A Brief History of Glass in Team Fortress

It may seem odd that I’m devoting a whole article to glass, an incredibly common and straightforward building material. Some games let you break it, others let you shoot through it, and many don’t. Within a few minutes of playtime, you’ll probably notice Team Fortress 2 is decidedly in the latter category. Case closed? Not quite, because glass actually has a more checkered history than you’d first expect. It first came to my attention when I started playing Team Fortress Classic and noticed that only one map had glass: Rock2, letting the flag-scoring player watch their pursuers die to toxic gas.… [Continue Reading]

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Starting Out

Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, and Overwatch have defined my gaming career. TFC was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, TF2 will forever be my most-played game with over 3400 hours clocked, and Overwatch was my flagship title when I started getting really serious about creating GIFs, videos, and overall promoting myself within the gaming community. In any game I play, I’ve always considered the “first life” something worth remembering, since it’s my very first story told from beginning to end within the confines of this new universe. I actually played TFClassic first, even though I started my… [Continue Reading]

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What? A Team Fortress Classic update?

It was surprising enough that Team Fortress 2 is forecasting activity this summer, but I don’t think anyone was expecting a new update for its predecessor, Team Fortress Classic! The last time we got an update for this game was the infamous March 29, 2013 update that pushed forward a few minor model upgrades and (much more importantly) reset everyone’s game folders, which wiped all customizations, mods, and configs. That’s right, a lot of people lost years of mods and settings if they hadn’t been bothering to back them up (and why would they? TFC never gets updates, does it?) I’m not sure… [Continue Reading]

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On Fortress Forever’s Huge Pyro Rework

The Team Fortress Classic Pyro sucks. I don’t care what the person in the comment section of that article says, she has almost no role to serve on the battlefield and does a miraculously bad job of filling her supposed niche of area-of-effect damage. Valve made some big changes to the class when creating Team Fortress 2, but they also tried to stay loyal to Pyro’s afterburn-based roots. For the longest time, Fortress Forever likewise attempted to create a more versatile afterburn Pyro by giving theirs some interesting mobility tools: he could ‘fly’ through the air by firing his flamethrower behind him, and his afterburn… [Continue Reading]

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Widowmaker Vs. TFClassic Sniper: Who Would Win?

So I was talking with a friend about hypothetical cross-franchise class matchups, in the vein of Scout vs Tracer, Medic vs Sona, Engineer vs Nuparu, Heavy vs Braum, and Pyro vs Toa Vakama. It’s a pretty popular concept on our blog and I realized we hadn’t covered one of the most obvious, that of TF2’s favorite Kiwi versus Overwatch‘s favorite cheesecake. But after ruminating on the idea, I had trouble even starting due to the nature of TF2 Sniper’s unlocks. Do I treat TF2 Sniper as his stock class (which means Widow wins easily) or as an amalgamation of his unlocks, which turns him into a horrifying combination… [Continue Reading]

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5 Great Guns in Gaming that Didn’t Make the Sequel

Some gaming franchises like Payday or Left 4 Dead manage to port everything forward, good or bad, into future sequels. Others aren’t quite that thorough, and various parts of older titles are abandoned as the franchise moves forward toward newer and better things. Oftentimes the missing elements were either widely disliked or mostly replaced by something that fills a similar role, but sometimes one of those abandoned guns carries a whole playstyle or game mechanic with it. Today I wanted to talk about a few of the fallen soldiers who will sadly never grace our inventory again. 1. Saints Row 2’s Shock Paddles: The defibrillator is the… [Continue Reading]

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Why Grenade Slots are a bad idea in TF2

Hey look! An article about Team Fortress 2! This is actually quite a surprise, because there’s not really been much to write about lately apart from cosmetics. But there’s been a thread on SPUF talking about grenade slots, from a person who is a fan of Team Fortress Classic (a.k.a Grenade Hell) and really, really wants to get that grenade slot in the game somehow. And I’m going to tell you why that is wrong. If you’ve ever played TFC with actual people, you’ll see a lot of grenades. Almost everyone in TFC has two grenades, a normal, bog-standard blow-things-up-in-an-explosion… [Continue Reading]

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My Favorite Moments in TF2 History

TF2 was the first game I really immersed myself into, meaning that a lot of my earliest internet memories come from this game. And through all the years, all the updates, all the thousands of hours of playing this game, there are a few memories that stand out to me the most. In the spirit of Love and War Part 2, I thought I’d take an article to recall my fondest memories as a TF2 fan. Especially since my more traditional “what I love most” article already exists. In no particular order: 5. STAR_ wins Mixup 2013. It was possible for you to… [Continue Reading]

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Windows in TF2

No, not that Windows. I’m talking about the ones that even Mac and Linux players have to deal with. Many maps in TF2 feature glass windows, which surprisingly are something of a new feature for the TF series. Going back into Team Fortress Classic, I can’t find any examples in official maps of transparent screens allowing the user to look but not interact with further parts of the map. They were consciously included in TF2’s design, as the Gravelpit developer commentary explains: “Height is a useful feature when designing defensible buildings. For instance, the cap B building needs to be defended from… [Continue Reading]

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The Benefits of Sharking

Sharking is an old but solid technique that shows up a lot in Valve games. Anyone can do it, and it can really give you a legup in some unprofitable situations. Originating from the original GoldSrc engine and surviving even to today, ‘sharking’ involves keeping the jump button (probably space bar) held down while landing in or entering deep water. The character will ‘surf’ along the top of the water maintaining their momentum, instead of sinking and blimping along underwater. Great for avoiding the dreaded slowdown of swimming. As an avid sticky-jumper I love sharking, its one of my favorite mechanics… [Continue Reading]

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