Widowmakers: Team Fortress 2

She says you spend too much time playing video games. She’s calling you to dinner. She wants you to give Timmy a bath. You’re busy mining gold, beating bosses, and leveling up, and she may never understand.  These are the games with ultimate suck power… the ones that earn the badge of shame… the widowmakers.

Team Fortress 2

The Game:
Team Fortress 2
Year:
2007
Publisher:
Valve
System:
360, PS3, PC
Genre:
First Person Shooter

The Short Version:
Basically, the Incredibles, sans superheroes, plus guns.

And entrails.

And hats. So many hats.

Why is it so addictive?
The Orange Box was one of two games I bought the day I got my 360. I would go on to have about 5 by the time 2007 was a goner, and although my love of Bioshock is true and eternal, there’s only one of those 5 games I still play. Actually, come to think of it, it’s the only multiplayer FPS I continue to play past the first few months of release.

Team Fortress 2 is one of those games that’s tailor made to cater to the kid in us all. Not the kid who still played with trucks or Barbies, and still played with sticks, pretending we’re wizards, or blowing on dandelions, or laughing with their families and singing songs on road trips. I’m talking about the real kid. The one that’s a bastard. It’s a living, violent toy box, coupled with everything primal about the FPS experience, and with a role suited for any player, regardless of your level of skill being about get the glory of a headshot. Nine classes exist, with 9 different characters for each one, all of them amazingly hilarious and complex. So right there, it feels like there’s 9 ways to play, and mastering them all takes time, and effort.

These factors just make the game brilliant and fun, however. Where the addiction comes in is this: A major reason the bloom left the rose with first person shooters online for me was a late night Halo 2 Assault game, which had been perfectly enjoyable, up until the opposing team hid the bomb, and would not make a run at setting it until nearly two hours have passed.

The opposite has happened when playing TF2. As an Engineer, I’ve set up a dispenser, a turret, crowned myself manager of this little one-stop shop of death, and parked at a convenient spot waiting for the enemy to make a run at capturing my team’s territory, and been stuck there for hours, and never once was I bored. A similar scenario happened when playing as a medic, finding a guy who actually knows how to play as a Heavy, and following him around, or just walking into random places as a Pyro, turning on the flames, and watching 12 of the enemy burn to death, while doing a happy Sandperson dance at a capture point. Again, these things have gone on for hours. And because there’s so many ways to play this game, as long as there are opponents, there’s joy to be had. Luckily, I have the good fortunate of dating very patient, loving, nerd-friendly women. Otherwise, I’d have been castrated by now.

And I’d have probably still made sure I got my Sentry up to Level 3 before going to a hospital.

Team Fortress 2 is an all purpose great shooter. You don’t just want to hang out with your friends here. You actually want to hang out in this world, with these characters. Games like this are the reason adult undergarment companies stay in business.

Moment I Realized I Was Hooked:
One of my days off during the winter after this game released, I ended up as an all around support guy in a 6 hour fracas between two awesome teams in a Capture the flag game. 6 hours. You can beat most first person shooters in that time. That’s not as insane as realizing the only reason I left was because there was a power outage. And realizing the sun was no longer up. That just doesn’t happen in games for me anymore.