Team Fortress 2 beta live

By Robert Purchese Published 18 September, 2007

Treats for Steam pre-orders.

Those of you pre-ordering The Orange Box on Steam will now be able to play the Team Fortress 2 beta.

It will give you a chance to try out Valve's new cartoon-style multiplayer masterpiece, the same one we just today called, well, lots of things - all variations on "fantastic".

The Orange Box costs USD 49.95 on the digital distribution service, and pre-purchasers will be given a 10 per cent discount as well as a free copy of Peggle Extreme.

Inside the rest of The Orange Box is Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode One, HL2: Episode Two and Portal.

You will be able to get your hands on the full pack on Steam on 10th October, or in shops alongside the 360 version on the 12th. The PS3 offering is expected to follow a couple of weeks later.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (32) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • X201 #1 5 years ago

    I only bought it for Peggle Extreme ;)

  • drunkymonkey #2 5 years ago

    Bah, looking at the videos (and the review) I can tell I'm really missing out!

  • rudedudejude #3 5 years ago

    I bet you don't review on Alienware really.

  • bdaggers #4 5 years ago

    Any news of a 360 demo / beta whatever ?

  • strangeed #5 5 years ago

    Argh, I am so jealous! Though I am pretty sure my pc couldn't even handle any of those anymore. Sigh, retro gamer not really by choice.

  • Zanuah #6 5 years ago

    Its fun! :D

  • Darkedge #7 5 years ago

    it's brilliant and hillarious :)

  • Nova5lag #8 5 years ago

    Powered by Dell Dimension...?

  • eAi #9 5 years ago

    I've been playing all day :) It can get very confusing, but even dying is fun :)

    When you die it shows you a shot of who killed you and shows little arrows like "This was your leg" and "This was another bit of you". It's full of little things that just make it so fun :)

  • IN4ARIOT #10 5 years ago

    How wonderful.. I pay how much for games I already have ? (HL2 and EP1) ..but hey I can "give " them to m8s..sheesh..I only want Portal and TF2 , but no you have to buy the lot in one go .. no discount there , just buy stuff again...no ta..but I'm missing out...bast marketing gits.. bollux anyway.

  • Kazzahdrane #11 5 years ago

    Errrrrm...I'm pretty sure Valve are going to sell HL2 Episode 2 on its own, they're just offering the Orange Box as a preorder and enticing people with the TF2 beta.

    If not, I'll definitely be getting the Orange Box for 360, as I was planning to get Episode 2 on PC for dirt cheap on Steam and then pick up 360 OB later.

  • Elendil #12 5 years ago

    IN4ARIOT, you pay 38€ for Team Fortress 2, HL.2 ep.2 and Portal and you still complain? TF2 alone is worth full price.

  • tonynibbles #13 5 years ago

    AND ITS AWESOMéZ!!

  • tobsen #14 5 years ago

    Does anybody have an idea about what the realistic Windows system requirements are for TF 2? I want to know if it makes sense to give this a shot on my Vaio laptop.

  • bioreit #15 5 years ago

    Hmm, now, do I buy this for my 360, so I can play against my friends and not worry about system specs and uber-twitchy mouse-freaks

    or do I buy this for my soon-to-arrive Core 2 Quad with 4 gig RAM and pray that the 256meg 8500GT can do it justice?

    Damn. And I'd promised myself that the PC was only going to be for video editing....

  • Saladin #16 5 years ago

    The whoring thing won't work.

    I've actually played more Peggle Extreme than I have of goddamn TF2 :(

  • FaceOmeter #17 5 years ago

    i love it. its crashing a lot though atm lol

  • rowsdower #18 5 years ago

    the game is fantastic, the most fun i've had on multiplayer. loads of lovely touches and a really good class balance mean that there's rarely a dull moment. the beta is buggy atm and a few balance issues need to be quickly resolved, but it's in remarkably good shape for a beta, almost production quality.

  • tesco #19 5 years ago

    for reference it runs fine on my pc spec of 6800gt, 2 gig ram and 2.3mhz

  • Sl1pstream #20 5 years ago

    @Tobsen: I'd say you should give it a shot. I'm playing on my shitty Fujitsu-Siemens laptop and it seems to work just fine. It scales even better than HL2 does.

    Seeing the game point out "a bit of you" when you've got blown to pieces is really funny.
    Edited by Sl1pstream at 19/09/07 @ 00:25

  • Vandrius #21 5 years ago

    Can't wait to play this when I get home.

    Yet another game that I'll play on my PC rather than console.

  • seasidebaz #22 5 years ago

    wow it runs on low spex, tesco (above, not the shop) got it running on a 2.3MHz machine, is it a 286 processor?

  • Freelancepolice #23 5 years ago

    Absolute gaming bliss imo. Could easily of played all night if I didn't have work

  • styrvolt #24 5 years ago

    Valve, I'll be glad to pre-order. Only, 360's does not let in steam...

  • The_Pope #25 5 years ago

    bioreit - why on earth would you order such a POS graphics card with a Quad-Core system?? Hope you're running 64-bit Windows or you won't get the full 4GB RAM. Nevermind that it's ludicrous overkill anyway :/

  • asphaltcowboy #26 5 years ago

    @bioreit

    That spec will absolutely annihilate the game, you'll have no problems whatsoever!

    I was umming and ahhing about the 360/PC decision and despite absolutely loving XBL, most multiplayer games tend to fadeaway quite considerably as soon as a new MP game comes out... PC will have longer legs methinks!

  • The_Pope #27 5 years ago

    Actually it won't, unless he's planning on playing at 800x600 in Low Detail. If he wants to play 1280, 1680 or 1920 with decent detail, I would expect 8800GTS as a minimum

  • Scuzz #28 5 years ago

    I was crashing a lot but have updated my graphics drivers and now it's all good.

    Running 1280 x 1024 everything maxed out.

    Core2Quad 2.4Ghz, 2 gig RAM (for now), 8800GTX :)

  • HiJinks #29 5 years ago

    You certainly DON'T need a 8800 to play this game at full detail in 1280x1024, I can tell you that. It runs full blast on my 7900 GT.

  • Lestat74 #30 5 years ago

    Playing at high detail on a 1900xtx and it runs great. Awesome game

  • symmetry #31 5 years ago

    Gits. Am buying the 360 version but am longing to play TF2.

    But it's only about £25... wonder if I should buy it twice...

  • bioreit #32 5 years ago

    @The_Pope

    May I direct you to the salient part of my post:

    "I'd promised myself that the PC was only going to be for video editing.... "

    I'm getting the Mesh Quad Core FX 6600 and that's the default card - I was happy getting such a lowly card, as it was really only going to be used as a better-than-integrated solution, thus meaning I didn't lose any RAM to a Nvidia GO or Intel GMA chip.

    My budget was really only £700 and the next few bits and bobs I'm buying for it are all going to be along the lines of internal and external hard drives - got three 750 gig on order to fill up the spare bays, then I'm moving on to 1.5tb externals after Christmas (lots of videos to edit and loads of DVDs to backup).

    The 8500GT is no doubt a card that, had it been available when HL2 was first released, would sit at the mid-to-top end of the spectrum, so should perform reasonably well.

    Like Symmetry above, I will probably buy it twice - on 360 for all my friends and on PC for my one lonely friend who got back to Uni on Sunday and found they block all UDP ports so cannot use Xbox Live, even via ICS.