Star Trek taught us that Engineers can save everything, always, even if the vital Keepusalivemotron has been smashed with a sledgehammer(motron). While this has the handy effect of resolving 45 minutes of tense drama by just shouting at someone with a space-PhD until they break the laws of physics, it isn’t very useful in gaming. I mean, Starfleet give warnings before shooting people. They clearly know nothing about modern gaming.

Which is why we’re looking at Engies who really know how to solve problems.

1. Brink

Brink servers don’t so much have “Engineers” as “Interns who spent a few weekends putting up flowerboxes with a wrench.” In most games the point of the Engineer is to build a gun to shoot for them instead of getting their own firearms dirty, but a Brink server’s sentry gun is less a fearsome turret of automated death as a noisy motion detector. Because when it explodes, you know the enemy arrived at that point about a second before that.

A Brink turret in its rare “firing, not destroyed” state

The landmines are equally ineffective, merely damaging your enemy. And since the release of Halo just “damaging” an enemy is a slap on the wrist, making them hide behind cover to think about what they’ve done (and regenerate their health.) The upside is that even the programmers realise that the engineer’s tools are rubbish, and we removed the capital E there quite purposefully, so his main weapons are just as powerful as everyone else’s. Meaning you can team up with your own sentry gun to take out enemies in gaming’s first cyborg buddy-comedy.

With a kickass sidekick if you count your own gun as another character, and in Brink we do.

So it’s not that you don’t get good engineering weapons. It’s that you get great guns, and then another gun which can fire itself, and then fire both at your enemies.

2. Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 has four classes, and one of the is Engineer because when you’re making a class-combat game you either include Engineer or didn’t understand the word “class.”

On Battlefield 3 servers Engineers aren’t mere functionaries, they’re the Gods of Machinery - bringing health or death down on the steel beasts rampaging around the conflict. BF3 shows off Engineers for the heroes they truly are, players who understand that it’s a team game and are prepared to sacrifice individual score for real victory. Dashing between wounded tanks with a welding torch enables others to fire main tank cannons at people, and the way they can rain ruination down on enemy vehicles with rocket launchers and mines is only a side effect. This is a guy who sees incoming enemy armor and thinks “I’ll do something about that.”

Even with modern scoring systems Engineers earn less points than expert sniping Recon players. Also unlike Recons, they actually help win the game.

3. Team Fortress 2

The king.

The Engineer is the king of defense on Team Fortress 2 servers. Also offense - if the attacking team moves past the halfway point, aka “is halfway competent.” The sentry guns shred opposition, dispensers bolster whichever way your preferred primary color of the moment is moving, but teleporters are absolute gamechangers.

It’s very simple: if you’re defending and don’t have an Engineer, you’re going to lose. If you’re attacking past the first point and don’t have Engineer, you’re all idiots, because anyone - anyone - would be better served switching and building that Level 3 teleporter.

So grab your wrench, start planning instead of sniping, and make a real difference to your team’s chances of winning. And your enemies’ chances of moving without being minigunned to death.

Valve are the fashion designers of firearms. Every they release a collection people suddenly need the new items more desperately than oxygen, and show off their latest acquisitions now matter how ridiculously impractical to the location or game mode. (Game modes are what servers have instead of weather.) Crafting allows people to make the latest and greatest items instantly (after the Dr Grordbort set dropped every TF2 server turned into Star Wars) while trading allows people to get what they need (the same set had thousands searching for Black Boxes harder than airline crash investigators.) Customizing characters for different roles makes new items are incredibly useful, so the parallel with fashion breaks down.

But that parallel with ridiculous expensive uselessness comes back triple with headwear! Hats! These millinery masterpieces are the most beloved of all items despite being the least useful and the most expensive (fashion!). They can cost almost eight dollars in the store, while crafting them requires more refined metal than the Large Hadron Collider, and they have no effect on anyone.

You’re the only one who cares (and before you say you’re showing off to other people, I can assure you that the only people who notice your hat are enemy snipers. They just love the location-advertising Towering Pillar of Hats, especially with a flame effect!) So why not enjoy some awesome free items on your own computer, for free, and which won’t get your head blown off? These custom skins can be downloaded right now - you might never wait for a drop again.

1. Getting A Head Of The Game

The Spy’s Head might sound like a TF2-themed pub, but it’s a brilliant referenc to Meet The Medic. Valve are famous for hiding upcoming items in their videos but FissionMetroid101 took up the slack when they missed their greatest opportunity yet. Behold, this year’s winner of “Least Moving Supporting Character.”)

The Solemn Spy replaces the Solemn Vow, reskinning the hypocritical Hippocrates as someone who knows how violent the Medic can be. And unwillingly helps him with it. We can only hope Valve ask to include it in their next round of user-submitted upgrades, as an animated taunt with the yelling head would be beyond priceless. A wisecracking enemy Spy skull might become the first actually good sidekick in the history of gaming. It also gives you a reason to use the Solemn Vow. The “see enemy’s health” thing was never any use. Either you kill them, in which case it’s zero, or they kill you, and you have plenty of time to gaze upon their healthbar in the mocking killcam shot.

2. Ambassador: Code 47

The Hitman Ambassador Redux isn’t just beautiful, it’s a labor of more love for guns than the NRA.

That is sheer shining beauty in Ambassador form. Invoking Hitman’s Agent 47 not only adds style, his professionalism fixes minor flaws in the original. Little things like “the barrel being a solid chunk of metal with no hole for the bullets.” Viva_93 even adds a cylinder rotation animation. He clearly has more powerful feelings for the Ambassador than the histories of diplomacy and Ferrero Rocher combined, and he’s shared that emotion with the world. Possibly the only time when someone sharing their feelings through firearms has been a good thing.

3. Super Missiles!

FissionMetroid101 again, and if you’re wondering how one modeler can get in twice, it’s because of more projectile-based retro beauty than Marilyn Monroe jumping to catch a beachball.

The Soldier’s Super Missile was released for Metroid’s 25th birthday, and it’s a better birthday present than most royals get.

4. Patriotic Buff Banners

When you blow a trumpet and wave a flag before charging, just to let the enemy know you’re coming, you want to do it under a flag you can believe in. And whatever that is, Gamebanana have it!

Whether you you follow the Finnish, the Russian, the Imperium or boldly flapping magesty of Underwear on a Stick, they’ve got you covered. Unlike the owner of that underwear. Even the “most insane videogaming corporate slashfic/slashflag in history.”

You just know someone’s written a fanfic about this, Just to imagine Alyx and Chell getting together.

5. The Leviathan

Ladies and gentleman, please be upstanding for the most incredibly badass giant-minigun wielding character in videogaming history.

For those who just failed Games You Should Have Played 101, Vulcan Raven stomped through Metal Gear Solid giving Snake a real reason to hide all the time. He first appearedin a tank, and when that didn’t work, he chose something even more lethal. The M61A1 Vulcan rotary cannon was built for jetfighters but Raven thinks they’re wimps because they run away really fast. He tore it out and lugged it around by hand, wearing the titanic ammo hopper as an immense backpack.

And the Heavy said “Pansy, you couldn’t lift the whole thing in one hand?”

Too many games treat the huge and heavy character as an idiotic enemy, Halo’s brutes and Unreal’s, well, almost everyone. Pay tribute to two men who fired more bullets than most World Wars with the Leviathan!

Valve have created the largest party in the world by making Team Fortress 2 free to play, and the only party where shooting people is a good thing. And while it’s always important to make new guests feel welcome, it’s more important to make sure they don’t wreck the place. Which is why Valve have crafted a special set of items for paying players as they play host to a horde of rookies with THE PREMIUM UPDATE.

The Double Agent

The game’s first score-sensitive weapon! Paid players in the top half of the scoreboard can now lighten their load by backstabbing the second, third and fourth idiot who thinks the team really needs more spies – stumbling around the enemy base, bumping into people and generally shouting “I say, old sport, there are some spies around here don’chaknow!”

Backstabbing a colleague forces a change in career, killing them not only on the field but in the class select screen. The Spy is number 9 because he’s the last one new players should consider using.

The Transporter

Brand-new maps can be confusing for fresh players, especially when they’ve made a religious vow never to observe signs, huge glowing capture points, or the repeated requests/demands/increasingly-loud cursing of everyone else on their team. That defensive scout is just so delighted with the dust-streaked artwork he’s going to play in frontier’s attic – even when the cart is at the first point. The Transporter forcibly teleports targeted teammates to where the action is. Even if their mind is useless, their body can usefully absorb incoming fire (for a bit!)

It also works on engineering gear built at the final point at the beginning of the match. Because leaving your team outnumbered for half the game is well worth that extra single second before your stupidly-placed Sentry is rocketed to pieces.

The cart is half a map away but WE’RE HELPING (the blu team)

We were going to make a kickass high-tech new phaser weapon for the Engineer too, but Valve already did that. And gave it to the soldier.

The Malpractice Suitcase

Cretinously Obtuse Moronic Asshole Teammate medics (COMBAT Medics) insist on charging into action with a syringe gun, despite that being a slightly less effective use of syringes than injecting yourself with strychnine. Why use tiny bits of metal when Russians spend their entire lives inappropriately loving huge chunks of metal for you?

Let the Heavy take all the damage - that’s what he’s for!

Do you have any ideas for exclusive items? Let us know!

Weapons are the most expressive inventions in history, but until now they’ve been limited to expressing how much you want someone to die. Quite loudly. Some games add a little extra information (Modern Warfare’s M203 grenade launcher says “I want you to die AND can’t be bothered to learn to play first”), but TF2 servers have turned weapon selection into a better communication tool than Morse Code. Your loadout now expresses more emotion than most artwork.

Let’s see the Mona Lisa do that, maggot!

Your choice of class tells people more about yourself than a dating profile, and isn’t lying: Demoknights are here for fun, Medics are truly wonderful people, and if you choose Spy on a team that already has a Spy then you’re an idiot. Multiple updates have given TF2 weapons more personality than every Oscar winner in the last decade, so let’s see what they say about you.

Apart from “I want someone to die by my hand.”

Razorback

YOU ARE: NOT VERY SMART

The Sniper’s secondary weapon says more about personality than a truth serum and a polygraph test, especially when they use the Razorback. The last teammate so short-sightedly selfish was Judas Iscariot. Wearing it says you don’t even care about your own body, never mind your team-mates, and you’re treating the entire multiplayer game as a shooting gallery. And you’re not very good at it, because the Razorback is Not Very Good.

The world’s first reverse “Kick Me” sign - he puts it on his own back to mock everyone else

It defends you from a single backstab attempt, so Spies won’t make a single backstab attempt, and generally items encouraging people to shoot you in the head aren’t a good idea. The warning from being shot in the head is the same as the “warning” from a car bumper hitting your shins at forty miles an hour - it’s already far too late. It takes considerably less time for a revolver to fire a second shot than it takes for you to unzoom, change weapons, turn, and kill someone. Yes, it does sound stupidly obvious when it’s explained. Especially since the Ambassador was designed specifically so that spies could execution-style idiots who think the Razorback makes them invulnerable.

If I could truly explain how good this feels I’d sell my words as narcotics

The only time the Razorback helps is when there are other teammates around to kill people for you, which is the exact opposite of the Sniper’s job, and only happens when the team has been pushed back so far you should have changed classes. And you’re using this instead of Jarate: the most useful combat fluid since gasoline. You can paint entire enemy groups in mini-crits (useful for points, bottlenecks and carts) and tag spies for destruction, helping the Engies who are actually defending the point. Jarate is a better anti-spy solution than killing anyone wearing a tuxedo. The Razorback is an advertisement that your team won’t miss you after enemy Spies don’t either.

Kritzkreig

YOU ARE: TAKING THE PISS

TF2’s handheld dialysis machine, which sounds like a fetish but isn’t

The Kritzkreig might be the funnest piece of videogaming hardware since the joystick, but it’s always and only taking the piss. It’s an ass-kicking multiplier which works both ways: if you’re stomping on the enemy team this will elevate that stomping to gigantic-crushing-from-the-sky Python levels of stomp in the form of crockets, grenades going off like atom bombs and the Harvester of Flesh that is the critted Brass Beast, but if you’re being beaten back every Kritzkrieg is just “Not an Über.” Machines don’t feel crits, and Übercharge is the only way to break the back of Engineering hives.

A bulletproof shield that kills you back

If the enemy team are even remotely competent you’re only taking the piss out of your own.

YOU ARE: GIANT!

This is best gun!

Look at other ridiculous baby guns! Tomislav has no barrel spin sound becaues you are scared of even waking baby enemy team. 20% slower firing speed, reducing damage because you do not want to hurt baby team, because you are baby mother baby, baby who has babies and cuuuuddles them. Natascha says she slows babies? Dead is slowest!

Brass Beast is for real Heavy. Get in position. Use gun. Move to new position for new babies to use gun on.

Mini-sentry

YOU ARE: ATTACKING or STUPID

Let us be very clear: the mini-sentry is one of the greatest and fairest things to happen in the history of superior weapons technology, despite “fair” being the exact opposite of the point of having such technology. The attacking Engy is finally freed from Teleporter maintenance duty, the Star-Trek extra’s version of the 9-to-5 slog (keeping the kit working so other people can do things), and becomes a badass dispenser of death. By dropping a Mini-sentry and running elsewhere with a shotgun or pistol he can fire two guns at once - he’s the TF2 server version of Chow Yun Fat. The attacking Mini-Sentry is cyborg death dealing, man and machine working in perfect synchrony to exterminate the weak fleshlings.

The defending Mini-Sentry is retardation in physical form.

From Left to Right: Great defensive pyro, Idiot, Idiot, Soldier’s best defensive weapon, Medic Hero

No exceptions, no justifications, no excuses. The defending Mini-Sentry is less justifiable than a pregnancy discount on cigarettes. A defending Engy with a Mini-Sentry isn’t an Engy, he’s the ultimate Spy, sent to sabotage any hope of a proper defense, and even pyros can’t kill him.

Wrangled Mini-Sentry

YOU ARE: DEFINITELY STUPID

This should self-destruct Mini-Sentries and disconnect you from the server

This isn’t emotion, this is basic math. A Wrangled Mini-Sentry inflicts 96 Damage Per Second (DPS). A Mini-Sentry and Pistol deal 138 DPS and provide multiple targets, mean they can’t both be wiped out by a single blast, and aren’t an invitation to Spies. Wrangling is a self-destruct system for both Engy and Sentry: the Engineer is by always standing still looking forward, and the Sentry shuts down for three seconds when he’s backstabbed, 2.9 seconds more than Spie need to sap it.

With Valve’s awesome production rate this personality test could come out more frequently than Cosmo, be much more accurate, and may well replace the entire field of psychology. And be much more fun.

What weapons tell you about your opponent, teammates, or yourself? Let us know!

Last week fans wanted “Meet The Medic,” and everyone got TF2 free forever as well. That’s like waking up on Christmas morning to find that not only did Santa bring you that new remote control car, but it’s life-size, legal to drive, and fitted with a warp drive which will take you to the planet of free candy. Valve have given out more free content than the Easter Bunny, and have clearly decided to take mock every other entertainment company in the world as a full-time occupation. While chain stores insist The Running Man still costs $19.99 twenty-four years later, the best class-based shooter in existence is free after only four.

Valve’s interaction with the standard business model

It’s also a graver threat to EA and Activision’s expensive shooters than, well, Activision and EA’s expensive shooters. While they carve vital chunks out of sixty dollar games to sell for even more dollars, every single weapon on TF2 is free. You pay for impatience and choice, not vital gear and guaranteed wins.

The Huntsman was worse than the sniper rifle in every way except fun. Lots of people use it.

Just like every other time a revolution has gifted freedom to the masses, selfish idiots are complaining. But for those of us who aren’t immature lunatics who’ve forgotten that “fun” is a word and that playing with more people gives rise to that, what effects will freedom have on the TF2 community?

I AM THE ÜBERMENSCH!

The assholes were already whining in forum posts (or, with an almost schizophrenic level of anti-fun madness, in teamchat while playing the game) even as Valve’s new horde of TF2 servers spooled up with thousands of new players - not realizing that when there’s a server full of new players, there is a far funner way to take out your rage!

As pictured above: Anger management

The gloriously even playing field of TF2 means that whether you’re were welcoming your new brothers in arms or unleashing hell on the hated Johnny-come-lately-with-a-rocket-launchers, it was the exact same thing: shooting at them! A tide of fodder meant professional players (in that there was an exchange of money for their play) spent days ‘teaching’ the masses the meaning of teamwork. The rising tide of fresh blood meant that while the experts still enjoyed the rewards of their skill, there were enough noobed-up servers for the new players to have fun. The game’s uniquely chunky damage profiles mean new players can be useful without the pixel-perfect shooting skills that make Counter-Strike and Modern Warfare servers so scary for the late starter.

Plenty more play

TF2 has always thrived on invention. With Valve’s incredible support for the modding community (as opposed to the “ban the people who have unapproved fun” approach of other monolithic corporations) there are more maps and modes than a Transforming cartogropher. Cp_steel started as a fan-made map, prophunt remains a joyously insane diversion, even tc_hydro’s glorious experiment in mutable map design is as remembered as it is failed.

The average tc_hydro server population

Maps like cp_circlejerk have always been hard to find, but with a horde of new players all the unlikely options are more likely to be live. No more scanning through lists trying to find a populated plr_hightower server - everything will be active, somewhere, and if it’s not it’ll be easier to find people to play it. That’s how the whole internet functions: an incredible number of people just doing what they feel like, and unlikely combinations turning out to be brilliant.

Appreciating Private Servers

The new players are welcome fresh blood, a tide of new excitement, and oh dear god they are such total idiots. They are mentally defective. If you could wire a lungfish up to a mouse it would still play better than some of the lobotomized wrecks we’ve seen stumbling around public servers over the last weekend.

The one and only time playing Medic is a bad idea

Everything else we said is true: free to play is the future of TF2, and it’s a more glorious future than Jesus returning with the cure to cancer, schematics for a clean fusion reactor, and an announcement that it doesn’t matter which (if any) religion you followed because everyone’s invited. But the short term is still an unending mass of moronic Medics leading the charge with syringe guns, teams of seven spies trying to defend, and attacking cp_steel point E with four engineers and no teleporters. This is when you truly learn who your (Steam) friends are - and huddle with them on private TF2 servers until everyone else evolves to the point of learning how to play.

I watched a Heavy do this for a full minute. Note how the cart and enemy are half a map away, because he didn’t.

In a mere month this will be a forgotten memory which made the awesomeness possible, like the Revolution (apply your country’s favorite revolution here), or all those cavemen who cut their hands really badly on rocks quite a lot before working out fire. But for now, every password-protected server is truly a gloriousRapture - an escape from the moronic masses and full of people shooting at each other.

Where in the world is Adrian Shephard? Chell recently escaped into the surface world (and a thousand fan-fictions), Gordon Freeman’s return is more anticipated than Christ’s because gravity guns are more useful than divine grace, and Alyx Vance has now appeared in more internet fanart than the color purple, but Opposing Force’s marine hasn’t been seen since the G-Man stored him away like a half-eaten lunch. Despite a dozen years on the bench, he has a lot to teach these modern shooting whippersnappers. Starring in one of the best expansion packs ever made gives you authority. Even over men whose sole definition is “Has a gun and uses it.”

For a man with no voice, or face, he has a lot to say

Outsource the Expansequels

Valve make fantastic games because they know when not to do so. They handed Half-Life over to Gearbox Software and told them “Make an expansion pack for that.” Why? Because they were busy upgrading official versions of Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike. Oh, and making Half-Life 2. It turns out that when a company can make breakthrough games, they should make breakthrough games instead of sitting around milking past successes like a nostalgic farmer. So they let someone else make the guaranteed expansion while they got on with revolutionizing the genre.

Which took a very, very long time but was worth it

This may be the most important strategy in gaming development, so it’s a pity that other companies pretend it didn’t happen. Companies like Bungie are rewarded for brilliant games like Halo by being forced to make expansequels forever. Inventive geniuses restricted to “new” games which would barely count as DLC for the original. Protip: when your second sequel’s biggest selling point is five new abilities for the exact same game, that’s barely a new level. But it could be worse: with Modern Warfare Infinity Ward made most incredible war shooter in existence, twice, and got fired, sued, and sued again.

Tough Guys Can Shut Up

Alan Shephard continued the Valve trend of utterly silent protagonists, and it’s brilliant. Bespectacled physicist Gordon Freeman was a reaction against the blood-soaked marine stereotype, Chell keeps quiet because GlaDOS and Wheatley are busy being the best voice-work in any game ever, but Shephard is simply a guy with a gun out to kill things. A marine deployed in a fubared situation full of alien horrors? Back then he couldn’t have been more stereotypical of shooters if he was a bullet.

Nowadays he’d need steroids and a dose of gamma radiation to even count as average

Which made his silence golden. Because we would actually pay gold in order to shut some modern “heroes” up. Halo let its characters speak, and in Halo 3 it ended up literally interrupting the game with stupid annoying bursts of dialogue, reminding you that hey, maybe you as the tough man were meant to save the naked woman held hostage by the bad guys. In case that complicated motivation was beyond your understanding. Gears of War’s Dom redefined whining as more painful than being chainsawed in half, because that part of the game happens in multiplayer, is fun, and doesn’t make you wish for the death of spoken communication.

The head:neck ratio of unity really contributes to his emotional range

Shephard doesn’t feel the need to shout Plot Motivation For Dummies at us. He’s alive, he’s in a base which will change that, so he kills his way out. Done! In fact, anyone who doesn’t get that without the characters explaining it probably shouldn’t be allowed even pretend guns.

Love The Original

We really shouldn’t have to explain this one. Gearbox understood, embraced, and enjoyed everything that was good about the original. Even the changes were those of true fans instead of employed hirelings. They removed the Xen sections, because anyone who played the first game would do that, but included a cheeky corridor long section where you teleport to the horrible alien jumpy-world of infinite enemies, thinking “Damn,” then teleport right back to the complex!

Proof that even the best make mistakes, and First Person Jumping doesn’t work

The other change was one of respect to the Half-Life universe: the ill-fated Race X. Gearbox wanted to add new enemies without messing up the Valve continuity, and it turns out there’s a really easy way to do that in a plot about dimensional rifts. The extra enemies teleported in for a single sequel and were utterly defeated by Mr Shephard. So never mind gamers - Gordon Freeman could learn something from this guy. Thirteen years later and he’s still trying to clean up his own mess.

Then again, the Combine weren’t considerate enough to teleport in between twin emplaced machine gun nests

So let’s hear it for the smartest marine in shooter history. The only one smart enough to find himself in a hellish science-base and decide “I should try to get OUT of here.”

Finding new reasons to want to shoot people in the face gets harder every year. In a world where revenge against everything from family-killers to nightmare corporations has become cliche, developers are forced into stupider definitions of “Extreme self-defense” every year. And while single-player story can be stupid, multiplayer plotting is outright madness. Your only character motivation is “I want to kill those guys.” Forcing story on top of that is like forcing a dog into clothes - some people with great dogs think it’s a good idea despite the results being hideous and usually getting in the way, but every once in a while it turns out awesomely.

This dog looks cooler than you ever will

Some games awesomely integrate story into the shooting. By redefining “integration” as “keeping it the hell out of the way” (warning: only works with videogames, this strategy is pretty much the worst thing ever when applied to people)

1. TF2

Trust us, there’s a story here. (For one thing 2Fort is a masterpiece on the futility of war)

Team Fortress 2 is a masterpiece of multiplayer mechanics and features better writing than most movies. And books. The classic “Red vs Blue” mechanic makes racism okay as long as it’s primarily-colored and removes the need for even the most basic story by wiring into our oldest, most horrible instincts instead: those guys are look different to me so I hate them.

Unreal Tournament 3 took that approach to the next level

Which is why we love Valve, because they gave this color conflict more excellent stories than most real cities full of people. The “Meet The” videos are masterpieces of machinima, the comics give the characters more flesh than the average Gear of War (and that’s more flesh than a herd of cattle), and even the blog is brilliantly in character. All of which is only a side-effect of a universe built around the manliest character since Adam.

He’d have whipped thatsnake to death with its own tail!

2. Brink

Brink took a lot of stick for separating story from the single player campaign, but that’s because it realized something much more important about single player campaign: it’s just a tutorial for multiplayer. It uses exactly the same maps as Brink servers, so as soon as you arrive in multiplayer matches you know exactly what you’re doing, instead of being shot in the head repeatedly as you learn the map like the world’s most suicidal explorer. As a bonus, it means you don’t have to stop in the middle of the action for a voice actor to read badly scripted dialog for the thirtieth time.

Can’t talk, killing.

Safely isolated in loading screens and text files (for the sort of person who likes it) is one of the best FPS stories ever written. Starting the game you choose between the forces of law and order or a group of rebels resisting oppression, and for the first time in videogaming history the people who want to smash the system really are terrorist scumbags. At last! It turns out that a group whose strategies consist of shooting people and setting fire to things aren’t very nice , while the police officers really are trying to save humanity’s last remnants.

SPOILERS:
Playing through either plot quickly reveals that the “rebels” are into biological weapons, tower-collapsing terrorism (the most infamous kind of terrorism), and the final What-If? mission reveals that their attempts to ’save’ the Ark with the outside world would lead to its merciless and literal cannibalization by an endless horde of savages. After thousands of games where wining teens connected to a computer system, an electrical system and able to afford both because of an economic system whining about “smashing the system”, we finally find a world where the forces of law and justice aren’t slightly-differently-uniformed Nazis.

END SPOILERS

3. Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 did an incredible number of things wrong, like looking at Modern Warfare servers - some of the finest shooting ever committed on silicon - and deciding “Nope, we don’t want any of that.” They screwed over the players, and just to show they weren’t biased they screwed over their developers too - pretty much the only people who benefited from MW2 were lawyers and accountants. And a few rogue writers who snuck in to be brilliant during the madness!

Modern Warfare 2’s story was amazing. It was a gloriously lunatic piece of apocalyptic soap opera masquerading as a serious story, proving that just because you’re using realistic graphics and realistic guns and real countries it doesn’t mean your story has to be in the same universe as reality.

Take this, verisimilitude!

Long dead characters turning up in the literal last place on Earth anyone would look, backstabbing each other with nuclear warheads, triple-crossers jumping out of helicopters - it was like someone crossed the set of Home and Away with a military supply base. It was wonderfully, joyously insane and a high-detail rendering of a middle finger to the current plague of ultra-grittiness, while pretending to be exactly that.

PC pistols don’t stand for Politically Correct whining weapons, assuring their targets that they would have projected fair-trade chunks of lead through them no matter what race they were (despite the fact they’re now all Russian.) While console games like Halo need aim-assisted assault rifles to even glance a moving enemy, the pistol has been the workhorse of the mouse-marksman since the first nazi was shot in the face.

The last Nazi was also shot in the face. Several hundred times!

We pay tribute to the best of those handguns which have saved our pretend lives thousands of times, by ending millions of others.

5. Glock 17 (Half Life, Half Life 2)

The Half-Life series has unusual casting for a first-person shooter. Its first person is a silent scientist instead of a linebacker who thinks he’s a stand-up comic, and its most famous weapons don’t actually shoot. The gravity gun can throw everything except bullets, while the original’s crowbar remains a symbol of PC gaming. And a reminder of the horror we felt in 1998 when an army of Doom players booted up Half Life and realized “My god, they’re really making me start this game without a gun!”

Which is why the Glock is such a relief.

Oh god yes, a weapon which doesn’t require me to be right next to them, WHICH WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED TO BE

There’s a rush of genuinely psychotic pleasure when you pick up the gun, and the distinctive clickety-click-clack equipment sound is probably Gordon buckling it to his wrist with five separate straps so he’ll never be without a gun again. It’s ridiculously useful due to having far more range than the enemies (despite the alien’s entire deal being “Able to hit you from another dimension”) and because it uses the machine gun’s ammo it’ll never run it.

4. Dual Pistols (Strangehold)

The only cyborg item on this list, because twinned pistols are a more essential part of Chow Yun Fat than his hands (and he uses them more often.) The criminally underappreciated Strangehold wrote action-movie logic into the game engine and the pistols’ mechanics, because they don’t need to be reloaded unless it looks cool.

If he has a hundred bullets left, they’re fed down his arms and straight into the guns because reloading would mean not shooting. He only reloads when you trigger the “Barrage” special move which makes them even faster and more powerful. This is a game where the main character not shooting for a second means you’re really dead.

This game loves guns so much a one-on-one standoff becomes a pistol threesome

3. USP (Call of Duty 4)

The pistol mechanic in Modern Warfare was so vital (as in “to do with staying alive”) that they included it in the tutorial. The game’s realism extended to reload times, with some guns so slow it would be quicker to build a new weapon around a fresh ammo pack. Which, in the case of the RPD, seems to be what you’re doing.

Stop the war, I’ll be ready in a minute!

This is the first game where the weapon switch is more than reload. It needs to be right next to grenades under your thumb, and if it isn’t, buy a mouse with more buttons. Spinning the scroll-wheel on a CoD serverwhen your gun’s empty is like defending yourself from a tiger by knitting a distraction. It also gives that wonderfully psychopathic feel of emptying your gun at someone, then switching weapons, then emptying that one too.

The USP wins over the Desert Eagle because it’s still pointing at the same hemisphere after five shots.

2. Lugermorph (TF2)

Team Fortress 2’s pistol is one of the most satisfying weapons, despite technically being the only 3rd-rank firearm in the game (it’s the Engy’s secondary weapon, and his primary is other people’s secondary.) It isn’t fun because of its damage, or craziness, or murderous efficiency, but because whenever you’re using it you really, really want that guy dead. Either a Scout finishing off a scattergunned enemy, or picking of a sentry gun, or an Engy chasing down that expletive-hatefulword-ed Spy who’s trying to get away: no weapon has been so charged with psychic hatred outside of Dungeons and Dragons.

And the Lugermorph makes it even cooler.

A cute little thing held by an angry little thing

TF2 with Sam & Max is a more impossible combination of awesome than ice cream and napalm, and even more lethal. If you’d told someone you could win an electronic gun from a comic character twenty years ago, you’d have been locked up. And awesomely right!

1. Deagle (Counter-Strike)

A fan-made buffet of death

The deagle is the most lethal thing up to and including old-age, which can only kill something once. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful guns even in the real world, and that fact is one of the few nasty realities about guns that makes it into videogames. While the Modern Warfare version recoils like an 18th century cannon which just saw goatse, the CS version could drop Superman.

Metacritic is democracy applied to reviews, which is like trampolining applied to brain surgery. Democracy works for society by relying on how people are generally stupid, which is bad, but kings and tyrants can be very specifically and psychopathically stupid, which is worse. Metacritic’s crowdsourcing strategy replaces professionals crafting thousand word reviews with a thousand idiots who can spell about one word each. It works about as well as you’d expect.

Another problem is the 10-point scale, which has been more devalued than the Confederate dollar. Never mind the reviewer’s paradox of needing to assign numbers to vague qualities - this is Metacritic - it has a way simpler and stupider problem. The angry masses simplify it 10 or 0 for “I liked it or I didn’t”, reducing an already ridiculously basic system to binary because they genuinely can’t handle something as complicated as counting their own fingers. And they flip that switch to zero for the stupidest reasons. The most recent and retarded example is the votebombing of Portal 2, scores of users driving the score down by submitting zeroes, because they’ve decided they hate it because of the cosmetic, optional downloadable content (DLC).

Behold the adorable subject of their rage!

DLC is a contentious subject. At first glance it should be perfect: gamers get more game, the makers get more money, and everyone is happy and profitable forever. The problem is when developers punish people for not paying enough, either by carving chunks off the original game to be sold for more money later (the dreaded “Day one DLC”), or bribing players by offering unique items for cash - giving everyone the choice of being an idiot playing as an underpowered character, or an idiot who paid twice.

They key to good DLC is that it should improve the game without making things worse for those who don’t buy it. TF2’s shop is a good example, because anything you can buy can also be found for free. Portal 2’s DLC is an even more harmless example because it’s clothing for videogame robots.

Let there be no mistake: spending five dollars on a paint job for your robot is dumber than just setting the note on fire, but it doesn’t hurt anyone other than yourself. It couldn’t have less effect on anything if it was homeopathic unicorn medicine, and it’s triggered more internet outrage than several real civil wars.

It’s more ridiculously overprivileged whining than Gadaffi complaining about NATO interrupting his holidays, except Gadaffi actually achieved something first. Unlike most of Metacritics commenters, who are by definition people who think others should listen to them despite not holding any position or experience which would cause that. Early Portal 2 scores were driven down as far as 5.2. Nintendogs + Cats 3DS scored 7.1, and it’s a hardware test designed to check the 3DS can survive suction vacuums.

136% as much game as Portal 2, according to people who expect you to listen to them

Luckily idiots are just as ineffective here as in every other aspect of their lives, and Portal 2 has been restored to 9.5 score, but check out the reviews:

You’ll notice that the critics are all agreed, while 10% of all users self-identify as hateful idiots. I don’t know what it takes to see over a thousand positive reviews and think “NOW is the time for me to blow this out of the water!”, and neither do you because you’ve read several hundred words to get this far. And are thus intellectually overqualified to understand these people. Most of the negative reviews don’t even have comments, because clicking on zero is both a metaphor for the reviewbomber’s life and exactly as much effort as they’re prepared to expend.

The written negative reviews are an split between idiotic complaining about the DLCs existence, countered by complaints that the DLC doesn’t do enough, with the remainder by mandatory “I am SO SMART I don’t think this game is very good, ack-chew-all-ee! Fear my genius brain!” And all they manage to prove is that you might as well get videogame advice from your horoscope, because at least those idiots don’t include misspelled swear words.

With the entire gaming internet gearing up for Portal 2, aka “We’re ready for it to be one of the best games ever this time,” what better time to celebrate the original? And what better way to celebrate than by blowing up your friends? Euginio “Motanum” Roman combines the ultimate in physics and class-based combat games with a King Of The Hill Aperture Science map for Team Fortress 2. And It is beautiful.

The Portal Gun, Cubes, and the Capture Point - what more could you want?

Valve have awesomely set up a stamp system to pay map-makers for their efforts, because when fans give you something like cp_steel you either make it worth their while or are an idiot. This means there are more level-editors out loose than at Nintendo headquarters, every one of them working to build something fun for the rest of us, which is why we want to offer some advice. And since Motanum’s is the coolest TF2 map idea since Coldfront we’re going to use it as the example.

1. Love Is The Key

That might sound like a hippy lesson for a game full by rocket launchers, but FPS map-making should be called SPF - that’s how exactly it’s the reverse of playing. You need patience and careful, considerate work for a delayed reward. That couldn’t be more opposed to shooting games than Jack Thompson. Mr Motanum clearly adores the idea of a Portal-themed TF2 map, just as anyone sane and into shooting games should, and the detailing really shows it.

For a busy psychopath she spends a lot of time just hanging around

2. Theme First, Map Second

A clear concept is crucial to survive the months of Hammer Time (which is a lot less fun when you realize Hammer is 3D map-making tool instead of a gold-panted 80s sensation). Going in and thinking “this, no wait, that” as you try to make it work leaves you tweaking pointless chambers for hours before abandoning the project in frustration. A clear vision will lead your followers to the promised land, whether you’re a map-maker or a messiah, and an Aperture science battleground is a vision you’d follow to your death. Death about twice a minute if you’re playing King of the Hill correctly!

3. Asymmetry is Fun

Fairness doesn’t exist in the real world, so it’s pretty hard to implement in worlds where everyone has several guns and is encouraged to use them as much as possible. The usual result is the “mirror map”, where red and blue sides of the map look exactly the same but with differently colored highlights. Like modern female pop singers, and about as deep.

Voluntarily leaving the beautiful outdoors to die in Aperture Labs. Proving that the Scout is smart-assed but not smart

4. Asymmetry is Hard

The other reason for simple symmetry is how asymmetric maps are really hard to balance. As you might expect. That’s unfortunately the case here, with the map descending from BLU’s invading helipad to RED’s underground security room. Which sounds fun, but the problem is that if BLU push past the central point they’ve got RED bottled up at the bottom of steep, narrow stairs. RED would have more chance of escaping from a black hole.

5. New Ideas Need To Do More Than One Thing

We’re not saying that blindly teleporting into a battlefield is without probelms

Motanum cunningly includes portals in the map (instant teleporters at fixed locations), and uses the distinctive hydraulic stairs and shimmer shields of Aperture science to open up alternate routes effect. Control consoles in different parts of the map can open these pathways, but there’s only one of each, and they can only be turned on, and they’re essential the team is to have any chance. Which means a scout dashes off to each at the start of every map. This makes them less “fun interactive elements” and more “annoying chores.” The key is if there’s anything a team has to do every time apart from winning the game, it’s not as fun as you think it is.

6. Graphical Gimmicks

There’s as similar problem with the breaking glass panels. They might be fun the first time, but they’ll never not be shattered - and they’ll never not cause lag. Any Mirror’s Edge survivor will tell you that breaking glass slows you down more than actually being shot, and multiplayer games simply can’t afford such processor-intensive luxuries. You could only guarantee slowdown more if you yanked out the network cable entirely.

7. One-hit kills.

Skill free one-hit kills are never, ever fun. An unwelcome visitor from GlaDOS’s domain are the energy balls bouncing around the central control point, killing anything they touch (and not stopping - so they could take out an entire team in one pass.)

The sniper and spy can take players out but that’s aimed, cp_well’s trains are rare and give heavy warning - they’re more a temporary barrier than a death threat - but these energy spheres are always on and give very little audio warning.

The end result? A fun map, and a beautiful idea, let down by some basic play-issues that are very easy to miss when you’re buried deep in a level editor instead of the action. We look forward to Motanum’s next effort, hope we’ve helped a few budding designers, and look forward to loading our servers with all the results.