By Kieron Gillen on October 1st, 2007 at 1:45 am.
Since the Team Fortress Beta went live, the collective bodies of Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been running around with cartoon projectile weapons pretty much non-stop. When that “Pretty much” kicks in, we have a break and write about Team Fortress 2, just to mix things up and keep it fresh. The following are the nine short critical examinations (with gags) of the character classes that Jim, Alec and myself conjured up with special Word Science.
Part 1: The Heavy.
Part 2: The Medic.
Part 3: The Demoman.
Part 4: The Pyro.
Part 5: The Sniper.
Part 6: The Engineer.
Part 7: The Soldier.
Part 8: The Scout.
Part 9: The Spy.
When we finished what we like to call a “ultromegafeature” we thought an opening post linking to them all and introducing the concept a little wouldn’t be a bad idea. So we did one, and it looked suspiciously like this.
Go Team!
01/10/2007 at 08:42 dartt says:
This was a great series of articles guys. It’s been a lot of fun finding out what you lot think of the classes and then reading all the comments.
01/10/2007 at 09:29 Crispy says:
QFT, anyone I know who is just getting into TF2 (especially those who haven’t played QWTF or TFC, or the new FF for that matter) I send here for a good read while they wait on their mammoth TF2 download.
01/10/2007 at 10:09 Kieron Gillen says:
Our work here is done.
KG
01/10/2007 at 10:16 Seniath says:
Aye, thoroughly enjoyed all these articles, they made an excellent read, as dartt said, both in the pieces themselves and the following comments.
01/10/2007 at 11:30 Martin Coxall says:
Gentlemen of RPS:
Any chance of a quick straw-poll on your favourite classes? Top three from each of you would be nice.
THANKS LOVE.
01/10/2007 at 11:32 Kieron Gillen says:
Soldier
Medic
Engineer
In that order. Demoman or Spy beneath them. Scout or Heavy beneath that. Sniper at the bottom. I have no problem with the Pyro, but I’ve still yet to play him, so he’s just above Sniper.
KG
01/10/2007 at 11:33 Jim Rossignol says:
Scout
Engineer
Demoman
01/10/2007 at 12:01 schizoslayer says:
Heavy
Sniper
Demoman
01/10/2007 at 12:03 John Walker says:
Scout
Pyro
Heavy
01/10/2007 at 12:06 Alec Meer says:
Heavy
Scout
Medic
01/10/2007 at 12:16 Martin Coxall says:
Heavies and Scouts? You people are REAL MEN.
For me, it’s (subject to capricious whims):
Engineer
Demoman
Medic
01/10/2007 at 12:32 Martin Coxall says:
Guys, you should be adding “digg this” “reddit this” “spong this” web-2.0 spammery buttons. If I want to spew your content all over cretinous wisdom-of-crowds news sites, it is your DUTY to make my life easier. Oh yes.
Anyway:
http://digg.com/pc_games/RPS_The_complete_Go_Team/
DIGG THIS.
01/10/2007 at 12:55 Andrew Farrell says:
No.
Anyway: Sniper, Engineer, Demoman
01/10/2007 at 13:47 Seniath says:
Pyro
Pyro
Pyro
Actually, that’s a lie. With the recent buffs, servers have been full of the Pyros, so I’ve been having a play with the other classes. My actual run down would probably be;
Pyro
Engineer (but again, like Pyros, servers tend to be full of them)
Soldier
01/10/2007 at 13:58 Andrew says:
I’ve only ever seen you as Pyro, Seniath. You fixated person you.
01/10/2007 at 14:02 Martin Coxall says:
Fire is pretty.
01/10/2007 at 15:01 Gulag says:
Pyro
Demo
Heavy
The Pyro is all sorts of burnination since the patch, and I’ve discovered the joy of the Demoman’s long bomb. Spiking the opposing battlements in 2Fort is becoming a favourite pass time.
01/10/2007 at 15:38 Iain says:
My order of preference is Heavy, Soldier, Pyro.
01/10/2007 at 16:32 Man Raised By Puffins says:
Medic
Engineer
Demoman
In that order.
01/10/2007 at 19:12 Homunculus says:
Descending order of preference, natch:
Medic
Pyro
Soldier.
01/10/2007 at 21:16 John P (Katsumoto) says:
Tricky, very tricky.
I can probably safely put 1) Pyro 2) Demoman, though it fluctuates a lot after that. Medic, Engineer and Heavy all vie for 3rd place really.
As I can’t aim for shit the sniper is out. I can’t work out how to play the spy properly and as im having so much fun with the rest i cba to allocate time to him, YET. The soldier I simply haven’t got round to trying yet!
01/10/2007 at 22:14 Jesse says:
Would be interesting to write a program that takes as input your TF2 stats, reduces them a little bit, and spits out your Meyers-Briggs personality. I bet you could train an ANN to do it.
02/10/2007 at 07:09 Gozer says:
He’s also said to resemble a Tusken Raider, or Sand People, from Star Wars. fire! fire! AAAHH!!
02/10/2007 at 13:31 Jonathan Burroughs says:
Medic.
Engineer.
Heavy.
Truth.
02/10/2007 at 16:28 Darius K. says:
Fantastic series of articles, guys. My favorite classes:
Heavy
Scout
Medic
02/10/2007 at 17:45 CrashT says:
Spy…. Let’s me unleash my inner bastard, and somehow not feel guilty about it.
Then maybe Engineer.
I’ve only managed to get TF2 to actually work properly in the last day or so though.
02/10/2007 at 17:48 plasmafire says:
Sniper
Spy
Heavy
No I am not a demented soul.. I’m a member of PETA.
How many of you have stood naked for 40 Minutes in the NY winter huh.. All for raccoons..
02/10/2007 at 18:02 Seniath says:
“I’ve only ever seen you as Pyro, Seniath. You fixated person you.”
*grin*
*twitch*
Alas, you wont be seeing me as a pyro again till thursday. My PSU blew up yesterday, which means no TF2 for me till a new one arrives.
Ofc the ironic thing is, the whole incident left me wanting to do nothing except set people on fire…
02/10/2007 at 19:19 MacBeth says:
Loved the articles – main question is where did you get that updated group shot, as the slight inaccuracies on the older one I have on my desktop are just not on…
02/10/2007 at 19:59 Kieron Gillen says:
I just nabbed it from the TF2 site. It’s not high enough resolution for a desktop though.
KG
05/10/2007 at 19:29 Mori says:
Great series of articles on a great game. My favourite class by far is the pyro, I have too much time played on him for it to be healthy. Something in the order of 15x the amount of time I have on any other class :P. I’ve kind of switched to soldier though, because I couldn’t sleep one night due to team fortress 2 appearing the moment I closed my eyes.
05/10/2007 at 20:05 Kieron Gillen says:
That happened to me this morning. I was in a half-awake/half-asleep state and playing Team Fortress on my eyelids.
I fear.
KG
20/10/2007 at 12:10 Man Raised By Puffins says:
Valve have now put together a couple of TF2 T-shirts, the Pyro one is clearly bestest.
http://store.valvesoftware.com/
20/10/2007 at 12:25 Alec Meer says:
I would totally buy a Heavy one if it didn’t have that crap on the back.
20/10/2007 at 13:13 Seniath says:
Shame white really isn’t my colour :(
03/11/2007 at 09:13 Aldrenean says:
Spy
Soldier
Scout
Beyond the spy, it’s really hard to list. My played time on Spy is more than twice my second place, but beyond that everything’s pretty equal. I’ve been warming up to the pyro a lot recently, and I sometimes do amazingly with the heavy. I also play Medic, Demoman and engineer a lot depending on the situation. I play sniper sometimes too, just to cover every class :P
29/01/2011 at 01:26 MikoSquiz says:
Just wanted to mention.. this series of articles is what got me interested in TF2 in the first place.
Today I broke 1000 hours played.
Thanks, RPS!
(Spy, Engie, Scout)