I’m only playing one game at the moment and that game is Team Fortress 2. It reminds me a lot of my favorite shooter of all time Unreal Tournament. While gameplay is different the fun is the same and that’s what counts in the end, at least for me.

One thing though that is annoying the hell out of me are the objective popups that appear for a certain time at map start. They contain general information about the objective of the map and are located at the center of the screen blocking part of the view.

Those popups remain for an undisclosed amount of time, I think it must be somewhere near 10-15 seconds. It’s real nasty because they cannot be removed after they appeared. No weapon switching or hotkey removes the popup.

I had to research that topic for quite a while before I came up with a solution. The file viewed.res contains all the information that we need. You find reference to any map that you ever played in Team Fortress 2 in there along with a number. That number seems to reflect the times the map was played already.

All that needs to be done is to increase that number to a value of 50 or greater to remove the objective popups from appearing for that map. Yes, it has to be done for all maps if you want to get rid of the popups and again if you play a map for the first time.

If 50 is really the play count before the popup disappears I have to say that this is way to high and that Valve should definitely provide a key to remove the popup and an option to turn that feature off completely.

The new Blizzard game that was unveiled yesterday will be Diablo 3! Diablo 2 was probably the computer game that I played the most in all of my life. I can only think of one other game that I could have played that much and that was the original Unreal Tournament game.

I have the feeling that Diablo 3 will be a smash hit unlike the sequels of Unreal Tournament that sucked so much that I vowed never to touch an Epic game again.

I do not want to rehash all the news that have been posted on all websites about Diablo 3. Instead I would like to concentrate on the differences between Diablo 3 and other sequels that could not live up to their hype. What’s Blizzard doing that others are not ?

The key element in my opinion is the simple formula Gameplay > Graphics. Blizzard games play perfectly when they come out and patches usually only add new content or correct game elements.

If you look at Blizzard games you realize that they are never at the top of their class graphical wise. They all have a very nice look and feeling but they are missing the graphical deception that many modern games like to concentrate on. What those games are usually missing is the fun of playing that game.

Blizzard games are fun to play and well balanced which is the reason why they are so successful.

Both Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 look like modern versions of the classic games. They do not try to change things that worked in the past but concentrate on elements that they can improve to produce a better game.

I do not need water reflections, realistic looking opponents, lighting and shadow effects if they do not add to my fun.

I stopped playing Team Fortress 2 about six months ago and only went back recently to the game to see if the game has changed in that time. I played it for about 3 hours in the last few days and did realize that indeed a lot has changed in the game.

The most notable change, apart from the new Goldrush map which brings a protect the VIP type of game mode to TF2, is a new achievement system which is currently only enabled for the medic class. Achievements are a great way of rewarding the player for certain accomplishments. They had been in the game before but now class specific achievements have been added that award the player with weapon power ups.

That would not be bad either but the problem is that these are only available for the medic class at the moment. This has the consequence that you will encounter more medics than any other class on a server. It’s no fun to play on a 16 player map with 8 medics. Medics are support characters and are utterly useless if they cannot find another player to support.

Since half of the players on a FFA server are achievement whores the maps become frustrating and sometimes unplayable.

I have nothing against achievements but if they change the game design dramatically they have to go. Valve made the error to enable them for one class only which is going to change in the future but as of now TF2 is more Medic Fortress 2 than anything else.