aabicus

I write articles! I also make games, release videos, voice act and lots of other cool things.

In Which Medic Writes Articles

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This article wraps up aabicus week! Hope everybody enjoyed me chewing through my old backlog, I’m certainly happy to finally have gotten a few of these out in the open. I’m wrapping the week up with a long overdue article, a sequel to the two-part series highlighting some of the best submissions from our most prolific writers. And nobody is more prolific than Chief Editor Medic herself, who at this point I suspect has written more content than the rest of us combined not to mention done a ton of website design, server hosting and image creation). While it’s tough… [Continue Reading]

Rocket Arena: Closed Beta Review

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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]

Role Queue is Finally Coming to Overwatch!

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Rejoice! (Or doomsay, if you’re on the other side of the fence.) A special edition of the Overwatch League tie-in show Watchpoint just happened, and they’ve formally announced the worst-kept open secret in Overwatch: role queue is finally coming to our favorite Blizzard shooter. Since the early days of Overwatch, players have been able to pick whatever character they want, and the game simply trusts all 6 to pick things that contribute to the team comp as a whole. If your team wants to go 6 supports, you could. No tank? No problem! However, this has led to some problems that… [Continue Reading]

Waking Up in Azeroth

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I’ve never really been an MMO kinda guy, even when my first job out of college was writing for one. I never had the patience to level up a character, and they’re always super boring at the early levels before you’ve unlocked anything of value. I first tried World of Warcraft in undergrad after it went pseudo-free-to-play, but didn’t get even remotely close to the level 20 cap before giving up on Kerychtyrr, my zombie warlock. The gameplay felt completely repetitive, just talking to NPCs and killing x amount of y enemies to complete quests. I didn’t touch the game for almost… [Continue Reading]

Team Fortress 2 Monopoly: Board Game Review

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A non-gaming friend got me TF2 Monopoly for my birthday last year, and it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since. I’ve been meaning to review it for a while now, but my heart wasn’t really in it because I pretty much just expected a cash grab where they renamed the properties after maps and added some custom playing pieces. Plus I unfortunately don’t live in a situation where I can convince my friends to play board games with me unless I can lure them in with promises of getting to shoot or stab each other. However, I’m glad Retro… [Continue Reading]

My Favorite TF2 Community Remixes

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TF2 has one of the oldest and proudest fan communities in gaming history. Part of it stems from the radical new approach Valve took when designing the playable classes; never before had a shooter made every class into a fully three-dimensional character with personalities, backstories, and Pixar-level visual design. The brilliant writing and voice acting was the cherry on top that propelled our nine favorite mercenaries into top-ten lists throughout the internet upon release. Valve was richly rewarded with a thriving community of artists, animators, and other creatives who showed their love for the TF2 characters through peripheral content that… [Continue Reading]

The Way it Was: A Week of Looking Back

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Hi everyone! aabicus here, and you may have noticed these days that I’ve been pretty much invisible on the SPUF side of things. My last article was in February (still haven’t caught a shiny Rattata…) and the SPUF of Legend‘s last video was 3 months ago. (That should change soon, though! Got another one in the final editing phase.) My main excuse, unfortunately, is money. In a nutshell, after graduating college I co-founded a gaming studio but got written out of the contract at the last minute. Without a backup lined up, I had to leave my apartment for financial… [Continue Reading]

Shiny Pidgey and Rattata are now in Pokemon Go!

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Hope you weren’t feeling burnt out by all these last-minute events in Pokemon Go, because Niantic just announced another one! In celebration of the upcoming #PokemonDay, we’re kicking off a new event, and we’ve invited some familiar Pokémon originally discovered in the Kanto region! Be on the lookout, as you might find Pikachu and Eevee wearing flower crowns on your travels! 🌸 https://t.co/7k2m8fRGof pic.twitter.com/u72ASvdLA8 — Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) February 25, 2019 Today is Pokemon Day, the 23rd anniversary of when Pokemon Red and Green first came out on GameBoy in 1996! To celebrate, Niantic’s taking a walk down memory lane… [Continue Reading]

Overwatch’s Zenyatta

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I’m slowly but surely trying to become proficient at every Overwatch healer. I consider myself a seasoned Lucio, Mercy, and Moira by this point, comfortable playing them even in competitive or any team comp. I’m capable of playing Brigitte and Soldier 76 if the team comp favors it, and I am absolute rubbish at Ana. That leaves Zenyatta, who I’m enjoying the more I play him, but the difficulty scale and the drawbacks to his kit are dampening my spirit somewhat. While I cautioned Moiras against focusing too much on dealing damage, Zenyattas suffer from no such restraint. Zenyatta is a… [Continue Reading]

Why Apex Legends is the Best Battle Royale

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I previously covered PUBG and Fortnite on this channel, and you may have noticed neither of them stuck around for very long because I just couldn’t get into them. To be honest, I’ve never been a fan of the Battle Royale genre in general, but Apex Legends is seriously the first Battle Royale game that I’m finding legitimately fun on its own merits and I’m amazed that I can’t wait to start playing it even from the moment I’ve turned it off for the night. The developers have looked at all the things that usually make Battle Royales boring and… [Continue Reading]