Gamers dressing up as the gamees is a tradition dating back as far as disposable income, but what about the characters themselves? Can they cackle in costumes for all hallows eve? Since we don’t waste opening paragraphs around here, the answer is “Yes”, and we look at seven skins to spice up your servers:

1. The Creepy Counter-Strike Skull

Counter-Strike servers are already stuffed with Skullz and Killaz [sic], usually embedded in usernames between clan tags and half the number row’s symbols. Modder “Laca” enables the anti-terrorists to become even scarier than “someone with an assault rifle out to kill you” by skulling things up under the creepily human eyes.

2. Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Those playing on Medal of Honor servers shouldn’t suffer because of the age or authenticity of their game - so “Vdog777” has built an in-character costume, and is far better at 3D modeling than coming up with a name. The French resistance fighter adds another option when you’re dressing to impress (and shoot several times in the head) those fashionable Nazi chappies.

3. Team Fortress Halloween

Halloween costumes are something fun and awesome, so of course Valve are involved. We’re only talking about this because we enjoy it, anyway, as anyone on any TF2 server has already enjoyed the new koth_harvest_event map, exploding pumpkins, brand-new hats (to pile on top of all the other awesome headgear), and the incomparable ghost costume of Zepheniah Mann.

PS We love our Gibuses, though proper grammer sometimes makes for odd pronunciation.

4. The Classic Spy

Just because you’re ten years behind the times doesn’t mean you can’t dress up - though it can mean you wish you were more advanced. That’s the lesson behind the awkwardly-named |WS|*Nikon’s smooth spy skin, disguising a Team Fortress Classic server’s Spy as: a TF2 spy!

5. The Red vs Blue Crysis

In the most insanely complicated meta disguise outside of Major Smith in Where Eagles Dare, “not so l337” lets Crysis commandos disguise themselves as the staff from Red vs Blue, who in turn are played by Spartans, from Halo. It would be impossible to add more layers to a costume without forming a human pyramid or dressing up as a double-decker bus.

6. Day of Metal Gear Defeat

Dr. Cloud understands exactly how to guarantee an Allied success on Day of Defeat servers: staff the side of the angels with an endless army of Solid Snake clones. With the Axis forces represented by far inferior GRU cannon fodder it’s quite likely the sheer psychological pressure will force them to fold (despite their advantage in heavy machine guns).

7. Left 4 Dead

The most popular costumes over the last week come from the Left 4 Dead pre-order exclusive demo, with our four favorite survivors sporting spanking new skins.

Bill: Everyone’s favorite armed uncle-figure swaps Vietnam flashbacks for a love of candy, and an incredibly convincing Coach fatsuit.
Zoey: The apocalypse’s only female pulls an incredible double reverse-Michael-Jackson, both turning from white to black AND staying alive to play Rochelle.
Louis: The hard-working everyman goes even further than Zoey to become Elllis’s engineering Suthan bo-ay.
Francis: Why hate everything at random, when Nick can hate and distrust everything as a scumbag conman?

The best bit? Game servers can be dressed up every day of the year!

In the most perfectly-suited delivery since the Rascal Scooters came in chocolate-flavored crates,  the Spy backstabbed the Sniper Update mid-week - before his own “Meet The Spy” intel was stolen and leaked over the internet.  Okay, it was accidentally released by Valve - but stolen sounds so much Spy-ier, doesn’t it?

What does the Spy Update mean for players?  Every update has created a temporary ecology on TF2 servers, a surge in the updated class and new predators designed to hunt them.  The medic update was a feast for backstabbers, while the Scout update gave every Engineer ever about a million kills.  While the Sniper update will do nothing but increase the average TF2 server from “Too many Snipers” to “Far too many bloody Snipers,” the Spy’s new toys have the potential to permanently alter the game.

1.  The Dead Ringer

This cloak-alternate does what Valve do best, taking half-broken ideas from Team Fortress Classic and making them playable.  The original “feign death” option was useless, only ensuring that everyone wasted time shooting corpses like there was a Zombie uprising scheduled that evening.  This timepiece instead creates an corpse, as well as proving you can get away with puns this terrible if you’re awesome enough at everything else.  (For more terrible pun proof, see: “Every TF2 Achievement List.”)

Expect a temporary massive increase in speculative fire, as seeing a Spy drop dead - previously the most satisfying sight in the game - is no longer a guarantee.  Pyros will be more useful than ever (assuming Valve don’t do anything idiotic like creating a fully ghost-like immune cloak).  The corpsewatch might need some tuning: they say it creates a clone on your first non-lethal hit, but everyone needs at least a few strikes to bring down a spy.  As it is people will learn to distinguish between a Dead Ringer and a Dead Real-one.

2.  The Cloak & Dagger

An excellent alternate.  The Dead Ringer might be a gimmick, but between this and the classic cloak there are two very different styles of play.  Recharging your shield by standing still means every moment is espionage action, the skill staying in the right spot while your cloak comes back - masterful missions all the way to the enemy spawn are now possible.

The standard cloak can still compete with it’s metal collection - every good spy has at least one incredible run through a warzone, scooping up enemy weapons to burst through to the objective.  This route will be faster than the C & D’s, but riskier, as the ammunition crates you need to keep cloaked are high-traffic areas.  While backstabbing someone then using their weapon is priceless.

3.  The Sliding Sap?

If that just looks like a low-resolution cap, you aren’t an Engineer.  That’s the moment every hard-hatter online screamed, seeing the Spy slide a sapper to destroy a Sentry Gun remotely: otherwise known as “One More Reason Engineers Are Boned.”  It may just be a slick cinema trick, but Valve have shown off incoming upgrades in videos before (the Flare Gun in the “Meet The Sniper” video, and watch the “Meet The Spy” video again - you’ll notice some different looking hats and helmets around the place).

Even standing by the building, Spys are an even match against a single Engy.  If they can remotely sap the hardware before getting close the repairing Engy will be a sitting duck for the mother of all backstabs - and when the long-suffering constructor goes down, his buildings will follow him to Engineering Valhalla moments afterwards.

Update anticipation is a much more exciting sport since the Scout Update, when Valve proved that yes, they can get things totally wrong.  But they’re still awesome, they always fix things, and we’ll be waiting with bated breath to see what really happens.

Well, bated breath and a butterfly knife.

Gentlemen.

The great thing about the internet is that you’re never alone. Whether you want to return to the gold standard, have inappropriate relations with Sonic the Hedgehog, or even think Valve get things wrong you can always find others who’ll agree.Every day hundreds people party like it’s 1999 by blowing  each other to pieces on Team Fortress Classic servers, Valve’s early-days version of the popular Quake mod. Whether you’re a hardcore yesteryearer, or just want to run with the Tyrannosaurs for a while, there are some vital differences between TFC and TF2 servers.  Literally vital, “the difference between life and death” vital.

Heavy Weapons are ALWAYS fun

1. Grenades

Grenades are a very personal issue on TFC servers. Ask a fan and they’re a vital and varied part of the strategy, a cruel omission from Valve’s simpleton sequel. Ask opponents and they’ll tell you they’re the most hideously unbalanced idiocy since Baron Von Zoo-meister put two hippos on one side of a seesaw and an endangered hummingbird on the other.

Not pictured: Grenades you can actually use.

Either way, anything which lets an Engineer one-hit a Heavy is something you need to know about. With two types of grenade per player, make sure to try them all out – from the utterly ignorable nailbomb (you’d take more damage from a dead scout) to the awesome power of the EMP there are a wide range of effects. Redefine your keys to put the grenades right next to your home row, or man up and get yourself a real gaming mouse – the number keys are a whole centimeter away, and in a game with snipers you don’t have that kind of time.

2. Status Effects

TF2 servers only offer three statuses: “I’m fine”, “I hate the Sandman” and “I am totally un-fine, on fire, and hammering the medic key like it dispensed thousand dollar bills.” On any classic server you can suffer any number of other statii, including concussion blasts (wobbling your screen), plague (wobbling your screen and turning it green) and the intensely annoying caltrops, which drop your speed and your screen will probably wobble a bit as you get blown to pieces. Technically Natasha can cut your speed on the modern battlefield, but since nobody who can aim uses that stupid damage-reduced gun it doesn’t matter much.

Many of the status effects are delivered by grenade (which is why so many miss them so much), and betray TFC’s roots as a mod: “Effects which interfere with your ability to actually play” are pretty much page one in the “Stuff not to do” game design manual.

3. Bots

You’ll see bots all over the TFC servers, making up the numbers when the dedicated but small fanbase aren’t online. Many new players have spent hours thinking they’re natural masters of Warpath, never noticing that everyone else was silent, had a ping of zero, and had a lemming-like tendency to run into sentry guns four hundred times in a row.

TF2 doesn’t have bots because once we can program computers to play TF2 intelligently (without making them ballistic-supercomputer demomen, anyway) we’ll be a little too busy defending bunkers of woman and children from rampaging T800’s to play videogames. On the upside, the conflict will be far more realistic - but we’ll only get one life and the match will be ludicrously unbalanced.

4. Class Critical Abilities

Team Fortress Classic adds some abilities which are less “cunning interplay of function and fun” and more “what else can we make this one do?” This is why you’ll spend half your first game esc-ing out of the action after death to redefine the command list and/or find out how to make your guy do your-guy-type stuff. The best example of this is the Demoman’s detpack, which can wipe out everyone in a room - as long as they agree to stand back let him set it, then rush in during the small window before it goes off. For those not playing against suicidal enemies it’s not quite so useful (especially when the scout can defuse the detpack by touching it).

The main use of the detpack is clearing alternate routes on maps like Well, but in practice it just means someone goes demoman for exactly one life, clears the route, then gets back to what they want to be.  Usually after another player spends ten solid minutes whining about how somebody should clear the route but refusing to do it themselves.

Armed with this info you can mount an expedition into the mists of time, landing in the lost world of Team Fortress Classic. Because underneath the flaws it’s still one of the most important shooters in the history of the genre. If it convinced Valve to spend eight years developing a worthy sequel, can you really say it isn’t worth a few minutes of your time?

Shipment, aka “The lunatic flesh blender in green and gray.” It looks like this:




though you’ll more often see it as this:




The worst map since a sheet of blank white paper with the word “Antarctica” written in crayon. How this abomination has stayed on CoD4 servers is a mystery, but likely connected to people who somehow feel good about skill-free high scores. For those unfamiliar the Small Square of Screwup, we’ve made the following helpful guide.

Shipment is to Call of Duty 4 as a bar-room brawl is to ice hockey - it may use some of the skills involved, but they’re all the bad ones and it’s nothing but pain for everyone involved. It’s as if after years of crafting one of of the best FPS games ever made, it was “opposite day” at Infinity Ward and they made a map to highlight every single flaw in the experience. The crates are unquestionably placed to provide sheltered niches for spawncampers, those bottom-feeding scum that hide behind your arrival point and machine gun people as they appear. Please not that the only reason spawncampers still exist is because we haven’t worked out a way to electrocute people over the internet yet.

The Containeryard of Crap also accommodates the game-ruining sports of the Three Frag Fling (using the 3x frag perk and throwing them all as soon as you appear) and the ever-terrible Martyr (drop a grenade when you die). You might notice that both of those perks reward people who don’t bother to “aim” or “hit things they’re shooting at”, traditionally regarded as important abilities in a shooting game. Imagine a basketball court that encourages people to hit each other and kick the ball. And where every match lasts three seconds.

The lack of cover and a target density slightly higher than lead bars falling into a black hole, Shipment is also the worst offender in the “Helicopter-helicopter-helicopter” loophole. If someone can stay alive long enough to call down the Chopper of Death (through luck, pacts with the devil, or being a scummy spawncamper), the high turnover of the map ensures that they’ll die, respawn, and have enough airborne murder-machine kills to call down another - certainly no-one can risk taking their eyes off the ground long enough to bring the thing down.

Some insist that Shipment is just a different but equally valid test of ability. Their grenade-spamming-”skill” may give them more points than anyone else, but this preference for “winning” over “the entire actual spirit of the game” makes them the kind of petty failure who’d knock over a Monopoly board, storm out of the room, and then insist they didn’t lose “because we never finished.”

If you do arrive on a Call of Duty 4 server running the Green Death, your best bet is to whip out the SAW and get all those LMG achievements: bullet-unproof walls and a crosshair that changes when you’re killing someone turns this 2007 gaming masterpiece into a child’s motor skills game - keep moving the cross till it changes shape and you win!

Except you’re playing Shipment. So you, along with everyone else on the map, lose.

Goldrush is the most popular map on Team Fortress 2 servers (recent update insanity aside), even pushing the almighty Dustbowl from the top spot. What makes moving a cart along a fixed track so compelling?



It can’t be the novelty - that fades a couple of weeks after each update, along with all the horrible TF2 achievementbox servers (aka “How to turn your favorite game into work in one easy step!”). As well as being added to the main rotation, loads of custom servers have cropped up offering Goldrush 24/7 and most tellingly of all, Goldrush/Dust TF2 servers.

That’s your first hint: the dedicated attack/defense dynamic is tremendous fun. There’s no such thing as a stalemate on a one-way map: if things aren’t moving forward then RED is kicking your weak BLU ass. But with a map so well designed it never becomes an uncrackable Chokepoint Of Death: there are always alternate routes and counter-strategies to however they’re holding you back. Protip: 90% of the time the counter strategy is “You need more medics you BLU dumbasses”. Looking at the win/lose ratio, we can see that this happens a LOT.

Why does RED hold sway on this map so often? Half of any battle is intel, and a look at the valve-provided “Death Map” for the stage reveals a major hotspot:

or as you normally see it:

This one section of corridor is slightly more lethal than a Predator wearing a necklace of nuclear warheads. A great stickybomb point, open to close-range sentries (and snipers from clear across the map), a Heavy buffet of Eety-Beety-victims and so wonderfully custom made for defensive pyros it might as well come with gas nozzles in the walls.

BLU can hide behing the corner and build an uber - but they never do seem to run fast enough when the RED counter-charge comes barreling round that wooden corner. I’ve seen more medics burned up at 90% uber than I care to count - and with so many medikits so close by, there’s really no excuse. Be ready to charge, but be ready to flee with that precious percentage at the first sign of trouble. Remember: a medic life without an ubercharge is a wasted life.

There are other hot spots (the final approach in stage 2 and the terminal corner in stage 3), but none nearly so deadly as that first tunnel. A few hints to help crack any of those hotspots:

- There are other routes. Outside of relay races, spending ten times as long running as fighting is not a good contribution, so don’t just march round the Corner of Instant Explosion trying to headbutt a level 3 sentry.
- Watch your back - and more importantly, watch your medics back! Some of the alternate routes work both ways.
- Are you a spy? Are you in the bottom half of the scoreboard? Then why not try going medic and NOT being hated by the rest of your team!
- If you must spy, be aware that after the first point is capped sapping the tele entrances does nothing but tell them you’re there.
- Don’t be an offensive scout on stage 1. What the hell is wrong with you?