Author: aabicus

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Four Things You Can’t Do With the Sticky Jumper

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Migrating over from Medic primaries, I’m shamelessly stealing an old article format and focusing on another one of my favorite weapons in TF2, a much-maligned mobility tool that has been lumped in with the Rocket Jumper and Sun-on-a-Stick as useless tripe. I’ve long-defended the Sticky Jumper as a perfectly-viable unlock that created a whole new playstyle for aerial Demoman, but thanks to the many, many times Valve has redesigned this weapon, this time we’re going to talk about the things you can’t do with it. At least, not anymore. 1. You can’t plant decoy sticky traps. When the Sticky Jumper… [Continue Reading]

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Lord of the Flies

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Once upon a time, long long ago, young aabicus made up his mind that he was ready to buy an unusual hat. I’d recently unboxed an Orbiting Lantern Officer’s Ushanka and sold it for $200 through Paypal, so I felt comfortable dropping some of that on a replacement unusual for a class I actually played. Which hat was a no-brainer; my beloved Prussian Picklehaube was the first hat the game had ever dropped, and it sat proudly on my medic’s head ever since. But what particle effect? There were so many, and I had to weigh the pros and cons… [Continue Reading]

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Featured Random Game Announcements 

You Can Finally Be Nude in Star Trek Online Again

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Warning! Censored images of naked people in this article. Turn back if you’re at work! The nude mod for Star Trek Online can trace its roots all the way back to 2012, when it was originally made by a GVZ user who went by the names meehee and thefunkyone, before his mods went offline due to the home forum shutting down. Lucky for us, somebody shared the file with budding modder Password42, who updated it for the (then) current game. He maintained it until February 2016, when changes to Star Trek Online’s underlying programming made it inherently unstable. Then it went offline,… [Continue Reading]

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Poor Ullapool Caber…

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Poor, poor Caber. Once the proudest member of Demoman’s unlockable melee weapons, the only one that merged Demoknight and Demoman into a weird parody of both classes, the only weapon that brought the ‘Demo’ part of the class name to Medieval Mode…the mighty Ullapool Caber is a shadow of its former self. The old Caber will always hold a special place in my heart. It was undeniably, indisputably fun. There are few pleasures in life more satisfying than flying through the air with the Sticky Jumper, landing on top of an oblivious sniper and obliterating them with a single melee… [Continue Reading]

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Sven Coop – A 2017 Review

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Yesterday I realized that I’m never playing the original Half-Life again. It’s one of my favorite single-player games of all time, and I have hundreds of hours in in from various playthroughs. It was the first game I ever tried to mod (to varying degrees of success, though none of my attempts were ever released to the internet) and its artstyle and gameplay will forever hold a special place in my heart. But I just installed Sven Coop and discovered that it contains the original Half-Life playable in multiplayer! Completely for free, you can go enjoy Half-Life 1 right now! Apparently Sven… [Continue Reading]

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Community Announcements Random Game Announcements 

Outland Free on Steam Until June 8th!

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Thanks to MysticTheMeemM for finding this one! Outland is a third-person platformer where the player “uses powers of light and dark in an epic journey to save the world from forces of chaos”, to quote the Steam page. I haven’t played it, I’m actually at work and this article is more of a thought experiment to see if I can successfully write and publish an article entirely from my smart phone during my lunch break. Hope you get your money’s worth!

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The Making of a Medic

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As I mentioned in a previous article, I am very particular with the cosmetics I chose for my Medic wardrobe. As a matter of fact, I can walk through my old screenshots and watch my outfit evolve as the various parts came together and at no point have I removed a piece. So I thought I might dedicate an article to each piece of the most beloved outfit I’ve ever owned in a video game. In college I made my first video game purchase ever; I bought The Orange Box and the Half Life Anthology pack in honor of finally getting a desktop.… [Continue Reading]

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Community Announcements Featured 

Overwatch Goes to the Moon

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Two days ago, everybody got really excited when the Blizzard Twitter account posted a link to this not-so-cryptic page shedding some lore on the Horizon moon base that Winston grew up in. Well, Blizzard didn’t make us wait long before revealing that the clues point to a new map set on this abandoned moon base! I’m super excited to play this. A few people are grumbling about it being a 2CP map (Volskaya and Hanamura being two of the most stalemate-inducing maps in the game), but Jeff took care to mention in his developer update that that focused on making the… [Continue Reading]

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BarrierWatch

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I’m finding myself playing less and less Overwatch these days, and while part of it is the new workload from preparing for my Master’s program in game development later this year, another part of it is me getting pretty tired of a mechanic that seems to have been Blizzard’s answer to too many balance problems. I don’t think there’s a single element of Overwatch that’s been buffed as many times as the barriers have. When the game was first announced, there were only two barriers among the initial twelve characters, and Winston’s sucked. Now, it’s perfectly possible (heck, downright common) for the defensive… [Continue Reading]

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Featured Now for Something Completely Different The SPUF of Legend 

A Theory on Samurai Jack

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Been a while since we had a SPUF of Legend video that came with a Daily SPUF article! We were supposed to make these transcripts for every episode, or write a tie-in article that incorporates the latest episode, but we kinda never do so we’re looking for any suggestions on better ways to integrate The SPUF of Legend with the blog proper. Got any suggestions? Let us know in the comments! This week we’re doing something a little different because my recording software has been a finnicky little twit for about two weeks now, and I can’t figure out why so… [Continue Reading]

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