Friday, August 19, 2011

30 Days of Video Games Day 30

My Favorite Game of All Time

Oh God.  I knew this was coming.  I knew this was coming, and I could not stop it.  All of the preparation in the world would not be able to help me now.  I'm not going to BS this and give you multiple answers.  No shout-outs, no I-was-thinking-of-this-games, just the answer.

Goddammit.


Easy and awesome as it would be, I can't just post this and call it a day.

Must...resist...mentioning...seven...games...

Okay.  I think I have my favorite game chosen, and I will probably regret this shortly after I type it.  At least three of the people reading this already know the answer and are thinking, "Why doesn't he just type it already?"

Okay.  I think that as of this writing, my favorite game of all time is Team Fortress 2.  I'll actually make a case for this.

1) The game is just too damn fun.  I love the don't-give-a-fuck attitude it takes with everyone's bad exaggerated accents, the cartoony graphics, and the very tight gameplay.  Pretty much every class is at least somewhat accessible, though it's almost guaranteed you are going to get raped when you start out as a Spy and don't know what you're doing.  

2) The updates have kept an almost four-year-old game new and interesting.  I'm pretty sure that if TF2 were the same game it was when it was released, very few people would still be playing it.  It's held on to the players it has by constantly bringing new weapons into the game and drastically altering certain classes.  Everyone hates Snipers, right?  A lot of it is because their advantage is distance; there is often nothing you could have done differently to beat them in a battle, as opposed to thinking, "Well if I had used my melee weapon instead, I could have killed that guy."  To fix this, you give the Sniper an option of using a Bow and Arrow set.  This gets him up close into the action.  Plus, the announcements for new weapons are often  retardedly awesome.  

3) The media surrounding the game.  Meet the Medic came out a full year after Meet the Spy.  Meet the Spy was so good, there were people worried that Valve wouldn't make Meet the Medic or Meet the Pyro because they wouldn't be good enough to top Meet the Spy.  Well, Meet the Pyro is marked as Coming Eventually, but Meet the Medic exceeded peoples' expectations.  It's stuff like this that gets you connected to these characters that we set on fire, riddle with bullets, and blow up into many small parts.

4) The community.  Valve hasn't designed all of the new weapons that are in the game.  Hell, at this point, they probably haven't designed more than half.  Half might even be pushing it.  Every single class has a weapon or four that were added to the game after someone in the TF2-playing community designed it.  Three updates all have work from The Polycount Pack, which was a new-weapons design contest by Valve and the folks at Polycount.  They aren't just new skins, but they also have different stats, making choosing your weapon a big decision.

5) Hats.  Hats are stupid.  When they were introduced, they did nothing.  They still do nothing.  No hat on its own has changed the game for anyone unless it was a mental thing, which would be stupid on the user's end.  To make a random hat, you have to sacrifice upwards of 50 useful weapons that actually do stuff.  There are only five hats that actually do anything, and you need three matching weapons in a set to make them be useful.  And goddammit do we want them.  We want them so much that often players will pay real money for something that has no effect on the game whatsoever.

Pictured: a hypothetical scenario, but a realistic one.

But they look cool, and they reflect on the characters' personalities, which is really cool for someone obsessed with that like me.  It's stupid, irreverent, and overall a waste of time.  But fun.

Those last two sentences actually pretty much sum up my feelings about TF2 succinctly.

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