• 21Jun 09

  Team Fortress 2: Medic Tips

  Team Fortress 2 is such a fun and amazing gaming experience. After 300+ hrs of game play though I'm forced to quit playing. One major problem is that with any multi-player game, players tend to reach a skill limit that hinders the rest of team from winning. This new series of blogs is to help fellow TF2 players understand their faults, and how to fix them. I'll be giving tips to certain classes that players seem to have a bit of difficulty understanding how to best use them. So here is a somewhat short list of how to become a better medic. If you have any suggestions feel free to add them to the comment list.

  PLAYING AS MEDIC

  1. Medics, use your ubers wisely. If you know you're going to die, hit the uber. If your potential ubered player dies, and you're surrounded by the opposing team, hit your uber, give it to ANYONE on your team or use it to save yourself and runaway. You lose a lot more time trying to charge another uber if you're spending 20 seconds respawning.

  2. Always keep an eye behind you. Medics are so much more of a target for spies than the giant heavies are. Looking at who you're ubering and the direction of what's going on is important, but realize that many players will go behind you to flank you before you uber and to kill you as soon as your uber (or crtiz) is finished. A good way to avoid spies is too also be continuously moving so that its much harder for a spy to register a backstab before you notice their presence.

  3. Valve was nice enough to add icons for players calling for medics. HEAL THOSE WITH ICONS IN RED. We're dying and you're healing the engineer that's full of health. Just taking a second to give us 30 health can go a long way. Too many times I'll be on fire at 50 health, standing right next to a medic and spamming "MEDIC!", only to die because he's oblivious to everything that's not in front of him.

  4. You want to destroy little sentry bases that are set up. You are 100% charged with an uber with a demo, soldier, pyro, and heavy next you. DON'T UBER THE SOLDIER. Soldiers are great for critz but absolutely useless for ubers. Take the demo to clear out large amount of sentries, dispensers and such. Use a heavy to do the same and/or clear out large clusters of enemies. Use a pyro to scare back the opposing team, and clear a path to the control point. Even ubering a spy with the ability to sap and backstab is much more useful than ubering a soldier.

  5. When ubering, run in front of the player first to make sure sentries aim at you and not the player. The knockback from the sentries will push your ubered player back preventing him/her from destroying the sentries and may even waste your uber.

  6. Most important about ubering is to not pretend like you're going to run out with a player and use their uber on them. If I'm at full health and you don't plan on using your charged uber on me, stop healing me. It leads me to believe that you're going to hit the uber so we can go out when many times I run out, you stay in a safe covered area, and I die.

  7. Most of the time, being a battle medic just leads to your death and mine. I'll protect you. That's the partnership we form when you're healing me. I'll check behind you and make sure those pyros flame doesn't reach you. But when you stop healing me to bring out your syringe gun, I end up killing the enemy while burning to death or being blown up. Use your weapons when dealing with a spy or if you're alone.

  8. Spend time studying how disguised spies move. It's very obvious which players are spies after playing for so long. It becomes quite frustrating seeing our medic healing a spy while he saps our engineer's buildings. A syringe gun is an easy test. If you're getting health back then he's a spy!

  • Posted Jun 21, 2009 9:45 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 23Mar 08

  The Trick To Purchasing Games.

  $60!?? Are you nuts? How could anyone charge that much for a game? I used to think $50 for a new PS2, X-Box, or GC game was pushing it, but now it's getting ridiculous. The sad thing is, people are actually emptying their wallets for them. I can understand wanting to purchase guaranteed buys like Devil May Cry 4 or Halo 3, but there are so many crappy games that come out on the nex-gen console that it's hard to distinguish the good from the bad. In the end you might have just spent $60 plus tax for the most awful game ever made.

  Well at this point you'll probably ask me "Well why don't you look at reviews so you can see if the game is worth buying?" Well for one, many buyers(un-informed families, children) simply make impulse buys. They are looking for a quick fix of fun. Secondly, I personally do look at reviews. At least 4-5 from various reliable sources such as Gamespot, IGN, and Nintendo Power, EGM, and TG Daily. I also go through a couple or so of the player reviews on the website too to be sure. Yet this isn't always helpful. For example Yoshi's Island got such great reviews that I bought it, played it for a couple hours, and thought it was the most un-fun game imaginable. I bet a lot of you felt the same way with other ventures such as Assassins Creed, Haze, or Hellgate London that clock out at $60 but are just average or horrible. Heck I bought the GTA 3 pack and after $30 and a few hours playing the games I realized that despite the reviews, the game just wasn't for me. And here is where my error in judgment was made. No matter how great a score a game gets, if it's not your particular genre type of game, than don't purchase it.

  The great thing about the mistakes I made by purchasing the GTA pack and Yoshis Island was hat I bought them at a discount. Yoshi's Island was 20% off and GTA Pack was for $30 as opposed to buying each game for $20 each. Bringing them in to gamestop got me $30 out of my $60 back. The whole point now that I'm trying to make is, I don't see the point in purchasing a game when it comes out .

  Why is it best to wait? Several reasons. Suppose I wait 6 months to a year to purchase a game. Specifically something on the ps3, 360. By waiting, I have a larger archive of both formal reviews and player reviews to help me understand what type of game I might want to purchase. Another reason is that any bugs, exploits, or flaws the game might be fixed after a certain amount of time. With access to the internet for the nex-gen consoles and the PC, after 6-12months(and even a quarter), patches become available to fix errors and bugs within the game without having to experience them for myself if I had purchased the game at release. Lastly, the most important aspect of waiting a period of time before purchasing a game, is PRICE. A game I most desperately wanted, Quake 4, had come out with a retail price of $50. I waited less than a year, and the price dropped down to $20. Now this isn't always the case. Some games take up to a year or more before a fall in price, but most of the time companies will lower the price to sale it's leftover copies in stock or when they feel they've dried up the audience at that price level. Sales are amazing to me. Best Buy had one only a month after releasing Orange Box and Bioshock. Both retail for $50. But during the sale each were half off. I bought both highly acclaimed games for $25 each and never had been happier for such a deal.

  Sometimes though, you don't want to wait. And that's fine. I mean we want to play these titles now and not wait. Same with movies and other technology. Yet with games, at the current price, we'll be fooled into believing the gaming market is doing well when it's just inflating their results with the extra ten dollars we're spending per game. Well in 2010 and 2011 when the consoles get their next revamp, I truly hope they start realizing that $60 is an insane an amount to charge for a game. I hope more though, is that it never goes up to $70

  So here are a few tips if you're new to the gaming industry.

  1) Always check for reviews on games. The best thing to do is go on Gamerankings.com or which calculate an average score based on dozens of reviews. From there you can browse thousands of games and the reviews for them. Another tip would be to read payer reviews as well. Although some are brief and written poorly, others are very informative and written to show both the pros and cons of a certain game.

  2) If you need to purchase a game, regardless of the price, at least wait 2 months. Patches and updates can seriously change and improve game play and prevent possible crashing, lagging, or glitches in games. If you are patient and a smart buyer, you'll wait a or a certain period of time so that games will come down in price. This can usually save you between 20-60% on a game.

  3) Stop buying these stupid collectors editions that are simply the game plus maybe stickers or how the game was made DVD's which are boring and pointless to pay for.

  There are times when regardless of the price you'll want a game such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl or the upcoming GTA 4, but the very best thing you can do, is to understand what type of game you are purchasing, and if it's the right game for you.

  • Posted Mar 23, 2008 3:11 pm PT
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