I may have bought Valve’s Orange Box for entirely different reasons, but I got the most mileage out of the inclusion of Valve’s standalone sequel to what was originally a Quake mod; Team Fortress 2. Honestly, the phrase “Most Mileage” is a bit of an understatement. With my current Steam playtime for TF2 reading 905 hours it sits proudly at the top of the heap of most total time I’ve ever spent playing a game… by some way. I consider a game above 20 hours playtime to be a big investment of single player effort and even games that have seen a good wedge of multiplayer rarely break in to triple figures. For a game that’s such a significant slice in my gaming past, it’s kind of strange that I haven’t mentioned it a whole lot before.

Of course that 905 hours was accumulated over years, but those years overlapped some of the trickier ones that I’ve had to face personally and, whilst I’m not going to go into all of those details, my own development and the game’s ongoing development come together to tell a story of my relationship with the eternal conflict between Red an Blu (and of course the Announcer who, like a puppet master, controlled us all). Continue reading “The Rise & Fall of My Team Fortress 2 Career”