Craving the Orange Box
Posted: Sep 21, 2007
So back in the murky mists of time before the dotcom crash, I used to run a little internet gaming concern in the UK. My job, in a nutshell, involved getting people to play multiplayer games. And yes, it was awesome, thanks.
Mostly.
Anyhow, my favourite game to play throughout all this was a little Half-Life add-on called Team Fortress Classic. The cool kids were all busy with Quake III and Unreal Tournament, but my true love was running around as a medic in TFC.
I couldn’t even begin to work out how many hours I spent online playing that thing, but since then my interest in PC gaming in general has pretty much evaporated as my tolerance for running Microsoft Windows has plummeted to zero.
New versions of Doom, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life came and went, World of Warcraft took over the world, but still I wasn’t convinced enough to buy a PC just to play games again. I was more than happy with my skinny PS2, Psychonauts and Katamari Damacy, thanks very much.
Then yesterday I saw a picture my brother Dave posted on Flickr that looked like something from a Pixar movie. It turned out to be a screen from the long awaited update to TFC – Team Fortress 2, and, just like that, I’ve remembered just how much of a online gaming geek I still am.
Seriously, go watch the trailers on the Team Fortress 2 site and tell me that doesn’t look like a whole bunch of fun. It’s a game-loving Pixar fanboy’s wet dream. That it comes with three installments of Half-Life 2 and the genius that is Portal, I’m excited about PC gaming again for the first time in years. The first chance I get I’ll be buying a 24” iMac, a copy of Windows XP and I’m going to see just how pitiful my trigger finger has become.
I can’t wait.
