Team Fortess 2 Impressions
I finally took the plunge on The Orange Box and preordered it in order to start in on the Team Fortress 2 beta right away. $45 (with $5 preorder discount) is a pretty good deal if you want the whole pack, but given that I already have Half Life 2 and Episode One, it's not really a great deal. I would have preferred for them to be cheaper individually ($30 for Episode Two and TF2 each seems a little steep). At least they give vouchers for the games you already have- which means they're probably never going to sell a copy of Half Life 2 again.
Anyway, I'm about 3 hours into Team Fortress 2 now and so far I am...not disappointed, but not blown away. I really haven't gotten into it enough to tell if I will end up being blown away. The thing that Valve definitely nailed is that this game has character. It probably has the best personality of any game I've ever played. The animations are fantastic. I talk to a couple artists on the Team Fortress 2 team (and previously Half Life 2 team) whenever I go up to Valve (I like to sneak that in whenever I can. ...seriously.) and they have knocked it out of the park in the environment and character design department. When I saw previews for the game initially, I remember thinking that the cut scenes they showed could not translate into a game. I am happy to say that I am wrong.
A cool thing about the game is that all the in-game sounds really give the game a feeling of camaraderie. The narrator's voice (the voice that keeps you informed about how much time is left, etc) speaks as though she is on your team, which makes it more personal. Also, the characters in the game all have comments they make from time to time, which are appropriate for the situation such that they add to the atmosphere rather than take away from it. So even if there's not a lot of microphone chatter (which is probably a good thing), it still feels like the people you're playing with are alive. I especially like the ruckus that is heard when the game goes into "Sudden Death" and the whole team starts shouting like they're about to run through the human tunnel after halftime.
I have a hard time telling whether I'm ultimately going to stick with the game because I don't know enough about it. I've gotten to know the levels and the play modes well enough, but I still feel like I'm just going out and killing as many people on the other team as I can, without directly helping the team fulfill the objectives. The roles that you can choose from seem balanced for the most part, although I notice I mostly only dominate with the heavy machine gun guy. It seems a little unbalanced there; I think the weapon power vs. speed trade off is not quite as important as some people at Valve think it is (this is also judging by the AWP in Counterstrike, which is slow but powerful, and horribly unbalanced). I need to spend some more time with it before I really make up my mind about it. One thing is for sure, I hope Valve goes back to Counterstrike Source and kicks the kind of life into it that Team Fortress 2 has. It's polished- not necessarily in the number of bugs (it is in beta, afterall), but definitely in style and it makes it a lot more fun to play.
There have been a lot of exciting games lately. Metroid Prime 3 is good so far and I just picked up Zelda for the DS today. I only had time to watch the intro but I just love the graphics! I usually downplay graphics, but this is the kind of visual achievement I really like: obviously the DS is underpowered but Nintendo puts that in the back of your mind with incredible art style. Then again, I've yet to see a Zelda game that didn't look incredible so I should have expected that. I'll add some impressions here once I've played it more.
