05/08/2011

Why Playing Pyro in TF2 is awesome (This title may or may not be relevant to the actual article)

Note: I apologise in advance for the inconsistency of this article.

Okay, well I have to confess that in the time period I will be writing this I will either be drunk or groggy and tired and slightly hung over, so the standard of writing and entertainment value may vary. I’ve been asked to write something to qualify me for writing on this blog within a couple of days and at the time of asking (immediately before now, when I am writing this) I was about as inspired as...as someone not inspired enough to think of a fitting simile for lack of inspiration. The article was also intended to be about gaming, which admittedly I haven’t done a lot of quite recently. As I’m literally doing this as I go along, for some reason I think it’s a good idea to go into this and make an article about it, and as I have nothing else to go on:

There are several reasons I’ve barely gamed in the past week or so, despite having not left the house much. In fact, I’ve not left the house at all since Tuesday. On Monday I went to see my girlfriend Laura, and as she was to go to Florida for two weeks on Wednesday I ended up staying over till Tuesday as I was supposed to see her that day as well anyway. Prior to this, I had spent plenty of time with her but also played a lot of TF2 with my friend Dean, who I met through video games on the internet, which would have also been done with Mike (the owner of this blog, if you are somehow unaware) if he were not on holiday and stupid things like that. I also know Mike through the same video game on the internet, but that’s a story for another inebriated writing session. 

I didn’t play games much while I was with Laura, as I was too busy enjoying the time I had left I had with her before she went (interpret that as you desire). When I got back on Tuesday night, Dean was, as he had been before, without good internet as for whatever reason his was screwing up, so I ended up just talking to him and a nice Floridian named Jake on Skype. As his internet was sucking he couldn’t play Team Fortress (which, as mentioned before by my lovely associate, is not only awesome but now free) so I ended up spending my days and evenings and also nights watching Let’s Plays. For those not in the know, these are videos where people play games and talk at the same time – essentially a walkthrough, but with more of a focus on entertainment than ‘this is how to win at this game’; though some are still informative. They are to me what anime is to Mike, and television is to normal people. They are also very entertaining, and I have now decided they are the focus of this article, which was originally somehow going to be about Team Fortress and how playing the Pyro class is fun. However I am sure I can tell you about that another time.

So during this time without a Dean to play with, I ended up also without a Dean to talk to as his family was angry at their ISP for sucking and not fixing the slow internet and so they ordered them to cut them off. This meant he then had no internet, and as everyone else I talk to was out of the country save for a few people, I resorted largely to talking to my friend Becky while watching these Let’s Plays. I could spend this article ranting about how Becky is useless at meeting up and how I miss her, but that wouldn’t really achieve anything. This article is about Let’s Plays, after all, and I’m probably going to go on about how awesome they are before I recommend some, so feel free to skip past this part. Except haha! I’m not going to do that here, if ever at all, because that awesomeness can be summed up by saying they’re fun and very entertaining.

And in fact, in order to make sure I always have stuff to write about if I get to make regular posts, I’m just going to recommend one Let’s Play which is very good right now, which I am rewatching due to its awesomeness. That is, the Something Awful Let’s Play (as the kind-of-originators of the concept, theirs are often the best) of Left 4 Dead [link to: http://lparchive.org/Left-4-Dead/]. In case you don’t know, Left 4 Dead is a 4-player co-op game where you shoot lots of zombies and try not to die. The players tell you more about the game as they play through, so that’s all you need to know about the basic concept, but I’d like to explain why this Let’s Play is so great. Also, if you watch it and you find yourself boring of the campaigns, try watching a campaign and then watching the versus play of it, as the versus videos are some of the best. Or you can forego the campaign plays of the default campaigns entirely if you wish. But anyway, the overly in depth list reasons this rocks that you have no real reason to read:

  • Firstly, and one of the most important, it’s a good game. There are many good Let’s Plays of bad games, but if you do a game as good as this it’s hard to make it genuinely bad and unentertaining.
  • The players are good at the game. Again, sometimes there is reason to be awful at the game (e.g. a blind play of a horrible or unfair game) but in this case, it’s really good to see the game played to a professional standard. Except by cKnoor.
  • The players are all amusing. Many Let’s Plays have only the commentary of the person who does the playing, or maybe one or two other people they invite to join in. In this case, there are four people playing normally, and that’s all you need, and each one is unique in their personality and sense of humour.
  • The players/commentators have a great relationship and synergy with each other. As well as playing well, they interact well. Even if that does end up in cKnoor being killed before most of the safe rooms (with brilliant results) it helps immensely to make it fun to watch and can genuinely result in attachment to the players’ voices.
  • It’s a full, long Let’s Play. Don’t get me wrong, some can overstay their good length, but this one is great throughout and demands a degree of thoroughness. This one shows off multiple game modes like versus, where one team of people plays as the infected (zombies) and also some of the good and bad custom campaigns, so they really show the game well, and are very informative.
  • It doesn’t need to be watched in order or in one go or anything. Because it’s basically split up into sections by the campaigns, you could watch one campaign (approximately one hour long altogether) a day and you needn’t watch them in the order they’re listed, because they don’t link together and things. The flexibility means you can miss out things you might find boring, as I mentioned, though in my opinion it’s all worth watching.
  • Damnit, you’re still reading? Go watch the Let’s Play.

And that concludes my first post, I guess, and regardless of its quality I can hopefully assure that any following ones will at least be more consistent in subject, if not better in...reading...goodliness...goodnight.

3 comments:

  1. You weren't kidding when you said the title was irrelevant! Also in terms of Let's Plays... SirRonLionheart, CruelestChris and Jefmajor are far and away my favourites.

    Let's see if Mike can guess who I am :P

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  2. I have absolutely no clue who you are DJ. None whatsoever. Hint?

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  3. SirRon is pretty awesome, but I tend to stick to the Something Awful LP forum for mine as Youtube-based LPers can be very variable in quality. And they all do the same goddamn thing, half the time.

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