Good morning, sirs, ma'ams, and others. This will be your all inclusive guide to everyone's favorite easy and affordable height gaining method (not you, stairs), jumping! Today we'll be going over the basics of how to jump in Team Fortress 2, the nuances of springing your tiny little legs into the ground, and the implications of such a beautiful God-Given ability, ignoring your tiny little legs.

Now, for all of you fresh meat who are too afraid of some good ol' fashioned trial and error, smashing each and every button on your poor keyboard, and dutifully taking notes on every action they perform on your meat puppet of an avatar, I'll let you in on a little secret: unlike some of the other settings, the controls for movement were actually designed by real people! (our leading theory anyways). Just press the long rectangular button at the bottom of your keyboard, and just like that you'll be jumping in place like a potato brained moron in no time at all! From this point forward, we'll be referring to this strange button as the "Space Bar", because BOY does it sure take up a lot!



Unless you've somehow managed to tell the game you prefer to jump with the wheel on your mouse or something, this will be the key you will use to jump until the end of time. If you HAVE managed to spread your blasphemy to this holy program of a video game, SCRAM! This guide isn't for know-it-alls like you! Go program a machine to tell you how attractive you are! Or better yet, go figure out how to display negative numbers on a screen, so that your first machine will work!

To most effectively make use of your new-found skill to leap into the air like a rabid prairie dog, you'll want to combine this technique with the other general movement keys, but hey! We're not here to discuss OTHER menial matters! Only this one! If you're really that helpless, go find another guide on movement! I'm sure it will be of much help to a diligent reader such as yourself!

Welcome back! I hope the guide on the other general movement mechanics served you well! I can see that the guides on menuing, classes, unlockable weapons, hidden statistics, team composition, and general studliness have helped too! You're looking great and ready to incorporate jumping into your master plan for victory! But first, I'm sorry to say, but you won't always be able to jump out there. I know, I know. A cruel world it is.

Here are some of the unfortunate circumstances that you will not be able to use your glorious space bar to jump:

• Charging with a shield as the Demoman
  
• Revving up or Firing a primary weapon as the Heavy
  
• Readying an arrow with a bow as the Sniper
  
• Performing a Taunt
  
• Crouching on the Ground
  
• Stunned by an Enemy Taunt Kill, Ghosts, Ghouls, Robots, or Powerups
  
• Something is above your head
  
• Being underwater
  
• Being in mid-air (Except for Scout)
  
• Having expended all of your available jumps

If you happen to find yourself NOT in any of these situations, then you will be free to jump as high and as much as your little heart desires. Get it out of your system now. Or don't! I love the enthusiasm!

You may have noticed that this isn't your standard flat boring playground for stubby legged children. This is WAR! And war has slopes, hills, walls, pits, cliff faces, dangling edges, and (sigh), stairs... But don't be overly reliant on the stairs, Private! That's how they get you! One day you won't be able to do anything without them! You'll be thinking "Hey, how do I get up here if there's no stairs?", but you WON'T, because you'll be a jumping expert! You'll be putting your newly toned legs to good use!

In practice, jumping does what walking WISHES it could do: help you claim your independence from the ground! The ground is selfish, Private. It's holding you back. You have to be able to grow past your need to be tethered to some big lump of dirt and gravel if you want to be able to live as your best self.

Jumping helps you cross gaps that the ground simply could not care about helping with. It's as if the ground looked you square in the face and spat in your mouth. If you could walk on walls, this story would only be a little different, because airspace is space too! (Space Bar was a good name for this button). Being above the enemy disorients them! We all love the joke about how some people can NOT look up for the life of them, but its true! Some people, when shot from above, will turn left and right and right and left and the thought will not even cross their mind that a well educated player such as yourself is right under their noses! Or should I say, above their noses! The human wrist isn't designed to move a mouse up and down. Really, it wasn't designed for a mouse at all. But if your enemy wants to even AIM at you, they have to either use their whole arm, or grip their mouse like a sissy! By giving yourself the superior position, you're starting an internal conflict within them against either their own body or their identity! A powerful tactic! And how do you achieve this position? Lemme hear it! That's right!

General Game-sense!

Yes! The most important part about jumping is knowing WHEN and WHY you are doing it!

Leaping head on into enemy territory is probably not the best idea. You'll be bloodied and mangled in no time at all. Why are you doing this? Is your 20 second re-spawn time really worth the one kill? Think Private, think! What could make this work? An ÜberCharge would help! That would push them back! Being backed up by your team during a push would make sure your death isn't in vain! Jumping from a higher vantage point into the air makes you a harder target to hit!

Just a little bit of work from that noggin of yours can make all the difference!

But I can hear you already, groaning and crying because the wittle baby dowsnt wanna use thewr bwain. I can smell you too. Go wash up, you big baby. Go sit in the shower and think about how wrong your opinions are, while arguing an imagined figure representing why. Once you've beaten your inferior straw-man, come back because you'll still be just as wrong. But at least your hair will smell like strawberries picked from domestically grown American strawberry trees!

See, Private, the thing about strategy is that you think about what you need to do NOW so you don't have to LATER. If you have to walk up to a bottomless pit and have to look at it and THINK about jumping over it every single time, well that's just a waste of your already concerningly small attention span. Try thinking about jumping over it before you get there, or before you spawn, or before you even set foot on the battlefield! Think about jumping over that pit before breakfast, before bed! Think about it before that shower you just finished! The earlier you know to do something, the more prepared you'll be to execute it. If you commit to remembering to jump over that pit, it will become a part of you, and pretty soon you won't even have to think about it to do it! You'll just do it!

Good job, Private. I can already see you're starting to warm up to the admittedly strange concept of using your legs to hurl your meat vehicle just a little closer to heaven. I can't tell you how proud I am. It feels like it's only been 3 or so body paragraphs since I insulted your tiny, tiny legs. But you've grown! And they've toned into the most beautiful pair of legs I ever did see. It's almost unbelievable how skinny and atrophied they used to look. So ugly and misshapen. Definitely an embarrassing state I found you in. Its like you were walking on 2 foreign-grown rotten bananas...

Anyways, I'll be seeing you out there. Whenever you so happen to grace an opponent and come out on top because of what I've taught you, just remember, you have only me to thank.

Go get 'em, Private. Hoo-ah!