The first menu the game came up with was nothing new. Choose a team; red or blue. In Counter Strike it’s terrorists or counter terrorists. In Day of Defeat it’s allies or axis. It was on the second menu that the big difference in this game lay; I was faced with a selection of nine different classes, each with its own distinct look, feel, weapons and abilities. Situated in the centre of these choices stood a huge, muscular man who, with my mouse hovering over him, lifted with all his might one of the biggest guns I think you’ll ever find in a video game. I’d just met the heavy.

From the moment I entered the battlefield (of what can be only described as uttermost carnage) on the first day of the Team Fortress 2 beta release to now, several years later, I can honestly say that I have loved every moment of it. The other eight classes each have their own, brilliantly designed features, and can be instantly distinguished from just a simple shadow. The pyro, with his scorching flamethrower, a class to flee from. The speedy scout, an asset to the infiltration of the well-balanced bases of ctf_2fort to steal the enemy intelligence. The demoman, with his sneaky spider mines and explosive grenade launcher. I can honestly say that there is no game which provides the same adrenaline rush generated by playing as the spy. I can hear my heart pound as I sneak up on an enemy sniper, ready to perform a well timed back-stab before quickly cloaking myself, invisible to the enemy. I stealthily plant sappers on the engineer’s constructed turrets and dispensers, whilst deceiving enemy medics into healing me. There’s never been so much unique diversity in a first-person-shooter.

The beautiful cartoon style (a rarity in video games) creates a stylish appearance, whilst placing further emphasis on the game’s entertainment factor. My favourite features of the game’s look are the character expressions and phrases. Engineers will cry out, “that spy’s sappin’ my sentry!” Heavies will ludicrously laugh at their foes as they empty 200 high caliber rounds into the enemy team as spies complain that, “they’ve got blood on their suit,” after knifing a soldier!

It seems that the game has been brilliantly designed to allow for players who perhaps wouldn’t normally play first-person-shooters to enjoy a slice of the action. The heavy requires little instant-reflex skills. The medic provides a largely non-combat role whilst providing a crucial asset to the team, whilst the engineer adds a more ‘RTS-like’ style of gameplay. Everyone seems to have been catered for, and new players will quickly become attached to their own personal favorite classes.

The game’s meta-critic score reached 92/100. The game has succeed in providing huge multiplayer diversity via its combination of a class system and superbly designed maps to allow for complex strategies. Valve has been consistently at work on the game since release, providing many patches as well as new maps, gamemodes, weapons, and achievement. There’s never been such a blast of quirky multiplayer mania as this – a thoroughly recommended game, and by far my favorite. It’ll be a long time before an online multiplayer game tops this.

Steam on Mac runs like a dream, and the new interface displays and manages all your games far better than the old one. Although, I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed with the initial line up of games for the Mac version of the platform. Valve had strongly implied that their catalog of source games would be readily available for Mac users. I found that this was a false assumption I’d been led to make, and when I loaded Steam for the first time, I found that only Portal was available of this collection of games. As awesome a game as Portal is, I’ve completed it about two years ago, and don’t really have any inclination to play it again! It turns out that apparently every Wednesday there are a series of new games released for the Mac. Effectively, every week there’s a random probability that the games I want to play, such as Counter Strike: Source, become available.

But I should put this aside, as the platform is a very enjoyable experience. I’ve found there to be a large amount of games available, and more are coming out all the time, and this is very good news for us Mac users. For the entirety of this weekend both Mac and Windows users can play one of the first cross-platform multiplayer games, Altitude, completely free! A game I may well have overlooked had it not been available to try, Altitude is a fun little 2D combat flight game with some typical game modes including ‘death-match’, ‘soccer’ and ‘demolition’. The most addicting feature of the game is its leveling and experience system, very similar to that found in Call of Duty 4. Kills, goals, level completions and achievements gain the user additional experience points, and at particular intervals the user gains an additional level, unlocking new planes, abilities, skins, and more! There’s definitely a lot to this initially simplistic-looking game. My house mate and I have just finished playing our first hour, I’ve reached level 10, and we’ve both gone straight to Steam‘s online store to purchase it for a currently discounted price of £3.50 – what a bargain!

I can completely confirm many of the things other reviewers write. Firstly, the installation of NVIDIA 3D vision is as simple as everyone makes it out to be. It’s a simple case of uninstalling your old graphics drivers, downloading the latest driver CD, installing, and quickly walking through the setup wizard. Then, any 3D game you load will automatically set itself to 3D mode, and you’ll be able to adjust settings using simple shortcuts at any time in the game on the fly. It really does just work.

But some games work better than others. The first game I tried was Half Life 2: Lost Coast. An old benchmark now, but with a NVIDIA 8800 GTS 640 Mb (doubling up to two GPUs using SLI should in theory allow one graphics card to be used per eye!) graphics card I was able to run the game in its highest resolution with all the graphics settings turned their highest and 3D vision enabled. And it looks incredibly good. The 3D effect works amazingly well with the Source engine games, with only minor problems involving the HDR effect, which can be turned off if wished.

So the effect then… What you will tend to find is that the effect creates more depth than it produces things popping out of the screen, but this depth is what gives the games an all-new immersive and realistic feel to them.

Lord of the Rings: Online, looked superb, and there was a very low hit on the performance for me. The depth really looks nice, and there’s a nice point at which close objects pop slightly out of the screen. I haven’t tried, as I’m staying well away from my World of Warcraft account, but I’m certain it’ll have an equally gripping 3D experience.
Some people have noted that it can be hard to see what the cursor is pointing at in games, but I hardly ever have a problem with this in games that the effect works well for anyway. For FPS games, NVIDIA has built in a system to replace the 2D cursor for some games with a dynamic 3D one, which gets around this problem. For games were it’s required to click on an object, I found that a 2D cursor over a 3D image works effectively anyway.

A general point is that the glasses do make everything you’re looking at a lot darker, so it’s necessary to turn the brightness up, and play around with the contrast. The good side to this is that it darkens everything in the room, which means you can focus much more on the game – making playing in the dark a whole lot more cinematic!

On the downside, the effect didn’t really seem to work for top down 3D games, such as The Sims 3 and Supreme Commander. The problem is that it becomes hard to focus your eyes on items that aren’t directly in front of you. These were the worst games that I’ve seen for the effect, but I’ve found it hard to find ones that don’t work well, so they’re part of a very small minority. I haven’t yet tried Age of Empires 3, which is supposed to work really well, and I can believe that some RTS games will, as I have been playing Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne, for which the effect works superbly.  Because the terrain is the same level as the screen’s window, most of the objects in the game are projected out of the screen – which looks fantastic. Buildings pop out of the screen, catapults fire corpses in curved angles that come right out of the monitor before curving round and landing on their targets, and dragons sour high in the sky above anything else.

3D Vision can only ever add to the whole gaming experience, but you’ll tend to find yourself sticking only to games where the 3D effect works best. Furthermore, once you’ve been playing in 3D you’ll never be able to turn back, but the other side of the coin is that it is a very pricey upgrade to your experience. Having 3D is really just a single effect. It’s an incredibly well put together and effective, but it is still just a single effect, just like HDR lighting or ‘ragdoll’ physics; it’s another effect that adds depth and realism to games. It’s this reason that’s placing it more among enthusiasts than the standard consumer. For more casual gamers though, upgrading to 3D is certainly worth not upgrading your graphics card for, particularly as you won’t notice 2D effects such as anti-aliasing for a while with the glory of 3D. It’s also certainly worth considering if you’re in need of a new monitor anyway.
Overall it’s a superbly executed product that will only continue to improve both visually, and performance-wise, as NVIDIA continues to release new drivers, and developers work out ways of better supporting this technology within their games.