Dem Choppas continued
It’s been a long time since I wrote about my favorite custom model in TF2, the choppa. I’ve changed a lot as a person and my tastes have grown more refined, but nowadays if I again had to pick a favorite custom model, I’d still have to go with the choppa. It’s just the best.
Hell, it’s even better than it was before! In late 2013 creator Bl8demast3r made some tweaks that included working killstreak sheens and a new golden model for owners of the Australium SMG:
And while he didn’t add anything for weapon skins (how the hell would he?), that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because with a 3-cent skin you can turn your AK into an inspectable AK:
How unbelievably cool is that?
Unfortunately, the major uncool thing that’s happened since that first article and now is Valve banning custom models from their servers with sv_pure. It’s so annoying because there’s loads of great stuff on GameBanana and the Steam Workshop and whatnot but the most populated servers have it blacklisted on a zero-tolerance policy. Valve games have been treasure troves of modders ever since the original Half-Life, and I don’t understand what Valve’s so afraid of anyway. They’re entirely clientside, so at worst the person is somehow gaining an unfair advantage by making all the spy weapons glow in the dark or something. And good for them I guess if they really need an unfair advantage that badly, its one player and they’re destroying an entire genre of the TF2 community just in the blue moon possibility that somebody tries to cheat on a Valve server. I really wish they’d lighten up and be less draconic about things like this.
But even so, the AK remains among my favorite weapons in video games, serving as my favorite gun in Left 4 Dead 2 and ranking pretty high up there in the Payday, Saints Row, Counter-Strike and Killing Floor series. In almost every game I play, I’m likely to pick up an AK when given the chance as its very rare that its inherent firepower will disappoint me. It would be a disservice to the gun if I weren’t to carry it over in some fashion to my favorite cartoony Valve shooter.