team-fortress posts

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Team Fortress is one of the most influential mods ever made, with the only other mod of comparable reach being Counter-Strike. While originally for Quake, the mod team would later be bought out by Valve and put to work remaking the mod for the GoldSrc engine. The result is Team Fortress Classic, which was one of the first mega-popular mods for Half-Life and the direct predecessor to the incredible Team Fortress 2. Ignoring it would be a travesty, and despite its sequel being out, it still has a strong following amongst the hardest of the hardcore.

There have been thousands of PC games released in the past few decades but let's be honest: Most of them are not that original. Oh sure, some are professionally made and even entertaining to play but in the end very few bring anything new to the table.

There are some games, however, that attempt to break the envelope of normal gameplay and take things in new directions. Sometimes these games are big hits. Other times the ideas are used and refined by other titles even if the original game wasn't a sales success. These titles influenced many other titles since their original release.

Big Download has decided to give our picks for the top 20 most influential PC games of all time. These selections are not necessarily the best selling games ever made or even the best from a developer's point of view. However they all have elements that were original and/or popular enough to see their designs used in many other games. We are counting down from 20 to 11 today. Be here on Thursday when we reveal our selections for the top 10.

Click on the image above to continue reading about the top 20 most influential PC games (20-11)

Before Team Fortress, there was Capture the Flag, and it was good. CTF pitted two teams against each other in an attempt to capture the other team's flag before their opponents could capture theirs. It was fun, it was visceral, and it provided a break from deathmatch, a game mode that had become ho-hum in the face of so many innovative mods and game modes.

For many, CTF wasn't too drastic a change from deathmatch. There were flags, yes, and teamwork was pivotal to success; but there weren't any major differences between the two modes. Captures could represent frags, and though excelling at CTF depended on skill over luck, having access to the same power-ups and weapons as every other player didn't significantly alter gameplay.

In 1996, three avid Quake players banded together in an effort to repave the landscape of FPS gaming. Months of throwbacks to early game development such as stale pizza and all-night coding sessions birthed Team Fortress, the opus of Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley.

Breaking into the video game industry isn't easy, but one great way to make an impression to create mods for existing games. Indeed there have been one or two occasions where a mod of a game has become more popular than the game it's based on. Valve has been a champion of these kinds of mods and games and has even bought a number of them into their fold to be released as commercial titles.

While technically their next game Left 4 Dead is an all original property the zombie co-op shooter has the spirit of a mod that was later made into a full game. In this feature we look back at both mods and mod teams that have move on to make some terrific first person shooter style titles including, yes, a number of Valve games.

Click on the image above to continue reading the feature article

You've now hopefully finished reading our wonderful guide to pyro achievements. Will this make you a better pyro? Indubitably. You will have better weapons, better skills, and generally be a sexier pyro for all to see. Well, maybe not the last one. However, if you took our advice, you should now have three new weapons: the flare gun, axetinguisher, and backburner. If you haven't been reading our guide that we spent so much time on (tsk tsk) then we will save you the effort of digging them up. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parts are all viewable here on Big Download.

Robin Walker is a Valve game designer who most notably worked/works on Team Fortress 2. He recently spoke at an event about how he sees Valve -- and other developers -- as service providers. It's certainly an interesting thesis to read through and well worth your attention. Walker goes on to explain his thesis, but he also dishes out discussion on Team Fortress 2 as well. The three main goals the team had for TF2 were long-term fun, indefinite free-content and rewards for player investment. Walker goes on to explain how the team reached these goals and their effect on the community and the game. There's some talk about how the medic update affected the player base, which is always an interesting topic for a TF2 player.

For Walker it all comes down to developers thinking about their roles from a community-orientated angle. He also says that it's important for a developer be able to dictate how much of what data from players they want to examine and that having a close relationship to the player base is the best way to do this. It's not an entirely new concept, but one we think developers should continually remind themselves about.

If you're an aspiring modder, than Garry (creator of Garry's Mod) has a list of ten things he'd like you to consider when creating your mod. All ten of the tips seem like solid advice, especially the last one -- which rounds the entire list out quite nicely. We're big -- no scratch that -- huge supporters of mods and their creators here at Big Download. It's the mod community that makes PC gaming so very special. The good kind of special, not the kind of special you tend to encounter in most Xbox Live conversations (NSFW).

We can't count the number of hours we've spent playing everything from Team Fortress and Day of Defeat to Dystopia and Pirates, Vikings and Knights II. Although now that we look at it, there's a strong tendency for FPS mods, which makes us wonder what kinds of mods we'll see after Starcraft II launches.