Monday, September 08, 2008

Team Fortress 2 has officially replaced Halo PC for me

I haven't really posted much on this game but, I can safely say it's replaced the lulz that is Halo PC as my drug of choice.
Admittedly, I must have played more hours of Halo PC than any other game to date.
Shameful truth.
Because it was my "relax" game, even if it is as I have repeatedly said, "A terrible port of a mediocre game."
Any time I wasn't playing a specific game, I would end up playing Halo PC, get something like a 50:10 score for hours on end, then call it a day like 8 hours later (NEET life back in the days etc.)
The game is literally inaccessible to 90% of normal shooter people because of how its terrible netcode handled lag; if someone lagged more, you had to shoot the air further ahead of him if he was moving.
And I mean you had to shoot quite FAR, this isn't mere leading this is like psychic powers.
Combine this with a 3 shot kill pistol and you could waste scores of clowns shooting directly AT you while getting out alive.
Forget it at point blank range, to melee someone in front of your face strafing right you'd have to turn right 90 degrees and punch the air.
Anyway, since I've always been sort of good shooting in front of people rather than AT them, the game was quite easy to me and basically my fallback on game when I was bored, depressed, annoyed, or any other mood that required killing an entire team over and over inside their base to fix.
It's nice to finally let it go.


TF2 is a different beast.
The guns that have leading make sense to have lead, you can't really take on an entire team or even two-three people by yourself unless by some special/freak circumstances or you're playing pure noobs.

Something I've fast discovered...
The game really is about teamwork.
In Halo PC, pubs tended to be decided by which team had more good pistolers.
1v2? Your team was doomed. 2v3? Your team was still doomed.
This didn't really change in competitive; cept it was pistolers/snipers now (good snipers in pubs were generally good pistolers, only in competitive would a distinction even exist).
Your flag carrier was always usually the guy who wasn't that great with lag (lol) or anyone adlibbing the role.
I can only think of one rare case where we faced an almost overwhelmingly better skilled team and used pure flag capture gimmicks er teamwork to win.
(versus NoOne on Ice Fields, basically someone got through their complete blockade of our base exits and waited about 90% of the match inside their own base until we finally took them down from their spawn camping positions and then he ran in and out and ninja capped.)
But it almost didn't matter what the rest of a public team did in CTF/Assault, the side with more pistolers would win.
This is completely not true in TF2.
You can have a team of all highly skilled individuals and lose.
Your entire team can collectively trounce the opposing team's scores and you can still lose on an even map (let's not mention the campofests Goldrush, Dustbowl and Badwater Basin, in descending order of annoyingness).
Can one person make a difference?
Yeah, but only if your team lets you.
I main medic, probably the easiest class ever, and generally I do well...but I only do as well as my team can be.
I enjoy playing TF2 a lot more than Halo PC, but I also rage a lot more than Halo PC, because inevitably I end up on the losing team, and feel it's COMPLETELY NOT MY FAULT.
There was no team to worry about in Halo PC, a single player could literally break an entire team over his knee like a bunch of sticks.

In casual, you can really screw up a lot of shitty players with medic...pyros who don't know when to back off, other medics who suck at getting the arc of the needle fire down (slightly down and to the right!) or overly depend on bonesaw, scouts who just strafe fire without jumping or moving in and out of your distance, engineers away from their sentries who can't aim, spies once they are discovered.

In competitive, the biggest difference is scouts.
You're not going to kill them.
If you do they shouldn't be playing scout.
Getting scouted as a medic is probably one of the most frustrating things about this game in competitive play, and easily the path to rage.
I get very angry at my team when I get killed by scouts because of non-watchful teammates.
I get very angry at my team when I get killed by scouts when it's my own damn fault for battle medicing.
Either way in pubs I usually just rage switch and go soldier or scout myself.
In competitive I rarely have the option to switch from the "sitting duck" class.
Until last match.
For the first time ever Skro (team captain) volunteered to switch the roles of soldier and medic with me on Granary.
Pickie was too busy playing Tales of Vesperia, the fag, so yes we were running scoutless on granary.
Somehow it worked.
I'll have a video up soon cause I found it sort of amusing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

TF2...
I used to play A.V.A., CSS, DoDS, RSV2, and Unreal 2004, all of them at random. Now I only play TF2.