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.”

Games need sequels. Complaining about the exploitation of a franchise is like complaining about the eating of cake. Whiners imagine a utopian world where developers aren’t concerned with money, but in a world where you don’t have to pay for things we’d be too busy jetpack-trampolining (followed by extreme fire-extinguishing of the burning trampolines) to sit with a controller.

When designers and marketers work together properly they can make a lot of money: the designers make a bog-standard polygon platformer, the marketers make sure some of those polygons are huge on the characters chest; the designers add a few items to a repetitive shooter, the marketers make sure the box still says HALO in big easy-to-read letters. As you can see, problems start when the marketers entirely the designers’ ideas with “We don’t care if you’ve thought of anything new, we have a shareholder meeting in June.”

That’s why we’re setting up the Sequel Seal Of Quality.

We think we’ve captured the motivation for making sequels rather well

Like Nintendo’s original, it’s not a review of whether the game’s any good, just if the sequel had another reason to exist beyond “More Easy Money.” Obviously that too, but did anyone expend the least effort beyond building an extension to their money pool? Or did they just ctrl-v the code and hire a few extra strippers to throw dollar bills in the air? To explain the system we’ll look at some examples.

Team Fortress 2

Such an obvious choice that most players think of the 2 as part of the title, like Left 4 Dead, instead of a sequel. TF2 is everything sequels should be - hell, it’s everything evolution should be, improving so massively on the original that if there’s ever a Team Fortress 3 it’ll have cure cancer not just while but by causing world peace to be worthy.

The funnest food chain in gaming

Team Fortress was a truly inspired Quake modification, upgraded by Valve into Team Fortress Classic, but both were like watching drunken Sumo wrestlers: great fun but massively unbalanced.

Back in my day we charged over the 2Fort bridge to our deaths without a roof over our heads!

TF2 took everything that was good about the original and utterly rebuilt it. The Six Million Dollar man wasn’t as thoroughly improved as this game, and didn’t have as many fans. It also mocks the sequel strategies of every other shooter, as free updates add more maps and equipment than most other franchises do in entire sequels. The Scout alone has received more new items than Master Chief did in three games.

Bioshock 2

Bioshock is the ultimate example of why the marketers have to be kept out of the game design process, or any other place where you need creativity beyond imagining building forts out of gold bricks. The first game revealed that you were the scripted plaything of your designers, a masterful parallel of the gaming experience, while the second revealed you the plaything of the marketers, which feels more like being mugged.

This image really does sum up the effort put into the sequel

The sequel played like the accountants had broken into the computer room one night and thrown something together before the real dev team arrived in the morning. Bioshock 2 re-used more art than Andy Warhol but without the same level interactivity, and Warhol made non-interactive things, and is dead. Returning to the same city to fight the same monsters was bad, but repeating the exact same delaying missions like finding a fire plasmid to melt your way through a frozen door feels like being mugged. The only difference between that and a stranger in a dark alley is that the latter uses a blunt object to damage your memories and doesn’t act like he’s doing you a favor.

“Would you kindly give us more money for nothing?”

Dragon Age II

We hate to admit it but this had a very clear sequel motivation. It’s just unfortunate that motivation was “Hack off every single part of the great original that doesn’t fit the mainstream console market, and hope people still buy what’s left.” As with the Nintendo original, our Seal doesn’t say it’s a good thing. The only thing in this world that get stronger when you remove chunks of them is Ashley J Williams. And he’s not in it (though he has turned up in a medieval setting in the third part of a trilogy once before, and it was awesome. Just sayin’.)

Crackdown 2

It’s clear that the Crackdown weren’t expecting a sequel, what with the small team, having to include a Halo 3 beta key to get people to buy it, and the twist ending. What was clearer was that they still weren’t ready to make a sequel even when they did it. Crackdown 2 wasn’t just a bad sequel: if it had been sent back in time four years and shown off as a demo of the original it would have been the videogame equivalent of shooting its own grandfather.

This not being fun isn’t just disappointing, it’s downright blasphemous

The game took three years to make but felt like it was written in negative six months, a broken beta with every single good thing about the game stripped out. The shining Pacific City was literally ruined and re-rendered in grey and brown. “Gritty, detailed grey and brown like every other boringly-realistic game?” the designers must have asked, surprised at themselves for saying something that stupid hopefully. “Nope. Boring grey and shit-brown in the cartoon engine.” And including an unskippable tutorial in a game whose whole point is “Sequel to something everybody played” was a really nice touch, Satan. When your motivation is “make it different from that thing that worked really well” don’t be surprise when the result is terrible.

Grenades! The exclamation mark is part of the proper spelling, because no noun has ever deserved one as much. This single usually-shouted word contains more warnings about the fragility of life, the urgent need for immediate action, pure excitement and sheer explosive force than ten self-help books and a thousand philosophy courses. It’s also much more useful, whether you’re faced with zombies or just trying not to waste your damn time in general. They’ve been essential part of blowing things up for centuries. Ever since man first thought “I really want to kill all those guys but they know that and won’t let me come over.”

They lead to far more arguments online than in the real world, because a real grenade’s entire function is to render the target incapable of discussion. We’ve looked over some of the most popular first person shooters to see how they deal with this most urgent of action-items.

Halo

Halo revolutionized first person shooting with three things. The first was the beautiful Warthog.

The first time suspension was sexier than suspenders.

The second was making grenades effective, which sounds like making steak delicious but had been screwed up by every other game in history. Even the incredible GoldenEye (which you can now replay on Half–Life servers!) included grenades as one of the regular weapons. Which was the problem. It meant you had to cycle through the weapons to get them and a situation where you have time to idly flick through your armory is the exact opposite of the time you need a grenade. Halo servers attached grenades two an always–on button, and – along with the regenerative shield – revolutionized console shooting combat forever.

Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 embraced grenades like a noble soldier in a crowded trench, and did far better out of the deal. It certainly lasted longer. Modern Warfare’s emphasis on realism unfortunately includes how grenades are utterly, utterly lethal. Every CoD expert has inbuilt reactions because of them – if you want to kill a Modern Warfare player, just sneak up behind them on the sidewalk and make that “tinkling” noise. They’ll automatically sprint into traffic.

Counter–Strike

The most contentious because Counter–Strike servers are the most popular, the most competitive, and more unlikely to change than Commandments carved in solid diamond and frozen in Carbonite.

Camper

The problem is that CS uses status–changing grenades, the annoying smoke and the appallingly annoying flashbang. It may be a real tool used against terrorists but that’s because we hate terrorists and don’t want them to have fun. Blindness breaks one of the fundamental rules of fun game design: removing control from the player and/or scrambling their input so their ability makes no difference.

Not fun, especially when you know there’s someone trying to shoot you in the head.

Team Fortress Classic

The genesis of truly classic class–based combat. The makers of Team Fortress Classic knew that variety was the spice of life. Unfortunately they didn’t know that “making up a bunch of different things” is to “game design” as “blowing up a quarry” is to “constructing a building.” Team Fortress Classic servers are fun, but about as balanced as Muhammad Ali versus Tom Thumb on a seesaw.

Worse interpersonal relationships than a Tila Tequila show

The grenades are a greater collection of flaws and cliches than American Idol auditions. The concussion and plague grenades annoy the target more than outright death, which at least doesn’t scramble their controls, while the worst offender is the Engineer’s EMP grenade. The damage done is proportional to the metal carried by the target, which sounds cool and involved the very first time you see it. The second time you realise “Doesn’t that mean Engies could one–hit kill Heavies at long range from any direction? And isn’t that more broken than Atlantis’s levees?”

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is the greatest upgrade in history. They took all the potential of TFC and made it actually happen, and the most important part was taking out all the unbalanced grenades…

… and turning them into part of the Dustbowl ecosystem.

A psychocycloptic part

The Demoman means all the great grenade tactics still work – indirect fire, anticipating enemy paths, targeting groups – without breaking the balance because the Demoman has a longer reload time and less close–range combat skill than a pregnant woman. Which doesn’t stop idiots who think “Charge forward screaming” is an acceptable tactic from complaining that he’s too powerful.

Left 4 Dead

You could discover a call–center full of Neo Nazis and it still wouldn’t be a more perfect place for grenades than a Left 4 Dead server. Most of the thrown weapons on L4D servers aren’t regular grenades, with the bile jar and the brilliantly Tankicidal molotov, but sometimes nothing but a beeping cylinder of explosive pipe–bomb death will do.

Explosive ex-zombie excellence

It’s also the most perfect world for these grenade-a-likes: huge hordes of enemies swarming without tactics, you need to blow a hole and advance instead of killing everything, and in a reversal of the real world your enemies are attracted to the noise explosives make.

User-created content is a complicated subject, with all manner of issues like profitability, piracy, distribution rights, liability, and various other words which are the exact opposite of fun.

Which is why we’ve broken it all down into one simple question:

It’s purely a question of corporate attitude, and any “issues” raised by that company are excuses because their corporate attitude is one that says “suckers” instead of “players”. Modifications are indisputably a good thing for gaming. The question of whether mods actually add anything to the player experience hasn’t just been answered, it’s been so answered it now reveals anyone who even asks it as either a non-gamer or a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. And at least the latter has an excuse for not knowing what they’re talking about.

Team Fortress and Counter-Strike both started off as modifications (for Quake and Half-Life respectively). Sorry, typo, I meant to say the two greatest FPS games in existence started as user-modifications. You could no more argue that mods are a “maybe” than you could claim the Sun is optional for life on Earth.

Smart companies take things like those and extend them into incredible new products. Team Fortress 2 and CS: Source servers are the most popular shooters online, and Valve regularly embarrasses every other company in the business with their sheer levels of sales and support based entirely on “providing great content for users, and letting them do that too.” It’s enough to make other developers ask themselves “Why the hell are we doing it our way?”

Like Modern Warfare. The first was an excellent online shooter with integrated Mod support. Modern Warfare 2 treated the user like a special needs student. They removed so many options you counted yourself lucky they still let you control the character. Tying to set up a server in ModWar2 gave you the strong impression the developers thought you were wearing a helmet.

The idea that modifications damage profits is ludicrous. Civ V took approximately infinity man-hours to make, and they’ve installed mod-support right from the first menu. No unpacking, no hacking your way through file trees, just telling the game “Hello lovely game that I bought, I would like to use you for fun things!” And the game goes “Great idea!”

You can tell somebody’s lying when people hide behind issues of “stability” and “customer satisfaction.” No company has ever failed to work out technical problems when there’s real money to be made, and unfortunately the opposite is also true: if they can make more by refusing to do something simple, that’s exactly what’ll happen. Player-made mods for popular games aren’t an abstract option, or some weird internet extra: they’re a simple binary indication of whether the company really cares about players or not.

Now we’ll look at which games don’t allow server mods. Or to put it another way: which Halo are you playing? It’s certainly not the original (unless you have a PC Halo server) despite how it that introduced the revolutionary - in fact now mandatory - shield mechanics for console shooters, or the grenade button (not so much an incredible innovation in that title but an incredible oversight in every game before that) Because the original Halo servers have been shut down (though you can still play on PC!) So has the Halo 2 support. So you’d better have bought 3. No, ODST. Sorry, Reach. Whichever they told you to buy most recently.

And people accept that! A strategically-mandated announcement “You don’t get to play anymore. It’s no longer worth OUR while to support this, so YOU don’t get to play this game you paid for - and clearly love because you’re still playing - anymore. Why not buy our sequel RIGHT NOW?”

Meanwhile, six years after release Half-Life 2 players can now now enjoy the cyberpunk class-combat of NeoTokyo, or the horror-movie hunting of The Hidden, the teamwork of Synergy and Follow Freeman, the insane Mad Max mayhem of D.I.P.R.I.P. and many more all from the same game.

You’d think that games based entirely on blowing other people up would vent all the aggression any sane person could have (if you’ve never, ever been online ever). While most griefers are emotionally stunted failures of DNA copying something they saw someone else do, a precious few are extremely entertaining. And by “a few” we mean “Team Roomba,” those incomparable griefologists who’ve spent more time breaking the TF2 code than East Germany spent on the wall. The Roombans are so expert at breaking code we can only hope they’ll reform and decide to grief cancer - they’d exploit flaws within a month.

In the meantime, let’s commemorate their five best exploits.

1. The Map Glitch

The most famous flaw in any game - you’ve got a map, and a bunch of players running around on it, and if there’s even the smallest hole on of those buggers is going to find out and tell all his friends. By killing them with it.

This might not look like much, but that’s because you’re not the one building the most lethal underground anything since Tremors

This one’s always a race against time: using the glitch will by definition tell everyone about it (where “tell” means “minigun-massacre the entire attacking team before the beginning of Dustbowl*.”) This means it’s gone in the next update, converting people who are trying to be assholes into unpaid beta-testers helping to improve the overall game experience. Though that does sometimes mean getting stuck in your spawn by invisible underground sentry guns.

*Insane cackling not required practically involuntary

2. Teleportation Troubles

An absolutely classic trick, and we mean that literally - this was the most common grief on Team Fortress Classic servers, which featured more teleportation disasters than the Starship Enterprise. Long capture point maps meant malicious teleporters could take you simulated miles the wrong way with no option but to slog your way back to the action (or, in unique video game logic, commit suicide to save yourself the stroll)

A gritty world where you can’t know if you’ll live or die or where those darn teles will take you

The addition of arrows removed that from TF2, forcing the teleporting tricksters to take their targets on a voyage of discovery. Specifically, “discovering parts of the map you can’t get into” and much more importantly, can’t get out of. Hybridizing the mag glitch with the teleporter led to a Star Trek style accident of being embedded in the wall, and the only Engineer around was too busy laughing at you to reverse the polarity.

ENGINEER IS TRAITOR TO TEAM!

There was even the ultimate irony inversion of teleporters, using them to prevent any motion at all by blocking the spawn exit on the slope in dustbowl. Luckily, this was another example of the evolution of griefing, with such seriously screwed slip-ups removed by the next Darwinian patch.

3. Engineering Betrayal

We all know Engies are essential for an effective team (except when it’s an idiot defending with a wrangled mini-sentry), but when they turn traitorous the effects can be devastating.

That’s a lethal trap with more espionage than James Bond and more technical knowledge than Q branch. You need a treasonous team of Engies on both teams, usually communicating on another program like Ventrilo. The “attacking” engies build their ‘porters where the sentries won’t automatically destroy them, delivering their entire team into enemy hands. If only once.

Nowadays you don’t necessarily need such careful positioning, with wrangling allowing the defenders to control what’s shot and what’s not, but if anyone takes out the controlling engy the entire plan will self destruct. Not that there’s much point though - if you’ve got two people on your own team dedicated to griefing, you’re much better off kicking them or leaving.

4. The Sniper Scope Show

Ah, blocking the sniper’s view.  It’s childish, it’s immature, it’s extremely annoying, and when someone decides that what your stalled offensive really needs is a fourth sniper it’s totally deserved. Anyone can block the shot, but flames have the best effect. Though the spy’s disguise cloud is also effective, and it’s extremely entertaining to see that the spy can screw snipers on both sides.

5. Melee

“Combat Medic” is actually TF2-ese for “I’m a useless idiot”

It doesn’t matter what achievement you’re going for, the only thing more annoying than an idiot charging into a gunfight with dukes drawn is a medic doing it. Note that the standard defense for this behavior - a whiny screech that “It’s just a game!” - is the reason kicking was invented.

6. The Doorway Glitch

This problem with the door’s gone the way of the dodo, but Team Roomba put it to such extraordinary use you’ll just have to watch this video (while the second includes examples of almost everything else we’ve been talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPoKaoJu0m4

Updates to Team Fortress 2 are like visiting the dentist with a toothache - soon things will be so much better, but right this second they suck and hurt. I’m especially affected by the Engineer update, which arms my favorite class with even more awesomeness but making it utterly impossible to play for at least a fortnight. Because it isn’t TF2 anymore, it’s

Every update triggered a tidal wave of the title class - from the Scottish hordes to the Super Scout Squads, but all the others established an ecology. When the Medic Update dropped, Spies had a simply splendid time

The doctor will see you now AND SHOVE A KNIFE IN YOUR BACK!

but by the Heavy update those same Spies were hunted by Pyros

A food chain

Each update established an entire food chain, and while there were still far too many of one class to even say anything rhyming with “balanced play,” it was still fun - it was almost a Mutation (like Left 4 Dead 2), and at least everyone learned about the new weapons at the same time.

But the Engineer update isn’t like that. It’s like a locker room full of straight men all trying to get laid - the more of them there are, the less they can get what they want even if the chance appears. Most of the Engineer’s arsenal is locked behind actual defensive achievements - and you can’t earn those when the opposing team is also doing more engineering than Scotty, LaForge and Torres put together.

Worse, there was about as much chance of establishing an ecology as there is on the surface of the Sun. Engineers stack like LEGO blocks, and against an army of them there’s nothing a Spy or Demo can do - sapping a point with five Engies is like throwing a snowball at a Pyro convention.

The only hope is to assemble an entire team of Medic/Heavy-or-Demo combos and attacking at the same time, and on a public server there’s as much chance of that as of getting the complete works of Shakespeare out of three monkeys with a crayon. It’s just not fun, which is why private servers - or simply stopping playing for a while - are the only options.

Two teams of Engies are about as entertaining as an Eyeball Gouging Competition where you’re the battlefield. Attacking Engies are ordinarily a Highlander factor - there can only be one, and even then only if he’s very good - but now we’re seeing armies of BLU building irrelevant, outdated equipment in the hope of being rewarded. Especially 2Fort - if you’d said it could become even more deadlocked last week you’d have been laughed at, but now it’s a staler mate than a tie on a bread-based chess board.

No, YOU come over HERE!

The words are ashes in our mouths, but this may be the first time in history achievement servers are justified. Sure, they may be antijoy factories turning games into unpaid labor, but at least it’ll transport all these neverwannabe Engies to the hell they deserve.

And I can get back to kicking ass with a Wrench.

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.