Me and my Chromebook

“Using Cloudready and the new Chromium OS, you can turn your old, slow Windows computer into a blazing fast new shiny Chromebook!” I was told as a shitty old laptop that dies the second you unplug it from the power supply was dumped in front of me. “Go on, I know you can do it!” A short father-daughter activity later left us waiting for Chrome to load itself. It was used once by my father then forgotten. Then my laptop died, and here I am, typing articles on a Chromebook. The relationship… isn’t great. This laptop though, back in its… [Continue Reading]

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Torbjörn – Overwatch’s Engineer

God help me, I’ve been playing and enjoying Torbjörn. It’s not entirely my fault, the game loves raining Torbjörn loot box rewards on me. He’s the only character for who I’ve dropped an emote, highlight intro, victory pose and epic-level skin (the Steampunk gold one). It just felt a shame to waste them, so I’ve taken to testing him out on defense when the team consistency calls for it, and I’m actually very impressed with how Blizzard fixed most of the flaws with TF2 Engineer. For one, the resource management minigame is gone; Torbjörn has only one building to place… [Continue Reading]

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Rambling on about Minecraft – My way of playing

I’m genuinely surprised that I haven’t written more Minecraft articles in the past. I used to be an avid Minecraft player, especially back when I started writing for the Daily SPUF, but it’s never really come up. I suppose it’s because everyone has pretty much covered Minecraft elsewhere, plus I wasn’t really doing anything new or innovative like building complex redstone mechanisms or recreating world icons or things like that. I just did what most people were doing, which was survive. That being said, I HAVE recreated CTF_Turbine in Minecraft, on an old creative mode server that no longer exists,… [Continue Reading]

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Playing With Other People

It turns out that most of my life, I’ve been a bit of a lone wolf. Yes, I’m a Medic main, but I don’t really play that much with other people, I’m more likely to play a game on my own and maybe invite people round later. It does depend on the game, but games with other people tend to have a lot of different obstacles to jump over, to the point where I just end up playing alone. Getting the timing right is the big one. There’s people I genuinely enjoy playing with, but they’re never online, or one… [Continue Reading]

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Happy Late Birthday, Team Fortress!

I know I’m late with this, and Team Fortress’s birthday was the 24th of August, but Valve is late with everything so hopefully they forgive me. Anyway, let me get all the fireworks and confetti out of the way… Anyway, back to the actual event itself. Twenty years is a pretty damn long time. Older than my sister, in fact. Yes, Team Fortress is older than my little sister. That… is a worrying thought. It’s a very impressive thing though, that a class-based first person shooter series of games is still around. Despite the fact that the little, Short-Circuit-killable bouncing… [Continue Reading]

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M1014 – The Ubiquitous Shotgun

I’ve written two articles on several guns that make very frequent appearances in games I enjoy playing: The SCAR rifle and the Mac-10 SMG. This almost requires that I write third third article on the final member of the triumvirate: The M1014 shotgun. (We’re not counting the AK47, its popular enough that nobody’s surprised it appears in every game ever). In most games, the M1014 fills the role of the balanced upper-tier shotgun; there’s nothing wrong with it in particular, but some other gun might trump it in certain stats. In the original Counter-Strike, the XM1014 was one of only two shotguns… [Continue Reading]

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Poem Day

According to the billion posts on my Facebook feed from Tearaway Magazine, it’s national poetry day or something. Probably in New Zealand. Really, the only reason I’m linking that is because our former SPUFer and ferocious catsnake Dekky (the guy behind the Phlogisticast and some of the Bionicle articles here) is a writer for Tearaway and he’s a damn good writer himself. Oh and he’s a friend. Anyway, I should probably do some poems or something. But I’m lazy and I generally dislike poetry, so I’m finding poems posted on SPUF about TF2 and are posting them here. Small problem… [Continue Reading]

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A Rant About Dawnguard

I don’t suppose many of you remember the Dawnguard Snipin’ series I did a while back, which concluded back in January, but it was pretty clear that 1. I had played through Skyrim’s vampire-based DLC before and 2. that I clearly went with the Dawnguard and didn’t consider the vampire side at all. I’ve actually played both sides, and I’m considering doing a brand new Skyrim playthrough at some point, including Dawnguard and Dragonborn, but it recently occurred to me just how stupid the Dawnguard storyline is. I did go on about it in Dawnguard Snipin’, but most of those… [Continue Reading]

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The Daily SPUF is back!

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Daily SPUF! After a bumpy week or so, the Daily SPUF is working again! Mostly. I still haven’t worked out how to get featured images working again, but they’re not really needed. Pretty much every picture was saved apart from those uploaded in the last week before blog.spuf.info died, and I’ve managed to save a few of those too. But let’s not worry about a few pictures, let’s bask in the glory of this new theme, and the new shiny stuff and the actual logo and things like that! As you can probably… [Continue Reading]

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On Learning How to be a Sniper of Sorts

I’ve never really been someone who picks the Sniper class in any sort of game. My aim isn’t absolutely horrible because I have been practicing and have finally got my mouse working at speeds I like. But I’m still not really Sniper material. The fast-paced, middle of battle headshottery isn’t part of my skill set yet. I should clarify though. I am not ready to play as a Team Fortress 2 Sniper. TF2’s Sniper is a weirdly weak class when it comes to sniping classes in general, with the inability to score headshots unless scoped in and after a brief… [Continue Reading]

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