gingerblog 2007: gaming edition

so last year i did this gingerbread thing, right. you might have read about it. since i like questioning my sanity every once in a while, i decided to keep the tradition alive again this year. the only thing is...the 'test market' is a remarkably small audience. not as small as it was a few months ago, but no one in my immediate physical circle (except one) will understand what the eff i'm doing. in short, this one's for me. (and my gaming clan, and my online friends, and a few thousand kotaku readers.)

a longass time ago, i played an online computer game called mega team fortress. when i say played it, i mean i played the fuck out of that bitch. i had no job, was out of school.. i was the archetypical nerd living with her mom and staying up until 5 am playing a mod of a mod of a mod of quake 1. (funny, the more i write, the less nostalgic i become.) i got involved in the community, created my own maps.. even my first four boyfriends (ever!) came out of playing this game. to say i loved mega was probably an understatement.

i started playing in november '98; it had already been around for a while before that. it started out with people playing many different maps, a different map for every server, if you will. as the years wore on, the number of popular maps dwindled, until most capture-the-flag servers were playing a map called 2fort5. two forts facing each other, one for the red team, the other for blue. simple enough. that and a few scant other maps were still being played when i left the scene. (to show what it looked like, a thoughtful fellow put up a mega TF 2fort5 rampage up on youtube. i never thought i'd see the day!)

skip forward to october, 2007. slavering geeks everywhere went mad with ecstasy over the orange box, which included a little game called team fortress 2. i was one of those geeks, secretly pining for my own TF days of yore. sure, i played a variation of TF, but who's counting? naturally since 2fort5 had been so popular in the first Team Fortress (and i'm guessing team fortress classic for half-life, but i never played that), valve decided to remake the old standard, complete with intelligence rooms, chicken wire and cows. aside from a few minor differences, it's the same 2fort i love, hate and know to an embarrassing degree.

that degree's going to get even more embarrassing when i undertake this year's holiday project: 2fort, gingerbread style.

now that's all well and good. it shouldn't be *too* tough.. no ceiling, two stories (three if i can figure out how that would work).. a structure not unlike a dollhouse with sniper decks. for the most part, i'm forgoing the fanciness of the new 2fort and kind of getting back to basics. what i'm really digging on are the nine different character classes in TF2. valve executed them with such graphical and stylistic brilliance that i want to bring them into my little gingerbread world. so, to go along with 2fortgb, i will attempt to render each of the nine classes in fondant. this is where i take flight and delve deep into the heart of madness.

however, to show it's not impossible (and how much i need a date), i gave the pyro a go a couple nights ago. keep in mind this is ONLY A PROTOTYPE. the finished pyro will lookd a damn sight better. if not, i'm feeding them all to neighborhood cats and taking up cross-stitch.