Team Fortress 2 is Taking Over My Life
and it hasn’t even been released yet.
I’ve been reading forums, watching videos, researching how to run a server, playing TFC and HL2. I am psyched for TF2!
The back story is: Team Fortress was a mod for Quake (yeah, the original quake) in 1996. Around this time I was just getting angry enough with playing Descent online. I think my joystick broke or something. Anyway, I got Quake for christmas and instantly was pulled into the online community. Team Fortress was awesome and I eventually joined a clan which I’m still a member of called the Green Panthers. We played for about 3-4 years until Team Fortress kind of fizzled out.
The reason for the fizzle was that TF2 was slated for development on the Quake 2 engine. A lot of new games started being released and people left the bustling TF community for smaller scenes. Half-Life, Quake2Action, Counter-Strike and eventually TFC put the nail in the TF2-coffin. TFC was a terrible remake of Team Fortress called “Team Fortress Classic”. There was nothing classic about it, the player physics were horrible, the game play was completely different and it was full of kids playing. So I never played TFC because it’s an abomination of the game.
Now, almost 7 years later, TF2 is finally going to be released. This Monday the beta begins, which you can participate in by pre-ordering the Orange box game bundle which includes HL2, HL2: Lost Coast, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Portals, Team Fortress 2 and Peggle Extreme. All that for $45 and you get to play on a wonderful monday TF2 game.
I have almost completely ruled out team-based league play like the days of old. I used to play competitively and join leagues, enter tournaments and compete on ladders. I just don’t have the time for that anymore, or at least neither do my clanmates. We all have wives and kids now. The plus side to this is we also have job experience and money now and I am planning on spending some of both on attempting to monetize a game server that I will host. I’ve been researching dedicated, VPS and shared hosting for a TF2 game server as well as judging the general tone of the community so far. The idea is, I’ll be able to host a server and a bustling web-community just like the days of yore. I’ll be an enabler for all those 16 year old shitheads who won’t come to family dinner because they have a match.