Wow, XFire has a pretty sweet contest going on right now. I just got an email notification about it. They have some pretty nice prizes and the clever part is how you enter. They have a bunch of "hoops" they make you jump through of varying degrees in order to be entered to win. The nicer the prize the more difficult the tasks. But the genius part is all the tasks are getting you to use the features that XFire has. It is a great motivator to get people to learn how all this stuff works so they get the most out of XFire. Nice job XFire. It worked for me!

So this has been said by me before in other venues, but I thought I may as well regurgitate it here on my XFire blog so that there can be something for people to read on the one in a million chance that someone comes to my XFire profile and wants to read my bloggings. That was a really long sentence.

I would encourage anyone viewing this blog, however, to visit the squad at www.fighting69.com and check out the BBS there.

Now to the topic at hand; Team Fortress 2!

I was a huge fan of the Team Fortress Classic. I realize there are earlier iterations of the game going back to Quake days, but I was not much of an online gamer back then. I did briefly play some Team Fortress on Quake 2 at a friends house one weekend, but that was about it until I started playing the beloved Half-Life. I would go to my Dad's office at Southern Utah University and play there since he had the best computer I had access to there. I swiped his spare office key and started going in at night long after even the cleaning crew and left. I discovered a mod for Half-Life called Team Fortress Classic. I was hooked. I played TFC for countless hours, often going home just before the sun came up. TFC was as close to the perfect online game as anyone could get. I hated straight Deathmatch, I enjoyed team based games more but did not much care for Team Deathmatch either. My favorite game type was Capture the Flag. Working with others to achieve a goal beyond just killing anything that moved was much more satisfying to me. Add to that the Class system of TFC and you had something very unique. I had never played a game like this where you could be an engineer and build turrets, be a spy and disguise yourself as an enemy, or snipe people with your laser sight. The maps were very well designed and symetrical which I liked for fairness. Eventually I was drawn away from TFC by Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, but I remember the great fun I had playing.

Present Day: Team Fortress 2

After nine years in the making we finally have TF2 in hand. I...

So I know I mentioned before how it is nice that XFire continues to make updates and this one is no exception. I LOVE the new default skin, best one ever. XFire is looking really sharp these days. There is still room for improvement though. I think they need to have better navigation for the clan pages. I don't even know how to get to my clan page from my own profile! That is kinda weak. Anyway, it is kinda pointless for me to blog here when I already have a site that I post on, but I guess I'm just trying to support the app that I have come to love. XFire FTW!!!

I think it is great that XFire continues to make updates and improvements to the service. I'm sure this new blogging feature will be a hit with the Tweener gaming community, but for me it offers nothing. I already have my own web site which makes a blog obsolete. I am more interested in new ways to integrate XFire with my own site. But, as I said before, I am glad that XFire continues to update and improve upon features.