Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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This entry is written by Joe, a regular reader of this blog.  If you’re up for Counter-Strike or another Valve product, drop by his web site.  Do it for Ghetto?

(Note: This entry is based on Team Fortress as modded for the Quake franchise.  I don’t consider Team Fortress Classic a member of the Team Fortress family.)

I believe Valve did a disservice to gaming by turning Team Fortress into a shallow deathmatch shooter with little emphasis on the team and a huge emphasis on kills.  I keep having to argue why Team Fortress 2 sucks and isn’t Team Fortress.  Maybe it’ll help if I explain what Team Fortress is and why the sequel isn’t Team Fortress.

In Team Fortress, everybody respawns instantly.  It is instant. Killing enemies in their base is a waste of time because they will return to battle in seconds with full health and ammo. In Team Fortress 2, thanks to the deathcam, “instant respawn” takes a number of seconds.

In Team Fortress, players take active roles on offense or defense.  Nobody roams looking for people to kill unless one is new to the map.  There is no reason to.  The game doesn’t reward kills and the player is back in the game before you reload your weapon.

In Team Fortress, capturing the flag nets everybody on the team ten points.  A sound is played so everybody knows what happened, and the name of those who touched the flag is displayed in a message at the center of the screen.  The flag capture is the touchdown.  Nobody gives a shit about kills, it’s about scoring points.

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