The Stack

More failure to fulfill the Oath here: I’ve got three days worth of lunchtime TF2 (plus a certain amount of evening play) to report on here, and I’m late even for the third. The only really notable thing that happened, aside from the halos belatedly showing up on the server at work, is that I reached the first Achievement milestone for the Pyro class.

The Pyro is probably the easiest classes to play. The basic Pyro weapon is a flamethrower, which doesn’t have much range, but it covers a largish area and fires continually without reloading. It’s like the opposite of a Sniper: if you can get close enough to the enemy, you’ll probably win. But the main reason that I’ve been playing Pyro so much is that it’s the one class that’s really useful against Spies. Spies have this irritating tendency to turn invisible just when you start firing at them, but no one’s invisible while they’re on fire. So whenever I’m having trouble with Spies, I switch to Pyro for a while.

The Pyro is presented as the least human character, his ¹I use the male pronoun here, but there is some debate about the Pyro’s actual gender. face concealed by protective rubber gear, his past and place of origin officially unknown. All the other classes have specific bios — for example, the Scout is “The youngest of eight boys from the south side of Boston”. Does this mean that if there are several Scouts in a match, each and every one of them is the youngest of eight boys from the south side of Boston? Best not think about it — this multiple instantiation of individuals seems to be just something that games take for granted these days. (See the species descriptions in Plants vs Zombies.) At any rate, such concerns don’t apply to the pastless Pyro. He’s also presented as the madman of the team, what with the occasional muffled maniacal laughter from under that mask. This is a little unfair, because when you come right down to it, all of the characters in the game are completely insane by real-life standards. This is something that really struck me on watching a Scout, the game’s designated weakling, charge out of nowhere and beat someone to death with a baseball bat.