Back 4 Blood Beta Review

I was lucky enough to get to play the Back 4 Blood beta thanks to my friend AngelOfWeir gifting me a pass! I will admit going in that I had some serious reservations about what I’d seen. After over 1800 hours in the Left 4 Dead, Payday, and Killing Floor franchises, I was seeing some massive issues in the early streams. So I was very happy to play the beta and see that all of the issues I was concerned about got fixed. Here are some reasons I’m definitely gonna buy the game when it comes out: 1. The zombies… [Continue Reading]

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Rocket Arena: Closed Beta Review

One of the perks of attending GDC 2019 with a Media badge was that they added me to some sort of mailing list that’s been receiving press kits and closed beta offers ever since. I usually stream said closed betas on Twitch, and every so often one of them leaves a real impression and really makes me look forward to when said game comes out. Rocket Arena hit the latter category with aplomb. Rocket Arena is a mobility-based arena FPS where the players have Super Smash Bros-style health bars. If you take too much damage, you’ll get blasted into the skybox… [Continue Reading]

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Very Early First Impressions of Dragon Souls and a Chat About UI Design

So I’ve been eyeing Dragon Souls for ages. A free to play game where you play as a dragon fighting other dragons while collecting gold? One with a more open-world, traditional dragon feel rather than a weird futuristic match-made deathmatch objective game mode cloning monster thing like Time of Dragons? Sign me up! Well, kinda. You gotta keep an eye on the email address you sign up with. And keep an eye on Dragon Souls in general since it’s a very small early access in beta sort of thing. Well, alpha. I don’t think we can call it a beta… [Continue Reading]

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Why Killing Floor 2 Isn’t Actually a Beta

I’ve been avoiding writing this article on Killing Floor 2, because I’ve already made it quite clear that I’m disappointed in the game and its developers. There’s not much to be gained from just ragging on something over and over, and I’m only giving them further undeserved attention. But since I made a video on their Versus mode, I needed a tie-in article, and I figured I’d cover probably my biggest gripe with the game: Tripwire marketing it as an “open beta.” A beta is an unfinished version of a product that the developers are working on completing, and I’ll grant that… [Continue Reading]

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A Match-Made Future?

You’ll probably have noticed that, while the rest of the TF2 community is going mad for matchmaking, here at the Daily SPUF, we’ve been rather quiet about it. Really, we should have been all over competitive matchmaking like a rash, what with being a TF2 blog and all, but there’s reasons why we’ve not been that keen, the main reason being that not a whole lot is actually going on with the beta. Yes, I know, we’ve had patch notes every few days. Which is a good thing because some bugs are being fixed. But there’s no actual changes. The… [Continue Reading]

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Medic’s First Tiny Steps into Official TF2 Competitive

This article was brought to you by Puffs, the Number 1 Medic-Calmer. Puffs – pink, round, puffy and opinionated, get yours now! Alright, a million years later than everyone else, I’ve finally had a go at TF2 matchmaking, during the 6th Stress Test. (Note: this article is a bit late – I held off publishing it due to a week of love and hate) I was finally around when that delightful Stress Test button appeared on my screen, and I was actually in a good enough mood to play. But, coward that I am, I didn’t want to go it… [Continue Reading]

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Team Fortress 2 Competitive Beta Sign-Up

Well, who’d have thought it? There’s actually matchmaking things going on for reals! No more will B4nny (bless him) be the only reliable and constant source of information about Team Fortress 2’s official matchmaking. Nope, yesterday, a Valve employee popped by and announced that there is now an official Steam group, as seen here. It’s almost definitely official, since the admins are three Valve employees, and the group also has a selection of Steam Community moderators. The main admin of the group, someone called Jill, has got nearly 4000 hours on Team Fortress 2, which is a sign of, um,… [Continue Reading]

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Competitive Matchmaking Beta is here! Kinda…

Well well well well, looks like those Teamfortress.tvers have found something interesting. It’s a small version of the Competitive Matchmaking Beta! It’s actually a real thing! Turns out a small update yesterday added a console command that enables you to open the Competitive matchmaking menu. The command, for whoever wants to try it, is OpenMatchmakingLobby ladder Typing this into console brings up a new page. It looks like this: Interestingly, it had a bunch of scores, and a drop down box. The box has a choice of either 6v6 or 9v9, which is unusual since everyone thought they’d just do… [Continue Reading]

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The Cutting Room Floor

Not everything Valve playtested for TF2 made the cut. From the moment Brotherhood of Arms and then its replacement Invasion was completely excised, Valve showed themselves committed to the possibility of axing whatever needs to be axed in the name of quality. Through avenues such as item schemas and the TF2 Beta, us players have had the ability to witness a lot of these ideas get introduced and later bite the dust. Thing is, we don’t always get to hear the rationale behind why they didn’t make the cut. For every Repair Node and Facestab Knife that got a blog post… [Continue Reading]

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Early Impressions and Strategies for the Beta PASS Game Mode

Let me start by saying that PASS is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s one of the first beta modes that feels like it should be in beta; it’s bizarre and completely different from anything TF2 has tried before, but it’s addicting and condones itself to all sorts of strategies and playstyles that really makes it stand out as a game mode. I genuinely hope this develops its own tournaments and things because it’s just as much fun to watch as it is to play. Everybody is still learning the ropes of this new game mode and there… [Continue Reading]

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