Team Fortress 2 - Lessons on Lemmings and Live

As a wee lad, I hated participating in team sports. Football, baseball, basketball...they were all my worst enemies. I was the lone geek, skateboarding, snowboarding and doing just about anything to avoid a team sport. When forced to choose a school sport, I chose track, as I could run the 400 Meter like it was nobody's business. This inherent speed was probably gained by my perpetual need to make speedy escapes from beatings delivered by the team sports guys...

This anti-team spirit carried through my formative gaming years, and until recently, seemed to be locked into my psyche, both online and off. And then came Team Fortress 2. Nobody would shut up about this game, so I caved and pre-ordered it on Steam. Did I mention I'm a Steam addict? Well, I am, there's got to be at least a dozen titles on each of my PC's, all bought via Steam. Yes, Peggle and Peggle Extreme are two of them. But anyhow, if it isn't released on Steam, I tend to avoid it, as I like the portability of the service. Do I sound like a shill? Probably...

I digress, so it's time to get Red Leader back on target. Upon release, TF2 became a digital narcotic for me. The idea that each class was so intricately balanced and matched up for just about every archetype of player out there astonished me. Here I am, Mr. Anti-team, switching over to support roles like the Engineer or the (gasp!) Medic. Forget the frenzied offensive classes, here I was taking on supporting my teammates with sentry guns or mediguns. What am I thinking?

It's hard to say, maybe deep down inside me, there's a nurturing instinct, like a mother protecting her brood. Or maybe I like the fact that some people can't catch a clue, and fall to the same sentry gun 5-6 times in a row. It's those kinds of delicious moments that I have to laugh, make my engineer do his taunt dance, and watch my kill score rise.

This is the kind of game that begs for players to communicate, which is another reason I like it. No rambling about what you ate, or screaming at mom to get you some milk - nope, this game allows for none of that, and best of all, neither do the players. It doesn't take long for a smart (or foul) mouthed kid to find himself bounced or simply muted - or worse, abandoned by the medics while the rest of the team enjoys happy health bonuses and temporary invulnerability.

While I'm on the subject of screaming kids, it amazed me at how vastly different the game plays on consoles. While on PC, all chat is about teamwork, on the Xbox 360, it was all about the various things other players were going to do to my mother after the 11th death they suffered at the hands of my medic's dart gun. Seriously? You are so awful at this game you fell prey to the dart gun? To make yourself feel better for it, you're calling me names that your mother, if she were ever to pay attention to you, would find so heinous she'd swear she gave birth to a middle-aged Merchant Marine? Alas, that's the life on Live, and we all know it, yet what truly surprised me was that for the most part, the PlayStation 3 players are more like the PC players. It's a rarity to jump into a game with even one screaming kid, and even rarer to find one where people don't know how to play the classes. Forget children who are furious that this game has goals and is lacking a Spartan Laser, TF2 on Sony's console has serious players who tend to know what they're doing. Of course I say this just after completing a game where in a team of eight, we had six engineers, but after a little voice chat, I convinced them to switch up the class mix. I can only imagine what I'd have been called if I asked anyone over Live to switch classes.

TF2 is a pretty amazing game in that it's changed my mindset about how I enjoy my digital entertainment. With its cartoon graphics, I find myself now put-off by excessive realism, and the team-based goal-oriented play makes me groan any time I'm invited to free-for-all matches or team deathmatches in any other game.

That's it for today, I need to rest up for some big matches tonight.

Greetings...

Welcome to my newest blog adventure, One Game Too Many, who's name you likely figured out by reading that giant headline up on the top of the page. The goal with this blog is simple - I'm going to try and tackle a big batch of games every month, until my brain runs off with the wrist that's suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Now, before you all think, "This guy's going to finish a ton of games every month, he's nuts, never going to happen.", I'm going to agree with you. Because, frankly, that's not the goal, rather, I'm taking a cue from Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree," wherein he begs, buys and borrows a batch of books (how's that for alliteration?) every month, reads some, ignores some, and often ends up reading ones he had not intended to. What that means here is that I've got a mountain of games, both old and new, along with a game rental subscription, and I intend to make use of them. I won't be trying to plough through each game, no chance. This is about sampling each game in the context of simply trying to enjoy it. We're not talking professional reviews here, you want that, please, feel free to hit CTRL+L, type in "metacritic" and follow that with CTRL+Enter and Enter again. Nice knowing you...

But if you're looking for an almost literary examination of games and how they relate to me (and hopefully, you and others), this might be a good start. We'll see, this might go down as the worst experiment ever, or it could be great. Who knows...but let's get started.