I took about a six month break from the game to do videos, and I come back to Team Fortress 2 to find it an appalling shambles. What was once a beautifully-balanced game has become a den of achievement whores and twinked-out, unbalanced characters. In the time I was away, Valve instituted a ton of character updates, adding X-Box Live style achievements to each class, and granting special weapons when a player got them.
The achievements themselves are hilariously over-specific, impossible to get during the course of normal gameplay. Naturally, the first thing everyone did was to set up achievement farms– servers tailor-made to facilitate the accomplishment of these achievements as quickly as possible. I’m torn between my dislike of farming achievements and the fact that I’ll never be competitive if I don’t go farming. Therein lies the problem: the game is no longer balanced, and the only way to compete is to become the very kind of achievement whore I hate. It goes against the whole spirit of achievements, like setting a home run record with the baseball on a tee, and then being rewarded with steroids.
The scouts are the worst right now. They were already borderline unbalanced before any updates, but now they’ve been granted a shotgun with knockback and enough damage to kill most characters in one hit, and the Sandman which can long-range stun any character for several seconds, even if they’ve been ubered by a medic. That’s just bullshit. And of course, everyone and their brother is playing a scout now, so it’s not uncommon to see teams comprised almost entirely of Scouts– either maxed-out and bloodthirsty, or whoring themselves out for their own achievements.
It’s hard to explain if you’ve never played TF2, and to most of you it’s just going to sound like whining from a n00b. I’m just a believer in skill against skill. I don’t mind losing if it’s a fair fight. I played Counter-Strike for years, but I had to quit because of all the cheaters. I couldn’t be sure if I was losing because I was lousy at the game, or because people were cheating. TF2 used to be the kind of game where, as long as there weren’t any bad apples taking great pains to ruin everyone’s enjoyment, you could have a great time and be confident that the playing field was level. Now it’s rewarding achievement whoring and creating two classes of players. Casual players are no longer welcome, it seems. TF2 is the munchkin’s playground now.
There’s been a small amount of Internet furor over an angry, dismissive negative review by Roger Ebert of the movie Fanboys: a review that can, at best, be described as an outright flame of fandom everywhere. The controversy isn’t over the film itself (which, admittedly, does not look very good), but that the ‘Bert claimed that Star Wars fanboys, and indeed, anyone who would consider sitting in line for a week waiting for a theater screening (Browncoats, Trekkies, you name it) are living an “idiotic lifestyle.”
This puts me in a weird position. Most of the work I’ve done for years is the critical equivalent of uppercutting fandom in the balls. I started by spending about five straight months writing essays about why Star Wars sucks and why Boba Fett is a phony. I’ve taken shots at Whovians, Battlestar fans, and of course, Squareheads (my term for Final Fantasy geeks). And yet, I feel directly insulted by Ebert’s remarks. I’ll be the first to admit hypocrisy in taking the fans’ side here, but I’m asking for a letter of marque on this one.
In an attempt to (weakly) justify myself, yes, I do enjoy tipping the sacred cows of fandom every once in a while. It’s fun watching fans get militant and flustered in impotent Internet rage, posting screaming, incoherent diatribes online in retaliation. Once again, I think it all comes back to my own unique blend of hypocrisy and my self-effacing nature. For every Star Wars slam I make, I expose an irrational worship of the old sci-fi show Sliders. Every time I issue an Internet bitchslap against people arguing who the best Doctor is, I’m embroiled in another argument about whether Deckard was a Replicant, and getting in my trillionth argument about AD&D alignments in another forum thread. I’m a fan. My crusade is against blind worship. I love a lot of weird stuff, but I can still admit that it’s flawed. I don’t care that you love Doctor Who, but don’t try to claim that it’s never sucked. It has. It does. But real fans can still love something in spite of– no, because of its flaws.
That’s me. I love you guys, and you’re a load of flawed, screwed-up weirdos. But that’s okay. I am your king, and you are not alone.
I’ve raged against furries and weird transgender moogle porn, but damn it, this is America! You want to jerk off to Filthy Multitasking Quistis, hell, throw that picture on the ground, huddle up, and I’ll put five bucks on whoever can bust a nut on her face first. You are not stupid for seeking people you identify with. You are not an idiot for finding friends and feeling like you have somewhere you belong. Your particular brand of happiness might be pretty fucked-up, but you’re not fucked-up for pursuing that happiness. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, wave that freak flag high.
Final Fantasy VIII may suck, and you may suck for liking it, but I’m the captain of this suck-filled leaking failboat, and I’m not going to have some jerkoff movie critic who’s never cracked a Player’s Handbook in his life call my homies STUPID.
My crack research staff have informed me that, in The Protector, the famous “passing of the torch” scene is faked!!
That’s not Jackie Fucking Chan!
It’s a lookalike! Seriously, what the hell? You just can’t do this! You can’t fake the passing of a torch when no torch has, in fact, been passed! There has been no torch passage! Foul, I say! FOUL!!
What kind of balls does it take to stage your own torch-passing? That’s not torch-passing, that’s torch-stealing!
I’m pissed off now. Can Jackie do something about this? I need to get Jackie on the phone so he can go get his torch back. Tony Jaa fucking STOLE HIS TORCH. This isn’t right, do you hear me? THIS. IS NOT. RIGHT!!
My quest for a quick, convenient time-killer has led me once again to the verdant, Moogle-infested land of Ivalice, as I do a quick review of Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift.
I haven’t played a Tactics game since the original PS1. How does it fare? Let’s just say that there are many words I would choose to describe this game, but “Tactics” isn’t one of them. Maybe “Shopping,” or “Micromanagement.”
Or maybe “Boredom.” Yeah. Let’s stick with that.
Edit: I probably didn’t express myself well enough to explain why I didn’t like the job system of Tactics A2. Not only do you have to switch jobs, but you have to constantly manage equipment specific to those jobs. The abilities you learn for each job are specific to the piece of equipment, not the job itself. So a White Mage carrying nothing learns nothing; he has to carry a Rod long enough to learn Cure, then carry a Healing Staff to learn Cura.
This is a major switch from simply learning class abilities through experience. Now you have to be in the job AND be carrying specific items before you can learn abilities. It’s extremely frustrating having to keep this in mind for over six characters, each of which has at least a dozen jobs to choose from, and each job has several powers to learn.
