HL2: Orange Box Thread

Nah, I never called PGR4 a jaggie mess, the game has more aliasing than I'd like but it is certianly better than games like those in the Orange Box which have no AA at all.

 

I jumped into Portal last night, and finished it in one sitting - great little game, though it's much shorter than I'd read (2.5 hours for me).

The graphics look very dated - textures are grainy and there's loads of aliasing. However, I'll forgive this package since it's so much damned fun! You kind of forget that in all the magnifying-glass type pulling apart of games these days... you know, the fact we play for pure enjoyment

Any recommendations for a good "noob" class for TF2? I've not played a class based online FPS before - other than DoD/DoD-S - and am dreadfully frightened of making my team hate me!

 

Soldier is by far the easiest class to jump into, its pure combat so you won't have any team mates yelling "Go invul you idiot!" or "Right click to cloak noob!" Other than that Sniper isn't to bad to start with though you need to be a decent shot and realize you need to "charge" the rifle before shooting for solid hits.

 

Scout is pretty good too, runs fast and thus it's easier to evade most of the strong enemies, yet its shotgun packs quite a punch from close distance.

Although some teammates might expect you to get flags/control points instead of fighting around and getting familiar with the levels

 

After playing Pyro 95% of the time since beta, I'm trying Engineer a bit. What a responsibility! Taking care of a turret or two basically eats up all your time, if there's at least one good spy on the other team. I found myself muttering irrational things such as "effin spy, just let me upgrade it for once!", but of course it's their job to annoy me.

It's good to spend at least a couple hours on every class even if yo ustick to a few. You find yourself respecting and better understanding others, and can better predict how they'll play.

 

Newb friendly... try the medic. It is an "active" medic so you will get some action and get to see the maps, but as importantly you will actually help your team. Just aim your healing gun at a teammate and hold down. The only tips you need to know is when Uber gets to 100%, right click makes you and your healing partner invulnerable for 10 seconds. (If you are go, you can swap between two friendlies quickly and both will be invuln.) At the beginning of matches as your soilders to hurt themselves so you can charge uber faster. Also, fall back on intense action if you see everyone dieing so you can preserve what Uber points you have gained and be careful running around with Uber at 100% because if you die you lose it.

Engineer is another good, helpful, class to start off with. You need to learn WHERE to put sentries, but outside of that they are a huge help and pretty easy to use. Lay a dispenser, pick up a gun or ammo crate, build a sentry, then use the dispenser to get more metal to upgrade your sentry so it shoots/tracks faster (hit it with your wrench).

For pure FPS, do as others said, soilder and scout. Scouts can double jump--remember their gun sucks at distance. Soilders can rocket job.

My favorite class is the spy... just had a single round with 20-something kills, 10 deaths, and about 40 points total--a lot of sentry sapping and dominations

 

Engineering involves heavy camping, really you should never leave your sentry. Instead place the sentry run grab ammo box, upgrade sentry, go grab ammo, upgrade again, go grab ammo, place dispenser, go grab ammo, place portal exit and then wait. From there you can camp it out and let the dispenser feed you metal and health while you just repair and repair the sentry. Once you die you place the portal entry (but run back this time to sentry) and hope the sentry is still up. If not, repeat!

I think it's an awesome class and really only certain maps the engineer can also play "offensive defense" since the shotgun he carriers is still very good.

 

Are games flooded with spys? I imagine they would be, since it's the "coolest" class - which makes me laugh, since what's the point of everyone pretending to be everyone else? Not unlike that Sony MMO annouced a while back actually.

At the same time, listening to the GFW podcast it sounds like it's a class that takes a ton of skill to pull off well. I'll work my way to it slowly methinks.

Oh, I forgot to add - for all the Aussies, JB Hifi have Orange Box for $79. Bargain!

 

Spy is certainly not the most popular class. It's cool but a lot of people suck at it. In fact I don't think there is a most popular class so for in my nearing 15 hours of game time. People are also very good at spotting bad spies at this point, so when you get owned a few times you go back to a different class.

 

Games are *sometimes* flooded with spies (as a pyro theyre easy to take care of). since I played engineer for about two hours this week and then back to pyro tonight, I now find myself quicker to react when I hear "ah spy's sappn mah sentry!" and jump on anyone who's not hammering the broken machinery.

depending on which class you take, might seem other classes are all over the place handing your ass back to you. while servers might sometimes be unbalanced, I think it's the whole rock/paper/scissors system that makes it appear that way.

 

It's good fun, looks great and the voice dialog couldn't be any better (especially for the Heavy: "You are a good doctor!"), however... some things that make me want to

1.) no grenades. I can see the argument that they lead to grenade spam near spawns, but c'mon, there has to be a better solution to that problem other then removing grenades altogether!

2.) no armor. In previous versions of Team Fortress there were Health and Armor counts. The medic healed you if you got wounded and the Engineer fixed your armor. It really did add a lot to playing as the engineer when you could fix up your team (speaking of the engineer, he's also missing his railgun...).

3. still on Engineer) destroying your buildings doesn't kill any nearby enemies (so far as I can tell). One of the great tactics of past Team Fortress games was to build a dispenser in some heavy traffic area just around a corner or something, fill it up (which you also can't do in TF2), and then use it as a remotely controlled bomb to kill any enemies that passed by.

4.) there are only 6 maps in the initial release, which is fine and all, but only one of them is a classic Capture the Flag style. The other 5 are Capture Point (CP) maps which I, personally, find less enjoyable.

I think once the novelty of the art style wears off (don't get me wrong, it truly is fanstastic), people familiar with the earlier versions are going to start realizing that TF2 is actually less a game than either TFC or TF were. They removed too much and added too little in return. Really, where's the stuff that makes this "Team Fortress 2", right now it's basically just Team Fortress:Source with stuff missing.

 

Valve can (and probably will) release TF2.1 with additional maps and renewed gameplay in the future. May not be named TF 2.1, but there will be updates for sure, just like how Counterstrike (the original) has evolved.

 

So what is the verdict, is the package worth the money and is the gameplay and story telling of ep1 and ep2 good?

 

best value for money this year
even if you already have HL2 and EP1, in my opinion!
TF2, Portal and EP2 are all fantastic!

 

The biggest trick to being an engineer is build the dispenser first . Way too many people build the turret first and then waste tons of time trying to upgrade it. After you build a dispenser it takes only like 10 seconds to get enough metal to start building a Turret. Try to place the dispenser behind it so you can just sit behind it hammering away at the turret while the dispenser is giving you metal. It is also very helpful when someone is trying to blow up the turret since you are gaining health back and repairing the turret at the same time. As far as spys go. Yeah it suck sometimes. I know. I am a spy and engineer almost all the time

 

Always build sentry first, just go grab ammo... Ammo gives back tons of metal.

 

How is matchmaking and lag in TF2 360?
Does it support dedicated servers, or is it fine enough without them?

 

I must STRONGLY disagree, I'm another proponent of the "build your dispenser first" crowd!

 

My take was the game is more by being less. The Rock-Papper-Scissors is really strong and no class dominates or is useless. The gameplay is very team oriented through passive encouragement. And it has a nice learning curve--easy to pick up, hard to master. And I have found myself using all the classes based on team need, map, and current gameplay circumstances.

I totally agree they need more maps--and more gameplay types. More server options would be great too. But my opinion is the gameplay really has benefits by being more focused. Nades are nice, but they also diminish the value of certain classes. Just my take.

On the sentries... in most cases I find dispenser first is the better tactic, but there are some maps/situations where getting your sentry up fast is helpful.

 

Hehe, that's fine. You'll just get overwhelmed!