Team Fortress 2 - The Orange Box

I admit I approached Team Fortress with some skepticism… not that I expected a bad game, but just due to my own lack of interest in the multiplayer arena combat genre. Sure, my friends and I spent plenty of time gibbing each other playing Doom back in College (yes, this dates me) but that was a looong time ago.

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher


Played For: about 4 hour


This is my second of three reviews for the Orange Box. When you complete this review, you will have read 66.6 repeating percent of the entire Orange Box review. That’s kind of an achievement right there!

I admit I approached Team Fortress with some skepticism… not that I expected a bad game, but just due to my own lack of interest in the multiplayer arena combat genre. Sure, my friends and I spent plenty of time gibbing each other playing Doom back in College (yes, this dates me) but that was a looong time ago.

However, I bravely donned by reviewer hat and attempted to join a ranked match game. This brought me to a lobby screen to await fellow players. It was very quiet, so I tried saying hello to the Host. I got a garbled greeting in answer, which sounded something between Richard Hawkin’s speech emulator and a depressed Elmo. After about twenty minutes of twiddling my thumbs and hearing no signs of life from my unhappy host except an occasional sigh, I decided to leave and try again. I imagine that guy’s still out there somewhere, shedding a silent tear that his friend in loneliness had slipped away…

This time I hosted a game, and suddenly weird and enthusiastic people of indeterminate age popped up in droves. We had ten players in no time, so I initiated the game and got down to business. I’ve hosted a couple of times since, with the same result… lots of people, no waiting time. This is a function of the Orange Box’s popularity, of course, but something tells me Team Fortress 2 will be around for a while. And I guess it is here that I grudgingly admit that I had a grand old time in the chaotic matches that ensued.

In Team Fortress you play one of a few games, including capture the flag and attack and defend, adopting different character types like Medic or Spy or Heavy as you go. I had the distinct advantage of having died A LOT, so I was able to test out all the different classes within a short period of time. The cartoony look and feel of the game and the Half-Life weapon interface worked for me, and gave me chuckles each time I blew someone up. I just hope none of them were my students, because I could see that getting hard to explain.

The game is pretty balanced, I expect, but I personally found some classes to be more trouble than they were worth. The Sniper saw the least play, as far as I could tell. With everyone running around like their butts were on fire, there wasn’t much chance for a carefully aimed shot… at least in the games I played. The explosives dude also required more finesse than I have developed in life, and the medic felt a little too boring and helpful. The Heavy machine gun tank of a dude, or the fast and skinny Scout... these were more my style.

In Capture the Flag you go after the enemy’s “intelligence” rather than a flag. Seeking intelligence is as good a goal as any, and sometimes hard to find in the multiplayer world. Happily, my randomly generated fellow players were on the ball, and had the kind of extensive knowledge of each arena that can only come from practiced gainful unemployment. I liked to imagine I was playing with wealthy idle oil tycoons sitting on pleasure yachts and sipping martinis… this felt better than getting owned by teenagers, which is more likely what was going on.

But I sell myself short. During one particularly exciting session I managed to grab the smarts and began running with a bunch of fellow characters back towards my base. It was only after we had traveled half the board that I realized I had the colors wrong, and that I was running along with an enemy charge. They wisened up at that moment as well (probably on account of my bazooka firing at them in a state of panic) but somehow it all worked out and I delivered the goods, scoring a point for my team and shouting with glee loud enough to send my cats running for cover. Good times