Instant Teamplay Revisited

I just thought I'd further encapsulate my previous article with the following example. Imagine you're playing Battlefield (or Call of Duty, or America's Army, or whatever big FPS you normally play. Except Counter-Strike, - I must admit that the biggest and baddest of them all, at least according to gamespy's numbers - is one that I've never been able to get into. Maybe this example doesn't apply well to them.), and within minutes of joining the public server, instead of the normal immaturity in chat, you realize that people are actually using team message to declare what they are doing. Everyone is doing it. This makes you want to help them out, and since you've got a pretty good idea of what everyone is doing, you can make an informed decision on how to best help the team, even without asking anyone.

That is what I miss in online gaming. That is what all the Battlefield public servers are still missing, despite the developers best efforts. And if the problem isn't exclusive to Conquest style maps, then we should be seeing a return to that level of intrinsic cooperation with Team Fortress 2. That's probably the best I can paraphrase it. Anyway, I felt this was missing from my previous article, but I didn't want to just edit it, as I wasn't sure how many of you would catch it.

Alas, I have more content. First off, I want to hype the new add-on to Sid Meier's Civilzation IV, Beyond The Sword. I feel it's an important product for all of PC Gaming. It appears to be (and I'm paraphrasing Gamespy reviewers here) the biggest expansion for any game... ever. Depending on how you look at it, it is two to five times more content than the original and previous add-ons. And some of that content are public user mods that were streamlined, bug-tested and then packaged with the add-on. Only good things ever seem to happen when PC game companies go the extra mile, and really support their mod community by acting as their peers and not their superiors. Counter-Strike and Team Fortress are other examples of this, as is Red Orchestra, I believe.

So it is noted, that I have my game to tide me over under October 9th. It's fair to assume that since most people who find this are FPS fans first, that they won't find a slow paced game like Civ IV up their alley. Well sorry then, the best thing I got for you is Team Fortress Classic, and you probably have given that a try before now. I'm currently also playing The Godfather to keep my aim sharp, but again, I wouldn't recommend that for everyone. Decent AI though, and great weapons and weapon interface.

It is coming down to crunch time for The Team Fortress War Room. I am keenly aware that even though this site was designed for Firefox, it looks atrocious on IE, and that is unacceptable. I hate CSS with a passion, I really do. Just really tough for me to sift through it, find the right places for things, and learn the proper methods to do exactly what I want to do with it. Hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll hammer that out though, along with finally hooking up with some social bookmarking sites. If anyone can link me to a simple tutorial for that (social bookmarking, not CSS), it would save me time, and I'd really appreciate that.

I also plan to review other sites like mine, other bigger Team Fortress resource sites. Feel free to leave your links in comments. Well, as long as they are relevant. Otherwise, they'll just get deleted, and I'll have to set the blog to send comments to me first for approval.