The first time I played Team Fortress 2 (TF2 henceforth) I was confused. Massively, massively confused.
What caused this colossal state of bafflement, you ask? Two things:
1) I had no fucking clue what was going on, and;
2) No-one had called me a n00b, neither my Mother nor my racial background had been questioned, and my mouth remained happily free of tea-bags.
You see, this was my first foray into the world of on-line gaming, and I was, I'm a little ashamed to admit, terrified of it.
As a life-long console gamer, I spent all my time sat alone in a darkened room, getting a little too into J-RPGs and survival horror games. Neither of these are exactly social events, but I was happy playing by myself, and for years they were my 'oh-shit-it's-four-in-the-morning' GamerCrack.
During these years, my friends were busy going out and meeting people, or at least staying in meeting digital strangers, who they then shot in the head. And humped. Sometimes they did this as Nazis, sometimes as power-suited soldiers and, occasionally, as theoretical physicists, but no matter who or what they were playing as, every time they crowbarred me down to the pub I always heard the same kind of stories.
- The 11-year old boy screeching his pre-pubescent way through the spawn, cussing his team like an anally-fisted dock-worker.
- The anally-fisted dock-worker sprays/decals.
- The time they accidentally played against a vastly superior clan, who literally reached through the internet and raped their mothers.
In any case, these sorts of stories, largely backed-up by what I read on forums (such as this one) convinced me to stay the hell away from online games, away from these clearly evil people. No, I was happy enough in my console world of massive hair-do's and zombies.
Fast-forward to last month, and to my acquisition of a 'real' PC, a matt-black beast that could actually play games. Games with graphics! And physics! Amazing! On the advice of... well, everybody, my first purchase was the Orange Box, and it amazed me by totally and utterly living up to the praise. Within a few days I'd torn my way through all it had to offer, and loved every second of it.
Except TF2.
It sat there at the bottom of my Steam page, taunting my cowardice with its '0 hours played' message. In the end I girded my loins, plucked up my courage (or got bored enough...), and decided to venture on-line, where my head promptly exploded, because I had no idea what to do. No idea.
Seriously, Valve, would it kill you to make a manual? The one posted on Steam is a joke (Literally. It's actually a humorous manual for the Engineer's sentry gun), and it just seems incredibly broken that I had to look for a guide on GameFaqs.com just to find out how to start a game. Yes, most PC gamers could easily work it out, but I wasn't a PC gamer, so I had to work largely through cack-handed trial and error. Anyway, once I'd messed around enough to know that I wanted to 'Find Server', I took the plunge and started playing.
For those who don't know, TF2 is a class-based on-line shooter made with the famous Source engine, where players must use teamwork to achieve specific objectives (capture X, hold Y, escort Z) rather than the more usual 'kill lots of people' Deathmatch. Each of the 9 available classes has a specific role, and whilst no particular class is stronger than any other, a well-balanced team will usually dominate an imbalanced one, emphasising the importance of teamwork. The weight attached to this, in fact, made me even more worried. What if I screwed up horribly and my own team were nasty to me?
Don't worry, they weren't. In fact, neither was the other team. There were no insults flying over the voice-chat, only a pleasantly-voiced Swedish man asking for 'an oober now pleash'. I had no idea what he meant, of course, and even if it was the perverse sexual act my mind was now imagining, it was a damn sight better than what I was expecting. There was no 'stfu n00b', no cries of 'hax!'. It wasn't what I was expecting at all.
Sure, I died a lot, and for the first week or so I sucked horribly. Again, the lack of any sort of manual or guide lead to me having to find most things out the hard way ("oh, so that's how to change weapons..."), but over time I got better. The few times I was called a n00b, I freely admitted that I was new to the game and, bizarrely, people were eager tohelp me. Help! On the internet! Madness! Sure, there were some dicks, but rarely were there enough to ruin the experience and if there were; well, there's plenty more servers in the sea.
I'm not sure if my friends (and the entire internet) were all liars, if TF2 players are just nicer than most online players, or if the 'team' elements weed out the complete arseholes, but I had a really, genuinely fantastic amount of fun playing online. So if you, like I was, are reticent to get into the online gaming scene, I whole-heartedly recommend this fantastic game.
Thank you,
_Serendipity_
