It is 2006. Several years of inconsistent announcements, numerous delays and a growing association with Duke Nukem Forever indicates that an actual release of Team Fortress 2 is extremely unlikely. Then from out of the blue Gabe Newell (managing director of Valve) thrusts a teaser trailer into our faces confirming that TF2 is indeed on its way. Sporting a venturesome art style with what appeared to be innovative game play, the new look TF2 quickly soared to the top of many “most anticipated” lists. Launching in October of 2007, it became an instant favourite among reviewers, achieving a plethora of awards alongside its partner in success The Orange Box.

As an avid PC gamer, the desire for a new class based multiplayer game was immense. I desperately needed to escape the grenade spamming insta-prone aids festivity that was Battlefield 2. To my delight, and many other likeminded gamers, TF2 delivered just that. Besides the attractive stylized graphics and often comical game play, it shipped with a secret weapon, one which would inevitably be the key to TF2’s ongoing success and development.

Steam, the popular content delivery service functions as the core of TF2, supplying speedy updates and flawless content delivery. Gamer profiles and statistic pages are accessible through a simple yet faultless social network. Hell, you can even browse the web in-game using the Steam overlay. It is undoubtable TF2 would not be as popular as it is on PC today, if it was not for Steam. This is clear when we examine the unfortunate situation our console brethren currently face, which I’ll touch on a little later.

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This post is for those of you with a Steam account, or a PC in general. Giant Enemy Blog now has its own Steam group that is open for anyone to join. Now, instead of wishing you could play Team Fortress 2 with the strangers you met on some blogging site, you can actually invite said strangers to a game for a jolly good time!

Steam is a digital distribution service created by Valve. Through Steam, numerous gamers may purchase and directly download a variety of games, mods, demos, and videos. Steam has its own in-game overlay that lets you surf the web and IM your friends without having to Alt+Tab your game!

P.S. If you don’t have steam, and you still haven’t gone to the site, you can download it here.

The Survivors (from left: Francis, Bill, Zoey, Louis)

So Left 4 Dead has been out for a while now and I’ve noticed that there’s a severe lack of teamwork and skill amongst the XBOX LIVE! community. Every game I have entered I have won. It’s a good feeling to win constantly but sometimes I just feel bad for the other team. Therefore this article will be about all the dos and don’ts of Left 4 Dead’s versus mode.
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It was inevitable. Eventually we were all going to make the shift to digital distribution and do away with the unnecessary retail, but I never thought it would happen so quickly.

So now it seems that Steam has pretty much all the publishers under their digital distribution belt. I guess I want to be mad, but I can’t seem to be. It’s a great service that doesn’t add any malware other than tying the program to Steam, which is dandy. You can still launch games straight and you don’t have to be connected to the internet to play.

I’m trying to think of ways that this upsets me, but it doesn’t. We won’t have anymore of EA’s intrusive nonsense, and we’ll probably have more deals.

My God . . .

What a glorious occasion!

I don’t have to go into a store anymore to try to haggle a game away from a clerk who’s unfortunately stuck trying to sell me everything at the counter because his brick and mortar location is losing large bills to the recession.

It’s . . . it’s so beautiful!

Alright, I think I feel better now. The important thing here is that this should essentially eliminate the excuse of “we pirate games so that we don’t have to deal with DRM bullshit,” since it seems that now buying a game is as easy as pirating it.

So, the PC version has been hit with a new update for Team Fortress 2. Sadly, 360 users will have to wait for a while before they get all the content we’ve been enjoying so far, but at least it’s been confirmed that it’s coming on the Team Fortress website.

We’ve had a couple days to play with this update now, and we can already see some effects on the game.

The most important change in this update is the ability to upgrade the Engineer’s Dispenser and Teleporters. While they were always operating on level 1, they can now go up to level 3.

A level 3 dispenser

And oh boy, is it a big change. A level 3 dispenser gives out a whopping 60 metal every tick, and heals as fast as a medic. A level 3 teleporter as a very quick recharge time, I estimate it to be about 3~5 seconds. This is a huge improvement over the old level 1 teleporters.

But now, the engineer is faced with difficult decisions. Before this update, you could just throw down your dispenser and get your sentry up as quickly as possible. But now you have to choose: Is it maybe worth it to get my dispenser up to a higher level first? Or should I just put up my sentry gun before I worry about my dispenser? Or should I put up my level 3 teleporter exit first?
Yes, that’s right. You can put down level 3 teleporter exits. Teleporters are upgraded as a pair: You can upgrade either the entrance or the exit. But if you first upgrade the entrance to level 3, which will take a short time as it’s usually located near a spawn room, the next teleporter exit you put down will be level 3. So if you’re located in the enemy base, if you can quickly build a teleporter exit, your entire team can be there as well.

And this gives us interesting possibilities. Gone is the sole archetype of defensive engineers. While it was already sometimes done on maps like cp_Well or ctf_2fort, it’s now much easier to be an offensive Engineer and put up a secondary base right in the enemy’s base.

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