Team Fortress 2 (Badlands – First Thoughts)

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=741

I’m not tired of the six maps originally released with Team Fortress 2 – but the mysterious power the game held over me, that beguiled me into believing that there wasn't anything else to possibly do with my free time, has slowly ebbed away. For the last month, I haven’t played it much – and only on the PC – until the release of Badlands, which has got me back to playing TF 2 more than Call of Duty 4.

It’s another large Capture Point level with five points, like Well and Granary. Unlike those two levels, it’s not laid out as a (mostly) flat rectangle. It’s quite a balanced map, with lots of flanking opportunities and nice corners for spies, engineers, and pyros to be complete bastards with.

It’s a shame that it’ll be awhile until Badlands is released on the Xbox 360. There’ve been eighteen updates on the PC since TF 2’s release, and only a single update on the 360 – which is still almost unplayable. Valve’s lack of support for this version is odd and surprising.

I’m starting to think Valve told Microsoft one night that they were going out for some ice cream and then never came back…