Of Heals And Heels: Team Fortress 2's Two Cities Update
The best of times
OK, time for a truth bomb: I haven't played Team Fortress 2 in age-- *KATHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMSPLURSHHHHHH* Oh jeez, wow. That was actually a regular bomb lightly sprinkled with truth. My bad. I'm gonna need to un-bury John and Alec from the wreckage momentarily (Graham was out, and Adam is immune to explosions), but quickly: I haven't played Team Fortress 2 in quite some time, but I still get excited about updates. Why, you ask? Because Valve always delivers brilliant laughs on top of them. Go below for delightful text and a gruesomely enjoyable video of the new, Medic-immortality-granting Two Cities update.
The update focuses largely on Mann vs Machine mode, adding three new maps: Mannhattan, the player-created Snakewater, and Rottenburg. Oh, but Valve wants to be absolutely sure you know that Snakewater isn't a city. It's not even "a legally defined government entity." There are only two cities, you see. Two. Completing a Two Cities Tour, meanwhile, grants you a killstreak kit which you can apply to any weapon to get a - drumroll, suspense, upheaval in cities across the world, people on fire - killstreak weapon.
The biggest class beneficiary of Two Cities, meanwhile, is the Medic. He can now sort of invalidate the field of medicine altogether by simply bringing the dead back to life with this Reanimator, and he also gets a powerful projectile shield to back it up. Oh, and mad milk syringes, which sound like the most devastating weapon of all, largely because I'm terrified of needles.
You can slip on your kinda-sterile (or at least, they were a few hours ago, before you killed all those people) gloves and dive into the update's guts right now. To encourage you to do that, here is a nice (and completely factually accurate) sentiment from Valve:
"'It was the best of times. It was the best of times.'
"So opens Charles Dickens' feel-good surf classic Super Good Times, and Dickens' words are as true today as they were at the beach cabana where he wrote them: The best of times, you guys. Let's have some."