Comments on: Our last control point is being captured.

Our last control point is being captured.

Soup — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:06:43 -0800

"Team Fortress 2 is the most beautiful game ever made." The unique rendering style (wmv, YT, or pdf). Near universal acclaim (near). How to improve your game. A two part interview with developers. What your class could say about you. And don't forget your sprays. Ha! (Previously.)

By: grabbingsand

grabbingsand — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:19:13 -0800

Someone will say something snarky about this being "Valve Week" on MeFi, so we might as well get that out of the way. Now ... carry on as you were ...

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:21:37 -0800

MetaFilter: we like to mock the dead, dance on graves, hump corpses. Also, so help me god, I will find a way to drop this quote into conversation: "that is, in the parlance of our times, the lols."

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:25:21 -0800

Huh. Soup has made three posts. ALL of them about VALVe games. I SMELL A BANNINATION!

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:27:16 -0800

Show him to the portal!

By: empath

empath — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:27:29 -0800

I'm torn, because I fucking love The Orange Box.

By: CitrusFreak12

CitrusFreak12 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:29:09 -0800

Huh. Soup has made three posts. ALL of them about VALVe games. I SMELL A BANNINATION! You can get banned for lack of variety in your posts?

By: empath

empath — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:29:42 -0800

3 fpp in 3 days about the same product? Even if it is the greatest video game ever made (which it is), it's a bit much.

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:29:47 -0800

I have a small child and therefore no free time to play orange box whatsoever. I am bitter and vindictive. I say ban away!

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:31:44 -0800

I have a small child and therefore no free time to play orange box whatsoever. I am bitter and vindictive. I say ban away! I would like to second this motion. Mr. Speaker, can we move to vote?

By: suckerpunch

suckerpunch — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:33:05 -0800

I'd help you ban Soup, but... I never really was on your side.

By: empath

empath — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:35:36 -0800

Let me remind you that Metafilter Hell is a real place and you will be sent there at the first sign of self-linking.

By: papercake

papercake — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:38:07 -0800

I have a small child and therefor grab my 360 controller and fire up the Orange Box at odd times at night when she's (temporarily) sleeping. This sleep deprivation may have to do with my obsession with things boxy and orange, but I prefer to think not.

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:38:51 -0800

Metafilter We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us Except the ones who are banned

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:38:56 -0800

Nice review, Lore. :)

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:39:27 -0800

I think Soup just really likes the games, folks. As a gushing fanboy, I can sympathize, though Valve Week probably needs to come to an end. On a related note, there is a (not used enough!) quasi-official Mefi TF2 dedicated server thanks to this thread.

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:44:06 -0800

I want to know if Lore had any, um, particular MeFi members in mind while writing that.

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:44:16 -0800

That was your spy impression, right cortex? There's really going to be bannination, right? right?

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:46:22 -0800

If you ban him, he'll just come back under the username Nuts.

By: Ian A.T.

Ian A.T. — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:49:54 -0800

Can't a video game just be "really really good?" Why must everything be "the best video game ever released?" Just in the last few months we've had the title applied to Bioshock, Portal, and now this. Can you imagine that happening in any other medium, where the newest product is touted as the greatest thing the genre has created up until that point?

By: papercake

papercake — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:51:33 -0800

Ian A.T. : sliced bread?

By: rmd1023

rmd1023 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:54:28 -0800

does the mefi TF2 server work for 360 users or only steam users? i haven't actually played TF2 yet, but would love to find me some group fun later this week, ideally with minimal asshabadashery from randoms.

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:55:10 -0800

I love TF2. It's like TFC, only better, and the art looks like a Pixar movie.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:55:33 -0800

The OP may just be a fanboy, who knows. As far as the post itself goes, I found this 'beautiful' artistic style dull and lifeless more then anything.

By: dw

dw — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:59:33 -0800

I think Soup just really likes the games, folks. As a gushing fanboy, I can sympathize, though Valve Week probably needs to come to an end. Oh, come on. We still have to do the "Half-Life 2 Episode Two: Greatest Video Game Episode Ever" post and the "Orange Box: Prettiest Video Game Box Ever" post.

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:05:19 -0800

Why must everything be "the best video game ever released?" Just in the last few months we've had the title applied to Bioshock, Portal, and now this. To be honest, it's arguably a true statement for some of these games -- while there may be some shuffling around at the top, I'd absolutely defend Half-Life 1 and 2 and Bioshock as some of the greatest games ever made. Those three and the Orange Box literally comprise 4 of the top 5 on MetaCritic's all-time high score list.

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:08:03 -0800

Of course, Starcraft comes in at #117, and Sam & Max isn't ranked, so the list is objectively incorrect, but it's the thought that counts.

By: Durhey

Durhey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:08:49 -0800

Earth vs. Soup? Is it really such a huge ordeal that an FPS decided not to take the route of attempted photo-realism? Well, hopefully it'll re-start the cel-shading trend form a few years back so I can actually run FPS games on my PC a few more years. (!^@%$! Crysis!)

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:11:11 -0800

Is it really such a huge ordeal that an FPS decided not to take the route of attempted photo-realism? How next-gen video game graphics are created. MORE BLOOM!

By: painquale

painquale — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:20:06 -0800

Mmm, Valve posts. It's hard to understate my satisfaction.

By: painquale

painquale — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:20:44 -0800

overstate. Crap.

By: googly

googly — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:24:05 -0800

Its all Plutor's fault.

By: ryoshu

ryoshu — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:34:17 -0800

I would like to second this motion. Mr. Speaker, can we move to vote? I vote to table the motion. And if you disagree, I"LL PWN U NUBS!!!11one

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:42:11 -0800

Fuckers took my cake.

By: autodidact

autodidact — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:43:10 -0800

That first link is one of the best written game reviews I've ever read. It actually has substance and puts across the feel of TF2 perfectly.

By: absalom

absalom — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:47:17 -0800

Does this mean I get to p0wn u n00bs this weekend? Viva la MeFi server!

By: dhartung

dhartung — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:50:55 -0800

Grammatically, which is more correct -- ValveFilter, or MetaValve? Anyway, what was up with that WMV? It kept pausing on my computer, which probably means that I can't run TF2 for real, either. I was a huge TF addict back in the HL-mod days (before TFC). Somehow I could have fun even though I couldn't play very well, which was almost impossible in any of the DM-style games. Something about the classes and the different constricting choices in gameplay made it more interesting than just trying to camp on somebody.

By: furtive

furtive — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:53:07 -0800

Great game, barely holds a candle to the original Enemy Territory.

By: pokermonk

pokermonk — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:56:31 -0800

OMG FURTIVE IS RITE!

By: pokermonk

pokermonk — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:56:56 -0800

Oops, sorry about that. I meant to end with 111!!!211111one

By: quin

quin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:58:22 -0800

I hereby officially resent all of you who have Xbox 360s and PCs capable of playing these games. You can't see, through your monitor, what finger I am extending in an obscene gesture, and pointing in your direction, but I want you to know; I'm doing it as hard as I can. someone give me a 360... pretty please

By: sien

sien — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:59:57 -0800

Can't someone do something to stop Lore wasting his time over at Wired and get back to making funny comments on MeFi?

By: four panels

four panels — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:02:17 -0800

I'd rather put my dick in a blender then disease a machine with Windows Vista. No game is worth installing Vista.

By: hindmost

hindmost — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:07:20 -0800

You don't need XP. Just a willingness to get your ass kicked by yours truly.

By: hindmost

hindmost — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:07:43 -0800

Bah. You don't need Vista. Just XP. Good thing my aim is better than my snark.

By: Big_B

Big_B — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:10:04 -0800

Who says you need Vista? And quin - it runs great on my 2gig Athlon with 1 gig ram and a 6600 gt, hardly a new system.

By: imperium

imperium — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:10:35 -0800

ur list has SupCom at 160, so whatevs.

By: robocop is bleeding

robocop is bleeding — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:18:39 -0800

This was a good post I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate the links' quality. Metafilter We post what we want because we can. For the good of all of us Except the ones who are banned. But there's no use flaming over every new post You just keep on snarking t'get favorited the most. You can call them all clouts And you'll make a callout For the posters who are on the Blue I'm not even flagging I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you are a jerk And stupid And can't even spell right And posted a double post (again) As I read I was so meh and did not favorite you. Now these posting patterns Make me start to suspect That you're shilling for something and really need Projects So I'm glad you got flamed Because your post was so lame to the people who are on the Blue Go ahead and flame out It's been awhile since we've had a laugh. Maybe you'll find another site to post on? Maybe Green Footballs? THAT WAS A JOKE, HA HA, FAT CHANCE Anyways, my posts are great They are so nuanced and smart. Look at me still flaming when there's Posting to do Reading your replies it makes me glad I'm not you. I've witticisms to be typed And some new bands to be hyped at the people who are on the Blue And believe me, I'm on the Blue! I'm getting favorites and am on the Blue! I have FPPs that are on the Blue! While you're flaming I'll be on the Blue! And when you're banned I will be on the Blue! On the Blue On the Blue

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:20:39 -0800

I'd rather put my dick in a blender then disease a machine with Windows Vista. No game is worth installing Vista. WTF, are we Slashdot now?

By: sisquoc15

sisquoc15 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:21:12 -0800

I demand more Orange box FPPs. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

By: blenderfish

blenderfish — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:26:29 -0800

*cough* Call of Duty 4 *cough*

By: gemmy

gemmy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:27:04 -0800

OMG, can we have some of you super talented folks over in Music record that for us, please? Pretty please? With cake on top? /crosses fingers

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:38:41 -0800

Peggle Extreme. For some, merely the finest game of all time. For others, a religion.

By: graventy

graventy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:40:13 -0800

Valve Week probably needs to come to an end. Valve Week must last a full week! Seriously, though, less time moderating, more time doing a cover with robocop is bleeding's' lyrics. Please!

By: graventy

graventy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:42:13 -0800

blenderfish, I've heard some fairly negative things about CoD4. Very heavily scripted, infinite spawning enemies, and if you try to undertake a mission in a way different from what the game has laid out, it will punish or even kill you. Pretty, though.

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:58:56 -0800

WTF, are we Slashdot now? +1 Karma-bonus modifier (You've been here for a while so you're automatically privileged) -2 Redundant (50% We've always been like this; 50% FFS, we have our own TF2 server, we're huge dorks) +3 Insightful (70% Implying MeFi's inherent superiority over Slashdot; 30% Mutual back-slapping) +1 Funny (Slashdot is teh funny) -Todd Lokken

By: blenderfish

blenderfish — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:04:59 -0800

graventy: Reviews for CoD4 are generally quite positive (95/100 on metacritic.) ... Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled TF2 FPP.

By: davros42

davros42 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:20:38 -0800

The soup is a lie?

By: ryoshu

ryoshu — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:23:54 -0800

we have our own TF2 server Link?

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:36:12 -0800

Yesh, thish ish a bit much with the Valve week thing, much as I love the games with a rampant boner. But I'm all gaga over the Orange Box games, so. Nearly perfect and groundbreaking as Portal is, I've always loved deathmatch gaming, team or individual. The thousands of hours I spent in Quake 2 and Quake 3 (or, more, in the Rocket Arena mods for them) online could have been better spent, maybe, but such love I have for those games. The Carmackian feel of the Quake engines, that indefinable solidity to movement, the perfect tuning of it all (and the hours spent in cfg files tweaking it all for whatever slightly-behind-the-times rig I was running)... nothing has ever come close for me, until now. I love TF2. The feel of the Source engine is very close to what I consider the Quake-series gold standard, and the game is just so perfectly designed in almost every aspect (like all of Valve's stuff), it's breathtaking. The character design and the improved facial animations, the sounds and dialogue snippets, the balance, the map design, the emergent gameplay, the fact that it runs butter-smooth on my aging box, all of it. It's so cool to watch common strategies (sentry placement, for example) evolve as the weeks go by and people learn how deep and intricate (or how free-for-all balls-out fun) it can be. I haven't had this much fun -- even with clueless dipshit pubbies on the servers here in Korea who wouldn't know what to do with a fully-charged health gun if you shoved it up their asses -- than I have since the heyday of Q3 Arena, back when I had reflexes good enough to make a decent showing against the young'uns. It's Friday morning here in Korea, and I'm looking forward to some beer and TF2 this evening with great anticipation. (If there are any other MeFite players here in Korea or nearby countries, please join the Steam Community group I started for English-speaking players -- Team Waeguk-in. I haven't got a link at the moment because I can't get to the site, but it should be easy to find.)

By: autodidact

autodidact — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:40:57 -0800

Stavros, in defense of the clueless Koreans you mention, I would no have idea what to do with a fully charged health gun if you rammed it up my ass either.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:48:20 -0800

Fun to try, though, maybe, with the consenting adult partner of your choice.

By: Reggie Digest

Reggie Digest — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:00:15 -0800

Waiter, this Soup tastes fishy.

By: dw

dw — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:21:03 -0800

I have a small child and therefore no free time to play orange box whatsoever. I am bitter and vindictive. My small child insists on playing Portal with me. "DADDY! I WANNA MAKE CIRCLES!!" I don't let her play past 13. I'm afraid she'll figure out how to get through level 16 with only two portals, and it would be humiliating to have a three year old show me up.

By: whir

whir — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:42:55 -0800

I like the Orange Box a good deal, but I'm with Zero Punctuation as far as BioShock is concerned. The production values are amazing and the setting is interesting, but the game itself is basically System Shock 2 if the only way you could beat SS2 was by killing everything.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:11:35 -0800

So I sort of recorded a song as it turns out. Thanks, robocop is bleeding!

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:33:12 -0800

The sprays links had a WWII poster or two, so I started looking to see if there were any other good WWII posters for sprays. I found the RL sniper.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:14:57 -0800

I just want to say that Portal is the Citizen Kane of the artform.

By: empath

empath — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:38:08 -0800

I said that first. copier.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:50:36 -0800

I surely have no idea what you are talking about.

By: eurasian

eurasian — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:06:47 -0800

The best sprays I've seen for TF2 can be found in this thread. He has a great graphical style. ryoshu : 8.6.77.194:27015 Of note with TF2, if you have no idea what the hubub is about, is that pretty much any type of player can play. And make a difference. There is no air control whackery, so you don't have one guy who gets like a zillion billion points and leaves you with 39 deaths. Every class actually has a purpose. Compare this to TFC, where the medic was a better runner than the scout, and he never actually, you know, healed anyone. However, if you still love the air control whackery and basically want TFC for source, with a few extras, Fortress Forever is a pretty excellent mod for that sort of thing (free, etc). Of course, the greatest multi-player game of all time is this. But hardly anyone plays it, it's a HL1 mod. If you've ever had a solid game of this, you will know what I'm saying is true.

By: Admiral Haddock

Admiral Haddock — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:12:33 -0800

I liked Halo 3 better than Team Fortress. Just sayin'. And, since I was called out for being sarcastic in the Portal thread (which I wasn't being), for the avoidance of doubt, I really do much prefer Halo 3 to Team Fortress. Although I do like the art direction in TF.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:17:52 -0800

I liked Halo 3 better than Team Fortress. Just sayin'. *proceeds to ignore anything Admiral Haddock says about anything, ever*

By: poweredbybeard

poweredbybeard — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:21:40 -0800

Well, hopefully it'll re-start the cel-shading trend form a few years back so I can actually run FPS games on my PC a few more years. Drivey

By: cowbellemoo

cowbellemoo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:36:09 -0800

It's been great fun folks. Lets have another VALVe week in a year or two when we celebrate the following revolutionary titles: Half-life²: Episode III Portal II Portal Multiplayer ya heard it here first, folks. my wild speculation, that is. oh, and gordon and alyx get married, lamarr reenters the atmosphere safely to land on kleiner's head, and dog falls in love with an aperture science turret and they have companion cube puppies!

By: First Post

First Post — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:56:24 -0800

So, another MeFi server match this upcoming Sat afternoon then?

By: spiderwire

spiderwire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:25:31 -0800

in a year or two You have a great deal more faith in Valve's release schedule than I do.

By: ssmith

ssmith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:55:52 -0800

I really wish I'd gotten the PC version to play via BootCamp instead of the hideous lag of the Xbox 360. Even after the patch, even in games with just 8 players, even with good connections all around, it's just unplayable. Everything else about the orange box is fantastic though. But, TF2 was the one thing I was really, really looking forward to.

By: acetonic

acetonic — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:24:22 -0800

I got the orange box for PC when it came out. So far I've only played the first couple of chapters of Ep. 2. I tried playing TF2 but on that night, for whatever reason, it showed no servers with anybody else playing. I haven't launched it since. I really need to check out TF2 and I hear Portal is pretty good to. I just haven't been in a shooter mood lately I guess. :(

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:55:13 -0800

You need to hit refresh for servers a couple of times, sometimes. There are heaps of servers out there. Also: I have question for anyone who's been playing it in a language other than English, because I'm curious. When you have a different language set in the game, do the character classes say their lines, when they speak, in that language, or is it still English, and only the UI text changes?

By: sexyrobot

sexyrobot — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:18:46 -0800

this game looks fun, but its missing a class..."Barbie"

By: prostyle

prostyle — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:35:37 -0800

I still haven't gotten around to picking this up, which is strange, considering the fact that I spent countless hours in TF since its release as a server side mod for NetQuake. Something so pure about five classes, standard game assets, everyone zinging around with grappling hooks in CTF matches on the single player levels... the Shambler shrieking out whenever a key was stolen... irreplaceable memories. I think that's the reason I've stayed away, it's not so much the passing of a decade as the idea that anything could live up to the perspective through my rose colored glasses. I'm imagining if I touched this game it'd be a repeat DOOM 3 experience, it would caustic enough to actually corrode my memories. Something about Valve's reductive design principles don't jive with me, I was too much of a TF elitist to even bother seriously investing time in TFC because the movement was so goddamn slow the Scout (fastest class) became eclipsed by the Medic. There's not even a Civilian class in this game, ten years on! No Hunted, Border, Civsaw, Spazball, The Rock... it has really amazed me how much they ignored some of the community generated staples from the original series. I'm not even sure the SDK supports those entities anymore, and frankly mapping in Source is a strange exercise in self torment so the idea of a lot of quality community maps popping up is slim. Things just don't seem that wide open anymore - to me TF was a limitless well of insanity due to the physics, the offhanded mashup of retextured quake assets, the freeform mapping community, the ability of the end user to customize their models, scripts and HUD. I think they went in the right direction by streamlining what they had and focusing on those aspects to an extent, it would have been an abysmal failure in this day and age to come out with another Battlefield clone. I simply can't rationalize the purchase of a multiplayer platform that consists of two game types and six maps, no matter how well packaged it may be. This is the meat of game titles for me, and this is where things can really shine on for years or fall flat, it's been that way for me since Quake. I have played more custom made game types and modified maps created by Halo 3 users in the space of two hours than even exist as default in this title, and that is pretty much all I need to know, fanboy or not. I think I will have to stick with H3 for my sci-fi and COD4 for my "Action Quake" fix, I'm up to my eyes in FPS games on this damn box anyways.

By: GLaDOS

GLaDOS — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:02:33 -0800

Oh you humans and your games. Why don't you just sit down and have a nice slice of cake instead?

By: L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg

L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:47:17 -0800

Nice review, Lore Thanks! I want to know if Lore had any, um, particular MeFi members in mind while writing that. I'm sorry to say I didn't. It was just a combination of playing a lot of TF2 and needing a topic because I had been playing a lot of TF2. Can't someone do something to stop Lore wasting his time over at Wired and get back to making funny comments on MeFi? Actually, a lot of my time recently has been spent working on things that are neither Wired nor MeFi. One of them should be up at Bad Gods (linked in my profile), circa this coming Tuesday.