Game: Team Fortress Developer: Team Fortress Software Platform: PC (Half-Life Mod) Release Year: 1996
This original version of Team Fortress was a Quake mod way back in 1996. This was ported to the GoldSrc (Half-Life 1) engine in 1999, and it is the Half-Life mod which I played.
Basic Plot
There is no plot. The game involves two opposing teams consisting of multiple players who battle each other and to complete certain objectives.
Gameplay
In its essence Team Fortress is a class based team battle game between the red and blue teams. By class based I am referring to the different character classes which the player can take control of during a game, each of which has unique abilities and weaponry.
The classes available were:
Scout - Fastest but weakest class. Useful for capturing flags and getting to objectives quickly, but greatly outclassed in terms of combat ability.
Spy - Also very weak unit but is able to change appearance to look like an enemy player, choosing which class they'd like to parade as. Had a knife attack for backstabbing enemies. Used for infiltration and assassination.
Sniper - Specialises in using a sniper rifle to take enemies out from afar.
Medic - Light warrior with the ability to heal allies and infect enemies.
Engineer - Light warrior with the ability to built and upgrade automatic turrets. These turrets could be used to fortify important positions on the map.
Demo-man - Specialised in explosives such as grenades, rockets, and bombs. Could set up traps that could be detonated to take out enemies.
Pyro - Fire-themed heavy infantry with a flame thrower among other weapons.
Soldier - Heavy infantry with a bazooka.
Heavy Weapons - The ultimate heavy infantry with a chaingun but very slow movement speed.
There are usually map objectives as well including capturing the enemy flag or holding strategic points. This is similar in gameplay to Starsiege: Tribes.
I think this is a set of class models from the original Quake version, I'm having trouble finding images of the version I played - all I seem to find are screenshots from Team Fortress 2.
Unlike Team Fortress 2 every class had some kind of grenades which could be used during combat. These were extremely useful and were effective at clearing out enemies who were "camping" in particular spots, and could even be used to get to high areas (by timing a jump as a concussion grenade went off, you could leap great distances).
Positives
The variety of classes and large number of players in a game meant that no game was ever the same. There was a kind of wonderful chaos about the game and each game was filled with action.
Negatives
It didn't have the realism of Counter-Strike in terms of head shots or falling damage, which was actually not necessarily a bad thing but was one of the reasons I stopped playing.
Memorable Moments
Team Fortress was my first taste at first person multiplayer action online. I really liked the game and only stopped playing because Counter-Strike grabbed my attention more and provided a game which required more skill and complexity to master.
My favourite class was the Engineer and I got pretty good at taking kills with the shotgun, and building turrets inside the enemy base without them noticing. They also had some of the best grenades in the game.
Team Fortress was arguably the most balanced game considering the amount of classes there were. It's sort of like BW where there wasn't too much realistic physics involved which allowed people to perform pretty neat tricks like rocket/grenade jumping to get to the flag.
When I played it, it was pretty noob friendly too as there wasn't much BM or flaming going on. You could play every class and it will be fun every time.
The game you are talking about It's Team Fortress Classic (TFC) thats the Half-Life 1 version, I played this game with a few friends and its not that bad but since no one plays it anymore it gets boring to join a server with 3-4 people only.
On September 13 2012 10:35 andReslic wrote: The game you are talking about It's Team Fortress Classic (TFC) thats the Half-Life 1 version, I played this game with a few friends and its not that bad but since no one plays it anymore it gets boring to join a server with 3-4 people only.
Thanks for the clarification. And in response to another poster I agree, I can't remember a lot of BM when I played either. Even just starting out I managed to contribute to the team as long as I didn't try and go Sniper
Sadly, you have a very shallow view of TFC. For example:
On September 13 2012 05:53 DRTnOOber wrote: Counter-Strike grabbed my attention more and provided a game which required more skill and complexity to master.
That is entirely false. Here's a somewhat recent video showing off the insane (and incredibly difficult) movement possibilities in TFC (many of which were not thought possible until this video was made, 10 years after TFC was released):
(seriously, that video is absurd)
EDIT: I realized that the above video might require intimate knowledge of TFC to fully appreciate. Be sure to check out some of the classic videos below.
On September 13 2012 11:42 squeek wrote: Sadly, you have a very shallow view of TFC. For example:
This is true. I am certainly no expert on TFC, just wanted to share the memory of a game which had a big impact on a lot of us. I will have to watch the video later, not available where I am right now.
squeek; Just watched some of those videos. Looks like at the high end there was a lot of skill involved, seems to be focused a lot around utilising grenades for extreme mobility to grab the flag. Pretty sick. Still; for me at the time, Counter-Strike had a higher skill level (I never saw ANY of what I just saw in those videos when I was playing!).
Yeah, that's actually not hard to believe. TFC was many different things to many different people, which is another reason why it is so special. There were an unbelievable amount of highly segregated and non-overlapping communities within this single game; to the point that it's not uncommon to find people that consider what I posted "not real TFC" because it utilizes bunnyhopping and conc jumping to such an extent.
Here are some more videos that show different aspects of TFC:
ADL (attack and defend league, dustbowl style maps; utilizes heavy offense and creative jump techniques (like friendly detpacks/snipers/etc) to cap each point) + Show Spoiler +
And of course there were also the ever-so-popular 24/7 dustbowl and 24/7 2fort servers that were just all out chaos. + Show Spoiler +
Such a pity that TFC and HL1 multiplayer are more or less dead nowadays, those were amazing. I do miss medics who did nothing but conc jump and poison people, haha, truly fun times.
To squeek, I do not question your knowledge on the topic since you seem infinitely more involved with the communities for the older versions of Team Fortress (and particularly TFC), but I find it ridiculous and stupid that people would call it "not real TFC" when it does nothing but vastly increase the skill ceilling with things like bhop and trick jumps.
How I miss the days where competitive FPS was more about being really good and enjoying the experience of getting better and playing good people than it was about getting shiny achievements and unlocking random modern weapon #J whilst arguing over voice chat with 11 year olds who don't know anything about anything.
On September 14 2012 04:32 MasterOfPuppets wrote:I find it ridiculous and stupid that people would call it "not real TFC" when it does nothing but vastly increase the skill ceilling with things like bhop and trick jumps.
I feel the same way, but the sentiment is very real. Some TFC servers even went to weird lengths to remove bunnyhopping from the game like disallowing jumping and strafing at the same time, removing air acceleration, etc. They usually consider bunnyhopping an exploit, or that it was not intended by the developers (even though Valve took steps to balance it rather than remove it; see Open Your Mind). Here's a thread on the Steam forums about it: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2596756
EDIT: Even in the Open Your Mind video comments, there's this: "bhpping and conc killed tfc." and this: "This is the only part i DIDN'T like in TFC. The chaotic mayhem and fast-paced action was cool, but i never liked bhopping and c-jumping. Well, maybe c-jumping was cool because it was built in the game, but bhopping was an exploit in the engine."
Now I'm the one getting nostalgic. Your posts remind me of all the thousands of wonderful hours my friends and I used to play Half-Life Deathmatch over LAN. We got pretty good, some games were absolutely brutal. 1v1 was the most intense... that was when the blood was pumping the most for me. I remember playing that standard map "bounce" where all the walls are a red/purple/dark colour so all of us would switch our skins to the same colour so we could blend in. There was a really high area with crossbow ammo and a long ladder, we called it the "perch" and would spend a lot of the game fighting to hold it for as long as possible, sniping anyone who got close. The other players would end up using the gause cannon to blast up there, or even using the "bounce" pads to land satchels up onto the perch, and then detonating them haha. There were some awesome player made maps too - "farmland" and "2play" were some of the best.
On September 14 2012 08:14 DRTnOOber wrote: Now I'm the one getting nostalgic. Your posts remind me of all the thousands of wonderful hours my friends and I used to play Half-Life Deathmatch over LAN. We got pretty good, some games were absolutely brutal. 1v1 was the most intense... that was when the blood was pumping the most for me. I remember playing that standard map "bounce" where all the walls are a red/purple/dark colour so all of us would switch our skins to the same colour so we could blend in. There was a really high area with crossbow ammo and a long ladder, we called it the "perch" and would spend a lot of the game fighting to hold it for as long as possible, sniping anyone who got close. The other players would end up using the gause cannon to blast up there, or even using the "bounce" pads to land satchels up onto the perch, and then detonating them haha. There were some awesome player made maps too - "farmland" and "2play" were some of the best.
Hmm... I think one of my favourite things to do was on this random deathmatch map** on some random public server where I would do a high gauss jump into bombing people with rockets or crossbow bolts. Fun times :D
The map itself I have no idea what it was called. Come to think of it, it wasn't a particularly popular map, just a dust-textured arena with 2 or 3 levels of height and a big block in the middle basically. Tau jumping was quite effective both to get a better view of the area and to be harder to frag by people down below. Still, fun times.
My most played map I think was Crossfire (what a surprise, lol) but I don't have any particularly awesome moments. I guess I wasn't that good back in those days and neither was almost anyone that I played with. :/
Still, I'd much rather get completely owned in a skill-centric shooter than crush noobs in a mainstream title where all you need to do well is to know the maps and have decent reflex.
EPT![[image loading]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kaOjjCqyENA/TuF8Jy7QSLI/AAAAAAAAAqo/TsBHSy7yErA/s320/valve-logo.jpg)
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