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?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Team Fortress 2 News, Team Fortress News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.