Forever NotDelayed

So, Valve have announced that anyone who preorders the Orange Box will get into the Team Fortress 2 beta which starts on the 17th. That's Monday. Now, great and all, but that does leave a weekend. If only there was some kind of new Team Fortress style game you can play in the meantime.

Why - what's this? It's old PC Gamer running joke Infofly. What's that, infofly? Little Betsy's stuck down the well? Oh, who cares about Little Betsy. We're amoral PC gamers, desensitized to horror. Tell us something about games, my insectoid chum. What? Fortress Forever's been released? That sounds like a cue for a screenshot.

Fortress Forever is a Source-based mod, basically, and is more heavily indebted to Team Fortress Classic than its true successor. I haven't actually had a chance to play it yet, so I've turned to what will surely be the new exciting shortcut when pitiful journalistic laziness strikes: the RPS chatroom on Steam. "I'd imagine it's like taking methadone the weekend before you start a serious heroin addiction," noted Dartt, who hadn't actually played the game, but came up with the best metaphor. Luckily, giving weight to the quote, was the ominous figure of SteveTheBlack who has both played it and agrees with Dartt. "It's pretty much the same as TFC but with new maps and slight tweaks," he notes, before expressing mild annoyance with an auto-reload feature if you don't fire your gun for a few seconds. Then conversation turned to who wants to play a rousing game of Defcon.

In short, you have a few days before TF2 Beta. It seems a fine way to spend it. And if you're the sort of person who rolls their eyes at the new cartoon look, clearly, you'll be there for much longer.