Raised on TFC and a packet of crisps

Certainly did wake to TF2 pumped and ready to go, and what a game. It plays almost exactly the same as the original, and you may think that it obviously will because it's a straight up remake, but keep in mind TFC was released in 1999, and I was was playing it when I was just 10 years old. I'm pretty sure that's back when I went by the alias Grey Fox as well, the original Commissar!
The most noticable difference is the lack of grenades and choke points, in the original you'd have about five minutes of solid grenade spamming from both sides into the first choke point, it'd only be broken when a scout finally gets lucky enough to run the gauntlet and distract the defenders long enough to let enough of his comrades through to break the stalemate. Of course that's only on the attack and defend maps, but that is what I played for the vast majority of the time.
Dustbowl makes an executive return as my favorite map. But my second favorite map, the one with the church at the top, is nowhere to be seen! And I call it that because out of all of the TFC map lists I can find online it just isn't in any of them, and I thought it was one of the most popular maps. There's also a lack of Warpath and Rock 2, which made awesome use of the demoman's demo charges, a weapon that has also been removed. But with the cool new Hydro map and game mode it makes up for it enough to keep me occupied until they release them, which they damn well better do.
I'm also very impressed with how problem free it is, thinking back to the debacles that were the Battlefield 2142 and Supreme Commander launches makes me very grateful, and what's more is that this is only the beta! Maybe that's what they were sorting out yesterday, well played either way.
Along with TF2 comes the new Steam community, with recorded stats, avatars, a revamped friends system and personalized profile pages it's looking a lot more like Microsoft's Xbox Live, which is the approach all websites and games are taking now days. With most people filling out this information you could quite easily find out a lot of personal information about any of the thousands of random people you encounter on online games every day.
Truly, god bless the communication age, and godspeed to globalization.

Started reading Ender's Game last night, and I am extremely impressed. It easily kept my attention throughout, the writing was flawless, the characters believable, the genre is right up my street and it moves along at the perfect pace. If it keeps the level of quality it has started with I think it will easily become one of my favorite books, but of course achieving such a feat as consistency is so famously difficult in popular literature. Still, hopes are high.

Two more days...