Team Fortress 2 is now free to play, so I figured I would give it a try. I don’t really play many first-person shooters. For the most part, the only thing that seems to have changed much in the genre since the early days is the much-improved graphics. Game-play usually just involves using bigger and bigger guns to shoot more and more people.

I’ve always enjoyed games that involve cooperation. The last first-person shooter I played was Tremulous. In fact, a friend and I ran a semi-popular Tremulous server for a few years.

Team Fortress 2 shares many of the qualities I liked in Tremulous, but the community behind Team Fortress 2 is much more sizable. It also shares many of the same pitfalls, but overall I am definitely enjoying the experience.

Getting in-game purchases and Steam connectivity working is easy

The fix is very easy and I am a bit surprised at just how fragile this is. You just have to install the Lucida Console font (lucon.ttf). I just copied the font into ~/.PlayOnLinux/fonts on my system, since I’m using PlayOnLinux. If you’re not, you probably just have to drop a copy in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts (or some similar location).

I didn’t install the font to fix the Steam connectivity. I installed it to fix the nearly unreadable font in the Team Fortress 2 console. I just happened to kill two birds with one stone.

We’re running a Team Fortress 2 server!

I’m not entirely sure how exciting this is, yet… Getting a crowd of people to play on a Tremulous server was easy. The community was small and it was pretty easy to differentiate ourselves from the crowd. This time, we’re just another (barely used) fish in a pond full of other nearly indistinguishable (also barely used) fish.