tempest in a teacup

Been a while since I last wrote anything…I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Team Fortress 2. For some reason, since the Heavy update hit I’ve been playing the game a lot more. I’ve also been reading the official TF2 forums from time to time to gauge what the state of the game is, and figured I would record my thoughts here.

Arena Mode

I must say, I rather like this mode - since every player only has a single life and health pickups are limited, having Medics on your team becomes a lot more important, and Spies become incredibly lethal when played correctly. It’s a mode that rewards skill. On the other hand, I could do without the random shuffling of teams - it makes it hard to plan strategy when all you have are 5 seconds at the start of the round to decide on class makeup.

Badwater Basin

This is probably my new favourite map. It’s a payload map much in the vein of Goldrush, but much more open - there are tons of alternate routes making it great for ambushing while both attacking and defending. There aren’t too many chokepoints, so BLU tends to have an easier time than it does on other maps like Dustbowl and Goldrush.

Class-specific stuff

The Pyro is still my most-played class (although how much of that is because of achievement farming, I’m not sure), but these days I’ve been trying to avoid picking it, if only because it’s starting to seem to me that Pyros have a fairly low skill ceiling. Adding the air blast to the regular Pyro has added some new capabilities (in particular the ability to blow attackers or defenders off a control point, and reflect projectiles), but his combat strategy is still entirely limited to ambushing - head-on encounters rarely seem to go well. So I’ve been trying some other classes.

I’m having a lot of success playing Heavy, which is a lot harder than trailers would have one believe - you need to be completely aware of your surroundings at all times, pick targets carefully and know when to pull back (before you take too much damage or before your ammo runs out). I’ve only earned one of the unlocks so far (the Sandvich) and it can be useful if the team’s Medic is busy somewhere else and I need to heal up after retreating from an attack. However, the shotgun is arguably the more useful weapon in most circumstances.

I’ve also been playing Soldier a lot more. This class gets a reputation as one based on spam and luck (lol critrawkets, etc) but if you ask me the distance between an expert Soldier and a novice Soldier is greater than that between an expert Pyro and a novice Pyro. Good Soldiers know to aim ahead of their opponents and take advantage of juggles, use the mobility afforded by their rocket jumping to attack from unexpected angles and retreat from battles, and most importantly to make their shots count (given that their reload time is so long compared to most other classes). I can’t say I’ve mastered any of these skills, but I have been trying.

On a final note, the Spy. Playing Spy is amazingly fun when you get it right (like in Arena matches like I mentioned earlier) but when you get it wrong it can be amazingly discouraging. I’m alright with getting discovered by a nosy Pyro who suddenly appeared around the corner, but when your primary weapon - the instant-kill backstab - fails to register half the time there’s clearly a problem. Sometimes it’s because the stab doesn’t register as a backstab, but most often it’s because of the laggy backstab animation you get if you’re too close to the enemy. I know the Spy is arguably the class with the highest skill ceiling, but this stuff even bites players who have far more Spy experience than I do.

The other thing I’ve been doing recently is keeping track of King of Fighters XII news - but that’s a topic for another post.

…of why I play the airblast Pyro in Team Fortress 2.

The backburner can be great fun in pure ambush play, but the ability to just run up to a control point and BLOW PEOPLE OFF IT is just too awesome. Bonus points if said point is suspended over an instant death pit :D

Meet the Sandvich!

(No, that is not a typo)

The Heavy update has finally arrived, and I took the opportunity to put a few hours into the game to see what had changed. I’ve already seen Heavies running around with all three unlocked weapons, so the achievements are definitely quite reasonable this time around.

I haven’t tried Arena Mode yet, although I will eventually. I did get to play a few rounds on Badwater Basin, the new payload map. I like the fact that there are now several side passages and back alleys that I can rely on for my Pyro ambushing. On the other hand, it seemed like the last cap was just as entrenched as the last cap on Goldrush tends to get on full servers. Time will tell, I suppose.

I didn’t see any servers running cp_steel, which was a little surprising, given that it was a community map that was overwhelmingly recommended to Valve for inclusion in the update. I did, however, see my TF2 client either crash or boot me out of the server I was playing in for no apparent reason. Others seem to be having similar problems - a patch will be needed.

Still, the abundance of Heavies means ample opportunities to get those Medic achievements - or improve my Spy skills.

On an unrelated note, I nabbed the PC version of Bionic Commando: Rearmed off Capcom’s digital store last week, and so far I have to say it was worth the money. I never played the original NES Bionic Commando, but this seems to be a decent recreation (although by comparing footage of the NES version to the remake it looks like some of the physics might be different). On top of that, the developers have taken a page out of Portal’s book and added challenge rooms for people to prove their mastery of the bionic arm.

Also, because I turned on my Wii for the first time in weeks and noticed that Mega Man was available on the Virtual Console, I bought it, and played it for a few minutes. First impressions: this game is just as challenging as the Internet says it is.

This makes me very, very happy. Especially because the Pyro is my favourite class.

Hopefully the achievements will be better designed than the Medic ones…some of those are just ridiculous (can you really expect a Medic to kill 50 Scouts in regular play with his needle gun of all things?). I’d like to earn my achievements through good Pyro play, not going out of the way to piss off my team.

Keeping my fingers crossed.