The Portal 2 Co-op Experience

Date written: 3/12/2024

My friend recently purchased a copy of Portal 2 on Steam. He quickly completed the main story mode, and wanted to play the co-op mode with me. The first time we played, he was hosting the game and he was the server operator (keep this in mind for later). We play for a few minutes, then I loose connection as his game crashed. We start it up again, and this time, I'm the one that's hosting. After some time, we both get borwed, and I have the bright idea to turn on cheats (as I was the host). I then promptly enter noclip mode and check the map out. My friend is extremely confused as to why I am suddenly able to fly. I then spawned in multiple conpanion cubes and multiple Wheatley clones. Then we both quit as we fully got bored.

tl;dr: My friend and I got bored of Portal 2's Co-op mode, so I messed around with the game's developer console. We maybe played for around 10 minutes before we stopped due to boredom.

Game screenshot

The Team Fortress 2 Experience

Date written: 3/13/2024 5:03 P.M.

I don't remember how my friend exactly mentioned it, but he was the one who refered me and got me into Team Fortress 2. I was instantly hooked by its addictive gameplay. I remember being amazed watching his friend play the Demoknight subclass on Hightower, watching him fly and move about due to the game engine's weird physics system.

Towards the beginning of my experience, I spent a lot of time on different community servers checking out different custom maps and experiences.

It wasn't until around 500 hours did I start to see some notable skill increase. I then tried to look for classes to main for a while, until I settled on playing Soldier.

Recently, as of writing this, I have around 1,000 hours in the game, far surpassing my friend's 300 hours. (haha, the student becomes the master)

My go-to class is Scout and my second best is Soldier. Scout can be an extremely powerful class when played correctly, which makes Scout players often rank high on the scoreboard and carry the entire team. In response to playing Scout, I find it quite funny that I have recieved numerous chat messages of other players in the same server that I'm in at the moment saying rude things to me in an attempt at trying to one up me. I keep my peace to myself, but I've seen worse.

I have also seen chat conversations between players ranging from various topics, and a bunch of other nasty stuff that no one should ever witness, which is to be expected from an online game.

Also, the game is a burning, sinking ship, as it is 17 years old and it has been 8 years since a major update due to lack of intrest and attention from Valve (but it still has an active playerbase).

In conclusion, TF2 is a fun free-to-play FPS game as long as you ignore the toxicity.