otherwise and has to be reloaded every two shots.

Why? Funny? I should clarify the name, actually, in case it’s a British idiosyncrasy: here, ‘nut’ means head, while ‘nuts’ means testicles. It is the former that this weapon proposes to crack.

Hobbler: sniper rifle that reduces the victim’s movement speed by up to 50% if the shot hits below the waist, but only charges to halfway up the normal charge meter. Partially charged shots to the legs slow by proportionally less than 50%. Healing steadily restores movement speed.

Why? Lets the Sniper be a help to his team in situations where he doesn’t have the time or skill to line up a perfect headshot.

Croc: Larger kukri that always crits against Spies, never otherwise.

Why? Vengeance.

Shooter: a larger and faster-firing revolver than the Spy’s, to replace the SMG.

Why? I’m forever out-gunning Snipers at medium range when I play Spy – I’m hitting them too often for them to snipe effectively, and their SMG has nothing like my damage output at that distance. Much as I love doing this, the poor Aussies could use a break, and some classic Crocodile Dundee one-upmanship ought to do it.

Man-Sapper 3000: useable on human targets – drains them of all ammo in a few seconds, and stays attached for five, or until an Engineer whacks it off. Target doesn’t get his ammo back when the sapper’s removed, he has to find more. Must be placed from behind, but does not break disguise.

Why? Good for disabling whole groups of people without necessarily giving yourself away, can lead to comedy escapes from angry mobs of sparking melee enemies.

Hack-o-Tron 3000: replacement for the revolver, can hack any Sentry in line of sight from 10 metres away. Hacking takes ten secondsish, during which the Spy must remain still, and at the end of it the Sentry will be reprogrammed to only attack its creator. The Engineer sees his Sentry spark green during this time, so he knows someone nearby is a Spy, and he only has to kill the Spy before the process finishes to abort it. The Spy can remain in disguise throughout, but since he can’t move without breaking the hack, he’s conspicuous for that. The Engy can destroy his Sentry at any time during or after the hacking process, the only disadvantage of which is, well, he’s destroyed his own Sentry.

Why? Firstly, I like the idea of seeing your Sentry spark and having to scan everyone nearby to spot who’s not moving. It’s an easier task for an Engy than de-sapping, because he only has one objective, but the danger is more worrying: losing both his Sentry and his life. Secondly, it’d be fun to find a great place to do this from, and watch the Engy scrambling about above or below trying to find you. Thirdly, realising you’re not going to find the Spy and scrambling for the Detonate control panel before it turns on you could be pretty tense. It has to be only the Engy it attacks once hacked, of course, or noob Engies could ruin the whole game for their team by letting a level-3 Sentry get hacked right in their base.

Identity Thief 3000: large knife that, when backstabbing, utterly shreds the victim and causes the Spy to quickly assume his identity. There’s a puff of smoke as usual, but it lasts only a moment rather than the several seconds that donning a disguise usually takes. The Spy cannot attack again with the knife until after this new disguise is assumed, so it’s slower for repeat-attacks.

Why? For situations when you have someone on their own, but don’t know how long you’ve got until his team-mates show up. Disposes of the body and renders you inconspicuous in one quick move.

Ghost-o-matic 3000: replacement cloaking device which, instead of rendering the Spy invisible, allows him to pass through enemies for ten seconds, and absorb incoming damage. During this time he can’t attack or sap, and enemy fire drains his Ghost charge rather than his health – so it won’t last long if he’s under fire. When his Ghost charge runs out, the Spy is vulnerable but still can’t attack for two seconds, and he gives off a suspicious spark – so spy-checking isn’t any harder. Ghost-mode also takes two seconds to activate, and regenerates fairly slowly when not in use.

Why? This lets him slip through very hairy or chaotic situations where enemies don’t have the time to look for Spies thoroughly, but in which he’d be killed in the crossfire if he was merely cloaked. The kind of crossfires this device would let the Spy get past are also the kind where one least needs his Cloak.

Identi-Kit 3000: replacement for the Spytron 3000 cigarette-case: it’s a device in the same housing which, when pointed at an enemy, tells you their name and health. If disguised, the enemy with your name is tagged on-screen at all times, the way Medic-callers are to Medics. The drawback is that you can only disguise by pointing it at an enemy and pressing fire, rather than selecting a class freely with the number keys. You can do this while cloaked, naturally.

Why? Allows the Spy to identify and eliminate injured targets with his pistol, and lets him strategise around his namesake. The loss of the “Am I dressed as him?” ambiguity is more than made up for by the many “Oh shit, that’s the real Duncan Disorderly!” moments.

Why not… a dummy weapon that lets you make it look like you’re firing while in disguise! This would only increase the believability of your disguise for the brief period before people realised that a disguised Spy can now fire like a real team-mate. Thereupon, you’d still get spy-checked, it would just be incredibly arduous and tiresome for everyone else to do so.

Why not… a silenced pistol! There’s actually nothing terribly wrong with this idea, it’s just not very useful. Obviously shooting people from an unexpected angle is a core tactic of the Spy, and I love doing it, but I don’t think people are pinpointing my location using the directional audio of their 7.1 home theatre surround-sound setup. I think they’re just turning around to find out where they’re being shot from, and seeing me with their eyes. If, like the four thousand people who’ve suggested this, you’re proposing a damage decrease as a trade-off, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole.

Why not… a weapon that can be used while cloaked or disguised! Because… just shut up. Just go away and think about what you’ve done.

YOU ARE SO SMALL! IS FUNNY TO ME!

To celebrate the release of the decent-but-not-great Meet The Scout short, I’m finally getting round to putting up a story about that class that I wrote ages ago. Well, kind of about the Scout, kind of about the primal psychology of competitive multiplayer gaming. Non-TF2 players: I’m currently writing a post that isn’t about TF2. Then three more that are.

I’d been trying to go cold turkey on Team Fortress 2 for a while, since I’d started to really care about winning and losing. That’s dangerous.

At one point I was coming up on an Engineer who was officially Dominating me, inches from his unguarded back (I was a Spy). He crossed the train tracks, while the “Train Incoming!” alarm was going off.

And I’d got to this mindset where there was just no fucking way I was stopping, there was no fucking way he was getting away from me this time. And so, of course, I was hit in the face by a train and he got away.

When you can’t see the funny side of something like that, you have to worry. I could not. It was about as funny as cancer. So, I decided, no more TF2 – at least until the next update.

But then in the course of researching a really fun piece for our Culture section next issue (now this issue! On sale now! Buy buy buy!), I kept running into Scout tips videos, Scout quotes and Scout ownage clips.

There’s a kind of philosophy to the Scout: there are many situations he simply can’t even begin to tackle, so he has to know his limits and pwn within them. I never got the hang of that – I have a hard time with the idea that I can’t take on the entire enemy team single-handedly in every conceivable circumstance – but I felt I could get it.

So tonight I went Scout. We got owned.

There’s a very particular feeling to getting owned. It’s unique to computer games – it doesn’t feel this way to lose at a sport, or chess. It has to be something violent – and not rugby violent. Gun, knife, fire, blunt force trauma violent.

It’s such a horrible, galling feeling of violation and misery that most gamers have come to refer to it as “getting raped”. I’m actually on a quiet and not very effective campaign to persuade them to stop using that word, because it suggests a pretty disgusting disregard for the weight of its real meaning, but the fact that otherwise sane people use it gives you some idea of how unpleasant the sensation is.

They’re everywhere, they’re in your face, and no matter what you do you get repeatedly and violently humiliated. TF2 rubs it in by proclaiming to everyone when you’re being “DOMINATED” by someone – they’ve killed you four times since you last killed them.

Non-gamers probably wonder why we wouldn’t just stop playing at this point, but that’s the worst thing you can do. If you do that, the feeling lingers, taints everything you do after. The only cure is reciprocation: winning isn’t enough now, however unlikely it may be – you have to own them.

This was proving hard. Scout is my lowest-scoring class – I’ve never once had a really good round with him – and even so I was by far the strongest player on my team. I virtually was my team.

I was responsible for more than half the kills, despite not being a combat class. I was our only defense – all our Engies pessimistically retreated to our last capture point, leaving the ones that were actually in play completely unguarded. And I was solely responsible for every single capture we made: five of them in a row, every time lost as soon as I died.

This is the slightly depressing thing about team-games: sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re going to lose, hard. Most losing teams finish a game hating each other far more than they hate the enemy. In fact, several attempt to join the other team at the start of the next round.

You can’t shake the illusion, though, that it must be possible to make a difference. It must be possible – just theoretically, not necessarily for me – to be good enough to transcend your team.

It was getting exasperating. I could kill everyone who came for our last cap before they got there, I could re-capture our next control point again and again, but no-one was there to hold it when I inevitably succumbed to their three Soldiers, three Heavies and two Pyros. And even the Engineers weren’t able to stop Scouts from getting to our final capture point when I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t even playing well: in most one-on-ones, I’d lose. The rest of my team were just significantly worse than that. At one point I gave in to the pointless urge to chide them: “Is anyone actually going to do anything about that Sentry?” I asked pointedly, being the only class who truly didn’t stand a chance against it.

“i was going to pretend it wasn’t there” said one.

Eventually I gave up trying to hold out against six stronger offensive classes while all our heavy firepower pussyfooted around in the corridors behind me, neither defending reliably nor daring to attack. I just ran past everything, including the Sentry.

This is a weird experience. Almost no-one can stop you, even if they’re good. And so you pass whole squads of enemies marching out to the front lines, and they all see you, and they all fire, but by the time the Heavies’ barrels have spun up you’re gone, and suddenly you’ve got a lot of people thinking about your psychology.

“What’s he doing?” they’ve got to wonder. “He’s heading for a capture point he can’t take, because his team haven’t got the two before it yet. So do we care? Only if he’s going to curve round and come up behind us. But we can’t wait here forever to see if he does that.”

So most people just carry on, glancing behind them a lot. I expected one to head back to look for me, but none did. So I hung out at their spawn, watching Pyros leave their supply room, waiting until they were far enough away that they couldn’t get back to it quickly, then striking from behind.

I had to abort a lot of these strikes – Scouts don’t have much health and don’t do their damage very quickly – but I stayed alive and caused a lot of confusion, irritation and death.

I ended up in the middle of the map, having just taken out a Soldier and a Heavy’s Medic at no small cost to my health, and I suddenly noticed it was unlocked.

My team! My team had actually done something! They took the capture point directly outside their base without my help! Well, cutting off the enemy reinforcements probably didn’t hurt, but still! One of the kill messages showed that the enemy Sentry in our base was down.

“like i said,” the same guy commented, “it’s not there.”

I had 16 health and a Pyro was coming towards me shotgun blazing, so I had to abort my capture to snatch a medkit. But soon he was dead and it was capped, and I was on my way to the next one.

This time I was heading to a point I could cap, but the stream of enemies pouring out of their base ignored me again: they were that sure they could re-take the middle point. They couldn’t possibly lose the upper hand. They were owning.

I nearly died taking their next one. They already had two people on the middle point to re-take it, but Scouts count double and the middle cap is the slowest to take. An enemy Scout had spotted me and doubled back to make sure I wouldn’t get it. I hid in a very obvious corner of the capture zone, and miraculously it took him a fatal second to figure out which one, during which I nailed him.

Suddenly we had four of the map’s five points, and I knew the last one would be unguarded. Only losers set up defenses on the last cap before it’s in play – that’s us, not them.

I immediately ran into a Heavy coming from their base, hastily doubled back and took the other route in before he could fire. This time he probably didn’t have to think long about my psychology: he knew I was going for their final point, he knew it was undefended, and he knew there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was the strongest class and I was the weakest, his team were winning and my team were losing; but he was slowest class and I was the fastest, and he was already heading the wrong way. I know exactly what that feels like. It feels like getting owned.

There’s a glass wall between the final capture point and the supply room that respawning players come out of to defend it. So I saw them: a Pyro, a Heavy, the Engineer who was dominating me, all pour out of that gate just as I was coming up to the capture point. I had 28 health.

I put my gun away, jumped onto the cap, and hit the taunt key: the key that leaves you unable to attack, fixed to the spot and helpless for the next few seconds, all for the sake of spreading your arms, surveying all before you and nodding cockily, baseball bat in hand.

My mental calculation was right: they could easily reach me before my taunt finished, but not before I captured the point. And since it was the last point, that meant winning the game. Which renders all enemies unable to attack, and triples the damage of your every blow.

It was obscene. The match was won just as three guys closed in on me, and I already had my steel baseball bat in hand. None of my team-mates were around, of course, so the spoils were all mine. Critical hits don’t just do triple damage, they make a cracking, booming sound like lightning, and when they kill they send the victim flying.

I pounded my way through their entire team, smashing each of their faces in with a furious series of thunderous bangs, ending, at last, with a Dominating Engineer. TF2 has two little jingles: one for getting Dominated, one for getting Revenge. The latter has never sounded so good.

I had to be in a bad mood to truly enjoy this – if it had all been harmless fun, I couldn’t have relished being so cruel. I had to still be stuck in the grimly competitive mindset that made me want to stop playing TF2, I had to spend the first half of the match having a thoroughly miserable time, and I had to have useless – or near-useless – team-mates.

I probably made twelve people feel really, really annoyed about that match – they lost to a cheap, nasty tactic, to one man on a team they could easily beat, and then they got smacked repeatedly in the face by a magic baseball bat while completely defenceless. And this game has made me enough of a dick to find that really, really satisfying.

Playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment is starting to feel like being part of something. We play it in the office at lunch. Chris Livingston’s making a comic in it. We settle our grudges against the US edition of PC Gamer with it. Yahtzee’s making bad Garry’s Mod machinima in it. The other day a level designer at Ubisoft Montreal mailed me an incredible map of a film set he’d made for it. And when the update adding Badlands, the first proper new map, was due to go live, everyone hung out at the Steam forums making tenuous “X sappin’ mah Y” jokes until it was released.

Badlands is good. I can’t help thinking it would have made more sense to go with this instead of Granary for the initial release, given how similar Granary and Well are. Granary’s become problematic on public servers because so few people are willing to play defense, and the straightforward layout makes it incredibly easy to win quickly once the middle capture point is yours. Badlands staves off rush-wins like this by making the second-to-last cap a) time-consuming to get to and b) easy to defend.

Which is good. So far it’s lead to a lot more back-and-forth than either Granary or Well had, and those are my favourite matches. Even if we win, I hate a trouncing. But like all symmetrical control-point maps, the final point is so wide-open and absurdly fast to capture that it might as well not exist.

I assume that if you make the final point tactically biased towards defenders, you get a lot of stalemates. But I don’t see why you can’t make it slow to capture shortly after the second-to-last point falls, then become gradually less resistant to capture the longer the pushing team manage to hold the defenders back to their last point. Stalemates would be just as unlikely, but rush-wins would become much trickier.

I think the reason this type of map gets a lot of flak on the forums, while Dustbowl and Gravelpit seem generally well-liked, is that defeat has long felt inevitable by the time it comes. On Dustbowl, you always feel like you can hold it for that much longer. You always feel like you can cap it in the time you have left. Victory is as close to your grasp as defeat.

On symmetrical capture-point maps, I’m always in a “Oh fuck it, we’ve lost this” mindset long before we actually do. Comebacks aren’t impossible, but they’re both daunting and improbable. When defeat is close, victory is way, way over there. If we’ve sucked this hard so far, what chance to we have of making it now?

The good news is that Goldrush, the map that’ll introduce the new Payload game mode soon, falls firmly in the former category. In fact, it makes that knife-edge between a win and a loss all the more tangible, because you can see how close that damn cart is to the objective. That’s one less level of abstraction than looking at a coloured icon or countdown clock.

And more importantly, the gradual roll-out of unlockable items for every class is going to make the game even more like being part of something. The simultaneous worldwide release of exciting stuff is one of the great pleasures of Steam, a shared moment that fuses the community together. And here’s a way for them to be doing that regularly, for years.

I apologise, but only a little, for talking about Team Fortress 2 so much. If you’re a gamer, I can only say that it’s like when Deus Ex had just come out. If you’re not, it’s like being a film buff at the time of The Godfather. But it’s not really like either, and that’s kind of the point.

• Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers

Ahhhh.

• Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world

Ahhhh!

• Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware

Ooh.

• Fixed players blocking doors in Well

Heh.

• Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well

Oh?

• Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

Hmm.

But my favourite Steam Update News – and I apologise if you’d hoped I might do something like a ‘Films of the Year’ post instead of this – was actually a little while ago.

• Added effects to players when they earn an achievement, visible to other players nearby

Cool. But isn’t there an achievement for tricking an enemy Medic into healing you while you’re disguised? Would this not give the game away somewhat?

A few days later:

• Fixed cloaked/disguised/disguising spy reporting his achievements to everyone else

Reason Valve should hire me #26: totally saw that one coming.

One of my only criticisms of Team Fortress 2 was that the Medic isn’t as fun to play as the other classes – a particular shame when he’s so critical to success. Some people objected to this, because they really enjoy the Medic, so I’d just like to make sure these people don’t miss the Team Fortress 2 stats: cold, hard evidence that I am right and they are wrong. The Medic, for anyone not motivated to click the link, is the least-played class by a head.

Obviously the THIRTY-SIX achievements they’re adding just for Medics is an attempt to redress that imbalance, but I wonder if that’s the way to fix this.

You never had to bribe people to play Medic in Battlefield 2, partly because they were effective combatants, but I think mostly because the medicking part of their job was extraordinary fun. When I’m holding my healing ray on a Heavy while he mows people down in TF2, I feel like I’m serving him. When I sprint through thwacking gunfire and dive defibrillators-first onto the unconscious body of my squad leader in BF2, I feel like I’m saving him.

What’s surprising about those stats- well, okay, there are lots of surprising things about those stats.

1. The first surprising thing is the very first fact: the Scout is the most-played class? He’s the only class which, for the majority of any given round, is almost entirely useless. The second the enemy have a single sentry up in any sensible location, he has no way of getting to their objective and is too weak to effectively defend his own. It must just be that, like me, a lot of people always play him for their first life on 2fort, well and granary. But when I do, can I persuade the rest of my team to get a decent Scout rush going? Can I testicles.

2. Speaking of those three maps – the three perfectly symmetrical ones – here’s the most remarkable stat of the lot: the Blue team is almost twice as likely to win on any of these. Even 2fort. These are maps in which each team’s base is a mirror of their enemy’s, and the game’s teams have no inherent differences. If you played in black and white, you wouldn’t even be able to tell which team you were playing on.

I can think of only two explanations for this, and the first one is stupid. Perhaps the Red team are just slightly easier to see? This would be a perfectly reasonable theory in a game with large maps or camouflaged players, but Team Fortress 2 is depicted with unprecedented clarity. It’s the one game in which you can always spot enemies and even tell which class they are, at any range. Perhaps Snipers, through the smallest and darkest of windows, sometimes go unnoticed for a moment, but you’d think Blue Snipers would stand out more strikingly against the warm wood buildings of well, and that’s the map with the the strongest pro-Blue bias of all.

The other possibility is that for whatever reason, better players pick Blue. It’s not often you get to choose your team, since one usually outnumbers the other when you join, but the times when you do could account for this difference. It would have to be an overwhelming trend, to show through the auto-balance and playercount restrictions, but it’s possible. I pick Blue when I can – maybe I’m just that good.

The real answer is probably the counterpart to this: it seems possible that new or inexperienced players might automatically pick Red, since it’s first on the team-choice menu.

3. My other criticism of TF2 was that hydro didn’t quite work. It’s the map that changes shape every round, in complicated ways, in order to keep it fresh for years. As far as I’d played when I reviewed it, this just seemed to keep it confusing for years, but I said I was prepared to bear with Valve’s experiment to see how it played out.

Three months later, I have a more conclusive answer: sucks! hydro is awful. But looking at the stats, Valve must be delighted: apparently hydro sees the longest rounds of any map, and never results in a stalemate. That’s funny, because around fifty percent of all stalemates I’ve ever had and my ten shortest rounds have all been on that very map.

The problem is that they don’t count the fight over two control points – before the map reconfigulates – as a round. They count the entire, tedious push through each arbitrary mess of blocked-off routes towards the enemy’s final base – at least four separate games – as one round. This cleverly conceals the two main ways in which hydro sucks: if one team is even slightly better than they other, they utterly storm the enemy control point in a matter of seconds, and no-one has any hope of mounting a comeback or even having an influence on the battle. And if the teams are even in skill, every damn game ends with two nests of Sentry Guns sitting vigilantly at their own bases, waiting for the Sudden Death timer to run out.

4. As you can see from the ugly grey lumps in that graph, Stalemates are all too common on the maps where they can occur. Amazingly the solution to this is so simple the community have already implimented it in places: a fantastic server-side mod causes everyone to spawn as the same class when entering Sudden Death, and restricts them to melee. When I last played on such a server, this meant twenty-four Heavy Weapons guys punching each other to death, but pretty much any class is as funny.

It completely transforms the dark, paranoid, defensive atmosphere of Sudden Death into a glorious burst of humour and madness at the end of the round. Instead of saying “You’ve failed to complete a game of Team Fortress 2, now you must play Counter-Strike until everyone gets bored and leaves or the game tells everyone they suck”, it says “Eh, you guys are about as good as each other. Fist fight! Woo!” Then it spins around with its arms out until it falls over from the giddiness. In other words, it’s silly and friendly and hilarious in just the way TF2 is everywhere else. You actually come away from it feeling almost like friends, instead of hating the enemy team’s stupid camping guts and your own team’s stupid non-Medic faces.

But if I were Valve, I wouldn’t be working on any of these issues yet. In fact, I’d be doing absolutely nothing to the game until I’d come up with the perfect auto-balancing/team-reshuffling algorithm. I think they ended up maximising almost every other factor that positively contributes to the percentage of time you spend enjoying a multiplayer game, but left alone the biggest one: engineering a fair fight.

If it were up to me, no-one would get to pick a team. Everyone’s auto-assigned according to their skill level, keeping Friends together and players who prefer the same class apart, in that order of priority. After every round, the highest-scoring player from the winning team, along with the third best, fifth best, seventh, etc, are switched with the second best from the losing team, and the fourth, and sixth, respectively. In other words, maximum rejiggling with a slight bias towards the losing team, giving the best players a challenge and the worst players a break.

The reason you couldn’t do most of this stuff in older games, like the original Team Fortress, was that the game simply didn’t have access to that sort of information about players. Steam now has all this and more, and if they’re only using that for playtesting, they’re missing the real value of this kind of data. They’ve got everything they need here to rig a multiplayer game to be fun every time, and that could be a hell of a thing.

Until today I honestly thought I was the biggest asshole playing this class. I see now that I have been thoroughly out-assholed, and I doff my balaclava to, er, MrCuddles100. He’s kindly uploaded the spray here so you can try it yourself. Even if using it just gets you killed, it’s still comedy gold like no other game. This sort of stuff is exactly why I love TF2 and The Spy so much.

For example, I really like just sitting here, next to your turret. I’ve got it. You can go off and build teleporters or something. Oh, my name? Yeah, that’s just a coincidence. I guess you and I think alike – after all, we’re both straightforward types, on the red team, the best team of them all.

I also really like being healed. So that I can better kill all the blues. That’s why their bullets don’t look like they’re hurting me, by the way – because of your excellent healing. Thanks, red team medic. You and I are on the same side; the red team. Just regular joes, fighting the good fight against the blue team, who are the enemy of us both.

No, I’m not going to fire just yet. Why don’t you go ahead? Maybe you can lure them with your Syringe Gun. I’ll mop them up just as soon as you walk ahead of me. Go, red team!

Boy, it’s good being a Sniper too. Just us two Snipers, up here on the battlements. It’s a great view. I particularly like how we shoot at things, like blue guys, who we hate, because of the way in which we’re on the red team. I shoot at things all the time. Not right now, but usually.

I also turned off my laser sight. I didn’t like it. You know what I find helps? If you stand just a little way away from the wall, your aim improves loads. The wall really cramps your style sometimes. I don’t know if it’s an elbow thing or what, but just taking a few steps forwards does the trick. And staying scoped. Always stay scoped.

Sometimes things go wrong. Like this one time, all my turrets and dispensers fell apart one after the other for no reason. There were no enemies around, except this one dead guy who looked like a good ol’ red Engineer, but he had my name so I guess he must have been a Spy. Spies, eurgh. Who’d have them?

It’s the same when I dress up as and really am the Medic, on the red team, as always. For some reason my medigun never really works properly, and pretty soon my Heavy falls over. I’m kind of new at this, but I enjoy it all the same. It’s kind of fun, despite the tragic loss to the red team; the best team, and the one that I’m genuinely on.

Whatever class I play, the maps have some spots I love to hang out. Under bridges and stuff. There’s a few backrooms in Well that are just cool to stand around in, then wander back out into the fight like nothing happened, which it of course didn’t. Yay red!

The only thing I’m not wild about in Team Fortress 2 is when my own team – the reds, my favourite team – shoot me. It doesn’t hurt, because I’m on their team, the red team, and there’s no friendly fire. But it hurts inside. Just the idea that my friends think I’m a Spy. A Spy! I hate those jerks.

In fact, here come the Blue team right now. I might just show them what I think of them by going over there. I think I can break into their Resupply room and get some health, which I don’t need. I found a powerup that lets me do that. BRB.

That is all.

The team must have been working on this for a long time, they’ve kept it very secret, and they must have been nervous as hell about whether people would go for a cartoon look to a class-based tactical shooter. They must now be beaming, because virtually everyone seems to love it. The only whispers of dissent I’ve heard are people who love it saying “I don’t know why anyone has a problem with it, TF1 was never realistic.” I was a sceptic before they released this shot, but I see now that it is wonderful. I love their slim chunkiness, their sharp curves, even shading, their characterful but not charicatured expressions. And how cool the Spy:

I still don’t quite understand why they’re giving it to us free with Episode Two, along with Portal – a fantastic-sounding Source-engine successor to indie gem Narbacular Drop (the best game name since Grim Fandango). My best theory so far is that it’s just to generate good will toward episodic gaming and Steam, and partially to ensure a large user-base for TF2. Maybe they were hedging their bets against the cartoon look putting people off, and ensuring that people would end up owning it whether they liked it or not. Of course, they did a similar thing with Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source. We’ll never know exactly how well that did, because they won’t release Steam sales figures, but I have to assume it exceeded what they would have expected for Half-Life 2 alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating the formula with TF2 and Episode 2.

Forgetting analysis, the ripe bunch of gaming fruit that your slim twenty-dollar bill is going to bag you now looks utterly irresistable. A hefty and exotic chunk of the most finely crafted single-player game ever created; a bold reimagining of one of the all-time greatest multiplayer games using a graphical style never seen in a game before; and a completely fresh and mind-fryingly inventive experimental game, put through the mighty Valve polishing machine. Maybe that’s the point – just to put together something wonderful and profoundly worth the money to everyone. Sometimes if I feel I’ve done something well, I spend an extra half an hour to make it extraordinary, just to see how someone reacts. To hear CEO Gabe Newell talk, the faceless collective grin of an impressed gaming public – expressed through poorly spelt forum posts – is what he lives and breathes for.