Team Fortress 2 is packed with some of the funniest incidental dialogue in any game ever, each class having a uniquely flavorful and humorous response for just about every situation whether it be a frag or a flag capture or a successful defense of a control point. While the Heavy weapons guy isn’t even close to being my primary class (that dubious honor would go to the medic, thanks medic pack!), his quips are by far my favorite of the bunch. Here are my Top 5 Heavy Quotes.
5. “What sick man sends babies to fight me?”
The Heavy is a big dude. So big that he refers to every other class as a baby. It follows that a sizable heavy chunk of his exposition involves calling his enemies babies. This one in particular happens only when you kill more than 2 guys in 20 seconds, which is not a difficult feat to accomplish considering the size of fattie’s heavy weapon.
4. “I hear someone building diaper-changing station!”
Staying true to the infant motif, this quote is a bit more difficult to come across as it involves an engineer (probably an enemy one) building a dispenser within proximity to the heavy. Personally I have not come across this one in my games, but this taunt needs no explanation as to why it’s awesome.
3. “I LOVE this doctor!”
The medic was always touted in the community as a natural partner for the Heavy. The HWG often echoes that same sentiment with this saying almost every time the medic heals him. Which is a lot. How does Valve solve this potentially repetitive dialogue pitfall? With broken english of course – it makes everything funny. I LOVE this line.
2. “Spy is not our spy!”
What’s this even mean? I see an enemy spy? There’s a spy sappin’ mah sentry? Our spy is being imitated by an enemy spy? Broken english, this time in the oft-used voice commands, makes this brain bursting phrase my number 2.
1. “We must push little cart!”
The payload game type is a slight variant on the attack-defend control point game type, featuring the escorting of the “little cart” toward the enemy base. Payload games typically involve the offense fighting tooth and nail to try to break through the defending team’s often thoroughly entrenched engineer sentry gun matrices. In that regard, the Heavy is actually a pretty good class to play on offense in this type, with his call to arms being “We must push little cart!” as he runs toward the mine cart with the rest of his cartoon team.
Honorable Mention: “Come to band-wagon!”
The actual response in game is “Come to bomb-wagon”, but I could have sworn I heard as “Come to band wagon” which is 100% better than “Come to bomb-wagon”. If it was actually band-wagon, it would have made the list without question instead of being relegated to the “so close yet so far” list of one. Too bad, I guess.
Gaming, Random
Random, Team Fortress 2
What’s this? I’ve been playing a game that’s not Soul Calibur IV?
Ok, not quite true as I’ve still been playing a hell of a lot of Soul Calibur (win percentage up to 43%…woot!). Instead, the highlight this week for me was Team Fortress 2 and the new content update featuring the the Heavy weapons guy.
Team Fortress 2 is my Counterstrike. That is, it’s the game where I start up on a whim and play for bite-sized sessions at a time. Whether it be a quick game before dinner or in between other activities, it’s a very low commitment game for me that I don’t need to devote a lot of time to like WoW and most console games. In the past few months, my playtime has been following the pattern of weeks of only a handful of games followed by an exceedingly larger spike coinciding with every TF2 class update: It happened with the Medic update back in April, again in June with the Pyro update, and finally this week with the update to the Heavy class. While I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m tired of playing, it’s almost as if each new patch is a new lease on life for my interest in the game. Valve is able to do this by introducing new, different, and sometimes hilarious weapons for the classes unlockable by manageable-yet-often-absurd achievements introduced in each patch. While I’m generally not too fond of using achievements to lock away new content (it often forces you to play the game in a way that it’s not meant to be played), Valve has found a good balance in making the quest for new weaponry challenging but not overbearing. Twenty-two out of thirty-six achievements for all of the weapons is a far better solution than the full 36 required for medic pack achievements. Which I did successfully but only with the help of some games in purely “achievement farming” maps. Thankfully, the Pyro and Heavy pack did not follow the same philosophy and force me into those sort of games: all of those achievements were achieved legitimately. Even the taunt-kill ones, which were honestly hilarious to pull off in a real game environment.
The Heavy pack was particularly enjoyable because this patch more than any previous one showcased TF2’s great sense of humor. Case in point: the first unlockable in the Heavy pack is the Sandvich. Which is, well, just a sandwich that replaces your normal shotgun.
The best funnies seem to be centered around the Heavy since he’s sort of the stereotypical lovable eastern European big oaf that speaks in broken English. But he’s such an integral part of giving Team Fortress 2 its unique feel. Point 2: the “Meet the Sandvich” video.
Anyway, I am thorougly enjoying this update. Great stuff, Valve. Keep up the great work!
P.S. I’m not yet finished Bionic Commando: Rearmed, but I assure you the review is coming along with some other bonus stuff.
WBP
Team Fortress 2, WBP
This week in WBP has been delayed a bit due for two reasons:
- The unexpected amount of time that was spent on the previous blog entry, and
- The release of Bionic Commando Rearmed on PSN late last week
Seeing as one of these points is rather integral to this week’s WBP, I felt it was appropriate to delay the entry a few days so I could talk about it. In any case, this week’s WBP consisted almost exclusively of more Soul Calibur IV and the retro remake of Bionic Commando.
This week spent with Soul Calibur IV was a bit different from the previous couple. Up till this weekend, my main character has been Hilde. The logic for sticking to Hilde boiled down to the fact that the character was new (meaning less characters would know how to defend against her) and the character design just looked awesome. One-hundred wins and two-hundredish losses later, I realized that my lack of skill couldn’t be the sole reason I wasn’t winning ranked matches. Rather, it was a combination of that and character imbalance and internet latency. Online basically consists of a lot of players who essentially power-leveled their ratings by abusing internet lag and the spam-skill characters (read:Kilik, Raphael, Amy). My Hilde playstyle primarily consisted of capitalizing on my opponent’s unsafe moves and then unloading a moderately damaging combo and keeping them on the defensive by mixing it up. The main caveat comes at the start of the match: Hilde does not have too many panic buttons if the opponent gets too close. As a result, most of my losses come from not being able to get away from the fast attacks of the mentioned characters. At that 140 loss mark, I figured it was a good enough time to start learning how to play a secondary character.
So I gave Sophitia a try. I don’t have anything to add except that I have a record of about 50 and 8 with Sophitia after spending a brief session in the training mode. She’s completely broken; safe attacks and high priority moves. I’m not going to say that I didn’t have fun winning all weekend, but c’mon Namco. Could you balance this game a little better?
The other game that consumed a bit of my time over the weekend was Grin’s remake of Capcom’s classic arcade and NES game Bionic Commando for PSN/XBLA/PC. Although I’ve never played the NES version, I did play the death out of the futuristic quasi-anime Gameboy remake back in the mid 90’s. My initial thoughts on playing Rearmed were of how my swing-grappling skills have atrophied so much: I did not remember the Gameboy version being so difficult. The physics of the swing mechanic are more or less the same as the version I played; even so I found myself in a pit of spikes very often. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing…after all, Rearmed is a remake of a classic Nintendo game. Meaning that it’s not obligated to coddle the player with modern gaming amenities like dumbed-down casual-friendly difficulty levels. Instead, the game chooses to kick you in the nuts swiftly and viciously from the get-go with the deviously-tricky ceiling grappling all the way to the purely S&M mobile platform grappling in later stages. And yes, this is a good thing.
I’ll probably wind up finishing the game this week sometime and maybe a couple of the interesting bonus challenges. And perhaps write a review, hmm?
WBP
Bionic Commando Rearmed, Soul Calibur IV, WBP
Although this console hardware generation is just barely three years old, it has already proven itself to be one of the most innovative with regards to software design choices and alternative business models. This is the first console generation to truly utilize the internet and the ‘always connected’ nature of broadband networking. With the integration of the internet into the home console, new gaming paradigms were introduced (and in some cases, reintroduced) for the new generation. In no particular order, here are some of the most important ideas we’ve seen so far this generation.
Read more…
Gaming
Thoughts
My WBP plate this week has been filled by hearty servings of two games with a little dollop of third.
The first game on the menu is Soul Calibur IV, which I’m still finding completely addicting to play despite the fact that I’m still pretty bad at it. My previous PSN account has a masterful record of 30 wins and 128 losses, of which at least 70 of said losses came from players spamming one button with Kilik/Mitsurugi/Siegfried and me failing to defend against that spam with my Hilde character. The other 60 I would probably attribute to misplays and other general noobishness. Despite this, I don’t consider losing matches a bad thing as practice against better opponents is the only way to get better. My new PSN account in about 50 games is at about a 28% win percentage, markedly better now that I’ve learned to play a little bit. And no, I didn’t change my PSN account because of my previous bad record in SCIV 
While we’re on the subject of PSN accounts, I’m going to take a little bit of time and agree with Garnett Lee on last week’s 1up Yours podcast about not being able to change the online handle of the account. I should not have to register a new email address to get a new handle. Period. This is pretty trivial database work. Seriously Sony, you need this option here.
The second game on the plate is the remake of Final Fantasy IV for the DS, a game that holds a very special place in my heart as the RPG that got me into the genre. This is the third release of the game I’ve played and the second time I’ve purchased it (I picked up the GBA version a few years ago as well). And the game is still awesome, though admittedly I am still a part of the problem for purchasing yet another Final Fantasy remake. This incarnation of the SNES classic features a full 2.5D reinterpretation of the old game, voice acting (which is ok, I suppose), and in-engine cut scenes that are pretty decent despite the hardware limitations. What I like most about FFIV this time is how the game manages to take the memories I have of the old 2D environments and rendering them in such a way that allows them to keep the charm of the old game yet at the same time look modernized. The game also features a solid retranslation, though I suspect some things were kept in (You spoony bard!) for the older fans of the game. Jeremy Parish of 1up supports this assessment, stating in his review that the game is mainly marketed at the older fans of FFIV. As such, the game is also a bit harder than I remembered: I’ve already lost my party a few times to former pushover bosses. Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.
Pixeljunk Eden has been my post dinner snack game. As expected, once I got past the initial control barrier the game got a lot more interesting. I wound up spinning and jumping through the first garden collecting all six spectra and starting the second and third gardens. Honestly I haven’t played much more of this to say anything more than it seems to be one of those games that you play for short bursts in spare moments. That’s not to say that Eden isn’t a good game, but rather I wanted to savor the flavor of this dessert for a long time. Perhaps I’ll find some more time to play this week before Bionic Commando gets released.
WBP
Final Fantasy IV, Pixeljunk Eden, Soul Calibur IV, WBP